“It was snap, crackle and pop in the early days of the universe. You would not want to live there. Astronomers said Tuesday that they had smashed the long-distance record in astronomy when they recorded an explosion, probably a massive early star, that lived and died 13 billion years ago, only about 600 million years after the Big Bang. The explosion was detected on April 23 as a burst of gamma-rays by NASA’s Swift satellite, which has been patrolling the skies for these powerful explosions for the last five years.” (New York Times )
Author Archives: FmH
Pipe Leak at New York Nuclear Plant Raises Concerns
“The discovery of water flowing across the floor of a building at the Indian Point 2 nuclear plant in Buchanan, N.Y., traced to a leak in a buried pipe, is stirring concern about the plant’s underground pipes and those of other aging reactors across the country.” (New York Times )
Related:
- Our Towns: Indian Point and a License to Disagree (nytimes.com)
- Go nuclear? (washingtonmonthly.com)
Blaming ‘Media Hype’ for Swine Flu Fears
“How loudly should a responsible person shout (or whisper) “Possible Fire!” in a crowded theater?” via The Lede – NYTimes.
In a Mexican Village With Swine Flu, Complaints About a Hog Farm Persist
“While public health officials are still trying to determine where the outbreak of the swine flu started, there has been a lot of speculation online this week about a possible, though as yet unsubstantiated, link to an industrial hog farm in Veracruz, Mexico.
As my colleague in Mexico, Marc Lacey, reported on Wednesday, “state health authorities looking for the initial source of the outbreak,” toured the “million-pig hog farm in Perote, in Veracruz State.” Mr. Lacey explained:
The plant is half-owned by Smithfield Foods, an American company and the world’s largest pork producer. Mexico’s first known swine flu case, which was later confirmed, was from Perote, according to Health Minister José Ángel Córdova. The case involved a 5-year-old boy who recovered.
Talent
This is the word tightrope. Now imagine
a man, inching across it in the space
between our thoughts. He holds our breath.
There is no word net.
You want him to fall, don’t you?
I guessed as much; he teeters but succeeds.
The word applause is written all over him.
— Carol Ann Duffy, the new poet laureate of Great Britain
Related:
- Carol Ann Duffy becomes poet laureate (guardian.co.uk)
- Britain Picks 1st Female Poet Laureate (nytimes.com)
- Premonitions by Carol Ann Duffy (guardian.co.uk)
- Carol Ann Duffy: Profile of the new Poet Laureate (telegraph.co.uk)
- Carol Ann Duffy becomes first female poet laureate (guardian.co.uk)
Souter Plans to Leave Supreme Court
The Burning Question of the Heavy Boots
“I decided to settle this question once and for all. Therefore, I put two multiple choice questions on my Physics 111 test, after the study of elementary mechanics and gravity…” via www.phys.ufl.edu.
Pufferfish
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Found in the photographer’s casting net on a Tampa Bay beach.
Some ways to track H1N1
This message was passed on David Farber’s IP mailing list:
- Healthmap (http://healthmap.org/en) brings together disparate data sources to achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health. The data is aggregated by disease and displayed by location for user-friendly access to the original alert. HealthMap provides a jumping-off point for real-time information on emerging infectious diseases and has particular interest for public health officials and international travelers.
- Disease Outbreak News (http://www.who.int/csr/don/en/)
- Google Alerts to monitor the H1N1 developing news story
(http://www.google.com/alerts?pz=1&ned=us&hl=en&t=1) - Fast evolving Wikipedia 2009 swine flu outbreak article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_flu)
- Google map of H1N1 Swine Flu:
— Pink markers are suspect
— Purple markers are confirmed
— Deaths lack a dot in marker
Query
Does anyone who’s seen it know if the season 1, episode 2 Breaking Bad scene involving hydrofluoric acid and a bathtub is chemically accurate? Not that I am planning to employ a similar technique, but a friend just recommended this series and I have started to download episodes. (thanks, abby) Thanks in advance for any insights.
Swine flu fears prompt quarantine plans, pork bans
“Countries planned quarantines, tightened rules on pork imports and tested airline passengers for fevers as global health officials tried Sunday to come up with uniform ways to battle a deadly strain of swine flu. Nations from New Zealand to France reported new suspected cases and some warned citizens against travel to North America.
[…]
Governments including China, Russia and Taiwan began planning to put anyone with symptoms of the deadly virus under quarantine.” (Yahoo! News).
Related:
- Swine flu cases spread (horsesass.org)
- 10 Students in New Zealand ‘Likely’ Have Swine Flu (nytimes.com)
Toward a Million?
Shameless self-promotion dept.: It is only six months until Halloween, more or less, and you know what happens shortly thereafter, don’t you? It’ll be the tenth anniversary of FmH in November. So far, my hit counter has recorded around 825,000 hits since the inception of this weblog. I suppose it is out of the question to hit the 1,000,000 mark as a birthday present to FmH, isn’t it? That would require 175,000 hits in 180 days, abit less than 1,000 hits a day on average, which is an order of magnitude beyond our normal readership and three times what FmH has attracted at its peak. But, if you ever thought you might disseminate a link to Follow Me Here, now would be the time.
Update: It never occurred to me, as a commenter pointed out (thanks, stan), that RSS readership doesn’t drive up the hit counter. This may mean that I am alot closer to the million mark than I think. If a significant number of people read my RSS feed (how would I know? drop me a comment if you do, please), it might be part of the explanation of the apparent progressive falloff in readership from earlier years. (I have been convinced that I lost a significant segment of my readership when I took several months’ hiatus a couple of years ago…) Of course, it may also be that FmH is attracting less interest than it used to, either intrinsically or because there is so much more competition out there. (None of which is to say that I am doing this for the circulation numbers!)
Ultrasound scans with your smartphone?
“Ultrasound imaging now possible with a smartphone. Computer engineers at Washington University in St. Louis are bringing the minimalist approach to medical care and computing by coupling USB-based ultrasound probe technology with a smartphone, enabling a compact, mobile computational platform and a medical imaging device that fits in the palm of a hand.” (Science Blog).
Related:
- Mobile Clinical Imaging On a Smart Phone (medgadget.com)
The State Of The iPhone Is Strong — Very Strong
People can downplay the actual number of iPhones in circulation all they want — the fact of the matter is that it has changed things. While there were some third-party mobile app developers before Apple’s App Store, they received almost no attention, and as such, it wasn’t really a viable business. Now, everyone and their mother is flocking to develop for the App Store. And every major mobile player is rushing to make their own app stores. But Apple’s already has over 35,000 apps — and in a few short hours, there will have been one billion apps downloaded in just 9 months.
Think about that for a second: One billion apps downloaded. There are currently 37 million iPhones and iPod touches combined. Certainly, there have been a lot less than that over various stages in the last nine months, but just take that 37 million number. That means that every single one of those devices has had an average of 27 apps downloaded to it. 27 apps — that do everything from games to music to movie times to fetching me a taxi.
I remember the phone I had before the iPhone, fondly: Motorola’s RAZR. It had zero third-party apps, and the most exciting thing it could do was take a grainy picture. That was just two years ago.” — MG Siegler (Techcrunch).
Related:
- Top 9 iPhone Apple App Rejects (abcnews.go.com)
- Apple’s App Store: 1 Billion Served (techcrunch.com)
- Sizing up the apps stores (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- iPhone continues to build momentum (tuaw.com)
- Landmark for Apple: One Billion App Downloads (cutewriting.blogspot.com)
- michael arrington: Feel Like Shaking A Baby To Death? There’s An App For That. (via TechCrunch) (techcrunch.com)
Why We Should Get Rid of the White House Press Corps
…[T]oo often, the White House briefing room is where news goes to die.
Name a major political story broken by a White House correspondent. A thorough debunking of the Bush case for Iraqi WMD? McClatchy Newspapers’ State Department and national security correspondents. Bush’s abuse of signing statements? The Boston Globe‘s legal affairs correspondent. Even Watergate came off The Washington Post‘s Metro desk.
Here are some stories that reporters working the White House beat have produced in the past few months: Pocket squares are back! The president is popular in Europe. Vegetable garden! Joe Biden occasionally says things he probably regrets. Puppy!
It’s not that the reporters covering the president are bad at their jobs. Most are experienced journalists at the top of their game — and they’re wasted at the White House, where scoops are doled out, not uncovered.” Ana Marie Cox (Wonkette) (Washington Post op-ed).
Is Pornography the New Tobacco?
“Imagine a substance that is relatively new in the public square, but by now so ubiquitous in your society that a great many people find its presence unremarkable. Day in and day out, your own encounters with this substance, whether direct or indirect, are legion. Your exposure is so constant that it rarely even occurs to you to wonder what life might be like without it.
In fact, so common is this substance that you take the status quo for granted, though you’re aware that certain people disagree. A noisy minority of Americans firmly opposes its consumption, and these neo-Puritans try routinely to alert the public to what they claim to be its dangers and risks. Despite this occasional resistance, however, you — like many other people of your time — continue to regard this substance with relative equanimity. You may or may not consume the thing yourself, but even if you don’t, you can’t much see the point of interfering with anyone else’s doing it. Why bother? After all, that particular genie’s out of the bottle.” — Mary Eberstadt (Policy Review).
Related?
- what do the Cold War and the Sexual Revolution have in common? (schansblog.blogspot.com)
- Is Food The New Sex? (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write
“I knew then that the book’s migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.” — Steven Johnson (WSJ).
Students in New York Fall Ill, and Swine Flu Is Suspected
‘Tests show that eight students at a Queens high school are likely to have contracted the human swine flu virus that has struck Mexico and a small number of other people in the United States, health officials in New York City said yesterday. The students were among about 100 at St. Francis Preparatory School in Fresh Meadows who became sick in the last few days, said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, New York City’s health commissioner.“All the cases were mild, no child was hospitalized, no child was seriously ill,” Dr. Frieden said.’ (New York Times )
A few comments on pandemic influenza
Terry Jones
“The virus has, as far as we know, not spent much time in humans yet. Once it does, it will begin to adapt itself in unpredictable ways. It may become more virulent, or less virulent. It may develop resistance to the antivirals that are currently effective. Antiviral resistance has been a topic of great concern for at least a couple of years. The current virus is already known to be resistant to both amantadine and rimantadine, though oseltamivir is still effective.
[…]
Some aspects of the current outbreak are, to my mind, cause for great concern.
The acting-director of the CDC has already said: “There are things that we see that suggest that containment is not very likely.” That is a remarkably candid statement. I think it’s very clear that the cat is out of the bag. The question is how bad is it going to be. That’s impossible to tell right now, because we do not know what the virus will look like in the future, after it has had time to mutate and adapt inside humans.
[…]
The new virus has been popping up in various places in the US in the last days. I expect it will go global in the next couple of days, maximum. What’s to stop it? The virus has been isolated in several diverse areas and in many cases is genetically identical. The 1918 virus also popped up, in many cases inexplicably, across the US…
There were 3 waves of the 1918/19 pandemic. The first was in summer of 1918 – very unusual, as influenza normally falls to extremely low rates during summer. Note that the current outbreak is also highly unseasonal.
The 1918 pandemic killed with a very unusual age pattern. Instead of peaks in just the very young and the very old, there was a W shape, with a huge number of young and healthy people who would not normally die from influenza. There are various conjectures as to the cause of this. The current virus is also killing young and healthy adults.
The social breakdown in a pandemic is extraordinary. If you read The Great Pandemic by John Barry, you’ll get some sense of it. America’s Forgotten Pandemic also helps give some idea of what it must have been like.
[…]
The influenza people at the CDC and the other international labs are an amazing team of experts. They’ve been at this game for a very long time and they work extremely hard and generally get a bad rap. It’s no wonder flu is such a political issue, the responsibility is high and the tendency towards opaqueness is understandable. Despite all the expertise though, at bottom you have an extremely complex virus – much of whose behavior is unknown, especially in the case of antigenic shift, especially when it is so young, and especially when you don’t know what nearby mutational opportunities may exist for it in antigenic space – spreading in a vastly more complex environment (our bodies), and with us moving and interacting in odd ways in a complex and extremely interconnected world. It’s a wonder we know as much as we do, but in many ways we don’t know much at all.” — Terry Jones via fluidinfo.
Related:
- What is an Influenza Pandemic and How Can You Protect Yourself? (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)
- More Bad News! (ethelthefrog.com)
- CDC: Swine flu seen in 2 California children (cnn.com)
- The Great Flu Pandemic of 2009? (horsesass.org)
- Swine Flu Outbreak Beyond Containment; Deaths Mount in Mexico, California, Texas (ethelthefrog.com)
- What You Need to Know About Drug-Resistant Flu (time.com)
- Mexico swine flu has ‘pandemic potential’ (cbc.ca)
- World Health Organization Declares Swine Flu Outbreak International Emergency (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)
- Will Swine Flu Panic Spread Beyond Mexico? (time.com)
Map of the H1N1 Swine Flu outbreak
Click on any ‘thumbtack’ for an annotation about the case. Google Maps.
Which Anti-Zombie Job Would Suit You Best?
The coming outbreak will certainly reduce the unemployment rate and create urgent new job opportunities for the few survivors.
Who’s Afraid of the Multiverse?
“In their efforts to solve fundamental problems in cosmology, many researchers have converged on the idea of a multiverse — the theory that a vast number of universes lie beyond the limits of what we can observe.
Because they’re unobservable, multiverse theories are also untestable, blurring the line between science and speculation and making them controversial in the scientific community. Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt has called the multiverse “a dangerous idea that I am simply unwilling to contemplate.” By challenging both humanity’s uniqueness and our central place in the cosmos, multiverse theories have also become embroiled in theological debates — some fear they will join evolution as another battleground in the culture wars.” (Seed)
This Is Your Brain on Facebook
“Recent studies on the effects of the internet and other new media on brain plasticity raises an open research question: Is Google making us smarter?” via Seed.
This, in contrast to the perennial spate of dire warnings, some from prominent neuroscientists, about the web making us stupider.
R.I.P., J.G. Ballard
In more than 20 novels and story collections, Mr. Ballard coupled his potent descriptive powers with an imagination attracted to catastrophic events and a melancholy view of the human soul as being enervated and corrupted by the modern world.
He is best known for Empire of the Sun, a somewhat autobiographical novel from 1984 about an English boy growing up in Shanghai, during the Japanese occupation in World War II. The book made the short list for the Man Booker Prize, Britain’s most prestigious literary award, and Steven Spielberg turned it into a 1987 film (with a screenplay by Tom Stoppard) starring Christian Bale and John Malkovich.
Although not a characteristic work — it was neither as fantastical nor as provocative as many of his other books — Empire revealed Mr. Ballard’s own childhood as the source of much of his surrealistic imagination. It is full of the images — emptied swimming pools, abandoned buildings — that came to symbolize his view of the world as “a bizarre external landscape propelled by large psychic forces,” as he said in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 1990. (New York Times obituary).
I’ve been a reader of Ballard since his earlier works such as The Drowned World and The Wind from Nowhere. My devotion remained through The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash.
Ethics of Physicians’ Sexual Relationships with Patients
A good introduction to the issue; helps you to understand the strict medical ethical guidelines against intimacy with our patients and even former patients, even when the parties are two consenting adults insistent on the consensual nature of their liaison. The ‘transference‘ to the authority of the physician, the AMA says, makes free choice on the part fo the patient difficult. The situation is even more thorny, the violations more egregious, and the condemnation of the profession more emphatic in my discipline, psychiatry, as you might imagine.
Related:
- Video: What is informed consent? (blisstree.com)
The Neuroenhancement Underground
Every era has its defining drug. Neuroenhancers are perfectly suited for our efficiency-obsessed, BlackBerry-equipped office culture. (The New Yorker)
Campus use appears to be greatest at the most competitive institutions, but not among the highest achievers. It seems that stimulant use can compensate for partying and not being that motivated for your schoolwork. Is the use of neuroenhancers like cheating? Or, to turn the ethical question on its head, could it one day be considered unethical not to dose oneself in certain professions — neurosurgery, for instance.
Bar Serving Alcoholic Mist Gets You Drunk as You Breathe
About forty minutes standing around and inhaling is the equivalent of one stiff gin and tonic in London bar. (Fast Company).
Key to preventing allergies and asthma: Lice?
Could lice be the secret to preventing asthma?. Research on mice shows that those carrying the most lice had calmer immune systems than uninfested rodents, and they said their finding may have implications for studying the causes of asthma and allergies in people. (MSNBC)
When did your county’s jobs disappear?
An interactive map of vanishing employment across the country, county by county, from Jan., 2007 to the present. (Slate)
The Well-Meaning, Bad Parent
“Psychologist Richard Weissbourd contends that parents who are obsessed with their children's happiness are ignoring other important values — like goodness, empathy, appreciation and caring — that are necessary to a well-rounded personality. Weissbourd is the author of The Parents We Mean to Be: How Well-Intentioned Adults Undermine Children's Moral and Emotional Development.” (NPR)
World’s Most Impressive Explosions of Lava
“The explosive nature of these fascinating geological mountains provide us with a time line of earth’s past, they create chains of living and breathing islands, and they cause deathly destruction to everything they touch.” (Scienceray)
Sunset at the North Pole
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...with moon at its closest point to the earth
Update: Hoax. This is a digital creation, not a photo, says Snopes.
(I was troubled by how big that moon was, I can now say in 20/20 hindsight. But it is lovely, nonetheless.)
International Space Station Timeline
- Artist’s rendering of the completed ISS, circa 2010.
This is a great graphical representation of the piece-by-piece construction of the ISS, both past and projected. I had had only the vaguest idea of its extent or configuration. (USAToday) via pam
7 (Crazy) Civilian Uses for Nuclear Bombs
You might think of nuclear weapons as just the most fearsome weapon ever invented by humans, but that would be seriously underplaying their versatility. (Wired)
Stupid Science
Some fun things not to do in chemistry lab: Informants recall the stupidest mistakes they have seen in their laboratories. (ScienceBase)
The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
I’ve received a number of links to the “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. I’m as much a “grammarian” as many others out there, but my feeling is that enough is enough. Yes, we get it, most sign-posters do not know how to use quotation marks. Very little rationale, IMHO, to keep amassing example after example of this pretty annoying but pretty common English usage blunder. Now, is there much of descriptivist pushback against prescriptivists with respect to unnecessary quotation mark practice, given how widely distributed this usage pattern is?
Related?
- Is stress pushing spelling snobs over edge? (msnbc.msn.com)
- Anti-Strunkites (snarkmarket.com)
Seder at the White House
In the true spirit of liberation from bondage? www.whitehouse.gov/blog photo [thanks, Steve].
With Victories, Gay Rights Groups Expand Marriage Push
“…[M]omentum from back-to-back victories on same-sex marriage in Vermont and Iowa could spill into other states, particularly since at least nine other legislatures are considering measures this year to allow marriage between gay couples.” via NYTimes.
How the Conficker Problem Just Got Much Worse
This post discusses an ominous scenario in which the point of April 1st wasn’t for Conficker to do any real mischief but rather to dig in deeper and spread vastly more widely, creating so many more infected nodes that it cannot be stopped whenever it does unleash the real malice. via Gizmodo.
Magnetic alignment in grazing and resting cattle and deer
Grazing and resting cattle and deer orient themselves toward magnetic north, according to analysis of satellite images. This has apparently never been noticed by herdsmen or hunters, the researchers say. via PNAS.
Now, as to why in the world this might be…
Antoni Gaudi must be turning over in his grave
11 Extinct Animals That Were Photographed Alive
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/go635254.s3.amazonaws.com/ecoworldly/files/2009/04/thylacinus.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://go635254.s3.amazonaws.com/ecoworldly/files/2009/04/thylacinus.jpg "Tasmanian tiger")
Tasmanian tiger
“Although fossil reconstructions or pictorial representations can sometimes be difficult to connect with, it’s impossible to ignore the experience of seeing a photograph of an animal on the brink of extinction.
Thus, what follows is a list of 11 extinct animals that were photographed while still alive…
The current rate of extinction is 100 to 1000 times higher than the average, or background rate, making our current period the 6th major mass extinction in the planet’s history.” via EcoWorldly.
Related:
- Strangest Beasts to Ever Die (neatorama.com)
Faces in Places
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A photographic collection of faces found in everyday places.
Aircraft could be brought down by DIY ‘E-bombs’
“Electromagnetic pulse weapons capable of frying the electronics in civil airliners can be built using information and components available on the net, warn counterterrorism analysts. All it would take to bring a plane down would be a single but highly energetic microwave radio pulse blasted from a device inside a plane, or on the ground and trained at an aircraft coming in to land.” via New Scientist.
Related:
- Colonel: US Army has working electropulse grenades (theregister.co.uk)
“When women stop reading the novel will be dead” — McEwan
‘ “Page Turners“, according to the research, are avid readers – 48% of the women surveyed fell into this category, while only 26% of men showed equal enthusiasm. In contrast, 32% of men were burdened with the “Slow Worm” label accorded to those who read only one or two books a year, while only 18% of women fell into that category. The research further labels some readers (or rather, book buyers) as “Serial Shelvers” – people who buy books because they look fetching in their lounges, not because they have any intention of reading them, and “Double Bookers”, who are either great multi-taskers or in possession of short attention spans, as they always have more than one book on the go at a time (they’re identifiable by the precarious stacks on their bedside tables). Gender didn’t play a significant role in these last two categories – with equal percentages of men and women being Double Bookers, it indicates there is gender equality when it comes to greedy readers, at least.’ via Guardian.UK Books.
The Biggest of Puzzles Brought Down to Size
Enrico Fermi
I have always loved back-of-the-envelope calculations, whether I get into the right ballpark or not. I find that this kind of ‘guesstimating’ is an important factor in feeling comfortable knowing how the world works. Difficult to get some people into reasoning this way, though…
‘Here is how it works. You take a monster of a ponder like, What is the total volume of human blood in the world? or, If you put all the miles that Americans drive every year end to end, how far into space could you travel? and you try to estimate what the answer might be. You resist your impulse to run away or imprecate. Instead, you look for a wedge into the problem, and then you calmly, systematically, break it down into edible bits. Importantly, you are not looking for an exact figure but rather a ballpark approximation, something that would be within an order of magnitude, or a factor of 10, of the correct answer. If you got the answer 900, for example, and the real answer is 200, you’re good; if you got 9,000, or 20, you go back and try to find where you went astray.
“It’s really just critical thinking, breaking down seemingly complicated problems into simpler problems,” said John A. Adam, a professor of mathematics at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va. “Once you get over the hurdle and realize that, good grief, any question can be answered to this level of precision, to the nearest power of 10, it’s quite exciting, and you start looking for things to apply it to.” ‘ via NYTimes.
Bicycle Built for Two Thousand
“Bicycle Built For 2,000 is comprised [sic] of 2,088 voice recordings collected via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk web service. Workers were prompted to listen to a short sound clip, then record themselves imitating what they heard.”
They were given no further information about the purpose of their recording, and were paid 0.06 USD each. The voices, originating in 71 countries, were assembled to create a portrait of humanity singing Daisy Bell (“Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do…”).
Vast Spy System Loots Computers in 103 Countries
Although not conclusive, evidence points to the Chinese government as the culprit in installing spyware on 1300 computers, a number of them considered high-value targets. The existence fo the network came to light after the office of the Dalai Lama asked Canadian cyber-espionage experts to examine its computers for evidence of compromise. ‘GhostNet’ focuses, in addition to the Tibetans, on Southeast Asian governments. There was no evidence that US computers had been compromised although a NATO machine had apparently briefly been monitored and the Indian Embassy in Washington had been penetrated. NYTimes.
‘Deathbed’ confession was premature
“A US man who thought he was dying and confessed to killing a man in 1977 has been charged with murder after he got better.” via Ananova.
What’s So Hot About Chili Peppers?
“Bolivia is believed to be the chili’s motherland, home to dozens of wild species that may be the ancestors of all the world’s chili varieties—from the mild bell pepper to the medium jalapeño to the rough-skinned naga jolokia, the hottest pepper ever tested. The heat-generating compound in chilies, capsaicin, has long been known to affect taste buds, nerve cells and nasal membranes (it puts the sting in pepper spray). But its function in wild chili plants has been mysterious.
Which is why Tewksbury and his colleagues have made multiple trips to Bolivia over the past four years. They’re most interested in mild chilies, especially those growing near hot ones of the same species—the idea being that a wild chili lacking capsaicin might serve as a kind of exception that proves the rule, betraying the secret purpose of this curiously beloved spice.” via Smithsonian Magazine.
Disease Mongering or Medicalization
“The medicalization of many social facets of our lives, multitasking pharmaceuticals and disease mongering are problems we should face head on…” via Sciencebase.
Related:
- What’s in a name? Medical jargon sounds scary (cbc.ca)
- Fibromyalgia: Disease Or Marketing Ploy? (cbsnews.com)
- Drugmakers help boost sales of fibromyalgia drugs (ctv.ca)
- Fibromyalgia, Questionable “Disease,” Boosted By Eli Lilly And Pfizer, Reports AP (huffingtonpost.com)
Flammable Water
So much natural gas leaks into a Colorado couple’s water that they can light it on fire. Via WCBS-TV.
If there is any justice, Bobby Jindal’s national political career is over
“A month after Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal complained about wasteful spending in President Obama’s economic stimulus package, including money for “something called ‘volcano monitoring,'” Alaska pilots were grateful for such expenditures. The Alaska Volcano Observatory was ready with warnings to flight officials when Alaska’s Mount Redoubt blew five times Sunday night and Monday morning, sending potentially deadly ash clouds north of Anchorage.” via The Associated Press.
Keep the Schoolbus Routes, Lose the Buses
“Each morning, about 450 students travel along 17 school bus routes to 10 elementary schools in this lakeside city at the southern tip of Lake Como. There are zero school buses.
In 2003, to confront the triple threats of childhood obesity, local traffic jams and — most important — a rise in global greenhouse gases abetted by car emissions, an environmental group here proposed a retro-radical concept: children should walk to school.” via NYTimes.
Mugged by our genes?
Grave of Sylvia Plath
“Last Monday, Nicholas Hughes, son of poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, killed himself. His mother was one of the world’s most famous suicides, and news stories have mentioned the tendency of suicide and depression to run in families. But this tragic inheritance is just part of a more complex story in which our lives are shaped by genes, environment — and unexpected connections between the two.” via International Herald Tribune opinion
Levitation Toys Operated Directly by Brainwaves
‘With both Mattel’s “Mind Flex” and Uncle Milton’s “The Force Trainer,” the goal is to focus your thoughts in order to levitate a ball. There are no blinking lights or 3-D graphics -– just a wireless headset, a lightweight ball and a fan.
Both toys use a modified form of electroencephalography — or EEG — technology to measure electrical signals emitted by the brain, says Jim Sullivan of NeuroSky, the company that created the technology that makes the toys work.’ via NPR.
Related:
- Mattel’s Mind Flex Toy (shoppingblog.com)
- Mattel’s Mind Flex teaches kids fake telepathy (engadget.com)
- Neurosky Mindset Hands-on: Brainwave Gameplay! [Gdc 2009] (i.gizmodo.com)
- NeuroSky Takes Pre-Orders For Its BrainWave Controller (ubergizmo.com)
To Congress: Prohibit Selling Patients’ Private Medical Data
“Electronic patient records legislation that will convert our health records from paper to data in electronic systems will put our personal medical records at risk of becoming a commodity that businesses can sell or trade.
Even Microsoft promises they won’t use health information in their database for commercial purposes. The Federal government needs to provide that basic level of protection and more.
Tell Congress we need real patient control of our health data and and that means prohibiting companies from selling or buying medical records or private information mined from records.” via American Civil Liberties Union.
The Null Device
Every so often I remember to check in on The Null Device, and I am usually rewarded with a rich harvest of stimulation and idiosyncracy. For instance, right now, you’ll find:
- a meditation on the reformation of Spandau Ballet and its relationship to Thatcherism;
- a review of the state of the art in neo-Nazi haute couture;
- a piece on anti-teenage lighting, the latest in Britain’s war on out-of-control youth;
- a summary of Lord Whimsy’s essay on bizarre and grotesque fashions throughout history;
- the revelation of the world’s most alienating airport;
- how to tell how credit-worthy a person is by looking at their face;
and much more.
The Civil Heretic
Déjà vu again
“Surprisingly, not only is déjà vu proving an interesting window on the peculiar ways that our memory works, it is also providing a few clues about how we tell the difference between what is real, imagined, dreamed and remembered – one of the true mysteries of consciousness.” via New Scientist
The takeaway message is that deja vu is composed of distinct but related elements — recognition, the sense of familiarity, the sense of the weirdness or bizarreness of the experience, and the recognition of its impossibility — each of which has its own circuitry and neurocognitive machinery.
Day of the Dolphin
Swim twice as fast as Michael Phelps: 
“The human body does many things well, but swimming isn't one of them. We're embarrassingly inefficient in the water, able to convert just 3 or 4 percent of our energy into forward motion. (Even with swim fins, we're only 10 to 15 percent more efficient.) But a new, dolphin-inspired fin promises to fuel the biggest change in human-powered swimming in decades, putting beyond-Olympian speeds within reach of just about anyone.
Culminating decades of research, engineer and inventor Ted Ciamillo, an inventor and engineer in Athens, Ga., who made his name (and fortune) building high-performance bicycle brakes, created what he has dubbed the Lunocet, a 2.5-pound (1.1-kilogram) monofin made of carbon fiber and fiberglass that attaches to an aluminum foot plate at a precise 30-degree angle. With almost three times the surface area of conventional swim fins, the semiflexible Lunocet provides plenty of propulsion. The key to the 42-inch- (one-meter-) wide fin's speed: its shape and angle, both of which are modeled with scientific precision on a dolphin's tail.” via Scientific American.
Ann Bauer: the monster inside my son
“I'm exhausted and hopeless and vaguely hung over because Andrew, who has autism, also has evolved from sweet, dreamy boy to something like a golem: bitter, rampaging, full of rage. It happened no matter how fiercely I loved him or how many therapies I employed.” via Salon.
The nuts and bolts of chess
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/blog.makezine.com/hardwarestorechessmen.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://blog.makezine.com/hardwarestorechessmen.jpg)
My friend Julia Suits wrote me that a chess set she and her sons made from hardware has been featured at the Make blog and also Boing Boing’d. As Julia describes,
“Headed toward the light-bulb aisle in my local hardware store a few years ago,I stopped to admire the bins of nuts,bolts and the like. This is not unusual for me who likens this kind of scene to a candy store. I love metal,and have cast and welded all types as a sculpture major in graduate school. When I saw the little bin containing two different types of castle nuts,I immediately thought of rooks. At the time my three sons and I hosted a weekly chess club,so chess was on my mind a lot. With my boys in tow,I returned with graph paper and we computed what sorts of bits we might want (we didn't know for sure) for each type of piece and how many in total. An hour later, after poring over numerous bins and waiting for the clerk to saw the threaded rod into measured lengths (for kings, rooks,and bishops), we went home with about fifteen pounds of loot, including spray paint for the black pieces. We created a set not far different from what is pictured here. Since then we've added washers to some and added a flanged hex nut to each of the bases to make the set uniform and even more stable. The hardware chessmen were a huge hit and the other boys built their own sets.
Make sure you add felt or cork to the bases if you plan on using a board whose finish you wish to protect. If you do this, you will need to glue the flanged hex nut base to the shaft before you glue your padding as the nut and shaft tend to screw up or down with use. Otherwise, note: none of the pieces are glued!! This is so they jingle (yes,they jingle, like cowboy spurs!) and so you can take them apart and rearrange them.” via Make.
World’s largest model train railway.
Video tour, via LiveLeak.com.
Tips for the Sophisticated Fugitive
“Why not take the ill-gotten money and run?
A touch of plastic surgery and a discreet payoff might purchase a sun-tanned life on an Indian Ocean archipelago, a number of which have no extradition treaties with the United States. Even a down-market move, manning an outboard motor for a skiff full of Somali pirates, seems preferable to a life term in a maximum-security federal prison.
Yet as more plutocrats face criminal investigations, few seem to view flight as an option. Perhaps it is a failure of nerve. Or perhaps, in this age of Facebook and “America’s Most Wanted,” the globe suffers a shortage of corners where a rogue might comfortably hide.” via NYTimes.
How Do You Amputate A Phantom Limb?
Robert Krulwich and Jad Abumrad, of NPR’s Radiolab (addictive podcast, by the way) interview neurologist V.S. Ramachandran about his ingenious and effective solution to the vexing and mysterious phenomenon of phantom limb pain. Via NPR.
The illustration to the left is the famous “sensory homunculus” described by Penrose, the representation of the body mapped onto the sensory cortex. This is, of course, the root of the problem of phantom limbs, because although the limb is gone, the representation persists, maing it hard to convince the sensory cortex otherwise. Thank heaven for Ramachandran’s tricky take on neural plasticity.
What a Ride!
![[Image 'http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/319335main_batontank226x.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/319335main_batontank226x.jpg "Poor little fella...")
“A bat that was clinging to space shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank during the countdown to launch the STS-119 mission remained with the spacecraft as it cleared the tower, analysts at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center concluded.
Based on images and video, a wildlife expert who provides support to the center said the small creature was a free tail bat that likely had a broken left wing and some problem with its right shoulder or wrist. The animal likely perished quickly during Discovery’s climb into orbit.” via NASA.
A Little Stress May Be Good for You
“A lot of stress can turn your hair gray, but a little stress can actually delay aging. A protein tied to protecting cells from stress also helps slow aging, a new study finds. The research, published February 20 in Science, identifies a key regulator of a mechanism cells use to prevent protein damage from stress.
Exposure to heat, cold or heavy metals can damage proteins and unravel them from their usual conformations — trauma that can cause cell death. But cells have a damage-limiting mechanism called the heat shock response to combat these and other stresses. As part of the heat shock response, special protein repair molecules patch up the damaged proteins and refold them correctly, preventing death and extending the life of the cell.” via Science News.
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The Daily Me
“When we go online, each of us is our own editor, our own gatekeeper. We select the kind of news and opinions that we care most about.
Nicholas Negroponte of M.I.T. has called this emerging news product The Daily Me. And if that’s the trend, God save us from ourselves.
That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.” — Nicholas Kristoff via NYTimes op-ed.
Although Kristoff has seemingly only just discovered the ‘echo chamber’ effect, it has been a longstanding preoccupation of thoughtful observers of internet sociology. As newspapers morph into lesser online versions of themselves with less pretense to completeness and objectivity, however, is the situation about to get much worse?
Philosophy’s great experiment
“A dynamic new school of thought is emerging that wants to kick down the walls of recent philosophy and place experimentation back at its centre. It has a name to delight an advertising executive: x-phi. It has blogs and books devoted to it, and boasts an expanding body of researchers in elite universities. It even has an icon: an armchair in flames. If philosophy ever can be, x-phi is trendy. But, increasingly, it is also attracting hostility.” via Prospect.
What is narcissistic personality disorder, and why does everyone seem to have it?
This is the cultural moment of the narcissist. In a New Yorker cartoon, Roz Chast suggests a line of narcissist greeting cards (“Wow! Your Birthday’s Really Close to Mine!”). John Edwards outed himself as one when forced to confess an adulterous affair. (Given his comical vanity, the deceitful way he used his marriage for his advancement, and his self-elevation as an embodiment of the common man while living in a house the size of an arena, it sounds like a pretty good diagnosis.) New York Times critic Alessandra Stanley wrote of journalists who Twitter, “it’s beginning to look more like yet another gateway drug to full-blown media narcissism.” And what other malady could explain the simultaneous phenomena of Blago and the Octomom?” — Emily Yoffe via Slate.
Why Not Boo?
“It goes without saying that the frequency of standing ovations devalues their significance. As Gilbert and Sullivan put it in “The Gondoliers,” When everyone is somebodee/Then no one’s anybody! Just as important, it also points to a lack of true engagement on the part of the spectators. At a preview performance of “Blithe Spirit” last week, I sat next to a man who laughed loudly and mechanically at every line in the play. Whenever an actor said something really funny, he raised his hands above his head and clapped. It was as though I were sitting next to a living laugh track — except that the man’s tic-like reaction to the show was anything but alive.
Booing, on the other hand, sends a different message, one that isn’t necessarily all bad. Francesca Zambello‘s deliberately provocative Met production of “Lucia di Lammermoor” was booed when it opened in 1992. “It isn’t fun to be booed,” Ms. Zambello later told me, “but sometimes it’s also a badge of success.” Why? Because the people who booed Ms. Zambello’s “Lucia” and Ms. Zimmerman’s “Sonnambula,” unlike the ones who spring to their feet at the end of a third-rate musical, were making it clear that they’d paid attention to what they saw and heard. No, they didn’t care for it, but at least they were involved with it, and such involvement can be the first step toward a deeper, more thoughtful response. “As soon as I detest something,” the music critic Hans Keller once said, “I ask myself why I like it.” Keller’s words may seem paradoxical, but in fact they’re wise. While anger may turn out to be love in disguise, indifference is rarely anything more than indifference.” — Terry Teachout via WSJ
The end of the British invasion
R.I.P. Virgin Megastores (Yahoo!)
Could box office bonanza dry up?
“…[Studio] output has hit a serious speed bump, thanks to a number of factors: The economic crash and retreat of private equity money, a protracted writers walkout, a production slowdown over fear of an actors strike and the dismantling of studio specialty labels.” via Variety.
Does Death Sell?
A recent study by University of Wisconsin and University of Virginia consumer researchers… examined how individuals relate to objects they have purchased when they think about death. The result, strikingly, is that thinking about one’s demise motivates people to form a strong connection to their material possessions, specifically to the brands that they have purchased. In the face of the great unknown, people develop, “strong brand identity,” a melding of their personalities and their possessions.” via Obit Magazine.
This school of research originated with Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death (1974), which argued that the entirety of human culture is an attempt to manage our terror at the prospect of our mortality.
No Speech, Please…We’re British
Britain’s politicians care so much about constitutional protections for human rights that they have two sets of them–the centuries-old traditions laid out by parliament and precedent and the newfangled European Convention on Human Rights, written into British law in 1998. Neither of these stopped Britain from becoming the first European Union country to bar an elected European legislator from its territory for his political opinions on February 12.
The Dutch MP Geert Wilders heads the Freedom party, which holds 9 of the 150 seats in the Second Chamber in The Hague. He has been preoccupied with militant Islam at least since November 2004, when the filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered by a Muslim fanatic in Amsterdam, and Wilders’s own name turned up on a jihadist hit list. In March 2008, Wilders released Fitna, a 15-minute film, on the Internet. It details contemporary Islamist outrages and locates their inspiration not in any perversion of Islam but in specific suras of the Koran itself, which Wilders likens to Mein Kampf and urges authorities to ban.” via The Weekly Standard.
Related:
- Dutch court orders anti-Islam MP to face race hatred prosecution (guardian.co.uk)
- Dutch antiMuslim politician Geert Wilders to screen Fitna film in Washington (telegraph.co.uk)
- Anti-Islam film’s director goes to Washington (cnn.com)
- Geert Wilders should not be banned from Britain (guardian.co.uk)
- Geert Wilders leads Dutch polls (telegraph.co.uk)
Why do people cook?
“…[W]ith Homo sapiens, what makes the species unique in Dr Wrangham’s opinion is that its food is so often cooked.
Cooking is a human universal. No society is without it. No one other than a few faddists tries to survive on raw food alone. And the consumption of a cooked meal in the evening, usually in the company of family and friends, is normal in every known society. Moreover, without cooking, the human brain (which consumes 20-25% of the body’s energy) could not keep running. Dr Wrangham thus believes that cooking and humanity are coeval.
In fact, as he outlined to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in Chicago, he thinks that cooking and other forms of preparing food are humanity’s “killer app”: the evolutionary change that underpins all of the other—and subsequent—changes that have made people such unusual animals.” via The Economist.
One more in the myriad attempted definitions of being human that go, “Man is the only animal who…” Here is a Google search on the meme of human uniqueness.
Related:
- The evolutionary role of cooking (rebeccablood.net)
The Roar of the Crowd
Marx was wrong: The opiate of the masses isn’t religion, but spectator sports. What else explains the astounding fact that millions of seemingly intelligent human beings feel that the athletic exertions of total strangers are somehow consequential for themselves? The real question we should be asking during the madness surrounding this month’s collegiate basketball championship season is not who will win, but why anyone cares.” via TThe Chronicle of Higher Education.
Wikileaks needs your support
Wikileaks is currently overloaded by readers. This is a regular difficulty that can only be resolved by deploying additional resources. If you support our mission, then show it in the way that is most needed. On average, each donation catalyzes the publication of around 150 mainstream press articles, exposing human rights abuses and corrupt government around the world.Wikileaks is overloaded. We need your support for more servers.”
Japan’s ‘suicide forest’
“[He]bought a one-way ticket to the forest, west of Tokyo, Japan. When he got there, he slashed his wrists, though the cut wasn’t enough to kill him quickly.
He started to wander, he said. He collapsed after days and lay in the bushes, nearly dead from dehydration, starvation and frostbite. He would lose his toes on his right foot from the frostbite. But he didn’t lose his life, because a hiker stumbled upon his nearly dead body and raised the alarm.
[His] story is just one of hundreds logged at Aokigahara Forest every year, a place known throughout Japan as the “suicide forest.” The area is home to the highest number of suicides in the entire country.” via CNN.
[thanks to Boing Boing]
A Perfect Crime?
Twins suspected in a spectacular multimillion-euro jewel heist in Berlin have been released. Despite DNA evidence from the crime scene, their genetic indistinguishability thwarted the requirement of German law that a suspect be linked exclusively. The twins, both of whom have criminal records and who may have committed the crime together, have steadfastly refused to comment, except to send a message that they were “proud of the German constitutional state and gave it their thanks.” via Der Spiegel [thanks to kottke].
One of the perils of modern crimefighting’s reliance on genetic evidence?
Google Street View funny images
16 photos via Telegraph.UK.
Teens capture images of space with £56 camera and balloon
Proving that you don’t need Google’s billions or the BBC weather centre’s resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere.
Taking atmospheric readings and photographs 20 miles above the ground, the Meteotek team of IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia completed their incredible experiment at the end of February this year.
Building the electronic sensor components from scratch, Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort managed to send their heavy duty £43 latex balloon to the edge of space and take readings of its ascent.” via Telegraph UK [thanks, abby].
Related:
- Meteotek high-altitude balloon project (makezine.com)
When It Comes To Shampoo, Less Is More
“Americans love to shampoo. We lather up an average of 4.59 times a week, twice as much as Italians and Spaniards, according to shampoo-maker Procter & Gamble.
But that’s way too often, say hair stylists and dermatologists. Daily washing, they say, strips the hair of beneficial oil (called sebum) and can damage our locks.” via NPR.
Medical Marijuana Back From The Shadows
“When Attorney General Eric Holder announced that drug enforcement authorities will end raids on medical marijuana suppliers in California, patients and activists cheered. Thirteen states, including Maine, have adopted medicinal marijuana laws similar to California’s.” via Medical Marijuana Back From The Shadows : NPR.
Related:
- Medical Cannabis – defacto policy in USA (mildgreens.blogspot.com)
- Pot Bust Flip-Flop in LA; Obama & Holder Must Clarify RxPot Policy Now (firedoglake.com)
- DEA Will No Longer Persecute Medical Marijuana Patients (teambio.org)
- Assemblyman Proposes Legal Marijuana As Economic Recovery Plan (takepart.com)
The human brain is on the edge of chaos
“Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives “on the edge of chaos”, at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study, published March 20 in the open-access journal PLoS Computational Biology, provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.
Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.
According to this study, conducted by a team from the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, and the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Unit Cambridge, the dynamics of human brain networks have something important in common with some superficially very different systems in nature. Computational networks showing these characteristics have also been shown to have optimal memory (data storage) and information-processing capacity. In particular, critical systems are able to respond very rapidly and extensively to minor changes in their inputs.” via PhysOrg.
The Beauty Of Urban Decay
Via In One Ear and Out the Other
Thank heavens someone is thinking about one of the most troublesome experiences I have — my inability to remember a joke I have heard, no matter how funny and no matter how determined I am to retain it to share with others later.
“Really great jokes… work not by conforming to pattern recognition routines but by subverting them. “Jokes work because they deal with the unexpected, starting in one direction and then veering off into another,” said Robert Provine, a professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of Laughter: A Scientific Investigation. “What makes a joke successful are the same properties that can make it difficult to remember.”
This may also explain why the jokes we tend to remember are often the most clichéd ones. A mother-in-law joke? Yes, I have the slot ready and labeled.
Memory researchers suggest additional reasons that great jokes may elude common capture. Daniel L. Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard and the author of The Seven Sins of Memory, says there is a big difference between verbatim recall of all the details of an event and gist recall of its general meaning.
“We humans are pretty good at gist recall but have difficulty with being exact,” he said. Though anecdotes can be told in broad outline, jokes live or die by nuance, precision and timing. And while emotional arousal normally enhances memory, it ends up further eroding your attention to that one killer frill. “Emotionally arousing material calls your attention to a central object,” Dr. Schacter said, “but it can make it difficult to remember peripheral details.” via NYTimes.
This may be a special case of something over which I have more generally puzzled — what is the difference between those raconteurs, who always seem to have a moving story or stories (funny or dreadful) to tell on any occasion, and others who are at a loss for words in social settings. I’m not talking about people who are shy or painfully inhibited so much as those who seem to have the material and those who don’t.
Is there that much of a difference in the content of people’s lives? Is it something about how observant they are? Or, again, something about memory function? I am fascinated by storytelling (for instance, I love the Moth podcast) and have always been intrigued by advertisements about storytelling workshops promising to develop attendees’ skills.
To some extent, there is a cultural influence as well. I suspect storytelling is a dying art, along with letter-writing and reading fiction, a way we used to interact and divert ourselves which is progressively and inexorably being supplanted in modernity. But there are still enough good conversationalists around to astound me.
Of course, other people may find it far easier than I do to talk about what happened to them during their workday, one of the important sources of our stories. As a therapist, I am privileged to hear in detail about a broad range of the lives of others, but all of what I am told, I am told in confidence. Perhaps I gravitated toward psychotherapy because I sensed myself to be a far better listener to the stories of others than I am a storyteller myself. In fact, some construe the work of psychotherapy as training our clients to become better storytellers about their own lives, as largely a matter of imposing coherence and pattern on their recollections and observations about themselves, making better sense of their lives, consequently appreciating and tolerating the humor and the pathos in their lives better, and developing an empathic connection to the life stories of those around them.
Related?
- Absentmindedness (oup.com)
Most Disturbing Moment in Obama’s Leno Appearance
…[I]nevitably, he talked about the long-promised family dog, joking that he might not get one after all. “This is Washington,” he said with a sly smile. “That was a campaign promise.” via NYTimes.
The Loon — James Tate
A loon woke me this morning. It was like waking up
in another world. I had no idea what was expected of me.
I waited for instructions. Someone called and asked me
if I wanted a free trip to Florida. I said, “Sure. Can
I go today?” A man in a uniform picked me up in a limousine,
and the next thing I know I’m being chased by an alligator
across a parking lot. A crowd gathers and cheers me on.
Of course, none of this really happened. I’m still sleeping.
I don’t want to go to work. I want to know what the loon is
saying. It sounds like ecstasy tinged with unfathomable
terror. One thing is certain: at least they are not speaking
of tax shelters. The phone rings. It’s my boss. She says,
“Where are you?” I say, “I don’t know. I don’t recognize
my surroundings. I think I’ve been kidnapped. If they make
demands of you, don’t give in. That’s my professional advice.”
Just then, the loon let out a tremendous looping, soaring,
swirling, quadruple whoop. “My god, are you alright?” my
boss said. “In case we do not meet again, I want you to know
that I’ve always loved you, Agnes,” I said. “What?” she said.
“What are you saying?” “Good-bye, my darling. Try to remember me
as your ever loyal servant,” I said. “Did you say you loved
me?” she said. I said, “Yes,” and hung up. I tried
to go back to sleep, but the idea of being kidnapped had me
quite worked up. I looked in the mirror for signs of torture.
Every time the loon cried, I screamed and contorted my face
in agony. They were going to cut off my head and place it on
a stake. I overheard them talking. They seemed like very
reasonable men, even, one might say, likeable.
“The Loon” by James Tate from Return to the City of White Donkeys. © Ecco Press, 2004. via a blind flaneur.
R.I.P. Sal Salasin
And am pleased to inhabit the earth with this species. Goodbye and God bless you all. More of the evil work of Denise and her evil twin Denise, bleeding through my dreams. Man is the only animal that builds jails. He can also eat peanuts and chew tobacco. Let's go back to the phones where we'll discuss idempotent transactions in just a moment. Well, yes, I'm sorry I did the best I could which was obviously inadequate.
Fate and too many painkillers.
Recently I had the pleasure of driving alone in an American car on American roads listening to American radio from Perth Amboy to Seattle. And this had its rewards although it didn't do the planet any good.
And if it makes you feel any better, I didn't use my tongue. I'm also extremely good at removing the lint after each use and believe I should get some credit for that. “By the light of a thousand suns, I am become death.” I'd sympathize but all in all, I'd rather talk about me. Just get my butt back safe from the K-Mart and I'm yours forever.
via RealPolitik.
Passive Aggressive Anger Release Machine
“All you have to do is insert a coin, and a piece of China will Slowly move forwards and fall into the bottom of the machine, breaking, and leaving you happy and relieved of anger.” Monoscope via walker.
Where can I access one of these?
The Aliens Among Us…
…is the theme of the latest Worth1000 Photoshopping Contest. What amazes me is how similar most of the imagined visages of the aliens are. It must be that we are channeling some actual memories of our alien encounters, don’t you think? I wonder if they preferentially contact people with Photoshopping skills.
Quadruple Saturn Moon Transit
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2009-12-f-web.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/images/hs-2009-12-f-web.jpg "Face of Saturn transited by four of its moons.")
Face of Saturn transited by four of its moons.
Fantastic Hubble image of the transit of four moons — Enceladus, Dione, the giant orange moon Titan, and Mimas — across Saturn’s face. Icy white Enceladus and Dione are on the left, casting their black shadows on the cloud surface of the planet. Mimas is on the right edge of Saturn’s disc, just above the rings. via HubbleSite.
An Outbreak of Autism, or a Statistical Fluke?
“Autism is terrifying the community of Somali immigrants in Minneapolis, and some pediatricians and educators have joined parents in raising the alarm. But public health experts say it is hard to tell whether the apparent surge of cases is an actual outbreak, with a cause that can be addressed, or just a statistical fluke.
… A small recent study of refugees in schools in Stockholm found that Somalis were in classes for autistic children at three times the normal rate.
Calls to representatives of Somali groups in Seattle and San Diego found that they were aware of the fear in Minneapolis but unsure about their own rates. Doctors familiar with the Somali communities in Boston and Lewiston, Me., had heard of no surges there.” NYTimes.
Rare Reptile Hatchling Found in New Zealand
“A hatchling of a rare reptile with lineage dating back to the dinosaur age has been found in the wild on the New Zealand mainland for the first time in about 200 years, a wildlife official said Thursday.
The baby tuatara was discovered by staff during routine maintenance work at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in the capital, Wellington, conservation manager Raewyn Empson said.
”We are all absolutely thrilled with this discovery,” Empson said. ”It means we have successfully re-established a breeding population back on the mainland, which is a massive breakthrough for New Zealand conservation.”
Tuatara, which measure up to 32 inches 80 cm when full grown, are the last descendants of a lizard-like reptile species that walked the Earth with the dinosaurs 225 million years ago, zoologists say.
There are estimated to be about 50,000 of them living in the wild on 32 small offshore islands cleared of predators, but this is the first time a hatchling has been seen on the mainland in about 200 years.”
(New York Times )
Free ‘NPR Music At SXSW’ Sampler
“Download a free 10-song sampler of the artists featured by NPR Music at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, TX this month. Click the link below and the songs will automatically begin downloading into your iTunes account.” via NPR Music.
Related:
- Jacob Soiboroff NPR: SXSW 2009 (offonatangent.blogspot.com)
- Dealzmodo: 6GB of Free, DRM-Free Music from SXSW [Deals] (i.gizmodo.com)
- SXSW 2009 on BitTorrent: 6 GB of Free Music (torrentfreak.com)
Stopping the Draft
“Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates announced today that the Army will virtually eliminate the unpopular practice of “stop loss” — or mandating that soldiers stay in the Army beyond their service obligation — by March 2011 and will offer extra pay to soldiers whose service is extended under the policy.
About 13,000 soldiers are serving in the Army under the stop-loss policy, nearly double the number of two years ago. Gates said the goal is to reduce that number by 50 percent by June 2010 and to bring it down to scores or less by March 2011.” via Salon.
Related:
What Doctors (Supposedly) Get Wrong about PTSD
This article in Scientific American by David Dobbs reports on the growing concern that “the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder is itself disordered”. The writer is critical of a culture which “seemed reflexively to view bad memories, nightmares and any other sign of distress as an indicator of PTSD.” To critics like this, the overwhelming incidence of PTSD diagnoses in returning Iraqi veterans is not a reflection of the brutal meaningless horror to which many of the combatants were exposed but of a sissy culture that can no longer suck it up. As usual, the veil of ‘objective’ ‘scientific’ evidence is used to cloak ideological biases.
FmH readers know that I too am critical of the frequency of PTSD diagnosis in modern mental health practice, but I think that is not a problem with the theoretical construct of PTSD but its slapdash application. With respect to domestic PTSD, the problem is one of overzealous and naive clinicians ignoring the diagnostic criteria and, more important, misunderstanding the clinical significance and intent of the diagnosis, labelling with PTSD far too many people who have ever had anything more than a little upsetting or distressing happen to them. Essentially, PTSD is meant to refer to the longterm consequences of either an experience or experiences that are outside the bounds of what the human psyche can endure. Both emotionally and neurobiologically, the capacity of the organism is overwhelmed and the fact of the trauma assumes an overarching and inescapable central role in future information processing, functioning and sense of self. Experience that occurs when the body is flooded with unimaginably high levels of stress hormones, when the nervous system is in the throes of the fight-or-flight response, and when the normal processes for making sense of what we are going through utterly break down are encoded differently in the body and mind, with immeasurable effects. Only someone who did not grasp this at all could misrecognize simple anxiety, depression or adjustment difficulties as PTSD. But it happens all the time, especially in the treatment of depressed women, largely because of do-gooder clinicians’ desires to be politically correct and not be seen as insensitive to their clients’ suffering. Unfortunately, what it mostly does is train these clients to remain lifelong inhabitants of a self-fulfilling inescapable victim role.
The concern, on the other hand, with soldiers returning from the wars in central Asia, is the opposite. All evidence is that PTSD is being underdiagnosed, because of systematic biases within the government and the military to deny the scope of the problem. Articles such as this, and the research that it depicts, should be seen as nothing but a conservative backlash, an effort to blame the victims. If coping with the scope of PTSD is a problem, deny the reality of PTSD. Certainly considerable research suggests that a proportion of soldiers returning from the battle front in bad shape will have shown their resilience, will no longer show a high magnitude of emotional disturbance, and will not warrant a diagnosis of PTSD if reassessed months or years later. Research also suggests that early intervention using a trauma paradigm may do more harm than good, perpetuating the vulnerability of the patient. And most Defense Dept. research on the effects of combat trauma is intended to figure out how to block the stress reaction so that a soldier can remain functional and return to a combat role as soon as possible. But it remains the case that the human nervous system did not evolve to endure the horrors of modern war, and that the indefensibility and anomie of this war in particular, based as it has been entirely on lies, amplifies the intolerability and makes it far less likely that a veteran can find sustaining meaning in the suffering they endured. This will inevitably turn into higher rates of PTSD than among veterans of other wars.
To deny the scale of PTSD in our returning veterans is to be an unquestioning apologist for the untrammelled American imperialist projection of power in lawless aggression. As Dobbs describes it, the PTSD deniers construe us as having a cultural obsession with PTSD which embodies “a prolonged failure to contextualize and accept our own collective aggression.” What horse manure. Our cultural neurosis, rather, lies in the unquestioning acceptance of suggestions like Dobbs’ that we should mindlessly embrace such aggression as natural. This was the neurosis that made it possible to elect Bush and his handlers to enact an administration that set about violating every supposed principle of our democracy and our humanity. I know we are not supposed to draw this particular analogy, but this brand of PTSD denial strikes me as akin to nothing as much as Holocaust denial. Via Scientific American.
