“Parent alert: the Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those “Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses. They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.” (New York Times)

“With a mixture of anticipation and anxiety, the art world has been awaiting Crumb's long-rumored illuminated manuscript, a four-year, monastic-like effort to adapt every word of the first book of the Bible in distinctive pen and ink.” (USAToday)

Related:

• R. Crumb zaps the Book of Genesis in latest work (Popeater)

Grammatical rules have always baffled

me, leaving me wondering whether my

life is transitive or intransitive, if I am the

subject or object of my life, and no one

has been able to provide words to describe

my actions, even if they do end in –ly.

But now the problem seems to be with

pronouns: I am unwilling to be him

and you are unable to be her, so we

will never be them~the ones talking

about what they need from the grocery

store because the Rogers are coming for

dinner tonight; the couple saving for a

vacation, perhaps a cruise to Alaska or a

museum tour of Europe; the two who meet

with a financial advisor to plan their children's

college fund while still managing to set enough

aside for their retirement~and so we will

continue to be nothing more than sentence

fragments, perfectly fine for effect,

but forever looking for the missing

part of speech we can never seem to find.

(The Writer’s Almanac)

and more…]
(Urlesque – Internet Trends, Viral Videos, Memes and Web Culture)

“Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at.” [thanks, abby]

Dave Johns writes in Slate Magazine about the resurgence of the long-discredited ‘science’ of physiognomy, the idea that personality attributes can be inferred from facial features alone.

My attention was grabbed by this on both a professional and personal basis. It is crucial for those in the behavioral sciences today to find their own position on the resurgence of biological determinism some would say has come to dominate the field. And, personally, I have always been dogged by the fact that people’s initial reaction to me seems to have a greater-than-chance tendency to find me intimidating. (I could understand it if they waited to hear what comes out of my mouth, but I think the reaction precedes any interaction with me.) It would be fine if I were the exception that proves the rule, but I think that, as is true of most of us, I am all too capable of falling into the role that has been shaped for me by those initial preconceptions. In addition to all the other prejudices in our society, are we face-ist?

A number of studies have demonstrated that most people hold …stereotypes about what criminals look like and believe that “the face fits the crime.” This can play out in court: The psychologist Leslie Zebrowitz has shown that “mature-faced” defendants are more likely to be found guilty of certain kinds of crimes. And when baby-faced defendants are found guilty, they tend to get more lenient sentences. She calls this form of discrimination “face-ism” and argues that defendants shouldn’t be required to show their faces in court. But if it is proved that the male face does indeed reveal “honest” signals about aggressiveness, jurors might deserve access to that information. (Then, too, defense attorneys might want to adopt a novel legal strategy: the meathead defense. “My client can’t be blamed for his actions because he suffers from high testosterone. Just look at his face!”)

Many of the supposedly indicative features are shaped by testosterone, which is linked to ‘masculine’ appearance and to aggression. But if the development of our frontal lobes has supposedly conferred on humans a much greater capacity to modulate our behavior, does the persistence of masculine aggression really reinforce biological determinism or merely that we have been pitiful failures at modifying the traditional male role definitions?

[On a lighter but related (?) note, I just realized that an anagram for my name is “genial towel.” Do I seem like a genial towel to you?]

University of Texas biochemist publishing in the Journal of Zombie Science (pdf).

“Nature might be red in tooth and claw, but even a glimpse of greenery can make us behave in kinder, gentler ways…I've written before about the powerful mental benefits of communing with nature – it leads to more self-control, increased working memory, lower levels of stress and better moods – but a new study by psychologists at the University of Rochester find that being exposed to wildlife also makes us more compassionate.” — Jonah Lehrer (The Frontal Cortex)

The Irish approval of the Lisbon accord apparently paves the way for Tony Blair to be the first president of the EU.

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the debut of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (Wikipedia article).

“Despite his esteem in the writing community, Serling found The Twilight Zone difficult to sell. Few critics felt that science fiction could transcend empty escapism and enter the realm of adult drama. In a September 22, 1959, interview with Serling, Mike Wallace asked a question illustrative of the times: “…[Y]ou’re going to be, obviously, working so hard on The Twilight Zone that, in essence, for the time being and for the foreseeable future, you’ve given up on writing anything important for television, right?” While Serling’s appearances on the show became one of its most distinctive features, with his clipped delivery still widely imitated today, he was reportedly nervous about it and had to be persuaded to appear on camera. Serling often steps into the middle of the action and the characters remain seemingly oblivious to him, but on one notable occasion they are aware he’s there: In the episode “A World of His Own,” a writer with the power to alter his reality objects to Serling’s unflattering narration, and promptly erases Serling from the show.”

I was seven when the show first aired, although at first I was a viewer of something on a competing channel. I no longer recall what it was, perhaps Walt Disney. Within a short while, certainly before the end of the first season. I began to become aware of schoolmates talking about this new show with fascination and devotion. It was the first time I was sensitive to being out of the swing of things, and my insistence I be allowed to watch it was the first time I recall asserting myself against my parents’ preferences for me. The Twilight Zone thus not only played a pivotal role in my coming of age but, I am sure, shaped my lifelong interest in the eerie and macabre.

Here is an episode listing of the original five seasons of the show. If you are old enough, which do you recall? Which was your favorite? I would have to list “It’s a Good Life”, “Nightmare at 20,000 Ft” and, of course, “To Serve Man.”

“Camouflage series by Beijing-based artist Liu Bolin. Covered entirely in paint to blend into their surroundings, each installation can take up to 10 hours of painstaking work…

via wide open spaces.

“Airbrushed photographs could be given government health warnings in France to protect women from 'false' images of female beauty.” (Telegraph UK)

(Mt. Holly Mayor’s Office)

“I had no idea so many people make a hobby of traveling beneath the sea in homemade junkers they call submarines. Here's a few of these DIY subs…” (Tinselman)

Cryopreservation Unit, by Taryn Simon

London Telegraph article by Salman Rushdie profiling “The Hidden and Familiar”, new collection of photographs by Taryn Simon of some of the world’s most hidden places.

And:

• Photographing secret sites: Taryn Simon on TED.com (ted.com)

“You could probably figure out the topic despite the medicalese in the title: “Positive Serum Ethanol Level and Mortality in Moderate to Severe Traumatic Brain Injury.” The study is a retrospective one, based on identifying a set of patients in trauma centers who had been diagnosed with severe brain injuries. Not surprisingly, a number of them had been drinking. The surprise was that the folks with alcohol in the bloodstream had a better survival rate than those who hadn't had a drink, even after correcting for some potential confounding factors. As always, further studies are suggested before we start dispensing vodka shots in the ER.” (Ars Technica)

“There are over 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the US, or about 1 for every 23,000 Americans. But even market penetration this advanced doesn’t mean that McDonald’s is everywhere. Somewhere in South Dakota is the McFarthest Spot, the place in the US geographically most removed from the nearest McD’s (*). If you started out from this location, a few miles north of State Highway 20 (which runs latitudinally between Highways 73 in the west and 65 in the east), you’d have to drive 145 miles to get your Big Mac…” (Strange Maps)

I would like to see an overlay of several maps of this sort, one for each of the major fast food places, one for Walmarts, etc. The cumulative effect, I suspect, would correlate quite well with the quality of life to be expected in various locales.

(The Awl)

Cory Doctorow: “British Airways has broken new exciting new ground in the race to make flying as awful as possible: they have announced a fee (ranging from £10-60 per passenger) for advance seat selection, explaining that this will be the only way that families and other groups travelling together can be assured that they’ll be sitting next to each other. I wonder what happens if you don’t pay it while flying with a two-year-old in her own seat; do they seat her at the other end of the plane from you and explain to the strangers on either side of her that they’re responsible for her well-being for the duration? …” (Boing Boing)

ethereal Sydney scene

“A storm which blew in from the Australian outback blanketed Sydney in a layer of orange dust. Here, residents describe the bizarre and frightening scene.” (BBC

During my psychiatric career, I have worked at several of these now abandoned or demolished-and-redeveloped sites, including Metropolitan State Hospital, Boston State Hospital and Worcester State Hospital. I routinely pass the sites of MSH and BSH. I can’t say that I have ever been back inside in an ‘unofficial’ capacity since their closures, although I am tempted.

'Ghost fleet' near Singapore.

“The world's ship owners and government economists would prefer you not to see this symbol of the depths of the plague still crippling the world's economies…” ( Daily Mail )

“The power of the imagination is well-known: it’s no surprise that scary music is scarier with your eyes closed. But now neuroscientist and psychiatrist Prof. Talma Hendler of Tel Aviv University’s Functional Brain Center says that this phenomenon may open the door to a new way of treating people with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other neurological diseases.” (Science Daily)

He said,”It was the greatest shot I ever hit in my life”. (kottke).

“Fancy a three-day weekend – not just once in a while but week in week out? You may think your bosses would never agree to it, but the evidence suggests that employers, employees and the environment all benefit.” (New Scientist).

“Electromagnetic pulses — high-altitude bursts of radiation that could disable power grids and cripple modern life over wide areas — are a security concern. But right and left disagree on how plausible, or far-fetched, the threat is.” Idea of the Day Blog – NYTimes.com.

“When a building collapses or a train wrecks, specialized rescue teams can extricate trapped people often in a matter of minutes, working with techniques and technology developed over the past two centuries.” (American Heritage)

“A cornucopia of drugs will soon be on sale to improve everything from our memories to our trust in others.” (Prospect)

Drugmakers Are Desperate to Find Out.. I became a web friend of Wired writer Steve Silberman because of the uncanny parallelism in our interests, and I usually post blinks to his thoughtful and important pieces. Here, he describes the difficulty drug manufacturers are having in distinguishing the efficacy of medications they are testing from that of the placebos to which they are compared. Perhaps surprisingly, the rates of placebo response seem to be growing, so that the claims for pharmacological effectiveness of their products are harder and harder to make. Big Pharma desperately wants to know why, both to succeed again in establishing the efficacy of the products they are developing and to capitalize on the placebo effect if they can find a way to bring it to market itself.

As Silberman describes, comparison with placebo has long been the gold standard in evaluation of drug efficacy. This has largely made the placebo effect a troublesome enemy of allopathic medicine. This is a weakness of those with a concrete, limited conception of how healing works. In fact, our understanding should be stood on its head. Instead of being a nuisance, the placebo effect may be the basis of most therapeutic effects, both in particular of the ‘magic pills’ we physicians give our patients and, more generally, of the healing relationship per se. I have long found it pitiful that most physicians do not see that much of what they are doing is mobilizing their patients’ intrinsic healing responses through enlisting them in a shared belief system. Of course, those healing responses have a physiological basis themselves. It is only the incredibly naive, for the past thirty or fifty years at least, who still must distinguish ‘mind’ from ‘body’ as if they are separate.

The placebo response may be getting stronger, if indeed it is, because it is more and more difficult to find subjects who are not in the grip of the Big Pharma Big Lie, in this era of TV advertising for prescription drugs and of physicians in the pockets of the manufacturers of the medications they prescribe.

The other reason it may be harder to distinguish pharmacological from palcebo effects is that drug development in the last decade or more has been largely a story of trying to squeeze larger and larger profits out of smaller and smaller distinctions in drug efficacy. There have been relatively few ‘breakthrough’ discoveries in pharmacology that have not been swamped by a rush of competing products consisting of slightly altered molecules claiming to be improvements but in reality serving only to establish or extend patent rights.

This is especially true in my own field of psychiatry. While there are certainly in some cases differences in individual patients’ responses to different medicines in the same class (say, for example, serotonin-reuptake-inhibiting antidepressants or dopamine-blocking antipsychotics). Prescribers, pitifully, trot out one after another drug in the same or similar class when a patient does not do well with an initial choice of medication, subjecting the patient to a futile and prolonged cycle of sequential expectation and disappointment. Even patients who are doing well on a medicatioon are often switched to far more expensive newer analogues which hit the market claiming to be improvements. And these claims are largely written by the ad copyists and marketing specialists rather than the scientists, who by and large cannot demonstrate advantages of their products in head-to-head comparisons with older, tried-and-true gold standard medications.

Finally, although I am not talking merely about the mental health domain when I argue for a broadened conception of how healing works, it is surely true that neurobiological and mental disorders have been one of the last frontiers in pharmaceutical development, and (along with a shift of emphasis to chronic diseases from the acute diseases with which medicine has had its greatest successes) a major focus in drug development in the last two decades or so. The placebo effect is probably at its strongest in the realm of behavioral disorders.

Click on ‘the film’ (Neurosonics Audiomedical Laboratories)

After seeing more than 60 zombie films, Johnathon Williams explains: “If civilization is ever overrun by zombies — which for the purposes of this essay shall be defined as reanimated corpses who feed on the living until they’re dispatched by a gunshot to the head — I know exactly what I will do. I will gather my family and I will take them to Wal-Mart.” (The Morning News)

“After a successful birth, opting not to breast-feed may trigger evolved mourning behaviors.” (Scientific American)

“It succors and drowns human life. And for the last eight years, oil — and the people and places that make it — was my obsession.” (Foreign Policy)