(YouTube)

The only process indicating apparatus you’ll ever need! “…[A]n enigmatic beast. At first glance, one hardly knows what to make of it… and at second glance things don’t get much better. Listed below are some of the more common questions we’ve been asked, and their answers.

(…)

Q: How integral a role can the Device play in my secret plans to take over the world?

A: The Device can be used for good or evil. Please only use the Device for good.

Q: If Albert Einstein was alive today, do you think he would own The Device?

A: Yes.”

There would be concerns about his fitness for the presidency even if he weren’t about to turn 72. Arguably, the President’s mental health is the aspect of his or her medical condition that has the most bearing on ability to govern. Every year, with great hoopla, the President is pronounced fit after a publicized physical exam at Walter Reed. But, as I have said repeatedly with regard to GWB (about whose emotional fitness I have had ongoing grave concerns), the double standard that bars parallel psychiatric evaluations and announcements of their results is unconscionable.

“According to a seemingly serious academic study reported in the Guardian in 2006, Icelanders are the happiest people on earth. (The study was lent some credibility by the finding that the Russians were the most unhappy.)” (Guardian.UK, thanks to walker)

Thousands of kilometers of lost fishing nets in north Atlantic are destroying fish stocks. (Yahoo! News)

A graphic data visualization. It would be interesting to superimpose the red state/blue state map over this one.

A friend wrote me today describing her plan to select a dozen names at random from the Paris phone book and send each of them a postcard:

“Greetings from the USA. You don’t know me, but I selected your name and address at random from the internet white pages. I send you this note to apologize. The president of my country is an idiot. I did not vote for him. The majority of us are deeply ashamed of this man and his law-breaking regime. Let us hope for a return to sanity and intelligence in the upcoming year.

Best regards,”

She was inspired by this:

I, in turn, am inspired to commit similar acts. We are both curious to see if anyone responds, and how. Care to join us? If so, spread the word.

Addendum: She wrote further:

“Someone replied and wanted to do this mailing of postcards to random recipients. In my previous email I failed to outline clearly how I did it. It is a bit more complicated than I let on, but actually very easy!

First, you use real postcards, not ecards: wire display-stand postcards made of paper with glossy photo on front (see attachment in previous email) They run about 50 cents new or always aplenty in thrift shops or at home. I’m afraid I wasn’t accurate in my explanation of how I ‘found’ names. For individuals’ addresses I went to this site:

http://c.asselin.free.fr/french/yellow_pages.htm

I clicked on ‘France’ and up came a search page with little browser windows for ‘name’s and ‘city’. (Note: you can’t just search name-filled pages.) Then I made up first and last names, typed them in the little browser windows along with my chosen city, ‘Paris’ until, voila! a real person’s name appeared with an address. Sometimes I had to think of several first and last name combos before I got a real person. It felt like more of a personal,prophetic connection doing it that way. Also,it might help to know a bit of whatever language so you can read the labels for the search windows.

With business addresses, you don’t use the phone book at all. It’s easier to google for example, “Pet Groomer, Paris, France” whereupon several businesses along with their addresses pop up, from which you can choose.

This method ended up working for me, anyway. Like I said, it sounds complicated, but isn’t.”

The Lebanese Army isn’t on your side any more!: “So there was George Bush, telling the BBC today that he is willing to send US aid to the Lebanese Army… Doesn’t he realize that… the Lebanese Army isn’t on his side any more?? Is it any wonder that the administration led by this man is losing so badly in the Middle East these days?” (Just World News)

Obsessive Video Montages: “… [a] genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage.” An extensive list from films and TV series, including every whacking from The Sopranos and every “dude” from The Big Lebowski. (waxy.org)

‘We’ve shown that the function of memory circuits can be modulated.’ A neurosurgeon testing deep brain electrical stimulation with implanted electrodes for other purposes was surprised to find normalization of memory function in a man with Alzheimer’s dementia. (Technology Review)

Some spectacular and haunting photos

(Dark Roasted Blend)

“…A victory for Hillary Clinton would be a victory for shameless pandering and for all that is small within us. We can do better.” (rc3)

this poem is for deer

I dance on all the mountains
On five mountains, I have a dancing place
When they shoot at me I run
To my five mountains”

Missed a last shot
At the Buck, in twilight
So we came back sliding
On dry needles through cold pines.
Scared out a cottontail
Whipped up the winchester
Shot off its head.
The white body rolls and twitches
In the dark ravine
As we run down the hill to the car.

deer foot down scree
Picasso’s fawn, Issa’s fawn,
Deer on the autumn mountain
Howling like a wise man
Stiff springy jumps down the snowfields
Head held back, forefeet out,
Balls tight in a tough hair sack
Keeping the human soul from care
on the autumn mountain
Standing in late sun, ear-flick
Tail-flick, gold mist of flies
Whirling from nostril to eyes.

Home by night
drunken eye
Still picks out Taurus
Low, and growing high:
four-point buck
Dancing in the headlights
on the lonely road
A mile past the mill-pond,
With the car stopped, shot
That wild silly blinded creature down.

Pull out the hot guts
with hard bare hands
While night-frost chills the tongue
and eye
The cold horn-bones.
The hunter’s belt
just below the sky
Warm blood in the car trunk.
Deer-smell,
the limp tongue.

Deer don’t want to die for me.
I’ll drink sea-water
Sleep on beach pebbles in the rain
Until the deer come down to die
in pity for my pain.

Gary Snyder

this poem is for bear

“As for me I am a child of the god of the mountains.”

A bear down under the cliff.
She is eating huckleberries.
They are ripe now
Soon it will snow, and she
Or maybe he, will crawl into a hole
And sleep. You can see
Huckleberries in bearshit if you
Look, this time of year
If I sneak up on the bear
It will grunt and run
The others had all gone down
From the blackberry brambles, but one girl
Spilled her basket, and was picking up her
Berries in the dark.
A tall man stood in the shadow, took her arm,
Led her to his home. He was a bear.
In a house under the mountain
She gave birth to slick dark children
With sharp teeth, and lived in the hollow
Mountain many years.

snare a bear: call him out:
honey-eater
forest apple
light-foot
Old man in the fur coat, Bear! come out!
Die of your own choice!
Grandfather black-food!
this girl married a bear
Who rules in the mountains, Bear!

you have eaten many berries
you have caught many fish
you have frightened many people

Twelve species north of Mexico
Sucking their paws in the long winter
Tearing the high-strung caches down
Whining, crying, jacking off
(Odysseus was a bear)

Bear-cubs gnawing the soft tits
Teeth gritted, eyes screwed tight
but she let them.

Til her brothers found the place
Chased her husband up the gorge
Cornered him in the rocks.
Song of the snared bear:
“Give me my belt.
“I am near death.
“I came from the mountain caves
“At the headwaters,
“The small streams there
“Are all dried up.

— I think I’ll go hunt bears.
“hunt bears?
Why shit Snyder.
You couldn’t hit a bear in the ass
with a handful of rice!”

Gary Snyder

“It’s interesting that having your own domain and Web site once set you apart from the crowd because it meant you were an early adopter, perhaps soon it will mark you as unusually old fashioned.” — Rafe Coburn (rc3)

I know you have all been dying to know for all these years. (Howstuffworks)

The Temporal Organization of Recovery — Emmanuel Mignot, Stanford University (‘Unsolved Mysteries’ discuss a topic of biological importance that is poorly understood and in need of research attention). (PLoS Biology)

at LibraryThing: “A group for those interested and involved in entering the library catalogs of famous readers.”

Kevin Kelly asks how much data a person generates during their lifetime, and what happens to it after the person dies? (Conceptual Trends and Current Topics)

“…two large colliding galaxies are featured in this Hubble Space Telescope view, part of a series of cosmic snapshots released to celebrate the Hubble’s 18th anniversary. Recorded in astronomer Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 272, the pair is otherwise known as NGC 6050 and IC 1179. They lie some 450 million light-years away in the Hercules Galaxy Cluster. At that estimated distance, the picture spans over 150 thousand light-years. Although this scenario does look peculiar, galaxy collisions and their eventual mergers are now understood to be common, with Arp 272 representing a stage in this inevitable process.” (APOD)

“What are the psychological ‘rules’ of bartering?” (Scientific American)

“US President George W Bush poked fun at his potential successors during his last White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.” (BBC) And the petty little man’s jibes don’t display an ounce of wit.

“direct link between the frozen remains of a man found in a glacier in northern B.C. and 17 people living in B.C., Yukon and Alaska…” (Globe and Mail)

Study shows geomagnetic activity correlates with self-destructive behavior in Kirovsk, Russia. Speculation that magnetic flux contributes to depression by desynchronizing human circadian rhythms. (New Scientist)

As in, “I’m off to…”. My family and I will be out of the country and I will not be posting or responding to comments for the next two weeks. See you at the end of April, and thank you for your continued visits here.

Is that a nude woman reflected in Cheney’s mirror shades? (Official White House Vice-Presidential Site)

(Emphasis added.) ‘Beijing boycott’, I mouthed excitedly after reading the headline… Kudos to Clinton for getting out in front on this, but skipping the opening ceremony alone is an empty gesture. The call should be for an outright boycott of the entire Olympics. [The piece is accompanied by what has to be one of the most unflattering pictures of the unphotogenic Clinton I have seen in awhile. Zombified, no?]

A discussion of how insanely powerful the magnets in MRI machines are, including discussion of the effects of either unwittingly or deliberately (!) introducing magnetic metals into their fields. Illustrated by video clips. (Mental Floss)

One person’s “list of the 10 most evil and unethical experiments carried out on humans.” (The List Universe via kottke)

“Federman’s masterful and economical utilization of strange loops, mise-en-abime, and other metafictionalist maneuvers will be received by readers versed in writing of this type with a smile of familiarity and a nod of admiration. Like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, Federman has internalized this type of writing to the point where the use of innovative and challenging narrative techniques such as metalepsis and hypodiegesis never seems contrived.” –Jeffrey R. di Leo

A number of the schizophrenic patients with whom I work, some of whom have similar explanations for the voices they hear in their heads, would be interested in the report, which is available here (pdf). ‘Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you’, the saying goes. Perhaps it should be ‘Just because you are paranoid means they are out to get you’?

‘Real Government Files on the Unknown’: Nick Redfern’s study of official documents on weird, X-Files-style phenomena, including Sea-Serpents, UFOs, ESP, Remote-Viewing, the Loch Ness Monster, Spontaneous Human Combustion, Crop Circles and much more.”

A very bad idea for anyone other than Big Pharma, in my opinion. The drug companies are sitting pretty if pro forma approval by an overwhelmed agency that has not effectively regulated in decades is the sole legal standard.

You know I am enslaved to you, serving up tidbits ’round the clock, day in and day out, dear readers…

What Billy Bragg is listening to. “There are some albums that take you back to your early teens — before they invented Guitar Hero III — when you’d get by with your bedroom mirror and a tennis racket for a guitar. This would be my tennis racket album of the year.” I usually find these New York Times “listening with…” pieces interesting; I just wish they discussed more than 5-6 selections. (New York Times )

I just thought I would give a plug for the assembled writings, at Texts and Connections, of my incisive online acquaintance Steve Silberman. I have linked to a number of these articles when they have appeared in Wired online in the past. Silberman and I have corresponded online and share alot of interests and sensibilities, although he has rubbed shoulders with them (the members of the Grateful Dead; other psychedelic, counterculture and Beat luminaries; Oliver Sacks and other neuropioneers; among others) while I just worship them from afar.

If anyone notices the online appearance of any new Silberman materials before I do, please send me a link and I will probably be impelled to take note of it here.

Those of you with more common family names, or with appreciable extended families, may have a hard time seeing the point of this post. But, as I’ve noted before, there are very very few Gelwans. I have always wondered, or you might even say obsessed around, how/if those I find are related to me. I have very little in the way of extended family; I guess this preoccupation of mine reflects an envy of those with large extended families and a thirst for deeper family connection, especially so that my children might come to feel embedded in a broader web.

I subscribe to a Google alert for new Gelwan references on the web, and just received a link to this page (gendrevo.ru). It appears to me to be from a Russian genealogy site in which survivors post remembrance pages for their relatives who died in the Holocaust. On my paternal side, the generation of immigrants were my grandparents, in the early 20th century; my father’s older siblings and he were born in the U.S. between 1910-1915. I have always assumed that Gelwan was an Ellis Island anglicization of something else and thus that researching my family’s roots would become squirrely because the family name of anyone related to me might not have precisely the same pronunciation or spelling. It was explained to me that, as the part of the world from which my ancestors emigrated shifted back and forth between Slavic and Germanic dominance, between Cyrillic and Roman alphabets, so too did the rendering of family names. I would have to pursue the Gelvans, the Gelmans, and even the Hellmans for relatives. [I may have made this up, but I think I learned somewhere along the way that we are actually distantly related to the Hellman’s mayonnaise family…]

The flip side of that coin is that literal Gelwans might not be related to me. For example, there is a Deborah Gelwan in the public relations industry in Sao Paulo, Brazil who is referred to on the web. When I was a child, a Brazilian tourist with the last name Gelwan, possibly from her family, arrived on our doorstep, having looked up Gelwan in the phonebooks on arriving in New York City. It appears that my parents and the visitor determined that it was unlikely we were related (although I cannot imagine how they did this, as my parents spoke no Portugese and rumor has it this visitor spoke no English). I’ve written to Deborah, without getting a response. I would at least love to figure out if these South American Gelwans descended from Eastern European immigrants. I am aware that eastern European Jews did go to South America in the diasporas, but I am not sure about Brazil per se.

I have even discovered two other Gelwans in the New York area where I grew up, interestingly enough both physicians as I am: Jeffrey, a gastroenterologist and Mark, an ophthalmologist. We’ve spoken by phone but cannot establish a common background. I assumed that it might merely be an accident that we share our name, that Gelwan might be a final common pathway of anglicization from diverse unrelated family names in eastern Europe.

I was told that my family originated in Riga, Latvia. Given that, I’ve written to Vladimir, or Wladimir, Gelwan, who I learned was the principal dancer in the Latvian National Ballet and who now runs a ballet school in Berlin, suggesting that we may be related, but have never gotten a reply back. (What is it with these nonresponses? Someone writing me from afar suggesting they might be my relative, with such a rare name, would immediately pique my interest and would surely get a response, although that might just be me. Do you think the recipients might have worried that my messages represented some kind of con?) I have seen a picture of Vladimir Gelwan on the web and can even imagine a certain family resemblance. I have determined that I will drop in on him if I am ever in Berlin. [Do I have any readers in or near Berlin?]

Given the waves of upheaval that repeatedly washed over eastern Europe in the 20th century, with ever-changing political hegemony over various regions, large scale displacement of populations, the Holocaust, the destruction of records, the changing of names, etc., conventional genealogical research is not possible. It is not as if there is an established family tree, with records waiting around for the taking, as is the case for at least some families with western European origins. My father’s older brother, now deceased, once returned to eastern Europe to try to find some of our roots. Despite a reputation for being extremely resourceful, he apparently had no success at all. Lamentably, I cannot find any notes from his research; otherwise I (acknowledged as someone with no lack of resourcefulness myself!) might pick up the trail where he left off, despite the passage of time having added fifty further years of obfuscation.

But now, here are remembrances literally of Gelwans! And they come from Poland and Riga. So it seems excitingly credible that these remembered Gelwans are somehow relatives of mine, but I am at a loss as to where to go from this point. The entries in this registry were made by a surviving sister, Miriam Bergman, in the mid-’50’s. Bergman is a common name, and I suspect it would be impossible to locate this woman or anyone connected to her. Do any readers have some suggestions as to how I could proceed in pursuing this?

[Perhaps one day someone googling their family name will be linked to this post and wonder how they might be related to Eliot Gelwan. Hurry up, Google, crawl this post and index it!]

“Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests.” (BBC) More from the FmH self-justification dept.

I’m sorry I am late in noticing this. As readers of FmH know, I think that the witness of conscience against American military adventurism is a high purpose and deserves to be propagated widely.

I just thought I would give a plug for the assembled writings, at Texts and Connections, of my incisive online acquaintance Steve Silberman. I have linked to a number of these articles when they have appeared in Wired online in the past. Silberman and I have corresponded online and share alot of interests and sensibilities, although he has rubbed shoulders with them (the members of the Grateful Dead; other psychedelic, counterculture and Beat luminaries; Oliver Sacks and other neuropioneers; among others) while I just worship them from afar.

If anyone notices the online appearance of any new Silberman materials before I do, please send me a link and I will probably be impelled to take note of it here.

I’m not sure I would go fully 6 for 6 with my kids…