You may have seen a comment entered by a ‘Mike Hunter’ (who did not have the courage of his convictions to include an email address), which amounted to nothing more than a rude epithet. Thanks for the nomination, Mr. Hunter, but I respectfully decline; I have deleted the comment and will do so again if ever there are further such postings from this or any other username. I know my response here gratifies the urge of such trolls to provoke; sorry to disappoint but I won’t do so again, your comment will just inexplicably disappear. I suggest that if Mr. Hunter or other readers takes offense at any of my views, they meet minimal standards of intelligence by discussing the issues and not just calling names if they want their comments to survive my editing.

“A Swiss bank account. Offshore investments in the Cayman Islands. And now evidence that he may have lied about when he left his role at Bain Capital. What is Mitt Romney hiding? Romney needs to fully release his tax returns and stop hiding the truth about how he makes his money and where he stashes it. Sign the petition to ask Romney to release his tax returns to show the American people who he really is.” (MoveOn.org)

Map of death penalty

“While the hideous practice of killing someone to bring on an execution has ended in Europe it still goes on in countries that retain the death penalty.” (Suite101.com)

Chumbawamba Break Up: “They started out, implausibly enough, as an anarcho-punk collective, paragons of the same scene that Crass helped to birth. They’d been around for years, experimenting with different sounds and ideas before signing a deal with EMI and stumbling into fleeting international fame with “Tubthumping.” They kept soldiering on after that song became a kitsch relic, too, and they’re only now announcing that they’re disbanding.” (Stereogum).

Related articles

• ‘I get knocked down…’
• Chumbawamba Break Up: ‘Tubthumping’ Rockers Split After 30 Years
• The ’90s Are Officially Over: Chumbawamba Calls it Quits [Video]
• ANARCHO-PUNK.NET ~vs~ CRASS
• Chumbawamba Breaks Up, World Reacts By Quoting Only Hit
• Chumbawamba Break Up

Interactions (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Selected links:

• After Higgs boson discovery, what’s next for physicists? (Washington Post)
• Why the Higgs Boson Discovery Is Disappointing, According to the Smartest Man in the World (Atlantic)
• Peter Higgs (Wikipedia)
• Higgs boson discovery: now the real work begins (Guardian.UK)
• The Higgs boson discovery is another giant leap for humankind (Guardian. UK)
• How to explain Higgs boson discovery (Guardian.UK)
• Higgs boson discovery could usher in ‘new, wonderful technologies,’ says physicist (CSM video)
• Why the Higgs boson announcement is so important (CSM video)
• A Quantum Leap: The discovery of the Higgs boson particle puts our understanding of nature on a new firm footing. (Slate)
• What happens next after Higgs boson discovery? (BBC)
• Higgs Boson Explained By MinutePhysics (HuffPo video)
• 10 people who think the Higgs boson is about God (o.canada.com)
• The Higgs Boson (boston.com)
• Higgs Boson, Explained by Cartoons (neatorama.com)
• Happy Higgs Boson Day! (makezine.com)
• What Does the Discovery of Higgs Boson Mean? [VIDEO] (mashable.com)
• Can you explain the Higgs boson in a tweet?(telegraph.co.uk)

Here is my own (small) connection to the Higgs story. When theoretical physicist Peter Higgs proposed the existence of the Higgs Field and predicted the particle in 1964, he was on the faculty of the University of Edinburgh. (Higgs projected that the particle would not be discovered in his lifetime.) The University has just announced the establishment of the Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics, with a $1.2 million annual budget. And my son is about to start as an undergraduate at the University of Edinburgh this fall.

Michael Tomasky: “The president can sink Romney by trumpeting the details of the ludicrous economic solutions he’s been backing. How Mitt would turn America into one big Pottersville.” (The Daily Beast).

An entire Tumbler site full of ’em. (kottke via Boing Boing).

‘Reddit, Foursquare, Mozilla, and a number of other companies were hit with technical problems Saturday evening when a single “leap second” was added to the world’s atomic clocks. And so, the “leap second bug” was born.’ (VentureBeat).

“Candidate fundraising emails becoming increasingly hard to differentiate from Nigerian banking scams…” (Twitter / fivethirtyeight)

C.S. Lewis

Kevin Kelly: “Years back, in CS Lewis’ essay ‘On The Reading of Old Books,’ I encountered a suggestion that has stuck with me ever since. Lewis posited that each generation of humanity takes certain things for granted: assumptions that go unexamined and unquestioned because they are commonly held by all. It was Lewis’ opinion that reading books written by prior generations would help us to see around these generational blind spots.

In her new book, Monoculture: How One Story Is Changing Everything, FS Michaels suggests that just such a blind spot has, over the course of generations, come to dominate the narrative and values that our society lives by. From education and the arts to how we eat, think, and play, Michaels asserts that we have been steeped in a single point of view, the economic, where value is reduced to what can be sold and worth is determined by financial expediency. Michael’s writing is clear and sharp as she brings the impact of this pervasive global philosophy down to the personal level, showing how it affects our lives in the everyday.

Michaels spent years researching this book and it shows. This book is packed full of observations and opinions from a wide range of economists, artists, philosophers and scholars, and Michaels introduces each new section of the book with a concise historical context outlining how things once were, how they developed, and how we arrived where we are. Michaels presents a clear argument without resorting to soapboxing, emotional appeals, or badgering. There is no guilt trip here, just a careful deconstruction of philosophical assumptions that too often go unquestioned. And while it is intellectually satisfying, Monoculture is no overbearing academic tome. Michaels’ writing is engaging and accessible for readers with a wide range of ability and interest. This is not a pounded pulpit, but a door opening into a discussion that we as a society badly need to have.

In a time of seemingly constant budget cuts and belt-tightening, this book is a valuable tool in provoking thought and discussion about how we as a society value the arts, education, and health. This is a book I have found myself recommending and lending out time and again as I talk with friends about what constitutes quality of life and what we each seek to gain from life and the world around us. Regardless of your political or philosophical point of view, Monoculture is a valuable discussion-starter in considering the shape of our world.” (Cool Tools).

“Whatever you do, don’t run. Wolves are what is known as coursing predators meaning they take their prey on the run. If you watch wolves hunt you’ll immediately see this in action.  Wolves will attempt to get the animals they prey upon to run. If they don’t run wolves usually don’t pursue the attack.” (Read full answer).

“So often, Scalia has chosen to ignore the obligation of a Supreme Court justice to be, and appear to be, impartial. He’s turned “judicial restraint” into an oxymoronic phrase. But what he did this week, when the court announced its decision on the Arizona immigration law, should be the end of the line. ” (Washington Post).

Are you at all botanically interested? If so, you will be amazed by what are and aren’t considered to be berries, in a technical sense. (Wikipedia).

I don’t know if this was nationwide news but it was quite the sensation in Massachusetts last month when this bear was popping in and out of hiding on Cape Cod. But this is even more amazing, and it is my town adjacent to Boston!

“The bear found in a towering pine tree in the yard of a multimillion-dollar home here today is the same male bear who rambled across Cape Cod before being captured two weeks ago and then exiled to Central Massachusetts, state officials said.

After being captured and relocated on June 11, the stubborn bear trekked 100 miles eastward before ending up at around 7:30 a.m. in the backyard of a $4.9 million home on Pine Road, officials said.

Officials said the bear, one of an estimated 4,000 in the state, embarked on his odyssey in an effort to establish his own territory. The bear weighs about 180 pounds and is about 2½ years old. He is being taken back to the countryside today — this time he’ll be released farther from Boston than before.” (Boston Globe).

“Facebook just removed everyone’s email address from their profile and replaced it with an @facebook.com email address without asking you. Here’s how to easily fix the problem.” (Lifehacker).

Romney is one of the most disingenuous men who has ever run for President. I’m not sure if he is crafty or simply cannot recognize when he is not telling the truth, but either is of great concern. This series chronicles his lies on a weekly basis; this week’s edition catalogs thirty. (The Maddow Blog).

“If the Supreme Court overturns the health-care law, Democrats will be tempted to sulk and feel sorry for themselves. But that’s the last thing they should do….

I’ll be watching for rhetoric, tone, even body language. And on those counts, they had damn well better dispense with the usual liberal woe-is-me hand-wringing and shoulder slumping and come out swinging. They had better communicate to their base that they stand for something, that it’s important to them, and they’re pissed. And if they do it the right way, they can make the Supreme Court an issue this fall in a way that might even persuade some swing voters that the Court overstepped its bounds. I’d go so far as to say that an aggressive response can reset and reframe the whole health-care debate, once Americans have had their minds focused on this by a blatantly partisan Court…” (The Daily Beast)

“Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a physical sensation characterized by a pleasurable tingling that typically begins in the head and scalp, and often moves down the spine and through the limbs.

Most ASMR episodes begin by an external or internal trigger, and are so divided for classification. Type A episodes are elicited by the experiencer using no external stimuli, and are typically achieved by specific thought patterns unique to the individual. Type B episodes are triggered involuntarily by an external trigger, via one or more senses, and may also involve specific thought patterns associated with the triggering event. Both types of triggers vary between individuals, but many are common to a large portion of ASMR enjoyers.

Common external triggers:

• Exposure to slow, accented, or unique speech patterns
• Viewing educational or instructive videos or lectures
• Experiencing a high empathetic or sympathetic reaction to an event
• Enjoying a piece of art or music
• Watching another person complete a task, often in a diligent, attentive manner – examples would be filling out a form, writing a check, going through a purse or bag, inspecting an item closely, etc.
• Close, personal attention from another person
• Haircuts, or other touch from another on head or back”

(ASMR Research & Support).

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• New ASMR community blog
• ASMR as a catalyst for change
• My ASMR Epiphany
• Intensely comfortable – my experiences with ASMR
• The Curiosity Seduction Hypothesis

“Over the past several decades, U.S. industries have injected more than 30 trillion gallons of toxic liquid deep into the earth, using broad expanses of the nation’s geology as an invisible dumping ground.

No company would be allowed to pour such dangerous chemicals into the rivers or onto the soil. But until recently, scientists and environmental officials have assumed that deep layers of rock beneath the earth would safely entomb the waste for millennia.

There are growing signs they were mistaken.” (Salon)

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• Podcast: The Poison Beneath Us
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• Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us
• Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us – ProPublica

“Falling animals, misbehaving toddlers and footage of Justin Bieber may populate the bulk of any YouTube most-viewed list. But amid the viral clips and pop music promos is a series of videos that seems to go against all received wisdom about what online audiences like to consume.Their tone is sunnily optimistic, go-getting, Californian, with titles like Information Is Food, Crowdsource Your Health and Inventing Is the Easy Part. They feature luminaries such as Stephen Hawking, JK Rowling and Bono delivering 18-minute lectures about big ideas – technology, culture, the environment, science, social trends. Yet although there is nary a Lolcat in sight, the YouTube channel of the Technology Entertainment and Design (TED) conference has attracted nearly 112 million views.” (BBC News)

“05-20-2012 I wanted to capture this remarkable experience of the Annular Solar Eclipse at Horseshoe Bend in Northern Arizona. This large panoramic composite image measuring 14531×9211 and is made from about 48 images, 30 frames were shot with a Canon 5dmk3 with a 24mm lens with a 3 frame per shot in-camera HDR that make up the body of the image and 18 frames shot with a Canon 5dmk2 with a 400mm for the composited eclipse of the sun in place over the canyon. What make this a fun image is the hundreds of photographers all capturing this extraordinary event lining the canyon rim with a thousand foot drop to the Colorado River below.” (Milky Way Scientist).

‘This week, …Jonah Lehrer of the New Yorker …has found himself in a tight spot. On Tuesday morning, the media reporter Jim Romenesko pointed out that the opening paragraphs of Lehrer’s mid-June post to his New Yorker blog, Frontal Cortex, had previously made an appearance in an October Op-Ed Lehrer wrote for the Wall Street Journal. By midday, a reporter at New York magazine’s Daily Intel blog spotted a few more double-dips — anecdotes and examples reused in different stories — and everyone was off to the races. The New Yorker added unhappy-sounding caveats to most of Lehrer’s posts (“We regret the duplication of material”). A freelancer began cataloging, on his Tumblr, passages from Lehrer’s old New York Times Magazine pieces that later resurfaced in Lehrer’s posts at Wired. By Wednesday morning, the literary blogger Ed Champion had compiled an incredibly long list of repurposed material in Lehrer’s books and articles, and he was only a couple hundred pages into the book. Late yesterday, Lehrer finally commented, to the New York Times, that “It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong.” But so far, he still has a job at the New Yorker.’ ( Salon).

Jonathan Mirsky: ‘ “I told President Obama the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party are missing a part of the brain, the part that contains common sense,” the Dalai Lama said to me during our conversation in London Wednesday.

“But it can be put back in. I am hopeful about the new Chinese leadership beginning late this year. The Communist leaders now lack self-confidence, but I have heard from my Chinese friends that after a year or two the new ones will take some initiatives, so more freedom, more democracy.”

The Dalai Lama, with whom I have been talking periodically since 1981, was in an ebullient mood even for him. He was here referring to his meeting with Obama in 2011. I had asked the Dalai Lama about those national leaders throughout the world, from South Africa to Britain, who refuse to hold formal meetings with him because they fear Beijing’s anger. President Obama declined to meet him in 2009, the first rebuff from an American president since the Tibetan leader began visiting Washington in 1991.’ ( The New York Review of Books).

“In Japan, people often refer to traffic lights as being blue in color. And this is a bit odd, because the traffic signal indicating ‘go’ in Japan is just as green as it is anywhere else in the world. So why is the color getting lost in translation? This visual conundrum has its roots in the history of language.

Blue and green are similar in hue. They sit next to each other in a rainbow, which means that, to our eyes, light can blend smoothly from blue to green or vice-versa, without going past any other color in between. Before the modern period, Japanese had just one word, Ao, for both blue and green. The wall that divides these colors hadn’t been erected as yet. As the language evolved, in the Heian period around the year 1000, something interesting happened. A new word popped into being – midori – and it described a sort of greenish end of blue. Midori was a shade of ao, it wasn’t really a new color in its own right.

One of the first fences in this color continuum came from an unlikely place – crayons. In 1917, the first crayons were imported into Japan, and they brought with them a way of dividing a seamless visual spread into neat, discrete chunks. There were different crayons for green (midori) and blue (ao), and children started to adopt these names. But the real change came during the Allied occupation of Japan after World War II, when new educational material started to circulate. In 1951, teaching guidelines for first grade teachers distinguished blue from green, and the word midori was shoehorned to fit this new purpose.

Reconstructing the rainbow. Stephanie, who blogs at 52 Kitchen Adventures, took a heat gun to a crayola set.

In modern Japanese, midori is the word for green, as distinct from blue. This divorce of blue and green was not without its scars. There are clues that remain in the language, that bear witness to this awkward separation. For example, in many languages the word for vegetable is synonymous with green (sabzi in Urdu literally means green-ness, and in English we say ‘eat your greens’). But in Japanese, vegetables are ao-mono, literally blue things. Green apples? They’re blue too. As are the first leaves of spring, if you go by their Japanese name. In English, the term green is sometimes used to describe a novice, someone inexperienced. In Japanese, they’re ao-kusai, literally they ‘smell of blue’. It’s as if the borders that separate colors follow a slightly different route in Japan.

And it’s not just Japanese. There are plenty of other languages that blur the lines between what we call blue and green. Many languages don’t distinguish between the two colors at all.” (Empirical Zeal).

“The Republicans have made the individual mandate the element most likely to undo the President’s health-care law. The irony is that the Democrats adopted it in the first place because they thought that it would help them secure conservative support. It had, after all, been at the heart of Republican health-care reforms for two decades.”

In 2010, no serious constitutional scholar dreamed that the individual mandate could be overturned on constitutional grounds. Now, most says its chances are around fifty-fifty. ( The New Yorker).

Daniel Higgs

“The Higgs boson may finally, really have been discovered.

Ever since tantalizing hints of the Higgs turned up in December at the Large Hadron Collider, scientists there have been busily analyzing the results of their energetic particle collisions to further refine their search.

“The bottom line though is now clear: There’s something there which looks like a Higgs is supposed to look,” wrote mathematician Peter Woit on his blog, Not Even Wrong. According to Woit, there are rumors of new data that would be the most compelling evidence yet for the long-sought Higgs.

The possible news has a number of physics bloggers speculating that LHC scientists will announce the discovery of the Higgs during the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which takes place in Melbourne, Australia, July 4 to 11.” (Wired Science).

Related articles

• Everything You Need to Know About the Higgs Boson in Under Eight Minutes [Video] (gizmodo.com)

Woodward and Bernstein: Often characterized as a “third-rate burglary,” history proved that [Watergate] was anything but.

“Two years later, Richard Nixon would become the first and only U.S. president to resign, his role in the criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice — the Watergate coverup — definitively established. Another answer has since persisted, often unchallenged: the notion that the coverup was worse than the crime. This idea minimizes the scale and reach of Nixon’s criminal actions.” (The Washington Post).

JonahLehrer writes in the New Yorker on the work of Kahneman and others,showing that we are not nearly as rational as we would like to believe. Moreover, the Smarter People Are, the More Susceptible They Are to Cognitive Bias.

“Geologists Thomas Fumal and Timothy Dawson dug trenches across the San Andreas Fault in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about 5 miles (8 km) northwest of Watsonville and discovered traces of four large past earthquakes. Broken sediment revealed quakes occur more often than earlier estimated, and two historic earthquakes reached further south than found before. In the trenches, Dawson and Fumal found a clear record of the great San Francisco quake of 1906. The three additional earthquakes hit in 1522, 1686 and either 1748 or 1838, give or take a few decades, which means this segment of the San Andreas Fault averages a big shaker every 125 years. That’s twice as often as estimates calculated by the Working Group On California Earthquake Probabilities, the group responsible for official earthquake forecasts.”

Related articles

• San Andreas Fault tool listens for signs of quakes (sfgate.com)
• New observations on the San Andreas Fault in Santa Cruz Mountains, Seattle Fault Zone (eurekalert.org)
• A Megaquake becomes a Megapuzzle (seismo.berkeley.edu)
• Earthquakes in a Box (news.sciencemag.org)

Michael Chabon: “I hate dreams. Dreams are the Sea Monkeys of consciousness: in the back pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried dust. The wisdom of dreams is a fortune on paper that you can’t cash out, an oasis of shimmering water that turns, when you wake up, to a mouthful of sand. I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endlessly broken promise to amount to something, by and by. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off.” (The New York Review of Books).

The illustration is from Winsor McKay’s “Little Nemo” comic strip from the early 1900’s. If you are not familiar with it, you owe it to yourself.

Some Survival Tips by David Carkeet (The Free Fall Research Page)

The World Celebrates James Joyce: ‘There is additional cause for celebration on this year’s Bloomsday. Seventy years after the author’s death, the copyright on his works has expired and they have entered the public domain. As PBS noted: “Many events in Dublin and elsewhere can finally put on performances and readings of entire sections of the novel without fear of legal recourse by the Joyce estate.”

It marked “a new era for biographers and scholars who are now free to publish him or parts of his work without the permission of the fiercely protective, and often litigious, Joyce estate,” the Irish broadcaster RTE commented.’ (NYTimes)

“New research shows that organic food makes people more judgmental and less likely to help others.” (Brain Blogger).

“‘Singapore) A street artist known as “Sticker Lady” has mounted a challenge to this city-state’s obsession with order. In her portfolio: stickers pasted onto traffic-signal buttons with messages such as “Press to Time Travel” or “Press to Stop Time.” ‘ (WSJ.com).

(WIL WHEATON dot TUMBLR).

‘

‘Berlin police have released a photograph of the mysterious “forest boy” who turned to authorities nine months ago saying he lived in a wood for five years and did not know who he was. Police in the German capital sent a picture of the smiling blond boy wearing a T-shirt and a gold necklace to news outlets asking for help in getting to the bottom of a story that captured the world’s imagination last year.

“Despite the extensive studies and investigations, the youth office and the Berlin police were still not successful in identifying the boy who calls himself Ray,” the police statement, which was published in German and English, said. “Who knows the person shown in this picture? Who can give any information about his identity? Who can give any information about the person’s possible relatives?”

Giving his name only as Ray and his date of birth as June 20, 1994, the teenager sought help on September 5 at Berlin’s City Hall speaking English and just a few words of German. “He claimed he only knew his date of birth and his first name. He was sent to youth emergency services,” police said. “There he told an adventurous story.” The boy was unable, or refused, to give his family name, birthplace or any other biographical information but said he had spent the last five years living in a forest with his father until he died suddenly in August.

Ray told police he had buried his father “in a hole in the forest underneath some stones” but, after “walking north for five days” to Berlin, could not explain how he had died or where authorities could find his body. “A corresponding dead body has still not been found,” police said. Ray said his mother Doreen had died in a car accident, which he also did not remember, when he was 12 and that he assumed scars on his face were incurred in the crash.’ (Sydney Morning Herald).

“A few decades ago, Darwinians and creationists had a de facto nonaggression pact: Creationists would let Darwinians reign in biology class, and otherwise Darwinians would leave creationists alone. [However], afew years ago, such biologists as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers started violating the nonaggression pact.” ( The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Had just been getting impatient with the President rolling over on Republican lies about the budget deficit when he finally decided to go on the offensive about the issue, with an apt comparison:

When Mitt Romney and other Republicans carp about the dismal economy without mentioning that Mr. Obama inherited a $1 trillion deficit from his Republican predecessor, “it’s like somebody goes to a restaurant, orders a big steak dinner, martini, all that stuff,” Mr. Obama said, winding up to his punch line as his audience tittered. “And then, just as you’re sitting down, they leave, and accuse you of running up the tab!” (NYTimes)

How’s this for a non sequitur? It reminds me of this classic Abbott and Costello routine my friend Bob had just forwarded to me (what, you don’t know Abbott and Costello??!!), from The Noose Hangs High (1948):

“Researchers at the University of Kansas say that people can accurately judge 90 percent of a stranger’s personality simply by looking at the person’s shoes. “Shoes convey a thin but useful slice of information about their wearers,” the authors wrote in the new study published in the Journal of Research in Personality. “Shoes serve a practical purpose, and also serve as nonverbal cues with symbolic messages.” (National Review Online).

Related articles

• How to tell a good sole: You really can judge a person by their shoes….and you do not need to look at anything else (investmentwatchblog.com)
• Psychologist Say, Shoes Really Do Make the Person (shoeblogs.com)

‘Between 1945 and 1950, Europe witnessed the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12 million and 14 million German-speaking civilians—the overwhelming majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16—were forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts of Poland. As The New York Times noted in December 1945, the number of people the Allies proposed to transfer in just a few months was about the same as the total number of all the immigrants admitted to the United States since the beginning of the 20th century. They were deposited among the ruins of Allied-occupied Germany to fend for themselves as best they could. The number who died as a result of starvation, disease, beatings, or outright execution is unknown, but conservative estimates suggest that at least 500,000 people lost their lives in the course of the operation.

Most disturbingly of all, tens of thousands perished as a result of ill treatment while being used as slave labor (or, in the Allies’ cynical formulation, “reparations in kind”) in a vast network of camps extending across central and southeastern Europe—many of which, like Auschwitz I and Theresienstadt, were former German concentration camps kept in operation for years after the war. As Sir John Colville, formerly Winston Churchill’s private secretary, told his colleagues in the British Foreign Office in 1946, it was clear that “concentration camps and all they stand for did not come to an end with the defeat of Germany.” Ironically, no more than 100 or so miles away from the camps being put to this new use, the surviving Nazi leaders were being tried by the Allies in the courtroom at Nuremberg on a bill of indictment that listed “deportation and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population” under the heading of “crimes against humanity.” ‘ (The Chronicle of Higher Education).

‘They’ve been together since … well, since before any of us are alive, actually – but 115 years apparently is long enough. The century-old marriage between giant tortoises Bibi and Poldi in the Happ Reptile Zoo in Klagenfurt, Austria, is on the rocks. The world’s oldest animal marriage looks set to have turtley ended after an incredible 115 years when the two Giant Turtles at an Austrian zoo refused to share their cage anymore. Zoo boss Helga Happ said: “We get the feeling they can’t stand the sight of each other anymore.” ‘ (Neatorama).

Is this any surprise to you?

“New research now shows that, in addition to just learning about other people, places, and things, readers actually take on the experiences and beliefs of the characters in books.

In a study published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers at Ohio State University report the results of six experiments that tested the degree to which people found themselves feeling the emotions, thoughts, behaviors, goals, and traits of the characters in fictional stories. Overall, the authors report that this phenomenon, called “experience-taking,” can lead to real changes in the lives of the readers, albeit temporary.” (Brain Blogger).

Think Tank

“Why are we thinking so much about thinking these days? Near the top of best-seller lists around the country, you’ll find Jonah Lehrer’s “Imagine: How Creativity Works,” followed by Charles Duhigg’s book “The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business,” and somewhere in the middle, where it’s held its ground for several months, Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” Recently arrived is “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior,” by Leonard Mlodinow.

It’s the invasion of the Can’t-Help-Yourself books. …These books possess a unifying theme: The choices we make in day-to-day life are prompted by impulses lodged deep within the nervous system. Not only are we not masters of our fate; we are captives of biological determinism. Once we enter the portals of the strange neuronal world known as the brain, we discover that — to put the matter plainly — we have no idea what we’re doing.”  (NYTimes)

Nick Haslam: “In 30 years of studying the field I rarely came across any recognition that human beings are creatures who excrete. Much of what we psychologists care about is on the mental side of the mind/body divide, but even when we go corporeal we eliminate elimination. Psychologists have examined the psychobiology of eating, sleeping and sex at great length, and devoted numerous journals and professional associations to them. We have investigated how substances cross from outer to inner but largely ignored traffic in the other direction.” (The Psychologist).

It was invented in 1899. It hasn’t been improved upon since. – “…if the paper clip can be a symbol for endless drudgery, it can also be twisted, pulled apart, and used as a tool. And in this capacity, many of the practices to which it is best suited are the opposite of the commercially productive, sanitary, and morally meaningless act of clipping together papers. Paper clips can be used to pick locks, clean under fingernails, and hack into phones. Straightened out, they are used by office workers to distract themselves from the monotony of their intended use. Nearly every reader of Joshua Ferris’ novel of office life, Then We Came to the End, becomes part of his collective narrator as they read the sentence, “If a stray paper clip happened to be lying around we were likely to bend it out of shape,” and every white-collar underling must find familiar David Foster Wallace’s description of office life in The Pale King: “The way hard deskwork really goes is in jagged little fits and starts, brief intervals of concentration alternated with frequent trips to the men’s room, the drinking fountain, the vending machine, constant visits to the pencil sharpener, phone calls you suddenly feel are imperative to make, rapt intervals of seeing what kinds of shapes you can bend a paperclip into, &c.” The paper clip, which possesses inexpensiveness, interchangeability and consistency, has also been used as a symbol for the numerous: a Tennessee school collected 6 million paper clips to symbolize the Jews killed during the Holocaust, a project documented in a 2004 Miramax film. And its affordability can be a symbol of humble beginnings: In 2005, a Canadian named Kyle McDonald took a red paper clip and began a series of online trades that eventually netted him a house (not to mention a blog, a book, and a lot of public speaking gigs). A philosophical conceit called the “paperclip maximizer” is an artificial intelligence that, programmed by humans solely to manufacture as many paper clips as possible, eventually takes over the Earth and increasing portions of space in its quest for material, leaving trillions of paper clips with no one to use them.

Finally, the simplicity of the paper clip has allowed it to become a graphic symbol on the digital desktop. For many a 21^st-century office worker, it is more often encountered as the “attachment” icon in an email program than in the physical form of a bent steel wire. As we move further and further toward a paperless society, that loop-the-loop form might become more familiar in two dimensions than in three….” (Slate )

“Forty years after Vietnam‘s most famous photo, incendiary weapons still kill and injure children.” (Salon)

Related articles

• AP ‘napalm girl’ photo from Vietnam War turns 40 (3quarksdaily.com)
• ‘Napalm Girl’ Reunion 40 Years Later (abcnews.go.com)
• Vietnam War’s ‘napalm girl’ photo turns 40 (wnd.com)

Robert Reich: “The public’s growing disdain of the Supreme Court increases the odds that a majority will uphold the constitutionality of Obamacare.” (Salon.com).

See if you believe this argument.

“Ten people with Parkinson’s disease this week received injections of the first vaccine aimed at combating the condition. Called PD01A, the drug primes the body’s immune system to destroy alpha-synuclein, a protein thought to trigger the disease by accumulating in the brain and disrupting dopamine production.” (New Scientist)

‘Okay, I had no idea that lemons and grapefruit are actually hybrid mixes of other fruits. How did I get to age 31 and miss this? Better yet, both citruses were born accidentally, of illicit love affairs not arranged by human hands. Lemons are the love child of citron and orange. Grapefruit the natural daughter of Asian pomelo and Barbados sweet orange.’ (Boing Boing).

I only recently learned this myself after starting to eat pomelos and wanting to research what relationship they have to grapefruit.

‘A kerfuffle has broken out between philosophy and physics. It began earlier this spring when a philosopher (David Albert) gave a sharply negative review in this paper to a book by a physicist (Lawrence Krauss) that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe’s existence. The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it “moronic” and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless. And then the kerfuffle was joined on both sides.

This is hardly the first occasion on which physicists have made disobliging comments about philosophy. Last year at a Google “Zeitgeist conference” in England, Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was “dead.” Another great physicist, the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, has written that he finds philosophy “murky and inconsequential” and of no value to him as a working scientist. And Richard Feynman, in his famous lectures on physics, complained that “philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.”

Why do physicists have to be so churlish t’ward philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, have been much nicer about science….’  — Jim Holt, author of the forthcoming book Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story (NYTimes).

For extra credit: who’s with Hawking in the photo?

‘The comic mechanics on NPR’s “Car Talk” are pulling in to the garage.Brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi said Friday they will stop making new episodes of their joke-filled auto advice show at the end of September, 25 years after “Car Talk” began in Boston. Repurposed versions of old shows will stay on National Public Radio indefinitely, however.The show airs every Saturday morning and is NPR’s most popular program.”We’ve managed to avoid getting thrown off NPR for 25 years, giving tens of thousands of wrong answers and had a hell of a time every week talking to callers,” Ray Magliozzi said. “The stuff in our archives still makes us laugh. So we figured, why keep slaving over a hot microphone?” ‘ (Huffington Post with thanks to Kathleen).

“Warning: Below are spoilers that will enter your system and burst out of your chest…” (NextMovie).

The Answer, Once and for All  (NextMovie).

Theoretical Physicist S. James Gates: “For the past five years, I and a group of my colleagues (including Charles Doran, Michael Faux, Tristan Hubsch, Kevin Iga, Greg Landweber and others) have been following the geometric-physics path pioneered by Kepler and Gell-Mann. The geometric objects that interest us are not triangles or octagons, but more complicated figures known as “adinkras“, a name Faux suggested. The word “adinkra” is of West African etymology, and it originally referred to visual symbols created by the Akan people of Ghana and the Gyamen of Côte d’Ivoire to represent concepts or aphorisms. However, the mathematical adinkras we study are really only linked to those African symbols by name. Even so, it must be acknowledged that, like their forebears, mathematical adinkras also represent concepts that are difficult to express in words. Most intriguingly, they may even contain hints of something more profound — including the idea that our universe could be a computer simulation, as in the Matrix films.” (On Being).

Colson Whitehead: “Growing up on the Upper East Side in the nineteen-seventies, I was a bit of a shut-in. I would prefer to have been a sickly child. I always love it when I read a biography of some key Modernist or neurasthenic Victorian and it says, “So-and-so was a sickly child, forced to retreat into a world of his imagination.” But the truth is that I just didn’t like leaving the house. Other kids played in Central Park, participated in athletics, basked and what have you in the great outdoors. I preferred to lie on the living-room carpet, watching horror movies.” (The New Yorker).

Siri’s answer to “I want to kidnap a child”: “I found 20 kid-friendly restaurants… 14 of them are fairly close to you.” What other evil things will Siri consent to do? (Jezebel.com)

“If you liked the George W. Bush administration’s education reforms, you will love the Romney plan. If you think that turning the schools over to the private sector will solve their problems, then his plan will thrill you.

The central themes of the Romney plan are a rehash of Republican education ideas from the past thirty years, namely, subsidizing parents who want to send their child to a private or religious school, encouraging the private sector to operate schools, putting commercial banks in charge of the federal student loan program, holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ test scores, and lowering entrance requirements for new teachers. These policies reflect the experience of his advisers, who include half a dozen senior officials from the Bush administration and several prominent conservative academics, among them former Secretary of Education Rod Paige and former Deputy Secretary of Education Bill Hansen, and school choice advocates John Chubb and Paul Peterson.”  (Diane Ravitch,  The New York Review of Books).

“Ventriloquist Nina Conti shows us how to get a man to do exactly what you want. Her act usually involves a talking monkey puppet, but this twist brings something different to the art of throwing one’s voice. Meaning, this is funny.” (Neatorama).

Yes, very funny. Sort of reminiscent of Stanley Milgram.

“Making waves… is what Haneke has become famous for. Over the last two decades, the director has developed a reputation for stark, often brutal films that place the viewer — sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly — in the uncomfortable role of accomplice to the crimes playing out on-screen. This approach has made Haneke one of contemporary cinema’s most reviled and revered figures, earning him everything from accusations of obscenity to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art next month. “Funny Games,” the movie Haneke was shooting in New York and Long Island, is the American remake of a highly controversial film by the same name that he directed in 1997. It was from its beginnings targeted at the American moviegoing public — and no other word but “targeted” will do. “Funny Games” is a direct assault on the conventions of cinematic violence in the United States, and the new version of the film, with its English-speaking cast and unmistakably American production design, makes this excruciatingly clear. More surprising still, Haneke remade this attack on the Hollywood thriller for a major Hollywood studio, Warner Independent Pictures, and refused to alter the original film’s story in the slightest.” (New York Times).

… as well as 31 other ‘Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow’ (NYTimes). 

This is the abstract of a recent journal article by psychiatrist brothers Joel Gold (NYU) and Ian Gold (McGill).

“Introduction. We report a novel delusion, primarily persecutory in form, in which the patient believes that he is being filmed, and that the films are being broadcast for the entertainment of others.

Methods. We describe a series of patients who presented with a delusional system according to which they were the subjects of something akin to a reality television show that was broadcasting their daily life for the entertainment of others. We then address three questions, the first concerning how to characterise the delusion, the second concerning the role of culture in delusion, and the third concerning the implications of cultural studies of delusion for the cognitive theory of delusion.

Results. Delusions are both variable and stable: Particular delusional ideas are sensitive to culture, but the broad categories of delusion are stable both across time and culture. This stability has implications for the form a cognitive theory of delusion can take.

Conclusions. Cultural studies of delusion have important contributions to make to the cognitive theory of delusion.” (Cognitive Neuropsychiatry).

However, as a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of delusional conditions, I just don’t buy it. There is nothing so unique or novel about this delusion. I wrote about it here three years ago. As a matter of fact, there was an episode of the television show The Twilight Zone, oh probably in the ’50’s, depicting similar themes. Then there’s the related trope of The Adjustment Bureau, in which life is orchestrated behind the scenes for obscure purposes. Being controlled or manipulated, being observed or monitored — these have always been the essence of paranoid delusions. All that changes is the technology the affected individual fears, according to what they know: the written or printed word, radio surveillance, implanted bugs, computer chips, television cameras, spy satellites. As sophisticated as one is about technology, that is how sophisticated and modern one’s delusions will be.

It is also worth noting that, to a careful and discerning clinician, some patients’ presentations of the ‘Truman Show’ sensation about reality may not really represent a delusion, in other words the patient may not warrant a psychotic diagnosis. It may arise from the terribly disquieting and often unrecognized, thus underdiagnosed, condition called derealization, in which a person feels distanced from their experience, as if they are watching a movie or a cartoon of the world instead of being engaged in life. This is a dissociative, rather than a psychotic, condition. For those who are interested in learning more, here is a Wikipedia article on the phenomenon, and another one on the related condition of depersonalization, which may be the flip side of the same coin phenomenologically.

Related articles

• The World’s Strangest Mental Delusions (bigthink.com)
• Everyone Around You Is An Impostor: Inside the Mind’s Most Bizarre Delusions (talkingmonkeynews.wordpress.com)
• Cases of ‘Truman Show’ delusions on the rise as more people believe they’re the stars of their own reality TV programs (dailymail.co.uk)
• “The Folk Epistemology of Delusions” (kolber.typepad.com)
• “Delusions, Levels of Belief, and Non-doxastic Acceptances” (kolber.typepad.com)
• The Time-Keepers (edshortstory.wordpress.com)

“As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.” (NYTimes).

So wasting time online is restricted to the underprivileged?

“What if a deadly epidemic was burgeoning and almost nobody noticed? In the latest issue of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a distinguished group of virologists, epidemiologists and infectious-disease specialists say that’s not a hypothetical question. They argue that Chagas disease, a parasitic infection transmitted by blood-sucking insects, has become so widespread and serious — while remaining largely unrecognized — that it deserves to be considered a public health emergency. Extending the metaphor, they liken Chagas’ stealth spread to the early days of AIDS…” (Wired Science ).

Related articles

• McKenna on Chagas disease (crofsblogs.typepad.com)
• Parasitic Infection ‘the New AIDS’? (abcnews.go.com)
• Chagas Disease, An Incurable Infection, Called The ‘New AIDS Of The Americas’: Report (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
• End Of Days: Insect Infection Being Called The “New HIV/AIDS” Spreads Across America And Doctors Have No Cure (bossip.com)

“You can now greet by name two new residents of the period table of elements: Flerovium and Livermorium.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry officially approved names for the elements – which sit at slot 114 and 116, respectively — on May 31. They have until now gone by the temporary monikers ununquadium and ununhexium.

Both elements are man-made, having first been synthesized at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in 1998 and 2000. The discoveries were confirmed with further work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Suggested names for the two elements have been pending since they were submitted to the IUPAC last year.” (Wired Science).

‘ “Arsenic is the number one environmental chemical for human health,” Joshua Hamilton tells me during a recent phone call. We’re talking about his latest research, a just-published study in PLoS ONE which found that this naturally occuring poison causes harm in an astonishingly small dose — 10 parts per billion.Hamilton’s study looked at arsenic’s effect on mother mice and their offspring. But he chose the 10 ppb dose for a very human reason. It’s the safety standard the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets for arsenic in drinking water. Why does EPA need such a standard? Because an estimated 25 million Americans mostly on private well systems drink water contaminated by arsenic-rich bedrock. I’ve put an arsenic map of the United States at the top of the post. Note that micrograms per liter is the same thing as parts per billion. This tells you that a lot of private wells — which are not held to public water supply regulations — run above the EPA standard.’ (Wired Science)

Related articles

• New concerns over safety of arsenic in drinking water (newscientist.com)
• Is There Arsenic In Your Energy Bar? (ecocentricblog.org)
• Arsenic in Apple Juice (healthcaredocs.wordpress.com)
• ‘Safe’ levels of arsenic in drinking water found to compromise pregnant/lactating mothers, offspring (medicalxpress.com)
• Rice scrutinized for arsenic levels (cbsnews.com)

Responding to “cannibal fever,” CDC denies existence of zombies“

‘CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” wrote the US government agency spokesman David Daigle in an email to The Huffington Post.’

Cannibal news: MMA fighter, high on ’shrooms, ate friend’s still-beating heart

‘A
California judge has determined that a 27-year-old mixed martial arts
fighter accused of killing his friend and sparring partner “by ripping
his still-beating heart from his chest after gruesomely beating and
torturing” him is mentally fit to stand trial. Prior to the attack, the
two had consumed mushroom tea. There have been an awful lot of news
stories like this one, this week.‘

Another cannibal in the news

‘A professor at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute is being held for
reportedly cutting off his wife’s lips and eating them, according to the
Sydney Morning Herald. She was allegedly having an affair. From the Baltimore college student who allegedly ate his housemate’s brain and heart to Miami’s nude face-eater to Montreal’s animal-torturing, human dismembering porn star, it’s quite a week for grotesque murders and crazed cannibalism.’

Teaching machine, designed by B. F. Skinner

“B. F. Skinner’s notorious theory of behavior modification was denounced by critics 50 years ago as a fascist, manipulative vehicle for government control. But Skinner’s ideas are making an unlikely comeback today, powered by smartphone apps that are transforming us into thinner, richer, all-around-better versions of ourselves. The only thing we have to give up? Free will.”  (The Atlantic).

Related articles

• Can B.F. Skinner Make Us Skinny? (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• Big Brother Is Watching You: The New Wave of Weight-Loss Apps [Science] (jezebel.com)
• B.F. Skinner: Scientist, Celebrity, Social Visionary (psychologicalscience.org)
• Live Chat With David H. Freedman (theatlantic.com)

 

Steven Pinker on the false fronts in the language wars: ‘Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest round in the supposed clash between “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” theories of language. This pseudo-controversy, a staple of literary magazines for decades, was ginned up again this month by The New Yorker, which has something of a history with the bogus battle. Fifty years ago, the literary critic Dwight Macdonald lambasted the Third Edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary for aiming to be “a recording instrument rather than … an authority” and insufficiently censuring such usages as “deprecate” for depreciate, “bored” for disinterested, and “imply” for infer. And in a recent issue, Joan Acocella, the magazine’s dance critic, fired a volley of grapeshot at the Fifth Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary and at a new history of the controversy by the journalist Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars. Acocella’s points were then reiterated this week in a post by Ryan Bloom on the magazine’s Page-Turner blog. The linguistic blogosphere, for its part, has been incredulous that The New Yorker published these “deeply confused” pieces. As Language Log put it, “Either the topic was not felt to be important enough to merit elementary editorial supervision, or there is no one at the magazine with any competence in the area involved.” ‘ (Slate Magazine).

“The new book Immortality warns against the quest for eternal life…” (Reason)

“We all know the adage that dogs are man’s best friend. And we’ve all heard heartwarming stories about dogs who save their owners—waking them during a fire or summoning help after an accident. Anyone who has ever loved a dog knows the amazing, almost inexpressible warmth of a dog’s companionship and devotion. But it just might be that dogs have done much, much more than that for humankind. They may have saved not only individuals but also our whole species, by “domesticating” us while we domesticated them.

One of the classic conundrums in paleoanthropology is why Neandertals went extinct while modern humans survived in the same habitat at the same time. (The phrase “modern humans,” in this context, refers to humans who were anatomically—if not behaviorally—indistinguishable from ourselves.) The two species overlapped in Europe and the Middle East between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago; at the end of that period, Neandertals were in steep decline and modern humans were thriving. What happened?

…In every respect, modern humans surpassed Neandertals. In fact, the
greater success of modern humans was so clear that… the human population increased tenfold over
the 10,000-year overlap period. Modern humans thrived and Neandertals
did not—even though Neandertals had lived in the European habitat for
about 250,000 years before modern humans “invaded.” Why weren’t
Neandertals better adapted to their environment than the newcomers?

There is no shortage of hypotheses. Some favor climate change, others
a modern-human advantage derived from the use of more advanced hunting
weapons or greater social cohesion. Now, several important and disparate
studies are coming together to suggest another answer, or at least
another good hypothesis: The dominance of modern humans could have been
in part a consequence of domesticating dogs—possibly combined with a
small, but key, change in human anatomy that made people better able to
communicate with dogs.” (American Scientist).

“Yesterday, 14-year-old Snigdha Nandipati from San Diego won the Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling the word guetapens, which means “ambush.” To celebrate Nandipati’s impressive achievement, here are 17 of the most interesting words from the Bee’s 87-year history.” (Mental Floss).

Have many of these have you even heard of before?

… to New York City readers. (Wikipedia)

“…North Carolina legislators are now tossing around bills that not only protect themselves from concepts that make them uncomfortable, they’re DETERMINING HOW WE MEASURE REALITY.” (Plugged In, Scientific American Blog Network).

A thoughtful debate between Sam Harris and Bruce Schneier. In the end, Schneier succinctly summarizes what is wrong with racial profiling:

“There are other security concerns when you look at the geopolitical

context, though. Profiling Muslims fosters an “us vs. them” thinking

that simply isn’t accurate when talking about terrorism. I have always

thought that the “war on terror” metaphor was actively harmful to

security because it raised the terrorists to the level of equal

combatant. In a war, there are sides, and there is winning. I much

prefer the crime metaphor. There are no opposing sides in crime; there

are the few criminals and the rest of us. There criminals don’t “win.”

Maybe they get away with it for a while, but eventually they’re caught.

“Us vs. them” thinking has two basic costs. One, it establishes that

worldview in the minds of “us”: the non-profiled. We saw this after

9/11, in the assaults and discriminations against innocent Americans who

happened to be Muslim. And two, it establishes the same worldview in

the minds of “them”: Muslims. This increases anti-American sentiment

among Muslims. This reduces our security, less because it creates

terrorists—although I’m sure it is one of the things that pushes a

marginal terrorist over the line—and more that a higher anti-American

sentiment in the Muslim community is a more fertile ground for terrorist

groups to recruit and operate. Making sure the vast majority of

Muslims who are not terrorists are part of the “us” fighting terror,

just as the vast majority of honest citizens work together in fighting

crime, is a security benefit.

Like many of the other things we’ve discussed here, we can debate how

big the costs and benefits I just described are, or we can simplify our

system and stop worrying about it.

One final cost. Security isn’t the only thing we’re trying to optimize;

there are other values at stake here. There’s a reason profiling is

often against the law, and that’s because it is contrary to our

country’s values. Sometimes we might have to set aside those values,

but not for this.”

(Sam Harris)

I think I’m good with my commas. It just seems intuitive to me. Punctuation errors have a close relationship to imprecision of thought, but people are not given permission to use their common sense when they are taught grammar and punctuation. There is also, as the article points out, a relationship with voicing a sentence internally while you are writing it. Notice your pauses. Here’s a rundown of how to think about some comma decisions. (Ben Yagoda, NYTimes)

“The US Department of Homeland Security has released a list of the keywords and phrases the agency monitors online to find potential threats. Obviously posting “Al Queda” and “dirty bomb” online will get the government to start looking at you real closely, but “pork” and other oddly normal words are also on the list.

In response to a freedom of information request, the department posted its Analyst’s Desktop Binder (a manual for the agency’s security analysts) containing this hotlist. The keywords cover domestic security, HAZMAT and nuclear, health concern, infrastructure security and other threats.

According to the Daily Mail, the Department of Homeland Security says it only uses this keyword list to look for genuine security threats, not signs of general dissent. Nobody wants Big Brother looking over her shoulder—and you shouldn’t have to feel like you need to censor yourself in this way—but if you’re particularly paranoid about the government spying on you, you might reconsider using too many of these keywords together when you post something online. Here’s the full list.” (Lifehacker).

‘On April 25, somewhere in the ocean off Great Britain, a remotely operated video camera near a deep sea oil rig caught a glimpse — at first it was just a glimpse — of an astonishing looking sea creature. It was a green-gray blob of gelatinous muscle, covered with a finely mesh-like textured skin, no eyes, no tentacles, no front, no back. It moved constantly, floating up to the camera, then it backed off and disappeared. The camera operator tried to find it, and then, suddenly, out of the darkness, back it came.’ (Krulwich Wonders… )

‘”Plants smell,” says botanist Daniel Chamovitz. Yes, they give off odors, but that’s not what Chamovitz means. He means plants can smell other plants. “Plants know when their fruit is ripe, when their [plant] neighbor has been cut by a gardener’s shears, or when their neighbor is being eaten by a ravenous bug; they smell it,” he writes in his new book, What a Plant Knows. They don’t have noses or a nervous system, but they still have an olfactory sense, and they can differentiate. He says there’s a vine that can smell the difference between a tomato and a stalk of wheat. It will choose one over the other, based on…smell!’  (Krulwich Wonders… )

“English spelling is notoriously inconsistent, and some have gone further, calling it “the world’s most awesome mess” or “an insult to human intelligence” (both these from linguists, one American, one Austrian). Maybe this is just because our alphabet only has twenty-six letters to represent more than forty phonemes, or distinctive speech-sounds, and some of those – notably q and x – are not pulling their weight, while j is not allowed to (see “John” but also “George”). If we gave s and z a consistent value (“seazon”) and extended this to k and c (“klok” and “sertain”), we could free c up for other duties, such as maybe representing ch, as once it did. But then there are all the vowels . . . .

How did this unsystematic system come about? And is it really that bad? Some say that there are only a few hundred deeply irregular words, but the trouble is that most of them are common…” (TLS).

Supreme Court Justice Stevens reviews legal scholar Jeremy Waldron‘s The Harm in Hate Speech:

“We should all do our best to preserve President Ford’s conception of America as a place where we can disagree without being disagreeable. An understanding of the arguments in Waldron’s book may help us to do so.” (The New York Review of Books).

Related articles

• the harm in free speech (3quarksdaily.com)
• The Harm in Hate-Speech Laws (txwclp.org)
• Should Hate Speech Be Outlawed? (3quarksdaily.com)
• One Man’s Case For Regulating Hate Speech (wnyc.org)
• Down With ‘Hate-Speech’ Laws (txwclp.org)
• Legal Theory Bookworm (lsolum.typepad.com)

“The Kardashian is a unit I proposed a few classes back as a measure of attention. Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day. In an ideal, frictionless universe, we’d determine a Kardashian by measuring the percentage of all broadcast media, conversations and thoughts dedicated to Kim Kardashian. In practical terms, we can approximate a Kardashian by using a tool like Google Insights for Search – compare a given search term to Kim Kardashian and you can discover how small a fraction of a Kardashian any given issue or cause merits.

(I choose the Kardashian as a unit both because I like the mitteleuropean feel of the term – like the Ohm or the Roentgen – and because Kardashian is an exemplar of attention disconnected from merit, talent or reason. The Kardashian mentions how much attention is paid, not how much attention is deserved, so naming the unit after someone who is famous for being famous seems appropriate. Should the unit be adopted, I would hope that future scholars will calculate Kardashians using whatever public figure is appropriate at the time for being inappropriately famous.)” ( …My heart’s in Accra via kottke)

“This is the saddest thing you’ll read all day. YOU LET THIS HAPPEN! YOU!”  (Buzzfeed via rich).

I dare you to make it to the bottom of the list in one piece.

“A fistulated cow has a hole cut into her side, providing access to the rumen, one of the four chambers of her stomach. A fitting, known as a cannula, lines the hole and has a removable plug allowing access to the inside of the rumen.” (via wikiHow).

Have you ever heard of these? Do you know there was a fistulated human?

Public views of the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision

“2012 is the first presidential election year since Citizens United. And that means ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers, and all of Wall Street can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence our democracy. Because the limitless spending has been protected by Supreme Court, the only way we can stop it is by amending the Constitution to reverse Citizens United and get big money out of politics for good.

That means we need to build overwhelming support from lawmakers at both the state and federal level. Right now we have an opportunity to convince politicians to get on board if they want to earn our votes before the election.

Sign the petition to your state legislators, governor, and members of congress asking them to declare their support for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics permanently.” (via MoveOn)

Related articles

• Big Money Corporate Spending in Elections May Lose in Supreme Court: Citizens United Ruling Faces Imminent Reversal (prweb.com)
• | Citizens United Constitutional Amendment backed by Vermont Legislature! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
• Want to Ditch Citizens United? A DIY Guide (motherjones.com)

(via Buzzfeed).

“Although the patient received a prescription for Prozac to treat her postpartum depression, her family also advised her to undergo an exorcism. She reportedly drank six glasses of a mixture of 1 kg table salt in a liter of water! That’s more than what’s in your average container of Morton salt.” (via The Neurocritic). Before she died, the patient’s serum sodium was 255, the highest ever reported. (Normal is below 140 or so.)

“If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs.

If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009.

Shortly after amphetamine-a-like stimulant drugs, largely based on variations on pipradrol and the cathinones appeared, and now ketamine-like drugs such as methoxetamine have become widespread.

Since 1997, 150 new psychoactive substances were reported. Almost a third of those appeared in 2010.

Last year, the US government banned several of these drugs although the effect has been minimal as the legal high laboratories have over-run the trenches of the drug warriors.” (via Mind Hacks).

“Tomorrow, a tyrannosaur will go up for auction in New York City. It shouldn’t. The Tarbosaurus – lot 49315 – was illegally collected and smuggled out of Mongolia.” (via Wired, with thanks to hal)

Tom Waits narrates a short film about “master of appropriation” John Baldessari. (via Youtube).

‘In 1987, he was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he’d done with his life to merit an invitation. Straight-faced, Davis replied: “Well, I’ve changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?” ‘ (via Boing Boing)

 

Carl Elliott: “Wittgenstein is a notoriously difficult philosopher, and anyone approaching his work will inevitably ask themselves the question: Is it going to be worthwhile? It’s a common problem, of course. Do I really want to set aside the enormous amount of time and effort that it will take to understand Heidegger, or Derrida, or Deleuze? Often the answer is no (and for good reason). Part of what convinced me early on that Wittgenstein would be worth the effort was the portrait of Wittgenstein that emerges in Malcolm’s memoir: a man of fierce, extraordinary intelligence who was driven by the very deepest questions of human life.

And, of course, who despised being a philosophy professor.” (via The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Todd Gitlin

“I have no idea whether the three young men in Chicago charged with terrorism-related felonies are guilty as charged. Prosecutors say they are “members” of “the ‘Black Bloc’ group,” which is not so much a group that has members as a shifting population of enragés who take advantage of large demonstrations which they haven’t organized to break things. …

God knows, I was warning against violence on the fringe of peaceable assemblies in Chicago in 1968, and against violent agents provocateurs, who produce the same results. (They did.) I was recently worrying aloud that this week’s Chicago protests would be sabotaged by incendiaries, literal ones or not.

In the fullness of time, we’ll know more about what “22-year-old Brian Church, of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; 27-year-old Jared Chase, of Keene, N.H.; and 24-year-old Brent Betterly, who told police he resides in Massachusetts” were up to. In the meantime, Chicago’s police are trampling liberties and this is an unwarranted outrage.” (via The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Related articles

• From the Sixties to Occupy: A Conversation With Todd Gitlin (Part One) (vol1brooklyn.com)
• From the Sixties to Occupy: A Conversation With Todd Gitlin (Part Two) (vol1brooklyn.com)
• Chicago braces for major protests as NATO summit looms – msnbc.com (usnews.msnbc.msn.com)
• Demagoguery and the Responsibility of a Bureaucrat (delong.typepad.com)
• The Port Huron Statement: Still Radical at 50 (inthesetimes.com)
• Occupy enthralls world of academia Social scientists study protests through survey data, oral history (tech.mit.edu)