Glacial lakes in the Himalayas are filled to the brim and poised to overflow due to increased glacial melt from global warming. The short-term danger of too much water coming out of the Himalayas, however, will give way in the long run to reduced runoff from shrunken glacial volumes. As meltwater dries up, some of the world’s mightiest rivers whose headwaters are on the spine of the world — the Indus, the Yellow, the Mekong — will shrink to trickles. Drinking and irrigation water for hundreds of millions of people will disappear. (Guardian.UK)

Related:

The big thaw

“Greenland’s glaciers have begun to race towards the ocean, leading scientists to predict that the vast island’s ice cap is approaching irreversible meltdown.” (Independent.UK)

pdf document: Doesn’t anyone at the patent office read these before granting patterns to someone who is either a liar, a hoaxer or seriusly deluded? “Quantized vortices of lattice ions project… a gravitomagnetic field that forms a spacetime curvature anomaly.” [via Interesting People listserv]

Gene turn-off makes meek mice fearless — Deactivating the gene for a brain protein called stathmin makes lab mice more fearless and less quick to learn fear responses to stimuli associated with painful outcomes. The protein destabilizes microtubule structures that help maintain neuronal connectedness. It is thought that such disruption is a basic prerequisite for learning, which occurs through the creation of new neural connections. Thus, mice that lack the protein do not learn to fear as easily. However, in case you were wondering about the obvious, the study suggests that they do not experience interference with other learning experiences because stathmin is largely restricted to the amygdala, where the fear response is thought to be controlled. The researchers said that the fearless mice were, for example, able to learn to navigate through a maze as well as control animals. How convenient to have a protein specific to the learning processes around fear. (There must have been some intelligent design, don’t you think??!! [grin]) (New Scientist)

There are evident implications for humans, if stathmin has the same role in our brain. I doubt, however, that other learning is so distinct from learning the fear response in humans. In the complex learning process that psychotherapy patients undergo in my field, for example, optimal learning is associated with an optimal level of anxiety. If anxiety is reduced too much, there is no motivation to learn, while if it is excessive, the organism is too overwhelmed to acquire, integrate and make available new information. Disrupting the ability to learn to fear certain experiences, I fear, would in humans disrupt overall learning efficiency.

Moreover, the brain’s fear circuitry is absoutely central and phylogenetically ancient. I would imagine we don’t have a clue how much else in CNS function would be disrupted if we found a way to disable stathmin in humans.

A fearless human being without much capacity to incorporate new learning might not be a problem for some, however. The military might very much like to fund some research into deactivating stathmin in humans, to prevent the fear response from paralyzing soldiers in combat. I imagine that Pentagon officials would not lose sleep at night if new learning — thinking for oneself — were concomitantly inhibited in its recruits. How much thought does one need just to follow orders? As the US’s wars get more and more dubious, it becomes harder to fight them with thoughtful people with even the slightest capacity for questioning authority. With the egregious futility adn duplicity of the invasion of Iraq, the Bush regime may have broken the bank at attracting recruits. (One can only hope.)

Some have worried since the ’50’s about the increasing efficiency and subtlety of mind control and the growing ability of powerful governments to turn their citizens into ‘a nation of sheep.’ Plausible deniability is being perfected. Since the Cold War, I have said that the US is not freer than, say, the Soviet Union was. It is just that its efforts to control its citizens (until the Bush dysasdministration’s transparent, egregious and clumsy lies, which rival those of the rather unsubtle Soviet regime) have been more subtle and refined, more difficult to counter, recognize or talk about.

But until now they have remained largely in the realm of propaganda and spin through media manipulation and co-optation of the educational system, etc. Except for small pilot programs like MK Ultra, we have yet to see it exercised on a direct neural basis, unless you believe the folks who walk around in tinfoil hats. And some say that even those are part of a government conspiracy!

I love it that FmH shares a birthday with this fine weblog. Many happy returns of the day to Kevin and a question to you: did you think when you started GitM that you would still be around at the six-year point?

from Sam Jordison, author of the recent The Joy Of Sects – An A-Z of Cults, Cranks and Religious Eccentrics. The list starts out with Mark Twain’s neglected Roughing It, with its portrait of the early Mormon Church. (Anyone interested in the topic has either already read, or is obliged to, Jon Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven, which is not on Jordison’s list.) A couple of these caught my eye and have to go on my to-read list:

(Parenthetically, I don’t think The Da Vinci Code really belongs on the Top 10 anything list! Jordison includes it, even though he says, “I hate this book almost as much as I love it. It’s literary crack cocaine – reading it does you no good at all, but you just can’t stop.”.) (Guardian.UK via walker)

“The practice does more than just make you feel good, it makes you perform better – and alters the structure of your brain.” (New Scientist)

And: “The drug ecstasy reduces the brain’s defences, reveals a new study of rats, leaving it vulnerable to invasion by viruses and other pathogens.” (New Scientist)

The double standard that underlies our torture policies. David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center writing in Slate, succinctly dissects the mockery Bush & Co. make of human rights with the U.S.’ policy on detention of foreign combatants without protection of law. Even torture apart, the central ploy, holding foreign nationals abroad so as to claim theat the U.S. constitution does not apply, makes no sense. We find humanity through the encounter with the alien, who deserves our consideration simply because he or she is human, nthing more. If we dehumanize the alien, we cannot be anything but, in the literal sense of the word, inhuman ourselves. The Republican ethos, I am convinced, is incapable of embracing humanity because it is fundamentally an appeal to tribal identity which is deeply encoded, I am convinced, in the neuroevolution of our social brains. Progressive ecumenism represents a moral imperative transcending our tribal xenophobia and the demonization of the Other. The culture war being waged now is literally one between our finer and our baser natures, and Guantanamo and the other extrajudicial detention facilities of the Bush administration are the frontlines of our battle to remain human, in all that that may potentially mean in the 21st century.

Digby agrees:

Follow Me Here… is six years old today.

Update: Thanks to Blogger; publishing didn’t work today, preventing me from publishing this post in time for the anniversary. “001 java.net.SocketTimeoutException: Read timed out.” And thanks to all my readers for putting up with, among other things, six years of intermittent Blogger crump-outs! Many happy returns.

The double standard that underlies our torture policies. David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center writing in Slate, succinctly dissects the mockery Bush & Co. make of human rights with the U.S.’ policy on detention of foreign combatants without protection of law. Even torture apart, the central ploy, holding foreign nationals abroad so as to claim theat the U.S. constitution does not apply, makes no sense. We find humanity through the encounter with the alien, who deserves our consideration simply because he or she is human, nthing more. If we dehumanize the alien, we cannot be anything but, in the literal sense of the word, inhuman ourselves. The Republican ethos, I am convinced, is incapable of embracing humanity because it is fundamentally an appeal to tribal identity which is deeply encoded, I am convinced, in the neuroevolution of our social brains. Progressive ecumenism represents a moral imperative transcending our tribal xenophobia and the demonization of the Other. The culture war being waged now is literally one between our finer and our baser natures, and Guantanamo and the other extrajudicial detention facilities of the Bush administration are the frontlines of our battle to remain human, in all that that may potentially mean in the 21st century.

Digby agrees:

A Marine inquires about ordering in bulk, describing how spraying fluorescent silly string into a darkened room lets you spot tripwires on boobytraps with ease. (Cockeyed)

And: How much silly string can you get out of a can?

Another in the occasional series of articles to which I link about the execrable penetration of reductionism, popularization, pseudoscience, marketing and profiteering into what I do, the care of urgently ill and suffering psychiatric patients. Let me emphasize, however, that I don’t post this stuff to call into the question the enterprise of treating depression, but rather our explanations for what we are doing when we do so. Others have written that antidepressants are no better than placebo, and (believe me) I know fervently that the placebo effect plays a great role in any healer’s repertoire. But it is also indubitably clear that medication treatment makes a great deal of difference — sometimes, literally, a life-or-death difference — in severely mentally ill patients. As readers of FmH know, I think claims to the contrary often relate to the expansion of the definition of medication-responsive conditions in the past few decades, driven by market pressures rather than empirical evidence.

In observance of Kurt Vonnegut’s 83rd birthday, a consummate collection of tidbits from the master modern aphorist by a consummate fan. Thanks, Ed, for introducing me to this apocryphal (but likely from Vonnegut) notion that we should more properly think of the year as having six seasons instead of four.

Nature Neuroscience has a new weblog which promises to be more interactive and speculative than its companion peer-reviewed scientific print journal. One of the interesting early posts is about natalizumab. Seemingly the most effective drug ever developed against multiple sclerosis, the drug has been pulled from the market because of an indubitable but inexplicable link to the development of the devastating brain disease PML. For those of you interested in such things, the post discusses an intriguing hypothesis about how matalizumab might potentiate PML.

Not a bad day at the polls. Despite Ken Mehlman’s attempt to spin them off, the two Democratic gubernatorial wins do seem like a rebuke to the Bushites, especially Virginia, where Bush made a last-minute campaign stop. Kilgore might have been thinking of that as the kiss of death when he woke up a loser this morning.

Perhaps more enjoyable was that the pro-‘Intelligent’ Design Dover, PA school board was roundly turned out of office. (CBS News) And I was very entertained watching all the Schwarzenegger ballot initiatives getting shot down. I share Rafe Coburn‘s disappointment, however, that the ballot question in support of taking legislative redistricting out of the hands of the politicians was rejected, notwithstanding the fact that Democrats opposed it. In my book, gerrymandering is a central challenge to the claim that the U.S. is a democratic state at all, and it has reached epic proportions.

Should all right-minded liberals give generously to the Scooter Libby Defense Fund? Perhaps a vigorous and spirited defense of Libby might go after the real culprits for whom he might have no love lost after being compelled to take the fall? (New York Times )

And:

“Even if the vice president himself is not indicted, imagine the questions he might be asked, under oath, in Libby’s case.” — Sidney Blumenthal (Salon)

Since this advocacy is a searing indictment of the Bush administration’s fiddling-while-Rome-burns, the IRS had better investigate pulling these evangelicals’ tax-exempt status!

If the Guardian‘s rendition is accurate, this sounds absurd. The inventor, after all, is a “Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at (M.I.T.)…” (“I’m not a physicist, I just play one for the venture capitalists…”) The fact that his ‘hydrino’ violates basic tenets about the alllowable quantum states of electrons sugggests to Mills that quantum theory must be wrong. Although I would not think this would find many advocates, Mills claims to have independent confirmation of his theory and the invective is flying. What fun; I think we have just seen the beginnings of a monumental pissing contest between supporters and detractors in the physics community.

Of course the investors Mills claims to have interested are a different matter — all weighing in on just one side of the controversy. Money certainly shapes wishful thinking in the oddest, most tortured ways. I predict those who supported Mills’ claims are going to be massively chagrined people one day in the not too far distant future… and with far less in their bank accounts than otherwise.

“All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena risks losing its tax-exempt status because of a former rector’s remarks in 2004.” First of all, this takes outrageous and egregious license with the tax regulations prohibiting tax-exempt organizations’ advocacy for particular candidates or involvement in political campaigns. The sermon, just before the 2004 election, told no parishioner whom to vote for but clearly asserted that opposition to the war in Iraq was a Christian value that Jesus would have espoused. Second, of course, the church is singled out from among the multitudes in which antiwar sentiments are preached, perhaps because the sermon received conspicuous coverage in the Los Angeles Times at the time? Finally, I daresay that the IRS has not gone after the tax-exempt status of the myriad fundamentalist, evangelical and other conservative churches which have far fewer compunctions against direct solicitation of their congregants’ votes for Bush than liberal churches have against soliciting votes for his opponents. (Los Angeles )Times

‘Surprising’ results of a survey presented at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Chest Physicians this week in Montreal indicate that there is a widespread misconception that nicotine causes cancer and that this interferes with efforts to stop smoking.

The investigator asserts that switching to “light” cigarettes on the basis of the belief that it will lower nicotine intake and thus reduce cancer risk is specious reasoning, since the carcinogens and other toxins are in the cigarette smoke and not the nicotine. But I don’t get it; it seems to me smokers switching to “light” cigarettes are doing the right thing even if it is for the wrong reason. Despite the mistaken belief that “light” means low-nicotine, doesn’t it indicate low tar and thus less carcinogens? Or is that just a marketing ploy without scientific basis?

In any case, the current study authors point out a more pertinent problem with the mistaken belief that it is the nicotine that causes cancer risk — smokers trying to quit will not use the nicotine patch. And it occurs to me that there is yet another reason why smoking “light” cigarettes would probably backfire. In the psychology of addiction, the belief that you have switched to a more benign product paradoxically encourages increased consumption, often to an extent that more than counteracts the risk reduction of having switched. This happens with food (“It’s ‘lo-cal’, I can have a little bit more…”) and alcohol (“I don’t drink the hard stuff anymore, just beer, so I’m okay…”) as well.

[thanks, Marla]

`

…(I)n the world of performance art, where transience was an integral part of some of the best-known work from the 1960’s and 70’s, “the idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has usually been seen, if at all, as heresy.” (New York Times )

Although this turns out to be about something more proasic, upon seeing the title I thought the Times Magazine was proclaiming the overthrow of the theory that literary works are ‘intelligently designed.’ But, oh, postmodernism has already dismantled that notion, I guess.

`

…(I)n the world of performance art, where transience was an integral part of some of the best-known work from the 1960’s and 70’s, “the idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has usually been seen, if at all, as heresy.” (New York Times )

British Medical Journal article on the anatomy and medical complications of sword swallowing. [via boing boing]

Why thank you, Daniel…so flattered!

[Two male professors, it should be noted!]

Related:

Beauty is Not in the Eye of the Beholder

And:

Questioning Beauty

Related?

From /. pointers to a radio remake of the famous H.G. Wells Mercury Theatre show from 1938, performed by members of the Star Trek Cast. The server is overwhelmed, but for this week only the show is apparently being streamed at http://www.scpr.org/programs/latw/. (via walker)

Do we know when others think that we are difficult? (Conscious Cogn.) [Well, I’m sure I would know if anyone thought I was difficult — not that anyone does, of course — but the problem is that nobody I think is difficult seems to recognize that the problem is them, not me!]

A Review of Why We Lie: The Evolutionary Roots of Deception and the Unconscious Mind by David Livingstone Smith” (Human Nature)

Vatican disdains anti-scientific ‘fundamentalism’?? (Yahoo! News)

Thank you, George Bush, for nearly six years of unremitting contempt.

Perhaps Bush is too embarrassed…or is that an emotion in his repertoire?

But is an all-out fight over Alito going to be good for the Democrats? Ed Fitzgerald has a good discussion of the concerns that the Republicans may circle the wagons around this issue. He quotes Publius: “Court fights are necessarily culture war fights, and polarization along culture war lines are usually better for conservatives.” Has current Republican fractiousness and vulnerability been overestimated? Are Democrats now well-situated to rout the Republicans in the 2006 mid-term elections and how does that weigh in the balance against the damning legacy of stacking the Supreme Court with the stuff of Bush’s wet dreams and our worst nightmares? Fitzgerald reassures us that most people don’t pay much attention to the Supreme Court and the far-off Washington battle would not be likely to have any effect on the elections. I tend to agree; when has the American electorate ever made an informed choice based on the truly important issues? On the other hand, both the nature and the timing of the nomination suggest it may not have as much to do with leaving a legacy of conservative pain for future generations — Bush has, after all, not been one with much capacity for deferred gratification or a vision that extends beyond the confines of his paltry field of view — as it does beginning his comeback, reuniting Republicans (who are uniformly laudatory about the nomination, rightwingnut or not) and diverting attention from Plamegate and the Iraq debacle.

New York Times editorial (goes without saying):

Der Spiegel examines the online obituaries of numerous suicide bombers now available at Islamist “martyr sites.”

A reprise of my Hallowe’en post of past years:

It is that time of year again. What has become a time of disinhibited hijinx and mayhem, and a growing marketing bonanza for the kitsch-manufacturers and -importers, has primeval origins as the Celtic New Year’s Eve, Samhain (pronounced “sow-en”). The harvest is over, summer ends and winter begins, the Old God dies and returns to the Land of the Dead to await his rebirth at Yule, and the land is cast into darkness. The veil separating the worlds of the living and the dead becomes frayed and thin, and dispossessed dead mingle with the living, perhaps seeking a body to possess for the next year as their only chance to remain connected with the living, who hope to scare them away with ghoulish costumes and behavior, escape their menace by masquerading as one of them, or placate them with offerings of food, in hopes that they will go away before the new year comes. For those prepared, a journey to the other side could be made at this time. It is fortunate that Hallowe’en falls on a Monday this year, as there is evidence that the pagan festival was celebrated for three days.

With Christianity, perhaps because with calendar reform it was no longer the last day of the year, All Hallows’ Eve became decathected, a day for innocent masquerading and fun, taking its name Hallowe’en as a contraction and corruption of All Hallows’ Eve. All Saints’ Day may have originated in its modern form with the 8th century Pope Gregory III. Hallowe’en customs reputedly came to the New World with the Irish immigrants of the 1840’s. The prominence of trick-or-treating has a slightly different origin, however.

The custom of trick-or-treating is thought to have originated not with the Irish Celts, but with a ninth-century European custom called souling. On November 2, All Souls Day, early Christians would walk from village to village begging for “soul cakes,” made out of square pieces of bread with currants. The more soul cakes the beggars would receive, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, it was believed that the dead remained in limbo for a time after death, and that prayer, even by strangers, could expedite a soul’s passage to heaven.

Jack-o’-lanterns were reportedly originally turnips; the Irish began using pumpkins after they immigrated to North AMerica, given how plentiful they were here.

The Jack-o-lantern custom probably comes from Irish folklore. As the tale is told, a man named Jack, who was notorious as a drunkard and trickster, tricked Satan into climbing a tree. Jack then carved an image of a cross in the tree’s trunk, trapping the devil up the tree. Jack made a deal with the devil that, if he would never tempt him again, he would promise to let him down the tree.

According to the folk tale, after Jack died, he was denied entrance to Heaven because of his evil ways, but he was also denied access to Hell because he had tricked the devil. Instead, the devil gave him a single ember to light his way through the frigid darkness. The ember was placed inside a hollowed-out turnip to keep it glowing longer.

Folk traditions that were in the past associated wtih All Hallows’ Eve took much of their power, as with the New Year’s customs about which I write here every Dec. 31st, from the magic of boundary states, transition and liminality.

The idea behind ducking, dooking or bobbing for apples seems to have been that snatching a bite from the apple enables the person to grasp good fortune. Samhain is a time for getting rid of weakness, as pagans once slaughtered weak animals which were unlikely to survive the winter. A common ritual calls for writing down weaknesses on a piece of paper or parchment, and tossing it into the fire. There used to be a custom of placing a stone in the hot ashes of the bonfire. If in the morning a person found that the stone had been removed or had cracked, it was a sign of bad fortune. Nuts have been used for divination: whether they burned quietly or exploded indicated good or bad luck. Peeling an apple and throwing the peel over one’s shoulder was supposed to reveal the initial of one’s future spouse. One way of looking for omens of death was for peope to visit churchyards

The Witches’ Sabbath aspect of Hallowe’en seems to result from Germanic influence, and fusion with the notion of Walpurgisnacht. (Familiar with the magnificent musical evocation of this, Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain?) Although probably not yet in a position to shape mainstream American Hallowe’en traditions, Mexican Dia de los Muertos observances have started to contribute some delightful and whimsical iconography to our encounter with the eerie and unearthly as well.

What was Hallowe’en like forty or fifty years ago in the U.S. when, bastardized as it has become with respect to its pagan origins, it retained a much more traditional flair? For my purposes, suffice it to say that it was before the era of the pay-per-view ‘spooky-world’ type haunted attractions and its Martha Stewart yuppification with, as this irreverent Salon article from several years ago [via walker] puts it, monogrammed jack-o’-lanterns and the like. Related, a 1984 essay by Richard Seltzer, frequently referenced in other sources, entitled “Why Bother to Save Hallowe’en?”, argues as I do that reverence for Hallowe’en is good for the soul.

That would be anathema to certain segments of society, however. Hallowe’en certainly inspires a backlash by fundamentalists who consider it a blasphemous abomination. ‘Amateur scholar’ Isaac Bonewits details academically the Hallowe’en errors and lies he feels contribute to its being reviled. Some of the panic over Hallowe’en is akin to the hysteria, fortunately now debunked, over the supposed epidemic of ‘ritual Satanic abuse’ that swept the Western world in the ’90’s.

The horror film has become inextricably linked to Hallowe’en tradition, although the holiday itself did not figure in the movies until John Carpenter took the slasher genre singlehandedly by storm. Googling “scariest films”, you will, grimly, reap a mother lode of opinions about how to pierce the veil to journey to the netherworld and reconnect with that magical, eerie creepiness in the dark (if not the over-the-top blood and gore that has largely replaced the subtlety of earlier horror films).

In any case: trick or treat!

The real one, near Darmstadt, Germany, said to be the inspiration for Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, including photos. And here you can listen (Real Player) to the famous 1952 ‘Frankenstein prank’ in which something was waiting for an Armed Forces reporter who visited the crypt under the castle on Halloween night. [via boing boing]

Renaissance paintings photoshopp’d to add monsters (Worth1000.com via boing boing)

Der Spiegel examines the online obituaries of numerous suicide bombers now available at Islamist “martyr sites.”

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