‘About once a year or so, a case comes along that jars us from our complacency, reminds us that, as a society, we put people to death. Without making judgments about the efficacy of the death penalty as a deterrent against crime, or about its moral legitimacy as a form of justice, its worth noting that putting someone to death is a weighty thing, and it inevitably takes a profound toll on those involved.’ (via PBS).

(via Spiked Math).

Lehigh Valley workers tell of brutal heat, dizzying pace at online retailer. (via Allentown Morning Call).

Writer Jenny Diski: “…In 1964, having spent some time myself in a psychiatric hospital, I read The Three Christs, and soon after came on Laing’s early books, which confirmed what I had seen in it. It has made me very wary of reading ‘case histories’, written about the disturbed by those who believe themselves to know better. It also seemed to me, aged 16, that The Three Christs of Ypsilanti contained everything there was to know about the world. That’s not the case of course, but if resources were short, I’d still be inclined to salvage this book as a way of explaining the terror of the human condition, and the astonishing fact that people battle for their rights and dignity in the face of that terror, in order to establish their place in the world, whatever they decide it has to be.” (via London Review of Books, September 2011).

The book to which she refers, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, is by my uncle, the late psychologist Milton Rokeach. This brilliant and poignant study in the 1950s, an attempt  at a god-like manipulation of three deluded long-term denizens of a psychiatric hospital,  is well-described in Diski’s article and well worth your while if you are interested in the nature of belief and the boundaries of delusions.

Related

• Jenny Diski: The psychology and history of shoplifting. (newyorker.com)
• “They were astonished at the majesty of God” (worryisuseless.wordpress.com)
• What proof do we have that Jesus Christ is real (wiki.answers.com)
• Caution: The Delusion Of Good Intentions (defrostingwindows.wordpress.com)
• psychosis (alixmacdonald.wordpress.com)

‘The holiday of Autumn Equinox, Harvest Home, Mabon, the Feast of the Ingathering, Meán Fómhair or Alban Elfed (in Neo-Druidic traditions), is a pagan ritual of thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth and a recognition of the need to share them to secure the blessings of the Goddess and the God during the winter months. The name Mabon was coined by Aidan Kelly around 1970 as a reference to Mabon ap Modron, a character from Welsh mythology.[14] In the northern hemisphere this equinox occurs anywhere from September 21 to 24. In the southern hemisphere, the autumn equinox occurs anywhere from March 20–23. Among the sabbats, it is the second of the three pagan harvest festivals, preceded by Lammas/Lughnasadh and followed by Samhain.’ (via Wheel of the Year – Wikipedia).

“Scientists said on Thursday they recorded particles travelling faster than light – a finding that could overturn one of Einstein’s fundamental laws of the universe… [M]easurements taken over three years showed neutrinos pumped from CERN near Geneva to Gran Sasso in Italy had arrived 60 nanoseconds quicker than light would have done…

If confirmed, the discovery would undermine Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity, which says that the speed of light is a “cosmic constant” and that nothing in the universe can travel faster. That assertion, which has withstood over a century of testing, is one of the key elements of the so-called Standard Model of physics, which attempts to describe the way the universe and everything in it works.” (via Telegraph.UK)

 

 

‘The innermost parts of a black hole’s active jets have been revealed for the first time. The observation suggests that the energetic spouts are more dynamic than previously suspected, with enormous blasts firing off randomly over timescales as short as 11 seconds.

It is somewhat odd that black holes, which are ultra-dense balls of matter from which no light can escape, can produce energetic flares. But these jets are a byproduct of gas and dust from a companion star that the black hole is consuming. The matter falls in circles toward the black hole, like water down a drain, and forms a gigantic flat disk that accelerates particles within, causing them to discharge energy. As yet scientists have only a vague notion of how the entire process works.’ (via Wired).

‘1982: At precisely 11:44 a.m., Scott Fahlman posts the following electronic message to a computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University:

19-Sep-82 11:44 Scott E Fahlman :-)
From: Scott E Fahlman

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

:-)

Read it sideways. Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends. For this, use:

:-(

With that post, Fahlman became the acknowledged originator of the ASCII-based emoticon. From those two simple emoticons (a portmanteau combining the words emotion and icon) have sprung dozens of others that are the joy, or bane, of e-mail, text-message and instant-message correspondence the world over.

Fahlman was not, however, the first person to use typographical symbols to convey emotions. The practice goes back at least to the mid-19th century, when Morse code symbols were occasionally used for the same purpose. Other examples exist as well.

In 1881, the American satirical magazine Puck published what we would now call emoticons, using hand-set type. No less a wordsmith than Ambrose Bierce suggested using what he called a “snigger point” — \__/ — to convey jocularity or irony. Baltimore’s Sunday Sun suggested a tongue-in-cheek sideways character in 1967.

But none of those caught on. The internet emoticon truly traces its lineage directly to Fahlman, who says he came up with the idea after reading “lengthy diatribes” from people on the message board who failed to get the joke or the sarcasm in a particular post — which is probably what “given current trends” refers to in his own, now-famous missive.’ (via Wired)

Related:

• Happy :-) emoticon day! (arjanshahani.wordpress.com)
• Happy Birthday, Emoticon :-) (abcnews.go.com)
• Internet Emoticons Are 29 Today :-) (gizmodo.com.au)
• September 19 in history (homepaddock.wordpress.com)
• Afternoon Bites: Ambrose Bierce, Edsel, Goodreads, and more (vol1brooklyn.com)

 

 

 

 

 

Miami Invaded By Giant, House-Eating Snails: ‘In southwest Miami, a small subdivision is being called “ground zero” of an invasion by a destructive, non-native species.”It’s us against the snails,” Richard Gaskalla, head of plant industry for Florida’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, tells weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz.That’s the Giant African Land Snail, to be precise. They can grow to be 10 inches long. They leave a slimy trail of excrement wherever they go. They harbor the microscopic rat-lung worm, which can transmit meningitis to humans. And they will literally eat your house.’ (via NHPR)

Related:

• These giant snails are looking for a new home – your home. (inquisitr.com)
• Florida Residents: Don’t Touch That Giant Snail! Make A Phone Call Instead (alternativenewsreport.net)

Obama: “The odds of me being reelected are much higher than the odds of me being elected in the first place.” (via Talking Points Memo).

“…Archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence…” (via DISCOVER Magazine).

Pet parrots, such as cockatoos, that are let loose in the wild are teaching native birds to talk. (via Australian Geographic).

Jonathan Sacks (chief rabbi of the UK): ‘The question is not radical Islam but, does the West believe in itself any more? Is it capable of renewing itself as it did two centuries ago? Or will it crumble as did the Soviet Union from internal decay. “We have met the enemy,” said the cartoon character Pogo, “and he is us.” That is the challenge of 9/11. It’s about time we came together to meet it.’ (via Standpoint).

‘Sci-fi has predicted reality before (think Star Trek‘s communicators and The Prisoner’s ubiquitious surveillance). But now there’s a science fiction concept that we never thought we’d see in real life: psychohistory.

Psychohistory is a concept found in Isaac Asimov’s epic series Foundation—which beat out Lord of the Rings in 1965 for the Hugo award for best all-time series—about using sociology, history and statistics to predict the future of large groups.

Now the BBC reports that “Feeding a supercomputer with news stories could help predict major world events.”

Could it help? Actually, it already has. Believe it or not, a computer predicted the revolutions in Libya and Egypt, as well as the approximate location of Osama bin Laden.’ (via Blastr).

‘The Department of Homeland Security said today that it was studying several “credible threats” made to the United States government in a two-hour broadcast Wednesday night from a location believed to be the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California.

Homeland Security spokesman Harland Dorinson said that the Department did not want to alarm the American people, “but whenever you have a group of individuals threatening to dismantle the US government piece by piece, it has to be taken seriously.”

In reviewing the two-hour tape, Homeland Security officials said they found threats to some of the most essential functions of the US government, from Social Security to the Federal Reserve.

While stopping short of saying that the speakers were engaged in some sort of jihad, Mr. Dorinson did note that a tone of religious extremism dominated the video.

“One speaker in particular, seemed bent on rolling back the advances of science and plunging America back into the Dark Ages,” he said.

But the most terrifying moment in the tape came when that same speaker received thunderous applause from the audience after threatening to execute people.’ (via Borowitz Report, with thanks to Dennis).

“…[M]any of society’s most pernicious troubles arise under the guise of, or as a consequence of, attempts to help others. Pathologies of altruism can result in all kinds of abuses, such as the neglect of children, and can lead to misinformed legislation and the misapplication of science. If we really want to help others, we should recognise that altruism can be dangerous…” (via New Scientist).

 

 

 

 

 

A modern approach to interviewing witnesses of crimes may make things worse: “People love to tell tales. Indeed, even when someone’s memory is patchy, he will still do his best to spin the information he has into a credible yarn. This is not a matter of deceit. Rather, it is an established psychological phenomenon in which the brain tries to make sense of fragmentary information. Although such behaviour is natural and normal, it is a nuisance for the forces of law and order when they are trying to find out what happened during an incident by taking statements from witnesses. For this reason, psychologists working with the police often advocate asking witnesses of crimes to say what they saw in reverse order, to stop them making things up to help the story run smoothly. It sounds like sensible advice, and police forces in Australia, Britain, New Zealand, Norway, Spain and Sweden have all adopted it. But a new study suggests that far from improving recall, it makes things worse.” (via The Economist.

“Whence the female orgasm? After 40 years of debate evolutionary biologists are no closer to deciding whether it evolved to give women a reproductive boost, or whether it is simply a by-product of male orgasm evolution. The latest attempt to settle the dispute involves quizzing some 10,000 twins and pairs of siblings on their sexual habits.

Some evolutionary biologists reckon the female orgasm is adaptive and possibly influences mate choice, strengthens pair bonds or indirectly helps to suck sperm into the uterus. Others argue that women have orgasms for the same reason that men have nipples – being highly adaptive in one sex, the traits tag along for the ride in the other…” (via New Scientist).

So you got to college, but… “…[t]o get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.)” (via Oxford American)

“For centuries, almost all carrots were yellow, white or purple. But in the 17th century, most of those crunchy vegetables turned orange. Why? Turns out it all has to do with Dutch politics.” (via  Ezra Klein – The Washington Post).

“An Israeli psychologist is asking whether Moses may have been tripping when he saw God on Mount Sinai, suggesting that many of our traditional ideas about the Abrahamic God may have been inspired by hallucinogenic drugs.

Professor Benny Shannon’s apparently cites historical evidence that the religious ceremonies of the Israelites included hallucinogenic plants and further bases his speculation on his own experiences with the reportedly similar psychedelic plant ayahuasca.”  (via Mind Hacks).

Jim Romenesko is closing up shop at the OS & RR as part of his ‘semi-retirement’, after 13 years. One of the first generation of webloggers and always worth reading. I was honored that he took note of and encouraged me, back when there were so few of us you couldn’t help but notice. Coming soon: jimromenesko.com, “a blog about media — and other things I’m interested in.”

Related:

• A fond farewell to The Obscure Store (kottke.org)
• The End Of The Obscure Store (theawl.com)
• The Sad Decline Of Poynter Media News (lukeford.net)
• Half the end of an era – Jim Romenesko plans ‘semi-retirement’ (nextlevelofnews.com)

Illusory Invulnerability Created by Taking Dietary Supplements Licenses Health-Risk Behaviors (Chiou, Yang and Wan, 2011, abstract via Psychological Science).

Related:

• Who should take dietary supplements? (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• The Orchestrated Smear Campaign (lewrockwell.com)
• Take vitamin pill, eat cake. How supplements can encourage unhealthy behaviour (bps-research-digest.blogspot.com)
• Dietary supplements: Do we need them? (pdresources.wordpress.com)
• Balancing the risks and benefits of dietary supplements (bioidenticalhormoneexperts.com)

“Although the history of carving miniature bas relief sculptures into coins stretches back to the 18th century if not earlier, it was greatly popularized in the early 20th century with the introduction of the Buffalo nickel. This particular coin was minted using soft metal and was imprinted with the portrait of an indian with bold features, making it easier to deface and transform into the portraits of other people, animals, or even scenery. Add to that the idle hands of unemployed artists during the depression (thus, “hobo”) and soon a flood of curious numismatic treasures were born. Most of the images on hobo nickels are too folk artsy for my taste, however a number of artists etched away the flesh of the subject to reveal these awesomely macabre skulls. Hobo nickel carving remains a popular hobby today and it even has a society. Don’t you wish we had actual money that looked like this?”  (via Colossal).

Related:

• Hobo Nickels (neatorama.com)

Scholars are enchanted by the notion of this anarchistic region in Asia. But how real is it? 

‘Much of the most recent debate has been spurred by the Yale University professor of political science and anthropology James C. Scott, who describes the region in his latest book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009)…

Zomia does not appear on any official map, for it is merely metaphorical. Scott identifies it as “the largest remaining region of the world whose peoples have not yet been fully incorporated into nation-states.” Though the scholars who have imagined Zomia differ over its precise boundaries, Scott includes all the lands at altitudes above 300 meters stretching from the Central Highlands of Vietnam to northeastern India. That encompasses parts of Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Burma, as well as four provinces of China. Zomia’s 100 million residents are minority peoples “of truly bewildering ethnic and linguistic variety,” he writes. Among them are the Akha, Hmong, Karen, Lahu, Mien, and Wa.

 

He depicts an alternative past for the inhabitants of Zomia. The majority of the people who ended up in the hills were either escaping the state or driven out by it, he says…

While others might describe the hill peoples as “primitive” because they did not have permanent abodes or fixed fields, adhere to a major religion, or adopt other modern practices, Scott turns that idea around. He argues that those many minority ethnic groups were, in a sense, barbarians by design, using their culture, farming practices, egalitarian political structures, prophet-led rebellions, and even their lack of writing systems to put distance between themselves and the states that wished to engulf them.

As Scott develops his thesis, concepts that many scholars might hold dear vanish. Longstanding notions about the meaning of ethnic identity: Poof, gone. The idea that being “civilized” is superior to being uncivilized. Poof. The perception that absence of a written language signals a group’s failure to advance. Poof.

Instead, Scott asserts, “ethnic identities in the hills are politically crafted and designed to position a group vis-à-vis others in competition for power and resources.”

Over the past two millennia, “runaway” communities have put the “friction of terrain” between themselves and the people who remained in the lowlands, he writes. The highland groups adopted a swidden agriculture system (sometimes known, pejoratively, as “slash and burn”), shifting fields from place to place, staggering harvests, and relying on root crops to hide their yields from any visiting tax collectors. They formed egalitarian societies so as not to have leaders who might sell them out to the state. And they turned their backs on literacy to avoid creating records that central governments could use to carry out onerous policies like taxation, conscription, and forced labor.’ (via  The Chronicle of Higher Education).

“A recently published New York Times expose details the improper ties between Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and influential rightwing funder and activist Harlan Crow…

Crow is not the sole source of questionable ethical behavior on the part of Clarence Thomas. His highly questionable relationship to an ethically challenged Supreme Court justice is simply the latest to be exposed.

Clarence Thomas participated in a secret political fundraising event put on by the Koch brothers to fund Tea Party infrastructure groups.³

And for years, Thomas disregarded rules requiring him to report his wife’s income on financial disclosure forms. His household received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the conservative Heritage Foundation during a period when he was voting on landmark cases in which the rightwing think tank had a clear ideological stake.⁴

This type of behavior wouldn’t be tolerated for other federal court judges because they, unlike the Supreme Court, are bound by a code of ethics. Common Cause Attorney Arn Pearson says in the Times, “The code of conduct is quite clear that judges are not supposed to be soliciting money for their pet projects or charities, period. If any other federal judge was doing it, he could face disciplinary action.”

…Clarence Thomas’ behavior has long been beyond the bounds of what is considered acceptable. In response to these latest revelations by the New York Times it’s well past time to demand Clarence Thomas’ resignation.” (via CREDO Action).

Related:

• Clarence Thomas: Liberal nightmare on Obamacare (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Is Clarence Thomas the only man in America that can take down ObamaCare? (ironmill.wordpress.com)
• Clarence Thomas praised in New Yorker (blithespirit.wordpress.com)
• Clarence Thomas Is Not An Idiot [The Supremes] (jezebel.com)

“Inspired by The Lesser Key of Solomon, comics, mythology and 17th-century grimoire, the 72DEMONS project is a venue for new and budding visual artists. Our goal is to compile and publish an illustrated book depicting the 72 demons archived in the Ars Goetia, believed to be a guide for summoning spirits.The 72DEMONS project started in the summer of 2011. We encourage all artists to apply.” (via Ars Goetia).

“Ars Goetia, contains descriptions of the seventy-two demons that Solomon is said to have evoked and confined in a brass vessel sealed by magic symbols, and that he obliged to work for him. It gives instructions on constructing a similar brass vessel, and using the proper magic formulae to safely call up those demons.

It deals with the evocation of all classes of spirits, evil, indifferent and good; its opening Rites are those of Paimon, Orias, Astaroth and the whole cohort of Infernus. The second part, or Theurgia Goëtia, deals with the spirits of the cardinal points and their inferiors. These are mixed natures, some good and some evil.^[1]

The Ars Goetia assigns a rank and a title of nobility to each member of the infernal hierarchy, and gives the demons’ “signs they have to pay allegiance to”, or seals. The lists of entities in the Ars Goetia correspond (to high but varying degree, often according to edition) with those in Johann Weyer‘s Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, an appendix appearing in later editions of his De Praestigiis Daemonum, of 1563.

A revised English edition of the Ars Goetia was published in 1904 by magician Aleister Crowley, as The Book of the Goetia of Solomon the King. It serves as a key component of his popular and highly influential system of magick.” (via Wikipedia).

“This spring, the Archives of Internal Medicine published a much-discussed study that showed that doctors might recommend different treatments for their patients than they would for themselves. They were far more likely to prescribe for patients a potentially life-saving treatment with severe side effects than they were to pick that treatment for themselves.

Understandably, people are worried that this means doctors know something they’re not telling their patients. But my own experience with illness taught me a simpler truth: when it comes to their own health, doctors are as irrational as everyone else.” (via NYTimes).

“Take a piece of paper. Crumple it. Before you sink a three-pointer in the corner wastebasket, consider that you’ve just created an object of extraordinary mathematical and structural complexity, filled with mysteries that physicists are just starting to unfold.” (via Wired.com).

Starting with Yellowstone, a gallery of 21 satellite images. False color highlights features that might not otherwise stand out. How many have you visited? (via Wired.com).

“Starting this weekend, the closest supernova found in at least 25 years will be visible from your backyard with just binoculars or a small telescope. The exploding white dwarf star is currently brightening in the Pinwheel Galaxy, nestled, from our perspective, within the Big Dipper.

…Most supernovas spotted at the Palomar Observatory are around 1 billion light-years away, far too distant to be seen by amateurs. At only 21 million light-years away, the newly discovered, violently exploding star is a close cosmic neighbor. In the video … Berkeley Lab’s Peter Nugent describes how to spot this supernova, set to reach peak brightness Sep. 9.” (via Wired.com).

To put it another way: can you name all seven deadly sins? Conor Friedersdorf reminds us (via The Atlantic).

Interview with Robert Almonte, a federal marshal for the Western District of Texas who investigates narcotics cases, on how the Mexican cartels take advantage of religious traditions, rituals, and iconography. (via Being Blog)

“…Are hurricanes getting worse because of human-induced climate change? The short answer from scientists is that they are still trying to figure it out. But many of them do believe that hurricanes will get more intense as the planet warms, and they see large hurricanes like Irene as a harbinger.” (via NYTimes).

Related:

• Is It Wrong to Link Hurricane Irene to Global Warming? (blogs.scientificamerican.com)
• Hurricane Irene 2011: Climate Change To Blame? (huffingtonpost.com)
• The Irene Mistake (themoderatevoice.com)

“A 5.8-magnitude earthquake rocked Northern Virginia Tuesday, briefly causing the shutdown of power at a nuclear plant in Louisa County.

The U.S. Geological Survey, headquartered in nearby Reston, Va., said the epicenter of the quake was 34 miles northwest of Richmond, Va., and 87 miles southwest of Washington, D.C. It was the strongest quake in Virginia in more than a century.

The quake struck at 1:51 p.m. at a depth of 3.7 miles.

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reported the quake was felt in Washington, New York and North Carolina. The newspaper said buildings swayed, and damage reports had begun to trickle in.” (via UPI).

My co-workers and I felt this in the hospital where I work. I saw a large plate glass window in the interview room I was in shimmying and the walls squeaked. It seemed to go on for about 30 seconds. I noted on my watch that the time was 1:53. (Does the two-minute lag reflect the time it took for the vibrations to travel the distance from VA to MA?) I recognized immediately what was happening, as I have been in earthquakes before, when I lived briefly in Tokyo. There have been reports that it was felt as far from the epicenter as Toronto.

Did any of my readers on the Eastern Seaboard feel it?

Related:

• Quake rocks Washington area, felt on East Coast (sfgate.com)
• New York City Earthquake: Virginia Tremor Felt In NYC (huffingtonpost.com)
• Parts of U.S. Capitol, White House evacuated after quake (theglobeandmail.com)
• Earthquake tremors felt in central Pennsylvania from Lycoming to Cumberland counties (pennlive.com)

Zone Near Fukushima Daiichi May Be Off Limits for Decades: “Broad areas around the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant could soon be declared uninhabitable, perhaps for decades, after a government survey found radioactive contamination that far exceeded safe levels, several major media outlets said Monday.

The formal announcement, expected from the government in coming days, would be the first official recognition that the March accident could force the long-term depopulation of communities near the plant, an eventuality that scientists and some officials have been warning about for months.” (via NYTimes).

Image by John McNab via Flickr

“The Higgs boson, the most sought-after particle in all of physics, is proving tougher to find than physicists had hoped. 

Last month, a flurry of ‘excess events’ hinted that the Higgs could be popping up inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator located at CERN, Europe’s high-energy physics lab near Geneva, Switzerland. But new data presented today at the Lepton Photon conference in Mumbai, India, show the signal fading. It means that “this excess is probably just a statistical fluctuation”, says Adam Falkowski, a theorist at the University of Paris-South in Orsay, France.” (via Nature News).

“We’ll pedal the Street View trike along the narrow dirt paths of the Amazon villages and maneuver it up close to where civilization meets the rainforest. We’ll also mount it onto a boat to take photographs as the boat floats down the river. The tripod—which is the same system we use to capture imagery of business interiors—will also be used to give you a sense of what it’s like to live and work in places such as an Amazonian community center and school.” (via Official Google Blog).

Image via Wikipedia

‘ As Nelson Mandela has said, “there can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.” By that measure, our current failure to provide stronger protection of children in the face of corporate-caused harm reveals a sickness in our societal soul. ‘  —  Joel Bakan (via NYTimes op-ed).

Image via Wikipedia

“More than ever, an urban nation plagued by obesity, sloth and a surfeit of digital entertainment should encourage people to experience the wild — but does that mean nature has to be tame and lawyer-vetted?

My experience, purely anecdotal, is that the more rangers try to bring the nanny state to public lands, the more careless, and dependent, people become. There will always be steep cliffs, deep water, and ornery and unpredictable animals in that messy part of the national habitat not crossed by climate-controlled malls and processed-food emporiums. If people expect a grizzly bear to be benign, or think a glacier is just another variant of a theme park slide, it’s not the fault of the government when something goes fatally wrong.”  — Timothy Egan (via NYTimes op-ed).

“We ought to teach true, serene airplane sleeping in college, with a primer class as a high school elective.” — Virginia Heffernan (via NYTimes op-ed).

Works by James Siena (via but does it float)

Re: the item about which I wrote below: broken experiment. Unreasonable theory. Media hype. (via The Atlantic Wire, again thanks to julia).

” Do we protect native plants because they’re better for the earth, or because we hate strangers? A cherished principle of environmentalism comes under attack…” (via Boston Globe)

Related:

• Humans: Earth’s Most Invasive Species (indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com)
• Innovative Approach To Invasive Species: EAT THEM!!! (naturalhistorywanderings.com)

Why We Can’t Give It Up:   Torture had become ‘as extinct as cannibalism’ in post-Enlightenment Europe. So why has it come roaring back in the last century? (via Historynet)

Related:

• UK torture inquiry “secretive and deeply flawed” (omaymen.wordpress.com)
• Torture (dooce.com)
• Is Torture Ever Acceptable? (socyberty.com)
• Obama bans war criminals, except our own [I think there may be more to this than meets the eye.] (jhaines6.wordpress.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? “Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing.” (via NYTimes)

Related:

• Do You Suffer From Akrasia? (reason.com)
• Do You Suffer from (Design) Decision Fatigue? The New York Times (apartmenttherapy.com)
• Ego Depletion and Decision Fatigue (paul.kedrosky.com)

Some good news this week, a gross miscarriage of justice undone by a strange legal maneuver.  If you haven’t been following the case, here is a Wikipedia article. Three young men have spent 18 years in prison after convicted, on little basis beside being into Death Metal, of a brutal  murder they did not commit. Many of us were first introduced to their plight in this documentary. Now they have been released on time served in return for changing their pleas to guilty, even though they have always maintained their innocence. (via  Washington Post).

He devised a more efficient way to gather solar energy utilizing an array of small solar panels arranged according to the Fibonnaci series, observing that this replicates tree branch patterns in nature. It turns out to be superior to a manmade flat array, and he has garnered a patent and commercial interest from the discovery.

‘Summing up his research and imagining the possibilities, Aidan wrote: “The tree design takes up less room than flat-panel arrays and works in spots that don’t have a full southern view. It collects more sunlight in winter. Shade and bad weather like snow don’t hurt it because the panels are not flat. It even looks nicer because it looks like a tree. A design like this may work better in urban areas where space and direct sunlight can be hard to find.” ‘ (via Treehugger, thanks to julia)

Related:

• Solar Panel Upgrade of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)
• Novel idea – arrange solar panels like Nature designed it (via Watts Up With That?) (loopysexpressions.wordpress.com)
• The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees (amnh.org)

‘…[S]ome 90 percent of the protein-encoding cells in our body are microbes. We evolved with them in a symbiotic relationship, which raises the question of just who is occupying whom.

“We are massively outnumbered,” said Jeremy K. Nicholson, chairman of biological chemistry and head of the department of surgery and cancer at Imperial College London. Altogether, he said, 99 percent of the functional genes in the body are microbial.

In Orlando, he and other researchers described how genes in this microbiome — exchanging messages with genes inside human cells — may be involved with cancers of the colon, stomach, esophagus and other organs.’ (via NYTimes).

“A new broad-spectrum treatment for viruses could be as effective as antibiotics fighting bacteria, MIT researchers report. The method uses cells’ own defense systems to induce invaded cells to commit suicide, preventing the spread of the virus. In lab tests, the new drug completely cured mice that had been infected with influenza….

“In theory, it should work against all viruses,” said Todd Rider, a senior staff scientist at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory who invented the new technology.” (via Gizmodo.)

If you install Dropbox (for free) as a result of this referral from me, I get extra space in my Dropbox. I find this an invaluable tool. Having a Dropbox folder on each of my machines (at work and at home, both PC and Mac as well as portable platforms), anything I put into the folder on one of my machines is instantly available on all of them. There is also a public subfolder where files are accessible across the web to anyone to whom I send the file’s URL.

As you know, FmH is totally noncommercial and I have never sought or derived any compensation from the almost 12 years I have been weblogging here. Could you consider gifting me with 0.25 Gb of Dropbox storage at no cost, and lots of potential benefit, to yourself?

Robert Krulwich: “It’s a simple question, really, but a cunning one, because the answers are so embarrassingly, voluptuously personal. Alex Bellos thought it up. He’s a writer, math enthusiast, and nut.

Here’s what he wants: He wants to know your favorite number. Just that. Tell me your favorite, and tell me why, he says.

He’s set up a website, www.favoritenumber.net and he’s asked people to write in. So far he’s had about 13,000 submissions. He wants more. So I’m pimping his site here…” (via Krulwich Wonders… : NPR).

I wonder if there is a significant constituency for 23.

Image via Wikipedia

Sam Harris: ‘I discuss issues of drug policy in some detail in my first book, The End of Faith (pp. 158-164), and my thinking on the subject has not changed. The “war on drugs” has been well lost, and should never have been waged. While it isn’t explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution, I can think of no political right more fundamental than the right to peacefully steward the contents of one’s own consciousness. The fact that we pointlessly ruin the lives of nonviolent drug users by incarcerating them, at enormous expense, constitutes one of the great moral failures of our time. (And the fact that we make room for them in our prisons by paroling murderers and rapists makes one wonder whether civilization isn’t simply doomed.)

I have a daughter who will one day take drugs. Of course, I will do everything in my power to see that she chooses her drugs wisely, but a life without drugs is neither foreseeable, nor, I think, desirable. Someday, I hope she enjoys a morning cup of tea or coffee as much as I do. If my daughter drinks alcohol as an adult, as she probably will, I will encourage her to do it safely. If she chooses to smoke marijuana, I will urge moderation.[2] Tobacco should be shunned, of course, and I will do everything within the bounds of decent parenting to steer her away from it. Needless to say, if I knew my daughter would eventually develop a fondness for methamphetamine or crack cocaine, I might never sleep again. But if she does not try a psychedelic like psilocybin or LSD at least once in her adult life, I will worry that she may have missed one of the most important rites of passage a human being can experience.’ (via Sam Harris‘s weblog).

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In an interview in Salon, Daniel Kelly, Purdue philosopher and author of “Yuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust,” discusses the evolution of the emotion from a mediator of protection from toxic foodstuffs to one protecting us from dangerous ideas:

‘Does disgust play a role in creating social inequality? So gays and lesbians shouldn’t be denied the right to marry on the grounds that their so-called disgusting lifestyle undermines the sanctity of marriage?

The groups that are most likely to elicit disgust are often the lowest on the social hierarchy. Women have been made into objects of disgust a lot throughout history. Disgust can be a very powerful rhetorical tool to discredit, undermine or demonize an opponent or a group of people with whom you don’t agree. An easy way to do those things is to portray someone as infecting the integrity of your own social group. Disgust is a really potent emotion, and using it can be pretty rousing and effective because it has an almost subliminal influence on how we think of things.

Why not use it to make discrimination unfashionable?

I argue against disgust ever being used as a social tool, even to get rid of something we all logically agree is morally pernicious. It’s easy to imagine someone arguing that, since rational and calculated arguments haven’t done a lot to change public opinion about racism, maybe we should try portraying racism and racists as disgusting. The powerful influence of this emotion might help push racism to the edge of society or eliminate it altogether, but my response is that we still shouldn’t do it. It’s not ethically appropriate to deliberately depict any group of people as disgusting because disgust makes it very easy to dehumanize, and that would do the very thing we seek to undo.’ (via Salon.com).

“The fantasy life of Nicholson Baker — that would be a great psychological study.” (via NYTimes.com).

“There’s an essential freedom in being alone with one’s thoughts, oblivious to and unpolluted by anyone else’s. Diminish that aloneness and we start to doubt our own perspective. Do I really think Blue Bottle coffee is that great? Or Blazing Saddles that funny? Do I really not like that pizza place because it isn’t authentic New York-style? Sure, it’s entirely possible to arrive at one’s own opinion amidst a cacophony of others. But it’s also possible to bend, unknowingly and imperceptibly, toward a position not naturally our own.” (via Magazine).

Image by cmdln via Flickr

“Beliefs come first; reasons second. That’s the insightful message of The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer, the founder of Skeptic magazine. In the book, he brilliantly lays out what modern cognitive research has to tell us about his subject—namely, that our brains are “belief engines” that naturally “look for and find patterns” and then infuse them with meaning. These meaningful patterns form beliefs that shape our understanding of reality. Our brains tend to seek out information that confirms our beliefs, ignoring information that contradicts them. Mr. Shermer calls this “belief-dependent reality.” The well-worn phrase “seeing is believing” has it backward: Our believing dictates what we’re seeing.” (via Reason Magazine).

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NYTimes. editorial: “The debt limit is not necessary, or good for the economy, and is now a political hand grenade.”

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Paul Krugman: “Watching our system deal with the debt ceiling crisis — a wholly self-inflicted crisis, which may nonetheless have disastrous consequences — it’s increasingly obvious that what we’re looking at is the destructive influence of a cult that has really poisoned our political system.

And no, I don’t mean the fanaticism of the right. Well, OK, that too. But my feeling about those people is that they are what they are; you might as well denounce wolves for being carnivores. Crazy is what they do and what they are.

No, the cult that I see as reflecting a true moral failure is the cult of balance, of centrism.

Think about what’s happening right now. We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while the president and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating — offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion.

So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent — because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship.

The reality, of course, is that we already have a centrist president — actually a moderate conservative president. Once again, health reform — his only major change to government — was modeled on Republican plans, indeed plans coming from the Heritage Foundation. And everything else — including the wrongheaded emphasis on austerity in the face of high unemployment — is according to the conservative playbook.

What all this means is that there is no penalty for extremism; no way for most voters, who get their information on the fly rather than doing careful study of the issues, to understand what’s really going on…” (via NYTimes op-ed).

“Street signs are boring. They pepper the landscape and add just a little bit more monotony to our lives. Thankfully, some homegrown artists and fans of culture jamming decided to mix it up a bit, and add some spice to an otherwise dull aspect of our daily commute.” (via WebUrbanist).

Andrew O’Hehir: “…some of these movies are well and truly missing in that it’s unlikely anyone will ever see them again, others are unavailable on home video because of copyright disputes or other business issues, some exist in a butchered form disavowed by their creators, and some can’t be seen because those who own them simply don’t want you to see them…” (via Salon).

“Acclaimed journalist, author and political activist Barbara Ehrenreich explores the darker side of positive thinking.”  (via YouTube). Skewering the self-help movement and ‘happiness psychology’, including a discussion of the pink-ribbon breast cancer posse.

A French study reveals which medications are most often associated with violence and aggression. ([Eur J Clin Pharmacol. 2011] – PubMed result).

“…You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP all sitting members of congress are ineligible for reelection.” (via The Big Picture).

…when they ask, “May I search your digital device?” ( .pdf via Electronic Frontier Foundation).

The tone of the post says that Gizmodo is enthusiastic about this development. Technological boosterism is fine, but don’t ignore that many humans are at their absolute worst when they are behind the wheel, which they will still be.

Related:

‘An amazing picture from Jeff Arris that plays havoc with our face perception system.’ (via Mind Hacks).

‘Embassytown‘ by China Miéville: Book review –This is definitely on my summer reading list. His last book, The City and the City, embodied a fascinating and original conceit, although it was not succinctly realized. (via latimes.com).

This movement interested me back in the day, since I studied both theoretical physics and the psychology of consciousness, altered states, etc. I also had no idea that most of the luminaries in this field were so intertwined.

Electron micrograph of E. Coli

This article from Eurosurveillance is a fairly technical microbiological discussion of the unusual characteristics of the E. coli strain causing the lethal European outbreak, the search for the source of which has been challenging. Rapid gene sequencing of the isolates and rapid communication of the data were unprecedented.

One of the things I had not known is that there is a whole class of virulent E. coli , the “Shigatoxigenic group of Escherichia coli (STEC)”, that produce Shiga toxin. This is a cause of bacterial dysentery I thought was only due to another bacterium called Shigella.

Related:

• Phage May Have Been Key to Europe’s Deadly E. Coli Outbreak (scientificamerican.com)
• Occurrence and characterization of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli in raw meat, raw milk, and street vended juices in Bangladesh (foodhygiene2010.wordpress.com)
• Some Thoughts About EAEC, Reservoirs, and Pathogenicity [Mike the Mad Biologist] (scienceblogs.com)

Related:

• The Psychopath Test: A Journey through the Madness Industry by Jon Ronson: review (telegraph.co.uk)
• Psychopath Spotting (bigthink.com)
• The Psychopath Test (politics.ie)
• Reading for non-psychopaths (scienceblogs.com)
• Review: The psychopath test: A journey through the madness industry (macleans.ca)

Surprisingly perhaps, some point to the move to unleaded gasoline as one factor.