| “This is an extreme closeup scan (2400 dpi) of a paint chip retrieved from the ruins of Belmont Art Park by Amy McKenzie earlier this year. The fragment is about 1cm thick, and appears to consist of about 150-200 layers of paint. (For a sense of scale, note the ridges of my fingerprint in the lower right.) This should give you an idea of the staggering number of pieces painted in this spot over the decades.” [via Kevin Kelly’s Lifestream] | ![//theworld.com/~emg/paintchip.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://theworld.com/%7Eemg/paintchip.jpg "Paintchip") |
Daily Archives: 21 Nov 07
Vertical Gardens
Living Walls, for gardening in small spaces. A gallery of designs by Patrick Blanc. (The Grow Spot)
Shadow World
“Just as a hologram creates the illusion of the third dimension by scattering light off a 2-D surface, gravity and the however many dimensions of space could be a higher-dimensional projection of a drama playing out in a flatter world.” (Science News)
Exploring the Ethics of Contested Surgeries
Metapsychology review: “Cutting to the Core, edited by David Benatar, deals with ethical issues surrounding some of the most controversial surgeries in practice. Discussed are male circumcision and female genital cutting, sex assignment and reassignment, conjoined twin separation, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery. The book is organized into six parts, each corresponding to one of these topics. As the editor mentions in his introduction, the aim of this collection was not to present an article for each side of the subjects (i.e., one ‘for’ and one ‘against’). Rather, the goal was to highlight the ethical issues involved with these surgeries by offering the reader various views of and approaches to these issues. Even when the authors’ conclusions agree, their approaches might not… ” It sounds like an interesting book, but I am surprised that it does not appear to include anything about surgical amputation for patients with apotemnophilia, about which I have written several times in FmH.
Talking Back to Prozac
The New York Review of Books on three new books; the titles tell it all: The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield; Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness by Christopher Lane; and Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression by David Healy. Essayist Frederick Crewes concludes that we have here
“some uncomfortable insights about American psychiatry and its role within a far from rational health care system. That system is too cumbersome and too driven by profit considerations to meet the whole society’s medical needs; but citizens possessing full insurance, when they feel mentally troubled in any way, won’t be denied medication or therapy or both. Nothing more is required than some hypocrisy all around. As for psychiatry’s inability to settle on a discrete list of disorders that can remain impervious to fads and fashions, that is an embarrassment only to clear academic thinkers like these two authors. For bureaucratized psychological treatment, and for the pharmaceutical industry that is now deeply enmeshed in it, confusion has its uses and is likely to persist.”
Woman left in CT scan machine 5 hours
The technician ‘forgot about her’, leaving the room after telling her to lie still. When she eventually extricated herself from the scanner, the office was closed and dark and she was locked in.
Victims of Congo rape epidemic:
How you can help (via Boing Boing)
Oil Officials See Limit Looming on Production
“The world certainly won’t run out of oil any time soon. And plenty of energy experts expect sky-high prices to hasten the development of alternative fuels and improve energy efficiency. But evidence is mounting that crude-oil production may plateau before those innovations arrive on a large scale. That could set the stage for a period marked by energy shortages, high prices and bare-knuckled competition for fuel.” (WSJ)
Why We do Dumb or Irrational Things
10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies (PsyBlog)
