“For nearly half a century, SETI efforts have Searched for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. Instead of searching for alien life outside our planet, the Lifeboat Foundation has decided to take the opposite approach and to search for ‘alien’ life on this planet. We call our efforts ‘Finding Artificial Life Created by Nanobiotechnology’…”

Thanks to walker for pointing me to this diatribe from Craigslist. It is clear, despite his/her disclaimers toward the bottom of the passage, that the ER doctor is very angry with this class of patients. But clean up the language a bit and it is something that ought to be posted on the ER door as an open letter.

Fred Kaplan in Slate Magazine: “Since Donald Rumsfeld’s departure from the Pentagon, American military officers are starting to speak their minds again�and what some of the best of them are saying is even darker than expected.”

In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, James Comey, former assistant to Attorney General John Ashcroft, describes Alberto Gonzales and Andrew Card rushing to the critically ill Ashcroft’s hospital bedside in March 2004 to pressure him to override Comey’s refusal to reauthorize the secret warrantless domestic surveillance program before its expiration the following day.

The researchers’ basis for determining if the dropped food is safe to eat depends on ascertaining what bacterial load they pick up from a dirty surface after various intervals. But that does not address the likelihood that the added bacterial load is probably an infinitesimal addition to the daily bacterial load to which we are exposed already, from the same varieties of microbes, even if we never eat a piece of dropped food. More important, although I am not a bacteriologist or an immunologist, I seem to recall an argument that exposure to dirt should be considered akin to an inoculation, invigorating the immune system, and that an obsession with cleanliness may actually leave a person in immunological jeopardy when the time comes to defend oneself. At least that’s my reasoning when I eat something I’ve dropped…and I utilize something more like a thirty-second rule.

Bruce Stutz, in the New York Times Magazine, gives a first-person account of his struggles to get off an antidepressant after treated with it. He speculates on whether these drugs have more costs than benefits:

Bruce Stutz, in the New York Times Magazine, gives a first-person account of his struggles to get off an antidepressant after treated with it. He speculates on whether these drugs have more costs than benefits:

The first time I saw this, I read it as Discordia. Now that miight be a holiday I would celebrate wholeheartedly.

Largely for those with privacy concerns; should this be in the closing-the-barndoor-after-the-horse-is-gone dept.? In any case, by asking Google to block reverse searches on your phone number, you can call even those with caller ID with impunity.

OTOH: 

What to do if you do want to be found through Google

Avoid Speeding Tickets. “Your online guide to Bear Traps and Exits for all the Interstate Highways of the United States. Bears are creatures of habit.”

This one is from several years ago — “Reflected and diffuse light from an obscured computer monitor can still be used to reconstruct what is on its screen, say UK researchers. The technique could be used to spy on computers through an office window, for example, even if the monitor was not facing the window.” (New Scientist) The system only works for CRTs, so your laptops and flat panel displays are safe. It was also thought that flat panels were safe from Van Eck phreaking, in which images can be reconstructed by tuning in to the radio coils in CRTs. But the same researcher from the earlier result, Cambridge University’s Marcus Kuhn, has reconstructed LCD images by tuning in to radio transmissions from the video cables carrying the signal to the display. (New Scientist via abby)

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Admittedly, this is from Fox News; so is it truly worrisome or their typical reactionary smear tactics?

Does anyone else remember this story, which I read in the ’50’s and which has stuck with me ever since… ?

Also:

Mathematical Fiction Homepage

And:

Moebius 17

If you can make heads or tails of it:

“Two writers are bombing a train. Eventually, drawing the highlights, they are suprised by the security staff. They are being chased but finally manage to escape. One of the two writers, starred by Johannes Benecke, decides not to give up until he gets “a fuckin’ picture of his fuckin’ train”. Trying to get a picture of his rolling canvas, he has to face a labyrinth of subway lines crossing each other, connections, quotations, fantastic observations, and paradoxical indications. However, Train No. 17 is missing inside the underground system. The Public Transport are looking for the disappeared train as well. The special Graffiti commission, special forces, and computer experts begin to chase. Parallelly, the chairman of the Public Transport, Himmel, is being accused of corruption while building a new cross connection. This is not by chance. In real life, Himmel’s name is Arno Funke who became Germany’s most sympathetic blackmailer of department stores using the alias “Dagobert”. Is he once again trying to escape in the underground with millions? Jörg Gudzuhn does not play a role in here. However, the actor starred already in 1994 as a commissioner searching the “Phantom” Dagobert. In 1991, he starred as a professor looking for a ghost train in Berlin in the movie “Moebius”. The current Moebius conspirancy started in 1997, when Frank Lämmer watched the Argentinian adaption of the story. Since that time, he has been on the “Moebius-stripe”. This differentially theoretical phenomenon, named after its discoverer A.F.Moebius, was not only engraved by the Dutch artist M.C. Escher in wood but has also animated the writer Esher to follow the nine ants of his namesake. Together with Jo Preußler he started the securing of evidence in 2002. After a wooden subway got cinematically lost inside the subway system of Buenos Aires, it is now up to No. 17. Both of the two Berlin film-makers have realized that one cannot get anywhere with this paradox using the five senses and a classical conservative world view. Therefore, they grab together with a crew of writers the motif of the short story “A Subway Named Moebius” by A. J. Deutsch(1950) and actualize the following idea: Two writers are bombing a train …”

Babel is immensely popular in Japan, in part thanks to a memorable and powerful role by Japanese actress Rinko Kikuchi. But, reminiscent of a memorable incident caused by an episode of the Pokemon cartoon series a decade ago, a number of Japanese have been sickened by a one-minute scene in Babel involving a visit to a club in which strobe lights flash for about a minute. The phenomenon has prompted the posting of a health advisory on the distributor’s website and on posters at theatres showing the film. (Yahoo! News) While strobe-induced seizure activity is a well-known phenomenon in patients with preexisting epilepsy, it is quite rare. In contrast, this has some of the hallmarks of communicable hysteria. It is a little different from the Pokemon incident, which affected viewers simultaneously without forewarning, and which probably attracted a much larger viewing population.

“Switzerland is one of the world’s richest and most tranquil countries, but it also has more suicides than most. This may show that money doesn’t buy happiness, but some Swiss also blame the guns.” (Yahoo! News)

Fight Crime With Rented Robotic Exoskeleton: “Need to move a piano? Picked on by bullies? Want to uproot trees in the backyard? Not to worry. Soon you’ll be able to RENT A HAL-5 EXOSKELETON for just $590 per month. The robotic suit gives its wearer super strength.” (The Raw Feed)

…It’s in His Tail (New York Times)

i.e. ‘I feel like I’ve heard this bull before…’ World Bank chief still has Bush’s support (WorldNetDaily)

i.e. ‘I feel like I’ve heard this bull before…’ Bush Reiterates Support for Gonzales (New York Times)

“European astronomers say they have found the first Earth-sized planet beyond this solar system with temperatures mild enough to allow liquid water — a crucial step toward answering whether our cradle of life is unique in the universe.

The planet circles the star Gliese 581, which at 20 light years away is among the 100 stars closest to Earth. Dubbed Gliese 581c, the planet orbits very close to its star — closer than Mercury is to our sun. But astronomers with the European Southern Observatory say the star is dim enough that average temperatures on the planet would fall in the range of an ordinary Chicago spring day.

Click here to find out more!
If the planet has water — a big unknown — its size and climate could make it habitable, experts said. The planet appears to be about 50 percent larger than Earth and has five times more mass, making it one of the smallest far-off planets ever detected.

The conditions look promising enough that officials with the California-based SETI Institute, which looks for signs of radio communication from alien civilizations, said they hope to give the planet a fresh look this summer. Previous radio observations of Gliese 581 in the 1990s turned up nothing unusual.” (Orlando Sentinel )

Was Seung-Hui Cho “shooting a John Woo movie in his head”? (New York Times )

Was Seung-Hui Cho “shooting a John Woo movie in his head”? (New York Times )

“A survey is suggesting that only a tiny minority of us are getting eight hours’ sleep a night. But do we really need that much?” (BBC)

Are you an “aspiring new media titan”, as the cover says? Then this is the periodical for you! First issue of Blogger and Podcaster magazine. So “blogging” (as you know, I have always eschewed the term and insisted on calling this a weblog) has made it so big it has its own slick new ‘old media’-style rag. For better or worse, it seems to make its appeal to everything FmH is not. However, the user interface is interesting. Click on the upper right corner of the page to turn the page (‘old media’ style).

by Duncan Clark & Richie Unterberger: “…a no-nonsense look at the in’s and out’s of the plethora of choices you can make to change and manage your impact.” (Cool Tools)

This may be seen as an audacious grandstanding move by Kucinich, with his indefatiguable Presidential aspirations. On the other hand, if successful it would remove the major stumbling block to the impeachment of George Bush.

Madam Fathom is the pseudonym of a neuroscience PhD student with a weblog about her (I assume it’s a her) field. This is an interesting post about the potential benefits of nicotine that offers a particularly lucid picture of brain function.

“The dangers of inhaling a cremated parent.” (Slate)

Edge interview with Philip Zimbardo, designer of the (in)famous Stanford Prison Experiment:

Zimbardo reveals that he ended the experiment because of the abhorrence his girlfriend, now his wife, expressed when she came down to observe. Zimbardo turns Hannah Arendt’s phrase on its head, talking about the “banality of heroism”:

Zimbardo’s notion of a hero has alot to do with activism, empowering people to speak truth to powerful wrongdoing, both by “cultivating the heroic imagination” in individuals, largely through education, and by changing our institutions so they become “hero-engendering.” He calls for “a new revolution of making heroes more common”. Nothing really new in this except the phraseology; it has been the eternal preoccupation of social critics and revolutionaries. But how to get there…

“NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has observed a remarkable eclipse of a supermassive black hole, allowing a disk of hot matter swirling around the hole to be measured for the first time.” (NASA)

? I recall once I subscribed to email serialization of Finnegans Wake, but the mailing list died. I just checked; dailylit doesn’t have that, but they have everything else of Joyce’s. I might start with William James’ Varieties of Religious Experience, Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, or Boswell’s Life of Johnson, and that’s just from the ‘J’ page…

Some of the recipients have been insulin-free for as long as three years, although the researchers do not claim this is a cure.

The study compared 157 bereaved individuals and 710 who met the criteria for major depressive disorder whose episode had been triggered by another loss. Grief specifically precludes a diagnosis of major depression, but the investigators showed that those diagnosed with depression after other losses did not differ significantly from the bereavement group on a well-chosen spectrum of indicators of the severity and impact of their symptoms. They concluded that the data “do not support the validity of uniquely excluding uncomplicated bereavement but not uncomplicated reactions to other losses” from the diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

The researchers are a social worker, two sociologists and one psychiatrist — interestingly, a psychiatric epistemologist who participated in the formulation of the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-4), the official ‘bible’ of acceptable psychiatric diagnoses and their defining criteria. This should be a clue that the study should be interpreted in light of the perennial conflict within mental health care between the medical and social models; it is a shot across the bow aimed at biological psychiatry. When psychoanalysts dominated in shaping the psychiatric paradigms of diagnosis and treatment in the era before modern psychopharmacology, a crucial distinction was made between “endogenous” and “reactive” depression. One still hears vestiges of that outlook when healthcare personnel observe, “Wouldn’t you be depressed too if you had gone through what he/she did?”

With the ascendency of biological models and medication-based treatment, roughly since the ’60’s, however, the distinction was largely thrown out (with the exception of the exclusion for acute grief), and a generation of psychiatrists were trained to see it as quaint and archaic. The focus in diagnosing and treating has come more and more to be on the description, the symptoms, of an episode of emotional distress (such as can be captured in the symptom checklists the article mentions) to the exclusion of the meaning of that distress to the individual and its contextualization in an individual life. With the development of medications that can treat depressive symptoms, what has been lost has been the question of whether they should be treated in all instances. Recent dogma emphasizing that depressive episodes not be seen as self-contained but as manifestations of a lifelong relapsing condition mitigates for preventive treatment through indefinite antidepressant maintenance. Relapses are explained with disdain as the result of inadequately insightful patients failing to comply with that paradigm. I will leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions as to whether this deserves to be seen as an aspect of the medicalization of everyday life driven by market pressures and the selling of healthcare down the river by the unholy alliance of Big Pharma and its handmaiden physicians.

On the other hand, I quibble with the implication of the article that this finding points to wholesale “misdiagnosis” of depression where it is unwarranted. That would be too simple, and I doubt it is what the authors intended. What is at stake is not just tidying up diagnostic criteria or diagnostic practices. There is no “true” definition of what depression is to aim for; it is a social construction that reflects dominant values and assumptions. We are in the midst of a full-fledged clash of conflicting paradigms, with a study such as this at its nidus. As Kuhn suggested in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , evidence inconsistent with the dominant paradigm is explained away or ignored until a sufficient accumulation occurs.

What are the dangers of ignoring these challenges to the dominant conception of depression, markedly broadened from that of a generation ago and ignoring context almost entirely? One of our real social ills may be not the prevalence of depression but of the narcissistic expectation that we are entitled to have any depressive distress eradicated, and the parallel assumption that it is the fault of a ‘chemical imbalance’ rather than the way we make sense of the world, process our feelings or treat one another. What is at stake is something very basic about the parameters of the social construction of the self in modern society. There may be biological consequences as well. I have been troubled by the possibility — which I cannot get many of my colleagues to take seriously — that having too low a threshold for beginning or maintaining our patients on antidepressants may actually perpetuate or worsen depressive dysfunction of the brain. Although antidepressants are not, in a rigid sense, addictive, their use may cause a self-perpetuating necessity to continue to use them. I hope to have more to say about that in the future as I clarify and extend my thinking about this issue.

The study compared 157 bereaved individuals and 710 who met the criteria for major depressive disorder whose episode had been triggered by another loss. Grief specifically precludes a diagnosis of major depression, but the investigators showed that those diagnosed with depression after other losses did not differ significantly from the bereavement group on a well-chosen spectrum of indicators of the severity and impact of their symptoms. They concluded that the data “do not support the validity of uniquely excluding uncomplicated bereavement but not uncomplicated reactions to other losses” from the diagnosis of major depressive disorder.

The researchers are a social worker, two sociologists and one psychiatrist — interestingly, a psychiatric epistemologist who participated in the formulation of the latest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-4), the official ‘bible’ of acceptable psychiatric diagnoses and their defining criteria. This should be a clue that the study should be interpreted in light of the perennial conflict within mental health care between the medical and social models; it is a shot across the bow aimed at biological psychiatry. When psychoanalysts dominated in shaping the psychiatric paradigms of diagnosis and treatment in the era before modern psychopharmacology, a crucial distinction was made between “endogenous” and “reactive” depression. One still hears vestiges of that outlook when healthcare personnel observe, “Wouldn’t you be depressed too if you had gone through what he/she did?”

With the ascendency of biological models and medication-based treatment, roughly since the ’60’s, however, the distinction was largely thrown out (with the exception of the exclusion for acute grief), and a generation of psychiatrists were trained to see it as quaint and archaic. The focus in diagnosing and treating has come more and more to be on the description, the symptoms, of an episode of emotional distress (such as can be captured in the symptom checklists the article mentions) to the exclusion of the meaning of that distress to the individual and its contextualization in an individual life. With the development of medications that can treat depressive symptoms, what has been lost has been the question of whether they should be treated in all instances. Recent dogma emphasizing that depressive episodes not be seen as self-contained but as manifestations of a lifelong relapsing condition mitigates for preventive treatment through indefinite antidepressant maintenance. Relapses are explained with disdain as the result of inadequately insightful patients failing to comply with that paradigm. I will leave it to my readers to draw their own conclusions as to whether this deserves to be seen as an aspect of the medicalization of everyday life driven by market pressures and the selling of healthcare down the river by the unholy alliance of Big Pharma and its handmaiden physicians.

On the other hand, I quibble with the implication of the article that this finding points to wholesale “misdiagnosis” of depression where it is unwarranted. That would be too simple, and I doubt it is what the authors intended. What is at stake is not just tidying up diagnostic criteria or diagnostic practices. There is no “true” definition of what depression is to aim for; it is a social construction that reflects dominant values and assumptions. We are in the midst of a full-fledged clash of conflicting paradigms, with a study such as this at its nidus. As Kuhn suggested in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , evidence inconsistent with the dominant paradigm is explained away or ignored until a sufficient accumulation occurs.

What are the dangers of ignoring these challenges to the dominant conception of depression, markedly broadened from that of a generation ago and ignoring context almost entirely? One of our real social ills may be not the prevalence of depression but of the narcissistic expectation that we are entitled to have any depressive distress eradicated, and the parallel assumption that it is the fault of a ‘chemical imbalance’ rather than the way we make sense of the world, process our feelings or treat one another. What is at stake is something very basic about the parameters of the social construction of the self in modern society. There may be biological consequences as well. I have been troubled by the possibility — which I cannot get many of my colleagues to take seriously — that having too low a threshold for beginning or maintaining our patients on antidepressants may actually perpetuate or worsen depressive dysfunction of the brain. Although antidepressants are not, in a rigid sense, addictive, their use may cause a self-perpetuating necessity to continue to use them. I hope to have more to say about that in the future as I clarify and extend my thinking about this issue.