Accepting the offer, I made an appointment and visited the psychic at her home in Nottingham. I was ushered into a small room that was suitably festooned with mystical artifacts and adorned with books on tarot cards and astrology. During the reading my psychic used such ancient arts as numerology, astrology, palmistry, tarot cards and rune stones and even found hidden meaning in the colour of my tie. I remember that, amongst other things, she told me I was an only child and that I had four children the eldest of which was a boy. Both these statements are certainly true.

I can see how this might make an impact on many of her clients: the build up was superb and the ambience just right. But I was, and still remain, utterly unimpressed. The reason for my indifference was that I had studied many such psychic readings and understood how and why they worked.” — Tony Youens (Royal Institute of Philosophy)

The pill has been associated with many side effects, including blood clots, migraines and weight gain. Perhaps least talked about is its tendency to dull libido by decreasing testosterone levels.” (New Scientist)

The story was about legislation concerning embryonic stem cell research, and it included a comment from Tom DeLay urging Americans to reject ‘the treacherous notion that while all human lives are sacred, some are more sacred than others.’

Ahh, pretty words. Now I wonder when Mr. Bush and Mr. DeLay will find the time to address – or rather, to denounce – the depraved ways in which the United States has dealt with so many of the thousands of people (many of them completely innocent) who have been swept up in the so-called war on terror.

People have been murdered, tortured, rendered to foreign countries to be tortured at a distance, sexually violated, imprisoned without trial or in some cases simply made to ‘disappear’ in an all-American version of a practice previously associated with brutal Latin American dictatorships.” — Bob Herbert (New York Times op-ed)

Nowhere is there a greater gulf between the frustration people feel over a dilemma central to their lives and their equally powerful sense that there’s nothing to be done. As a result, talented people throw up their hands. Women are ‘opting out’ after deciding that professional success isn’t worth the price. Ambitious folks of both sexes ‘do what they have to,’ sure there is no other way. That’s just life.

My unreasonable wife rejects this choice. If the most interesting and powerful jobs are too consuming, Jody says, then why don’t we re-engineer these jobs – and the firms and the culture that sustain them – to make possible the blend of love and work that everyone knows is the true gauge of ‘success’? As scholars have asked, why should we be the only elites in human history that don’t set things up to get what we want?” — Matt Miller (New York Times op-ed)

But authors of the federal research said in interviews that they stood by their conclusions and that the criticisms were based on misrepresentations of what they had done.” (New York Times )

By explicitly exempting from the agreement two additional judges opposed by Democrats, it did not meet Mr. Bush’s oft-stated demand that all his nominees get a vote, and it did not foreclose the possibility that Democrats could block an eventual nominee to the Supreme Court, a matter of intense concern to the White House. The split-the-baby outcome, moreover, did little to resolve a rolling series of challenges to Mr. Bush that in coming days and weeks could do much to set the tone for his second four years in office.

On Tuesday, the House is to vote on a bill that would defy Mr. Bush and lift restrictions on federal financing of stem-cell research, legislation that stands a good chance of passing.

In the days and weeks that follow, Congress will confront a proposed trade agreement with Central America, the confirmation of Mr. Bush’s embattled choice as to be ambassador to the United Nations, an effort to rein in government spending and the first legislative steps toward overhauling Social Security – all topics on which Mr. Bush faces excruciatingly close votes in Congress, where Democrats are generally united against him and his own party is splintering around the edges.

Although the deal on judges announced by the 14 senators fell well short of the principle set out by Mr. Bush that all nominees get a vote on the Senate floor, the White House said it viewed the development as positive. Mr. Bush has always tried to create an atmosphere within the White House that takes the day-to-day bumps in stride and focuses on winning in the long run.

But Monday evening’s partial victory was hardly a display of overwhelming political strength. Beyond the judicial nominations, administration officials and their outside advisers recognize that the convergence of so many high-stakes issues in such a short period will shape public perceptions of Mr. Bush’s power at a time when his approval ratings are already lackluster and his signature domestic initiative, remaking Social Security, is in trouble.

To some degree, the confluence of disparate issues is coincidence. But in another way it is the logical consequence of Mr. Bush’s decision to expend his political capital, as he put it immediately after his re-election, to push through initiatives that he suggested voters had endorsed by putting him back in the White House. ” (New York Times news analysis )

But no crash research program is going to produce some dazzling bioethical principle we never thought of before. We know all that we’re going to know about the moral issues, and we just have to decide. There are three issues…” (Washington Post )

There are researchers who believe that some of this disturbing cacophony — specifically a subset found only in children — is caused by something familiar and common. They call it Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated With Streptococcal Infection, or, because every disease needs an acronym, Pandas. And they are certain it is brought on by strep throat — or more specifically, by the antibodies created to fight strep throat.

If they are right, it is a compelling breakthrough, a map of the link between bacteria and at least one subcategory of mental illness. And if bacteria can cause O.C.D., then an antibiotic might mitigate or prevent it — a Promised Land of a concept to parents who have watched their children change overnight from exuberant, confident and familiar to doubt-ridden, fear-laden strangers.” — Lisa Belkin (New York Times Magazine)

Starting Monday, the petition will be delivered straight to Congress every three hours until the final vote, and many of our comments will be read aloud on the Senate floor.

Please sign right now at:

http://www.moveonpac.org/nuclear

Why is this an emergency?

This Tuesday, the Senate will vote on Republican Leader Bill Frist’s ‘nuclear option’ to break the rules of the Senate and give the Republican Party absolute control over appointing federal judges.

For 200 years the minority’s right to filibuster has kept our courts fair, by making sure that federal judges needed to get at least some support from both sides of the aisle before they were given life time appointments.

If Frist eliminates the filibuster, his next step would be to force far right partisan judges onto the powerful U.S. Courts of Appeals. The real targets, however, are the four seats on the Supreme Court likely to become vacant in the next four years.

With that much power on the Supreme Court, the far right could strike down decades of progress on labor rights, environmental protections, reproductive rights, and privacy.

The ‘nuclear option’ will live or die by a final vote, probably on Tuesday, and the vote is still way too close to call. There are at least 6 moderate Republicans still on the fence and only 3 more votes needed to win. If we can get enough of our voices into congress and into the streets in the next 72 hours, we can still save our courts.

Please take a minute to join me and sign the emergency petition today.

http://www.moveonpac.org/nuclear“

The pacemaker-like device, called a vagus nerve stimulator, is surgically implanted in the upper chest, and its wires are threaded into the neck, where it stimulates a nerve leading to the brain. It has been approved since 1997 for the treatment of some epilepsy patients, and the drug agency has told the manufacturer that it is now ‘approvable’ for severe depression that is resistant to other treatment.” (New York Times )

There are researchers who believe that some of this disturbing cacophony — specifically a subset found only in children — is caused by something familiar and common. They call it Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated With Streptococcal Infection, or, because every disease needs an acronym, Pandas. And they are certain it is brought on by strep throat — or more specifically, by the antibodies created to fight strep throat.

If they are right, it is a compelling breakthrough, a map of the link between bacteria and at least one subcategory of mental illness. And if bacteria can cause O.C.D., then an antibiotic might mitigate or prevent it — a Promised Land of a concept to parents who have watched their children change overnight from exuberant, confident and familiar to doubt-ridden, fear-laden strangers.” — Lisa Belkin (New York Times Magazine)

Could you be a target, too? Answer these 6 quick questions to find out!” (ACLU).

Over the last four decades, scientists have come up with a variety of theories, arguing, for example, that orgasm encourages women to have sex and, therefore, reproduce or that it leads women to favor stronger and healthier men, maximizing their offspring’s chances of survival.

But in a new book, Dr. Elisabeth A. Lloyd, a philosopher of science and professor of biology at Indiana University, takes on 20 leading theories and finds them wanting. The female orgasm, she argues in the book, ‘The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution,’ has no evolutionary function at all.

Rather, Dr. Lloyd says the most convincing theory is one put forward in 1979 by Dr. Donald Symons, an anthropologist.

That theory holds that female orgasms are simply artifacts – a byproduct of the parallel development of male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life.

…Dr. Lloyd said scientists had insisted on finding an evolutionary function for female orgasm in humans either because they were invested in believing that women’s sexuality must exactly parallel that of men or because they were convinced that all traits had to be “adaptations,” that is, serve an evolutionary function.

Theories of female orgasm are significant, she added, because “men’s expectations about women’s normal sexuality, about how women should perform, are built around these notions.” …Central to her thesis is the fact that women do not routinely have orgasms during sexual intercourse.” (New York Times )

For all the chaos and storm caused by this debate, and all that is likely to follow it, don’t forget that the all of this will be done by fifty Republican senators quite knowingly invoking a demonstrably false claim of constitutionality to achieve something they couldn’t manage by following the rules.

This is about power; and, to them, the rules quite simply mean nothing.” (Talking Points Memo)

Working through the papers in Causation and Counterfactuals will help us with this. The volume consists in eighteen cutting edge papers (twelve new, six previously published) by the best people in the field, as well as an editors’ introduction. Most are devoted to one leading view of causation — the counterfactual view. Hume articulated the basic idea this way: ‘we may define a cause to be an object followed by another . . where, if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.’ (An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section VII)”

But what is becoming clear only now, from the first interviews with Commander Mooney and 15 other officers and enlisted men, as well as a review of Navy reports, is how much worse it nearly was, and how close the San Francisco came to being lost.” (New York Times )

Nearly 500 people have contacted a helpline over the last 48 hours, giving possible names, but so far none have led to his true identity.” (Scotsman)

Michael Camp, the man’s social worker, acknowledged claims by a Polish immigrant in Rome who believes the so-called ‘Piano Man’ is a street musician from France — but he said officials will continue to follow up on more than 600 calls they have received from as far away as Australia and Canada.” (LA Times)

A spokeswoman for the West Kent NHS Trust said, “There was nobody he was with skilled enough to recognize the music, they just knew it was classical music and he played very well.” ‘

…The editors of Merriam-Webster dictionaries got more than 3,000 entries when, in a lighthearted moment, they asked visitors to their Web site to submit their favorite words that aren’t in the dictionary.

…Some of the proposed words even gained multiple submissions so the editors came up with an unofficial Top 10 list.

First place went to ‘ginormous’ — bigger than gigantic and bigger than enormous — followed by ‘confuzzled’ for confused and puzzled simultaneously, and ‘whoot,’ an exclamation of joy. A ‘lingweenie’ — a person incapable of making up new words — placed 10th.” (Yahoo! News)

‘People get burned by these kind of events because they think it can’t happen in their lifetime,’ said Willie Scott of the

U.S. Geological Survey.

The agency ranks Mount Rainier as the third most dangerous volcano in the nation, after Kilauea on Hawaii’s Big Island and Mount St. Helens. Both are currently active.

Other studies call Rainier the most dangerous volcano in the world — not just for its explosive potential, but because of the 3 million people who live in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue metropolitan area. At least 100,000 people live on top of Rainier mudflows that have solidified.” (Yahoo! News)

Mr. Nickels, a Democrat, says 131 other likeminded mayors have joined a bipartisan coalition to fight global warming on the local level, in an implicit rejection of the administration’s policy.” (New York Times via abby)

The Toronto law firm Thomson, Rogers issued a statement Monday saying that plaintiffs are seeking millions of dollars in compensation from the drug’s Canadian manufacturer, Boehringer Ingelheim (Canada) Ltd., and two American corporations.

Gerard Schick, the plaintiff from Midland, Ont., says he began gambling compulsively after starting to take Mirapex and lost more than $100,000.

‘Some 100 or more Canadians are believed to have suffered a similar experience,’ said a statement from the law firm.

A study by a team at the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Research Centre in Phoenix, Ariz., published in the journal Neurology in 2003, found that of 529 patients who took pramipexole (brand name Mirapex), eight developed serious gambling addictions.” (C-Health)

I realize that we have a duty to report suicide bombings in the Middle East, especially when there’s a spate as bad as in recent weeks. And I know the old rule of television news: if it bleeds, it leads. But I’m still puzzled by our zeal in frantically competing to get gruesome pictures and details for broadcasts and front pages.” — John Tierney (New York Times op-ed)

No matter what happens to Huffington, it’s clear Hollywood will suffer the consequences. It seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she has served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out. I hear that prominent liberals in L.A. and N.Y. and Washington D.C. are aghast not just that she’s encouraged jejune rants by their liberal brethren, but that she’s also provided yet another forum for select right-wing blowhards. They don’t understand why Arianna has saddled progressives with that ‘Hollywood elitist’ branding.

Only the fawning mainstream media didn’t see this coming. Instead, The New York Times, the New York Observer, the Los Angeles Times et al. were too busy breathlessly reporting Arianna’s big plans and bons mots to bother to do any reporting. ” (LA Weekly)

For the study in the scientific magazine ‘Forskning och Framsteg‘ — which has also been published by The American Journal of Psychiatry — researchers examined the court psychiatry records and other medical evidence for 2,000 people found guilty of murder, attempted murder, manslaughter or attempted manslaughter between 1998 and 2001 in Sweden.

The certified psychiatric illnesses include schizophrenia, personality disorders, anxiety, post-traumatic stress and depression.

…The Swedish situation is different from that in countries where organized crime, drug trade and easy access to weapons result in a higher percentage of murders committed by people who are not certifiably ill than in Western Europe, the study’s authors acknowledged. They cited as examples the United States, Bolivia, South Africa and the Baltic countries.” (Yahoo! News)

She’d probably still win for pith. Who but historians familiar with the likes of Sergius III (904-11) — his mistress Marozia the Theophylact bore him an illegitimate son whom she later appointed as John XI (931-36) — would question the shock value? But international newspapers, if not the usual scaredy-pants American ones when it comes to the Roman Catholic Church, gave Parker a run for her money last month.

‘White Smoke, Black Past,’ trumpeted the headline in Israel’s Yediot Aharonot. ‘From Hitler Youth to … Papa Ratzi’ roared London’s Sun, indelicately describing Cardinal Ratzinger as an ‘ex-World War II enemy soldier.’ German papers proved harshest on his doctrinal present and personality. ‘Ratzinger is the Counter-Reformation personified,’ asserted the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Berliner Zeitung described his hold on the Vatican as ‘autocratic, authoritarian,’ deeming the new pope ‘as shrewd as a serpent.’ Die Tageszeitung described him as a ‘reactionary churchman’ who ‘will try to seal the bulkheads of the Holy Roman Church from the modern world…'” (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

Problem: The first season DVD of ‘Desperate Housewives’ won’t be released until September of 2005.

Possibilities: 1) There is no DVD. 2) There is a DVD and ABC sent it to the White House. 3) The White House rips and burns. If 3), where is that zero-tolerance Justice Department?” (Swami Uptown (Beliefnet))

It might have been better if Mr. Bush had stayed in closer touch with his earthly father. From the very beginning the war in Iraq has been an exercise in extreme madness, an absurd venture that would have been rich in comic possibilities except for the fact that many thousands of men, women and children have died, and tens of thousands have been crippled, burned or otherwise maimed.” — Bob Herbert (New York Times op-ed)

The new research may open the way to studying human pheromones, as well as the biological basis of sexual preference. Pheromones, chemicals emitted by one individual to evoke some behavior in another of the same species, are known to govern sexual activity in animals, but experts differ as to what role, if any, they play in making humans sexually attractive to one another.

The new research, which supports the existence of human pheromones, is reported in today’s issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Dr. Ivanka Savic and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

The two chemicals in the study were a testosterone derivative produced in men’s sweat and an estrogen-like compound in women’s urine, both of which have long been suspected of being pheromones.

Most odors cause specific smell-related regions of the human brain to light up when visualized by a form of brain imaging that tracks blood flow in the brain and therefore, by inference, sites where neurons are active. Several years ago, Dr. Savic and colleagues showed that the two chemicals activated the brain in a quite different way from ordinary scents.

The estrogen-like compound, though it activated the usual smell-related regions in women, lighted up the hypothalamus in men. This is a region in the central base of the brain that governs sexual behavior and, through its control of the pituitary gland lying just beneath it, the hormonal state of the body.

The male sweat chemical, on the other hand, did just the opposite; it activated mostly the hypothalamus in women and the smell-related regions in men. The two chemicals seemed to be leading a double life, playing the role of odor with one sex and of pheromone with another.

The Swedish researchers have now repeated the experiment but with the addition of gay men as a third group. The gay men responded to the two chemicals in the same way as did women, Dr. Savic reports, as if the hypothalamus’s response is determined not by biological sex but by the owner’s sexual orientation.” (New York Times )

But increasingly, doctors are identifying a group of people whose levels of L.D.L, the so-called bad cholesterol, are low, but who still appear to be at increased risk for atherosclerosis, heart attack and stroke.

They have a condition known as metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors that include mild hypertension, elevated glucose levels, high triglycerides and low levels of H.D.L. cholesterol.

People with the syndrome also tend to have high levels of a protein, known as C-reactive protein, or CRP, which is released during inflammation and has recently been linked to heart disease.

‘By far, the people we’re seeing with heart disease are people with metabolic syndrome, because weight gain is the driving force and people are gaining weight,’ said Dr. Arshed Quyyumi, a professor of cardiology at the Emory School of Medicine.” (New York Times )

Tyler Hamilton has been suspended from competitive cycling for two years.

In other words, his scientific expert argued, Mr. Hamilton had a twin that died in utero but, before dying, contributed some blood cells to him during fetal life. And those cells remained in his body, producing blood that matched the dead twin and not Mr. Hamilton. Or perhaps it was his mother’s blood that got mixed in during fetal life.

An arbitration panel did not believe those hypotheses and said there was a ‘negligible probability’ that Mr. Hamilton was anything but guilty.

The test, they concluded in a 2-to-1 decision, shows a blood transfusion and that meant that Mr. Hamilton was suspended from racing for two years, the first and only person convicted for that offense. At age 34, near the end of his career, it could mean his championship days are over.” (New York Times )

A fragment from the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, dating to the Third century, gives the more mundane 616 as the mark of the Antichrist.

Ellen Aitken, a professor of early Christian history at McGill University, said the discovery appears to spell the end of 666 as the devil’s prime number.” (Religion News Blog)

…One of the curious consequences of today’s emotionally correct atmosphere is the corresponding rise of a culture of offensiveness, a punkish, kneejerk reaction among what might be termed the Jackass generation against today’s emotional orthodoxy. Where world leaders say ‘The Pope was a good man’, they say ‘Dude, the Pope was an asshole.’ Yet this is a shallow rebellion; it takes the piss out of orthodoxies rather than challenging them. The inspiration of Beavis and Butthead seems to sum it up. Just as they sat around watching MTV, mocking the poncy rock acts, today some individuals watch Mourning TV (all channels) and feel able only to knock the weeping participants. Heh heh, indeed.” — Brendan O’Neill (spiked)

But the mores and institutions of civility can be a double-edged sword. By insisting on ‘keeping things civil,’ in polite society, repressive powers may suppress ugly truths about their conduct merely because raising them requires bad manners. I always thought it was a stroke of genius on the part of Robert McNamara to start crying at dinner parties in the late 1960s when someone raised the issue of Vietnam, as it pre-empted discussions of the deception and destruction for which he was responsible. Perhaps if McNamara had been confronted with some of the morally uncomfortable consequences of his policies, he might have worked harder to reverse them.” (The Nation)

It’s as if her bigger-than-life role as a long-time advocate for the victims of war was a giant finger poking at the tightly woven cocoon many of us have spun (consciously or not) that insulates us from acknowledging the ravages of armed struggle on the lives of ordinary people in other lands. Yes, she did the heavy lifting for a lot of us.” — Rebecca Ephraim (Alternet)

Daniels then dug up a woman’s corpse, staged a fiery car accident to fake her husband’s death, and had him re-emerge as her new boyfriend. Authorities say it was all to collect a $110,000 life insurance policy while hiding her husband, Clayton Daniels, from the cops.” (Salon News)

The brain-developing benefits of pop culture?

That the very question seems preposterous is the backdrop of Steven Johnson’s iconoclastic and captivating Everything Bad Is Good for You. In fact, he says, it’s the public’s overly righteous preoccupation with sexual and violent content that is diverting attention from pop culture’s important contribution to Americans’ cognitive development.” (Boston Globe)

The research is a boost for the free radical theory of ageing. This proposes that reactive oxygen species damage cells and tissues, leading to declining health and, eventually, death.” (New Scientist)

…It is sobering to reflect how ignorant humans have been about the workings of their own brains for most of our history. Aristotle, after all, thought the point of the brain was to cool the blood. The more that breakthroughs like the recent one in brain-scanning open up the mind to scientific scrutiny, the more we may be pressed to give up comforting metaphysical ideas like interiority, subjectivity and the soul. Let’s enjoy them while we can.” (New York Times Magazine)

Even fewer have lived to tell their stories, but two women in the UK who recovered after weeks in a coma give a rare insight.” (BBC)

The court ruled, as petitioners argued, that the FCC lacks the authority to regulate what happens inside your TV or computer once it has received a broadcast signal. The broadcast flag rule would have required all signal demodulators to ‘recognize and give effect to’ a broadcast flag, forcing them not to record or output an unencrypted high-def digital signal if the flag were set. This technology mandate, set to take effect July 1, would have stopped the manufacture of open hardware that has enabled us to build our own digital television recorders.” (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

What’s more, it is possible to travel back in time, to any place, any era. Where would people go? Would they zoom to a 2005 Saturday night for chips and burgers in a college courtyard, eager to schmooze with computer science majors possessing way too many brain cells?

Why not, say some students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who have organized what they call the first convention for time travelers.

Actually, they contend that theirs is the only time traveler convention the world needs, because people from the future can travel to it anytime they want.

‘I would hope they would come with the idea of showing us that time travel is possible,’ said Amal Dorai, 22, the graduate student who thought up the convention, which is to be this Saturday on the M.I.T. campus. ‘Maybe they could leave something with us. It is possible they might look slightly different, the shape of the head, the body proportions.’

The event is potluck and alcohol-free – present-day humans are bringing things like brownies. But Mr. Dorai’s Web site asks that future-folk bring something to prove they are really ahead of our time: ‘Things like a cure for AIDS or cancer, a solution for global poverty or a cold fusion reactor would be particularly convincing as well as greatly appreciated.’

He would also welcome people from only a few days in the future, far enough to, say, give him a few stock market tips.”

Yes, it’s Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, respectively, but the words aren’t just a game. They are Statistically Improbable Phrases, the result of a new Amazon.com feature that compares the text of hundreds of thousands of books to reveal an author’s signature constructions.

…(A commentator) thinks Amazon is currently just experimenting, but it will soon find intriguing ways, such as using authoritative texts to answer user questions, to wring profit out of what may well be the largest collection of electronic books in the world.

Bill Carr, Amazon’s executive vice president of digital media, confirms that this is a serious attempt to sell more books. ” (Wired)