Social Networks Protect Against Alzheimer’s (ScienceDaily)
Brain training can change autistic behaviour (New Scientist)
Daily Archives: 22 Apr 06
Oregon Man Survives 12 Nails to the Head
“An Oregon man who went to a hospital complaining of a headache was found to have 12 nails embedded in his skull from a suicide attempt with a nail gun, doctors say.
Surgeons removed the nails with needle-nosed pliers and a drill, and the man survived with no serious lasting effects, according to a report on the medical oddity in the current issue of the Journal of Neurosurgery.” (Yahoo! News)
Iran & the Bomb
Christopher de Bellaigue, writing in The New York Review of Books: “It is not unthinkable that an imaginative solution will be found to the immediate diplomatic impasse. (The ICG, for instance, proposes that the Iranians be permitted to have a small and heavily monitored enrichment facility, but to commission it only after several years of building confidence with the IAEA and the EU countries, among others.) That would be good news, but the underlying issue would still need to be addressed. That issue is what Iran’s conservative leaders need to do to save themselves from being overwhelmed by George Bush’s administration, whose plan to transform the Middle East has no room for undemocratic ayatollahs.”
Christopher de Bellaigue is the author of In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran.
The Anti-Semitic Hoax That Refuses to Die
“For more than a century The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has made its way into many languages, selling untold numbers of copies, portraying Jews as demonic schemers.
Said to be the minutes of a secret council of Jews discussing their plot for world domination, this slim volume, first published in Russia in 1905, has become a nearly sacred text for political and religious movements ranging from American nativism and German Nazism to Arab Islamicism.” (New York Times )
Eliot Weinberger : What I heard about Iraq in 2005
“In 2005 I heard that… “ (London Review of Books)
The Best a Man Can Get
In search of the perfect shave: “As the ‘tech editor’ for NBC’s Today Show, Corey Greenberg spends most of his on-air time shilling for the latest technological gadgets. (Literally, shilling—last April the Wall Street Journal revealed that several technology companies had paid him handsomely for his promotional efforts.) He can tell you why you need a video iPod, what you’re missing without satellite radio, and where to put the fifty-inch flat screen tv. But on January 29, 2005, he was enthusiastically undermining half a century’s worth of high technology.
In the Today Show studio, Greenberg lathered up his face with English shaving cream and a badger brush, whipped out a vintage double-edge razor, and made a passionate case that the multi-billion-dollar shaving industry has been deceiving its customers ever since 1971, when Gillette (no small advertiser on network television) introduced the twin-blade razor. Everything you need for a fantastically close and comfortable shave, Greenberg said, was perfected by the early 20th century.
With his Today Show segment, Greenberg became the highest-profile convert to ‘wet shaving.’ He is still one of its most fervent evangelists, with—what else?—a blog, www.shaveblog.com. At 120,000 words and counting, Greenberg’s blog could best be described as gonzo shave journalism. He explores every nook and, for that matter, nick of the wet shaving experience, whose defining elements are a single sharp blade (whether ensconced in a safety razor or exposed in the fearsome straight-edge), a brush, soap, and lots of hot water.
But Greenberg’s blog is just the most visible salient of a movement that has all the ingredients to reach its tipping point.” (Christianity Today)
As someone who has shaved only three times in the last thirty years (on Jan. 1, 1981; Jan. 1, 1991; and Jan. 1, 2001), I am envious that I will likely not be partaking in the phenomenon of the Epicurean shave…
Beckett remembering himself
A review of Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett, Uncollected interviews with Samuel Beckett and memories of those who knew him, edited by James Knowlson and Elizabeth Knowlson:
“Towards the end of his life, Samuel Beckett, confronting the prospect of a major creative impasse, wrote to the theatre director George Tabori about the abiding illusion that had sustained him throughout his long career: “While still ‘young’ I began to seek consolation in the thought that then if ever, i.e. now, the true words at last, from the mind in ruins. To this illusion I continue to cling”. With typical economy, Beckett’s statement brings home some of the major themes of his post-war writing, his dream of stripping away the accoutrements of language, culture and personality – the “accidentals” of our existence – to see what remains. Yet beyond the strikingly Beckettian image of “the mind in ruins”, the statement is also sounding out the farrago of times and tenses that make up our minds on matters of remembrance – here, the way in which the future “then” of a young man anticipating how it will be shifts to the “now” of an old man remembering how it was. Finding the right form for expressing the tangled relations between memory, self and language was something that preoccupied Beckett throughout his writing life… It has become something of a critical commonplace to suggest that memory is another name for invention in Beckett’s work, a way of creating self-consoling stories to accompany us in the dark…” (Times of London)
Not that I liken myself to Beckett, but the personal resonances for me are powerful…
How Much Do You Have to Know?
Trust your own reactions, don’t seek enlightenment: “We all have a part of ourselves that cries out for certainty and meaning. If we encounter a contemporary artwork one of the first things we ask is: “What does it mean?” We can be uncomfortable with not knowing, not being sure, not having the safe ground of the authorised, correct interpretation. When encountering an artwork we seek the explanatory panel.” — Grayson Perry (Times of London)
But this is not just about why we feel the need to ‘explain’ art:
“An article in The Guardian by Madeleine Bunting touched on a trait I’ve been noticing in myself and others. Her piece was about how in talk about the global war on terror the European Enlightenment is often wheeled out as an opposing force to fanatical religious fundamentalism. She questioned the way it was used to validate arguments against religion. She was surprised by the vehemence with which contributors to her blog discussion defended what they believed was a correct history of the Enlightenment.”
As Perry concludes, “I wonder if a similar dialogue went on in someone’s head that started: “I fancy invading Iraq in the name of enlightened democracy.””
Two Cultures Revisited
If there are problems with science-for-humanities-students courses (commonly referred to as “physics for poets”) (Inside Higher Ed), what about humanities for budding scientists? (New York Times )
Psychiatric experts found to have financial links to drugmakers
As a Whorfian, who believes that the language we use to describe it shapes our thought about any endeavor, I have often written about the profound impact of the diagnostic system used in psychiatry, codified in the ‘bible’ (or perhaps it would be more apt to say ‘Chinese restaurant menu’) called the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Among other things, it cements the hegemony of the biological psychiatrists over the mental health field. Now a new study (by a non-psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist) reveals that “every psychiatric expert involved in writing the standard diagnostic criteria for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses”. The study dovetails my concern with classificatory schemes to another of my rants about modern psychiatry — how it is in the hip pocket of the pharmaceutical industry’s profit machine.
But it is not as if Big Pharma planted its hired guns on the DSM authorship committee to do its bidding, and the study does not establish whether the experts’ financial ties to the industry predated and shaped their involvement in the DSM or resulted from their visibility and achievement. I think it is more likely the latter. The psychotropic drug manufacturers tend to offer their perks — paid speaking engagements, research and consulting contracts — to established authorities in the field. For example, Eli Lily would be interested in subsidizing psychiatrists whose research serves its interests, such as someone who supports the notion that certain premenstrual problems deserve codification as psychaitric disorders when it is interested in using its drug Prozac to treat those disorders. Given that corporate penetration into psychiatric nosology has grown explosively in the past two decades or so, the planned fifth revision of the DSM due out in around five years will be the first to be appreciably tainted by this issue. The American Psychiatric Association (publisher of the DSM)’s decision to require its authors to disclose their financial ties, if there is any honesty about those disclosures, should at least answer the chicken-and-egg question of whether industry subsidy is in place at the time of a psychiatrist’s contribution to the DSM.
The weaker dismissal of concern, such as influential psychiatrist John Kane’s comment that the work of his subpanel on schizophrenia was driven only by science —
“It shouldn’t be assumed there is a true conflict of interest. To me, a conflict of interest implies that someone’s judgment is going to be influenced by this relationship, and that is not necessarily the case.”
— is embarrassing. given that behavioral science research design goes to such lengths to eliminate subtle unconscious biases that shape outcomes. Perhaps it should be seen as the effort to drive the final nail into the coffin of the psychoanalytic roots of psychiatry, Freud’s notion of the mysterious and opaque power of unconscious processes?
Kane and others suggest that the mere revelation of financial ties should not undermine the public’s confidence in psychiatry. In a sense he is right; confidence has long ago been undermined. This, however, may be one of the last straws. Psychiatric care is about helping patietns to take appropriate responsibility for their actions. Physician, heal thyself.
