“Fab four ‘created passive teenage consumers'” (Guardian.UK)
Daily Archives: 9 Oct 08
Le Clézio, French Writer, Wins Nobel
“The academy called Le Clézio an ‘author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization.'” (New York Times)
I am not familiar with his writing at all [has anyone out there read him?]… Off to Booksmith to give him a look.
Hi Ho Honda!
Civic Musical Road Plays Rossini’s William Tell Overture: “From Autopia‘s ‘Most Annoying Promotion Ever’ department comes this dispatch from Lancaster, California, where Honda’s marketing team joined forces with the city to turn a stretch of road on the edge of town into a giant LP that plays ‘The William Tell Overture,’ which you might more readily recognize as the theme to The Lone Ranger.
The quarter-mile stretch of Avenue K renamed ‘Civic Musical Road’ features grooves cut into the pavement in such a way as to make the tires resonate to the tune of Gioachino Rossini‘s classic symphony. The road, which Honda claimed sounded best when ‘played’ on a new Civic going exactly 55 miles per hour, was just one of four ‘melody roads’ in the world and the first in America. ‘I think it’s kind of cool,’ Peggy Llano told the L.A. Daily News. ‘When you are driving out on Avenue K. you’re going out to the middle of nowhere. It’s kind of a nice surprise to come across this thing.’
A lot of Lancaster residents disagreed, which is why we’re writing about this in the past tense. The ‘musical road’ is being paved over today, leaving only the YouTube video after the jump to remember it by.” (Wired)
O death, when is thy sting?
Gerrymandering the boundary: “In August… Robert Truog of the Harvard Medical School and Franklin Miller of America’s National Institutes of Health, bioethicists both, published a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine describing a recent trend to revert to using cardiac death as the critical marker. But that is not good news for Dr Scaraffia and her followers for, according to Dr Truog and Dr Miller, the definition of cardiac death has changed over the years in just the sort of way that Dr Scaraffia predicted that it might.
Dr Truog and Dr Miller posit the example of a patient who has given informed consent to the withdrawal of life support in the case of his suffering devastating brain injury. The doctors respect his wishes and his heart stops beating. So far, so ethical. But instead of waiting a few minutes for his brain to die as well, they anticipate this inevitability and declare him dead immediately, so that they can hurry along with the business of removing his organs.
Death in such cases is therefore based on a decision not to resuscitate, not the impossibility of resuscitation. And their hypothetical case does seem to be happening more frequently in reality. In America, data from the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network, an organisation that matches donors to recipients, show that those classified as cardiac-dead but not brain-dead represent the fastest growing proportion of donors, having risen from zero ten years ago to 7% in 2006.
Dr Truog and Dr Miller reckon this gerrymandering of the division between life and death will continue as long as doctors have to abide by the dead-donor rule—that although a living person can consent to have a non-vital organ removed for transplant (a single kidney, for example) vital organs can be removed only from dead bodies. Instead, they propose that someone whose brain is devastatingly and irreversibly damaged, and who has previously given his informed consent, should be able to donate vital organs while still alive.
In practice, says Dr Truog, this would not differ much from what happens now, except that doctors would be released from the temptation to fudge the definition of death, or to accelerate it by, for example, withdrawing life-sustaining treatment. Indeed, the British government is considering changing the regulations in a way that would allow just that to happen.” (The Economist)
Mud Pies for ‘That One’
Image by DoubleSpeak with Matthew and Peter Slutsky via FlickrMaureen Dowd skewers McCain, Palin and Lee Atwater with elegance and conscience. Must-read. (New York Times op-ed)
