Monthly Archives: December 2008

An impact he could never appreciate

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‘Henry G. Molaison, 82, of Windsor Locks, CT died on Tuesday. He is known in the medical and scientific literatures as “the amnesic patient, H.M.” He was born in Manchester, CT and graduated from East Hartford High School. In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation at the Hartford Hospital to relieve his seizure disorder. Immediately after the operation, Mr. Molaison showed a profound amnesia, which became the topic of intense scientific study for more than five decades. From age 27 on, he was unable to establish new memories for events in his everyday life and to acquire general information about the world in which he lived. His memory impairment was “pure” and not accompanied by intellectual or personality disorders. For this reason, and because the operation has not been repeated, he is the most widely studied and famous case in the neuroscience literature of the 20th and 21st centuries. Mr. Molaison's contributions to knowledge about memory have been groundbreaking, and researchers worldwide are in his debt.’

via Vivienne Ming, Ph.D..

Company tries to get gun classed as medical device

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Derringers are small and can be easily concealed.

“A US company claims to have received federal approval to market a 9-mm handgun as a medical device and hopes the US government will reimburse seniors who buy the $300 firearm. But the US Food and Drug Administration says there are currently no formal designations of the gun as a medical device.

Called the Palm Pistol, the weapon is designed for people who have trouble firing a normal handgun due to arthritis and other debilitating conditions.”

via New Scientist.

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Justices Take Case on President’s Power to Detain

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“The Supreme Court on Friday agreed to decide the most fundamental question yet concerning executive power in the age of terror: Can the president order the indefinite military detention of people living in the United States?

The case concerns Ali al-Marri, the only person on the American mainland being held as an enemy combatant, at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. Mr. Marri, a citizen of Qatar, was legally in the United States when he was arrested in December 2001 in Peoria, Ill., where he was living with his family and studying computer science at Bradley University.

Eighteen months later, when Mr. Marri was on the verge of a trial on credit card fraud and other charges, President Bush declared him an enemy combatant, moving him from the custody of the Justice Department to military detention. The government says Mr. Marri is a Qaeda sleeper agent sent to the United States to commit mass murder and disrupt the banking system.

The case, which will probably be argued in the spring, will present the Obama administration with several difficult strategic choices. It can continue to defend the Bush administration’s expansive interpretation of executive power, advance a more modest one or short-circuit the case by moving it to the criminal justice system.”

via New York Times.

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The Lie We Love

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“Westerners have been sold the myth of a world orphan crisis. We are told that millions of children are waiting for their “forever families” to rescue them from lives of abandonment and abuse. But many of the infants and toddlers being adopted by Western parents today are not orphans at all. Yes, hundreds of thousands of children around the world do need loving homes. But more often than not, the neediest children are sick, disabled, traumatized, or older than 5. They are not the healthy babies that, quite understandably, most Westerners hope to adopt. There are simply not enough healthy, adoptable infants to meet Western demand—and there’s too much Western money in search of children. As a result, many international adoption agencies work not to find homes for needy children but to find children for Western homes.”

via Foreign Policy.

The Mumbai Strategy

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Guy Sorman: “The Mumbai terrorist attacks have opened a new chapter in the war against terrorism. They remind us that Islamic radicalism owes more to classic Leninist thinking than to the Koran…

Before the attacks, India and Pakistan were on the verge of concluding an alliance against their de facto common enemy, Islamic radicalism, under the guidance of the American government. In reviving Indians’ fears that they were once again under attack from Pakistani security forces, the Mumbai atrocities may well disrupt the projected alliance. Further, the attack on Mumbai took place in advance of decisive provincial elections in India: vociferous Hindu nationalist parties will undoubtedly exploit anti-Muslim feelings for political gain. The timing of the Mumbai attack, like that of al-Qaida’s Madrid bombing in 2003, confirms the broader Islamist-terror movement’s sophisticated strategy.”

via City Journal.

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He’s Not Black

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Maria Arana: “He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black.

We call him that — he calls himself that — because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: “Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President.”

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.”

via Washington Post op-ed.

Housekeeping

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Jerry asked: “Are you changing your blog format daily?” Yeah, playing around with different “themes”. It is so easy, virtually one-click, now that I’m using WordPress. I’m only doing it while I search for the ‘perfect’ setup, then I hope it’ll be static, in case it’s disorienting to my readers. Comments?

Strange Experiments Create Body-Swapping Experiences

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Art´s imagery of humanoid

“Scientists now have manipulated people’s perceptions to make them think they have swapped bodies with another human or even a “humanoid body,” experiencing the sensations that the other would feel and giving the illusion of being inside the other’s body.

The bizarre achievement hearkens to body swaps portrayed on numerous TV shows and movies such as Freaky Friday and All of Me.

In real life, the cognitive neuroscientists at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet succeeded in making subjects perceive the bodies of mannequins and other people as their own. The illusion also worked even when the two people differed in appearance or were of different sexes. It also worked whether the subject was immobile or was making voluntary movements. However, it was not possible to fool the subjects into identifying with a non-humanoid object, such as a chair or a large block.”

via LiveScience

‘I See Dead People’

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“The dead stay with us, that much is clear. They remain in our hearts and minds, of course, but for many people they also linger in our senses—as sights, sounds, smells, touches or presences. Grief hallucinations are a normal reaction to bereavement but are rarely discussed, because people fear they might be considered insane or mentally destabilised by their loss. As a society we tend to associate hallucinations with things like drugs and mental illness, but we now know that hallucinations are common in sober healthy people and that they are more likely during times of stress.”

via Scientific American

The Rotting, City-Sized Pile of Texan Waste

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Bruce Sterling: “A 30-mile scar of debris along the Texas coast stands as a festering testament to what state and local officials say is FEMA's sluggish response to the 2008 hurricane season. (((Okay, great, blame the feds, but what about the next storm surge?)))

Two and a half months after Hurricane Ike blasted the shoreline, alligators and snakes crawl over vast piles of shattered building materials, lawn furniture, trees, boats, tanks of butane and other hazardous substances, thousands of animal carcasses, and perhaps even the corpses of people killed by the storm.

State and local officials complain that the removal of the filth has gone almost nowhere because FEMA red tape has held up the cleanup work and the release of the millions of dollars that Chambers County says it needs to pay for the project.”

via Beyond the Beyond – Wired Blogs

Grand chieftain of anthropology lives to see his centenary

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Claude Lévi-Strauss

“France celebrated the 100th anniversary yesterday of the birth of one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century. This was not just a centenary. It was a genuine birthday. Claude Lévi-Strauss, the father of structuralism and modern anthropology, born on 28 November 1908, is still alive. His work, after going out of fashion several times, is more alive than ever.”

via The Independent

As an undergraduate studying social anthropology at the height of the romance with structuralism, I got lost in Levi-Strauss and ultimately disenchanted, when papers I wrote doing structuralist analysis of myths and other cultural phenomena were praised even though in my heart I thought what I had written was gobbledigook… that you could get away saying anything in a structural analysis if you knew how to couch it. I do think The Savage Mind is a paradigm-changing masterpiece, showing that other cultures’ ways of making sense of the world partake as much as ours do of ‘scientific method.’ But delving deeper into structuralism was my first experience of that ’emperor-has-no-clothes’ feeling about a venerated discipline that I have had so often about cornerstones of post-modernism. (Perhaps I shouldn’t be admitting this; perhaps it means I didn’t really understand structuralism, but in that case neither did those grading my papers, did they?)

Pain in the eye of the beholder

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How do you quantify pain?How do you quantify pain?

“It goes without saying that we are capable of noticing changes to our bodies, but it’s perhaps less obvious that the way we perceive our bodies can affect them physically. The two-way nature of this link, between physicality and perception, has been dramatically demonstrated by a new study of people with chronic hand pain. Lorimer Moseley at the University of Oxford found that he could control the severity of pain and swelling in an aching hand by making it seem larger or smaller.”

via Not Exactly Rocket Science

UFO enthusiasts call on Obama to release X-Files

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Baptism Of Christ By Aert De Gelder

“UFO enthusiasts are pressing Barack Obama to release classified documents about sightings of alien spacecraft, encouraged by support from within the President-Elect’s own White House team.”

via Telegraph.UK

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Anatomic Basis for Being Change-Friendly

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‘…[P]eople who actively seek lifestyle changes may have a more developed connection between two specific brain areas: the hippocampus, a site for storing and retrieving new and old memories, and the ventral striatum, a reward system which is responsible for those carpe diem moments, said researcher Dr. Bernd Weber of the Life & Brain Center at the University of Bonn in Germany. Turns out, if the hippocampus identifies an experience as new, it then relays signals to the striatum to release neurotransmitters which lead to positive feelings.

"The strength of the connection is positively correlated to novelty seek[ers] …’

via Yahoo! News