“You no longer have to work out to eat like a professional athlete. That’s the message from the growing number of energy bars and fitness drinks filling supermarket shelves. As the fitness food market has grown, companies that once targeted athletes are trying to attract the average consumer, claiming to offer conveniently packaged nutrition perfect for a busy lifestyle. But nutrition experts warn that products designed for the needs of athletes may backfire when used by the rest of us.” Boston Globe

Ridiculous trend which shows how much at the mercy of clever marketing the ill-informed credulous consumer is.

“New evidence for a link between a virus and human breast cancer has been revealed in a series of studies by Australian researchers. The virus, dubbed HHMMTV, is very similar to a version known to trigger mammary cancer in mice.

The researchers stress that they have not proven that the human form causes cancer in people – but if it does, its raises the possibility of developing a vaccine against the deadly disease.” New Scientist

Reporters: U.S. Troops Negligent: “Fellow journalists accused U.S. troops of negligence in the shooting death of a Reuters cameraman, saying it was clear the victim was a newsman when soldiers on two tanks opened fire. Press advocacy groups called for an investigation.

Mazen Dana, 43, was shot and killed by U.S. soldiers Sunday while videotaping near a U.S.-run prison on the outskirts of Baghdad. The U.S. Army said its soldiers mistook his camera for a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. ” CBS News

” ‘I got the Dean message at an e-mail address that I have not used in several years, and I did not sign up with Dean for anything. I was very surprised to see Dean sending spam. I can’t imagine him being so tech savvy if he is resorting to that.’ ” Wired News

“The inventive language created by doctors the world over to insult their patients – or each other – is in danger of becoming extinct.

The increasing rate of litigation means that there is a far higher chance that doctors will be asked in court to explain the exact meaning of NFN (Normal for Norfolk), FLK (Funny looking kid) or GROLIES (Guardian Reader Of Low Intelligence in Ethnic Skirt).

Dr Fox recounts the tale of one doctor who had scribbled TTFO – an expletive expression roughly translated as ‘Told To Go Away’ – on a patient’s notes.

He told BBC News Online: ‘This guy was asked by the judge what the acronym meant, and luckily for him he had the presence of mind to say: ‘To take fluids orally’…’

Top Medical Acronyms (in UK):

• CTD – Circling the Drain (A patient expected to die soon)
  
• GLM – Good looking Mum
  
• GPO – Good for Parts Only
  
• TEETH – Tried Everything Else, Try Homeopathy
  
• UBI – Unexplained Beer Injury” BBC

The author of the study hasten to add that he does not advocate the use of any of these acronyms or the numerous other examples of obloquy you’ll find in the article. He said: “I do think that doctors are genuinely more respectful of their patients these days.”

You have to vote if you want Bush out in ’04. Please click on this link to send an email to any friends who share your values who may need to register to vote or are in a position to encourage other like-minded people to register to vote. Spread the word. WorkingForChange

“(The central claim of astrology) – that our human characteristics are moulded by the influence of the Sun, Moon and planets at the time of our birth – appears to have been debunked once and for all and beyond doubt by the most thorough scientific study ever made into it.

For several decades, researchers tracked more than 2,000 people – most of them born within minutes of each other. According to astrology, the subject should have had very similar traits.

The babies were originally recruited as part of a medical study begun in London in 1958 into how the circumstances of birth can affect future health. More than 2,000 babies born in early March that year were registered and their development monitored at regular intervals.” Telegraph/UK

What’s the lack of blackout-induced crime tell us about America? Reason

Phil Ringnalda pointed to this “unique Internet webcast, originating from a 12 x 12 cabin in Talkeetna, Alaska. We play music by independent artists, and we broadcast 24 hours/day, 365 days/year. Unlike most other webcasts, Whole Wheat Radio is interactive.

This site is designed for both listeners and independent recording artists who would like to get some additional exposure. Feel free to explore the links on the left, and you’ll find out more than you really want to know about Whole Wheat Radio.”

“Today, Google introduced a new advanced search feature that enables users to search not only for a particular keyword, but also for its synonyms. This is accomplished by placing a ~ character directly in front of the keyword in the search box.

For example, to search for browser help as well as browser guides and tutorials users can search for browser ~help. The ~ character was chosen because it’s shorthand for approximate and a good way for users to express their wish to expand searches to include synonyms. ” Google Weblog I haven’t played with this yet, but I think it is going to turn out to be very useful. I very often have to construct searches with the or operator ‘|’ to handle synonyms.

Wired had this piece just before 8-14-03. Imagine what would have happened if the whole world had been on one grid already.

Declan McCullagh: An interview with Sherman Austin:

“Sherman Austin is looking forward to a year in federal

prison with the kind of equanimity that most people reserve for a trip

to the doctor’s office.

The 20-year-old anarchist was charged with distributing information

about Molotov cocktails and “Drano bombs” on his Web site,

Raisethefist.com. Under a 1997 federal law championed by Sen. Dianne

Feinstein, D-Calif., it is illegal to publish such instructions with

the intent that readers commit “a federal crime of violence.

…Austin appears to be the first person so far convicted under the controversial law, which some First Amendment scholars say may violate the right to freedom of expression. Earlier this year, Austin pleaded guilty, and last week a federal judge in Los Angeles sentenced him to one year in prison.” CNET

“Programmes aiming to change young offenders and those that support victims need to be re-thought because they are often the same people, according to new research sponsored by the Economic & Social Research Council. This latest in a series of reports tracking 4,300 young people who started secondary school in Edinburgh in August 1998, shows that victimisation and offending are closely linked.” EurekAlert!

and how to find them on the web: “Did you know? The Web has an abundance of freely available consciousness articles. Scientific articles on anaesthesia, visual attention, and blindsight, just to mention a few. All this is available through many different websites and services. Some websites offer documents uploaded by the authors themselves, other sites are regular science journals that offer free articles older than 1-2 years. Here is a brief tour guide through some of the best places.” Science and Cnosciousness Review

“Common sense tells us that we become unconscious the moment we fall asleep at night, and come back to full consciousness again in the morning. That idea was challenged when REM sleep was discovered some 5 decades ago. The EEG traces that signal waking consciousness are fast, irregular and low in voltage. Brain activity in REM sleep looks exactly like that…

People waking from the least conscious state (Slow-Wave Sleep) still report experiences of “mentation” — fragments of verbal thoughts. The most radical interpretation is that we are never fully unconscious, even when in deep sleep without dreams. This seems totally against common sense…

During the most unconscious state of sleep, the brain may be like a great city at night. Most of it may look dark, but there could be local spots of meaningful activity going on even then…” Science And Consciousness Review

“A recent study of dream patterns in the duck-billed platypus, the odd-looking Australian marsupial, reveals an interesting surprise… Platypus may be bringing a message from the earliest years of mammalian evolution.” Science And Consciousness Review

The unique intersection between mind, matter, science and mysticism

Research on the brain actions of psychedelic drugs has potential implications for theories of consciousness and the brain correlates of mystical experiences. People who claim to have had a mystical experience under the influence of a psychedelic give reports that are often similar to the accounts of non-drug using religious mystics from the major religious traditions (Pahnke & Richards, 1966). Themes such as the unity of all sentient beings, oneness with God and the universe, and the illusory nature of human existence have been reported by figures as diverse as Buddha, the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart, and psychologist turned sixties LSD guru Timothy Leary. The psychedelic experience thus represents a unique intersection between mind, matter, science and mysticism that still defies explanation. — Michael Lyvers, Bond University (Australia), Science And Consciousness Review

“What is the relationship between brain activity and transcendental experiences?”

Frontal coherence, power and CNV patterns may objectively characterize cortical transformations underlying the progressive integration of transcendent experiences with daily activity. As science earlier quantified the physiological markers of waking, sleeping, and dreaming, so now research has begun to quantify the experience of states beyond ordinary waking. — Fred Travis, Maharishi University of Management

Science And Consciousness Review

…and its consequences: “Can it be the case that Descartes, totally alone in Germany in November of 1619, had a panic attack that we are still recovering from?” — Sean O’Nuallain, Science And Consciousness Review

“‘Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information’ (Steidl and PaceMcGill Gallery, 2003) is a boxed set containing a 96-page book and a DVD featuring 20 minutes of animation. In both mediums, Mr. Byrne, who is best known as a musician but who was trained as an artist, subjects PowerPoint’s characterless graphic templates to a radical metamorphosis.” NY Times

How Much Is Too Much?: “Having already given one kidney to a total stranger, Zell Kravinsky was sipping an orange-mango Snapple and, unprompted, making a case for giving away his other one.

‘What if someone needed it who could produce more good than me?'” NY Times

“The federal Medicare program is expected to decide this week whether to pay for an aggressive and expensive lung operation that could offer a lifeline to tens of thousands of elderly patients.

But health economists and medical experts say the treatment, however alluring, is part of an unsettling trend: new and ever pricier treatments for common medical conditions that are part and parcel of aging.” NY Times

“Despite early assurances from the Bush administration, new studies are finding alarming health problems and risks related to the cloud of debris that enveloped lower Manhattan.” Salon. And following is another Salon piece about a different kind of toxic fallout enveloping the nation’s airwaves.

Sidney Blumenthal: “Sure, Michael Savage lost his MSNBC show for going too far, but Limbaugh, O’Reilly and Coulter show bullying and humiliation are still a big business.” Salon An extraordinary observation of Blumenthal’s is this:

The rhetoric of abuse is not a sudden outburst, but has been well-designed for years. Republicans use these words and pursue these strategies consciously. In 1990, then Republican House Whip Newt Gingrich (later Speaker of the House) hired a pollster to devise a lexicon of demonization. In a memo that Gingrich circulated, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” Republicans were instructed that “words and phrases are powerful” and that the list that had been test-marketed should be “memorized.”

They were urged to apply these to the opponent, their record, proposals and their party:

“decay … failure (fail) … collapse(ing) … deeper … crisis … urgent(cy) … destructive … destroy … sick … pathetic … lie … liberal … they/them … unionized bureaucracy … “compassion” is not enough … betray … consequences … limit(s) … shallow … traitors … sensationalists …

“endanger … coercion … hypocrisy … radical … threaten … devour … waste … corruption … incompetent … permissive attitudes … destructive … impose … self- serving … greed … ideological … insecure … anti-(issue): flag, family, child, jobs … pessimistic … excuses … intolerant …

“stagnation … welfare … corrupt … selfish … insensitive … status quo … mandate(s) … taxes … spend(ing) … shame … disgrace … punish (poor … ) … bizarre … cynicism … cheat … steal … abuse of power … machine … bosses … obsolete … criminal rights … red tape … patronage.”

The Gingrich memo is online here.

Declan McCullagh: An interview with Sherman Austin:

“Sherman Austin is looking forward to a year in federal

prison with the kind of equanimity that most people reserve for a trip

to the doctor’s office.

The 20-year-old anarchist was charged with distributing information

about Molotov cocktails and “Drano bombs” on his Web site,

Raisethefist.com. Under a 1997 federal law championed by Sen. Dianne

Feinstein, D-Calif., it is illegal to publish such instructions with

the intent that readers commit “a federal crime of violence.

…Austin appears to be the first person so far convicted under the controversial law, which some First Amendment scholars say may violate the right to freedom of expression. Earlier this year, Austin pleaded guilty, and last week a federal judge in Los Angeles sentenced him to one year in prison.” CNET

Mysterious virus sweeps B.C. care facility: The virus is similar enough to SARS that it registereed positive on the antibody tests for the latter, yet it caused symptoms no worse than the common cold. 143 at a residential care facility were affected, and there was no excess mortality from the virus. Although they won’t know until it can be cultured and its genome sequenced and compared to SARS, the speculation is that it is a mutant SARS virus without the virulence. Makes sense that it would cause cold-like symptoms, as the cold virus is relatively closely related to the SARS agent. The Globe and Mail

What is a Lost Word? “There are rare words, and there are rarer words, but only a very special word qualifies as a bona fide lost word. Of course, no word in the Compendium can be completely lost, or I could never have found it. To as great an extent as possible, I have tried to use a set of criteria by which truly rare but real English words can be classified as lost words.” [via MetaFilter]

A 24-year-old repeatedly arrested for offenses connected with the manufacture of methamphetamine makes history as he is charged under laws prohibiting the production of weapons of mass destruction in North Carolina. Mountain Times

Rebecca Blood points to this report of a new study suggesting that humiliation is more important than pure loss in promoting depression. The writer, Ellen Barry, gets one at least one thing badly wrong in her article. She says that the study “calls into question assumptions about depression that date to Sigmund Freud”, implying that Freud founded his theory of depression on loss. But his seminal 1917 essay on the subject, Mourning and Melancholia, thinks along much more sophisticated lines asking what the difference between an uncomplicated loss that leads to resolvable grief and one that leads to an involutional depression might be. Althoguh this is an oversimplification, Freud said that if the person’s attachment to the lost object was ambivalent, e.g. tinged with anger, the anger will be turned inward and mourning gives way to melancholia.

Now we have the Kendler study, making a big deal of the fact that it is humiliating losses, rather than just any ol’ losses, that predispose to depression. There’s a problem with this however. Does Kendler distinguish certain losses which are intrinsically humiliating in social status terms from those where it is the sufferer’s low self-esteem and vulnerability to depression which predispose to feeling humiliated? In other words, does being humiliated cause depression or does depression cause one to feel humiliated? Although Kendler tries to isolate the environmental from the constitutional factors by comparing identical twins with disparate experiences of depression, he may not have explained much.

One of the reasons the report interested Rebecca is Kendler’s nod to the evolutionary significance of depression. “How on earth does a tendency for acute and chronic hopelessness in any way benefit human survival?” she has long wondered. Evolutionary psychopathology is one of the intellectually stimulating venues in psychiatry today, one of the fun places to be, since it involves so much pure speculation. It has the thrill of controversy around it because it is firmly predicated on the materialist proposition, with which some are not very comfortable and about which I write about quite abit here, that complex behavioral patterns are brain-based and have biological and genetic roots. Evolutionary psychology has had to overcome the intellectual distaste that was aroused throughout academia several decades ago by the arguments of Richard Herrnstein and Arthur Jensen (among others) about the genetic roots of IQ, which were seen as being used to further a racist agenda. Perhaps because genetic studies are more sophisticated nowadays and proponents are more careful about which complex intellectual or behavioral traits they claim have genetic bases, evolutionary psychology is enjoying a resurgence. Even a socially progressive mental health professional leery of the insidious uses to which such thinking can be put can be intrigued and captivated by some of its speculations and implications.

That being said, one of the most appealing evolutionary theories of depression — only one among several — is the one consistent with Kendler’s findings and described in the article, that depression evolved in the proto-human pack economy as a way to reduce resource utilization and ambitions by one with lower social status, as one might have after a humiliating loss.

By the way, Rebecca, for a maladaptive trait to survive evolutionarily, it does not necessarily have to be beneficial to human survival, as your question suggests. Although this theory of depression does suggest that it is beneficial, all that is necessary for a trait to survive is that it not have an adverse effect on reproductive fitness. For example, a trait that expresses itself after the reproductive years will be neutral with regard to survival and not selected against. Or, a partial expression of the trait may confer an advantage, while those unlucky enough to get the full genetic load may suffer — too much of a good thing, if you will. This is discussed, for example, with respect to psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia or manic depressive (bipolar) illness. Could, for example, lesser expression of the relevant genes inspire quirky visionary originality of thought and creative energy, while the full flowering of the tendencies spins one out of control? (In modern society, it is certainly true that psychotic disorders, which have their most common onset in young adulthood, confer a reproductive disadvantage, but are artists or visionaries advantaged? There was a study I wrote abut here several weeks ago which peripherally bears on that, suggesting that marriage is the kiss of death to creative output…) Think, for example, of the difference between James Joyce’s fractured language and the fractured thought of his schizophrenic daughter Lucia (a patient of Jung’s), which one commentator likened to the difference betwen swimming in the river and drowning in it. A more prosaic example, although not from psychiatry, is sickle cell anemia. While having a double dose of the gene gives you the devastating syndrome, a single ‘hit’ (which gives you “sickle trait”) apparently confers some resistance to malaria, which is endemic in the regions where the sickle cell mutation arose.

The Top Ten Theories About What Caused the East Coast Power Blackout:

10. Governor Gray Davis wanted to show that California’s mess wasn’t really his fault: see, there were blackouts on the East Coast too!

9. Overstressed computers in West Coast attempting to tabulate all the candidates for California Governor.

8. Osama bin Laden and his compatriots check into a motel in New Jersey and turn up the air conditioning *really* high.

7. All innocent persons on death row in Texas prison system electrocuted at once.

6. Justice Antonin Scalia seeks return to original conditions when Constitution was written.

5. Department of Homeland Security seeks to confuse terrorists by hiding location of New York City.

4. Liberal paranoia comes true as country is returned to Dark Ages.

3. Latest new excuse by Bill Clinton to explain to Hillary why he can’t make it home for dinner.

2. President Bush attempts to divert electricity from middle class to the wealthiest 1 percent.

1. Fox News sues Con Edison for trademark infringement for using the word ‘con.'”

Prettier now, made over with Moveable Type, and it also seems Garret is starting to comment more than just blinking.

Greg Palast: The Tale of The Brits Who Swiped 800 Jobs From New York, Carted Off $90 Million, Then Tonight, Turned Off Our Lights

Machines accurately infer user intent, remember experiences and allow users to call upon simulated experts

“The massive power failure that struck the Northeast and parts of the Midwest this week also delivered a jolt to Congress, where energy legislation has been stalled amid deep regional differences over how best to upgrade the nation’s aging electric power transmission system.” Washington Post

Competing bills differ on support for a plan that would put electricity transmission under the control of several regional authorities, a step toward a national transmission system opposed by regions like the South and the Northwest which enjoy cheaper power. Bush, as usual, voiced his usual authoritative but empty platitudes about an “antiquated transmission system” and how we’ve got to “figure out what went wrong.” Of course, his energy scheme focuses more on federal handouts to his friends on the supply side — tax incentives for oil and gas drilling (especially in wilderness areas) and nuclear power support. Although analysis of the power failure, whose precise cause remains unknown, does not suggest it was set off simply by a short-term overload in peak demand, almost no one in the national debate pays much attention to the potential value of conservation in reducing demand for power and consequent stress on the transmission system. And participants in the debate draw diametrically opposite lessons about whether it calls for centralization of control over the power grid or enhancing regional autonomy. Along with centralization, of course, comes automated control of transmission traffic, automatically reconfiguring connections across the grid to respond instantaneously to surges in demand somewhere in the system. It strikes me that this is precisely what analysts say caused the cascading series of failures on Thursday, whereas in areas that were spared it was because local power engineers flipped a switch to isolate their localities from the larger process.

While the debate should probably not be shaped by these dramatic failures which so far have happened only three times during my lifetime (1965, 1979 and now), they are probably only the tip of the iceberg in alerting us to potential unintended consequences of automation of electricity flow. The megalomaniacs (literally) who favor centralization, giveaways to the energy industry, and unquestioning responsiveness to the unchecked growth in demand are those who will control the public debate with emotional evocations of the spectre of chaos, anarchy and social breakdown with increasingly frequent massive blackouts if we do not do their bidding.

“The greatest brute an African mother ever brought to life” (according to Milton Obote, whom Amin overthrew but who returned to power in Uganda later to rule with equivalent inhumanity and repression) is dead at 80 in Saudi Arabian exile. The current Ugandan President, Yoweri Museveni, through a spokesman, said “Good.” Washington Post

“Iraqis who have suffered for months with little electricity gloated Friday over a blackout in the northeastern United States and southern Canada and offered some tips to help Americans beat the heat.

From frequent showers to rooftop slumber parties, Iraqis have developed advanced techniques to adapt to life without electricity.” CNN. How insensitive of them…to include Canada in their gloating.

[Here is a slightly edited version of an (as yet unpublished) letter I wrote to the editor of the New York Times, for your edification.]

To the editor:

I read with interest the article (“How One Hospital Benefited on Questionable Operations“, August 12) on the enormous fine Tenet Healthcare has just agreed to pay to the government to resolve accusations that doctors at one of its hospitals conducted unnecessary heart procedures and operations on hundreds of healthy patients.

You note that this is the largest penalty ever paid for accusations that a healthcare company billed federal health programs for unnecessary care. Criminal investigations of the doctors involved, although not the hospital or Tenet Healthcare, are underway.

Yet, such egregious cases are the tip of the iceberg of the abuses for-profit healthcare corporations commit in the name of patient care at the expense of those patients and the taxpayers, and they are by no means restricted to the notorious Tenet. ‘Benefiting from questionable practices’ is the name of the game in for-profit healthcare! In an era when community-based hospitals with an investment in quality care for members of their community struggle to remain afloat, the massive healthcare holding companies enjoy respectable growth and continuing returns on their shareholders’ investments. One would be hard-pressed to explain this distinction without suspecting questionable practices.

Mental health services, where the question of whether a patient requires care is more a subjective value judgment unsupported by laboratory or examination data, provide perhaps the greatest opportunity for a hospital’s owners to maximize Medicare reimbursement, and operating behavioral health facilities is the most fiscally healthy facet of for-profit corporate healthcare. As Medicare is the payor for our elderly patients as well as younger patients permanently disabled by major psychiatric illnesses, this results in exploitation of some of the most vulnerable in our population.

As until recently the medical director of a psychiatric hospital owned by a large healthcare corporation, I had a firsthand opportunity to see aspects of how this agenda is translated into operating policy. One example — it became clear to me that a concerted management policy functions to exclude clinical input from the loop when deciding which patients are to be accepted for admission. My name was routinely listed as the “accepting doctor” for cases I had never reviewed and would not have found suitable for inpatient admission (i.e., could the care they require be provided in a less expensive community setting? Could they be expected to benefit from the services of a hospital?).

Despite the perennial complaints of physicians and nurses at their facilities, the admissions offices of hospitals in this chain are staffed, as a matter of policy, with personnel who are not healthcare professionals and have no clinical expertise. Admissions policy amounts to, literally, nothing beyond filling vacant beds with paying patients as rapidly as possible. A similar climate shapes care after admission. Again, because justifying continuing need for inpatient stay is largely subjective in mental health care, utilization review functions to argue with payors for continued stay for as long as possible regardless of the clinical merits. Administrative consideration of the appropriateness of an admission does not occur until a patient’s benefits are exhausted and the hospital is no longer being reimbursed for continued treatment. Because Medicare is not “managed” and there is no prior approval or outside review of the appropriateness of hospital level of care, there is never any pressure for discharge of Medicare patients.

I was faulted for attempting to divert geriatric admissions to specialized geropsychiatry units or to psychiatry units in general hospitals where, as contrasted with a freestanding psychiatric facility, they receive more comprehensive and safer care for the medical and mental health problems which are often intermingled in a behavioral decompensation. A further reason for attempting to divert geriatric admissions from my hospital and other hospitals in its chain is that its corporate owners have a misguided risk management policy of not honoring patients’ advanced directives. Often, a patient and her family are not informed until after admission that the patient’s “Do Not Resuscitate” wishes will not be honored, i.e. that aggressive resuscitation measures will be initiated on all patients who have a cardio-respiratory arrest at that facility regardless of their wishes. But attempting to implement a policy of quality control assuring that the admissions department alerts potential admissions and their families to this policy results in lost admissions opportunities and empty beds.

Concerned about these practices after the corporate takeover of the hospital, the state regulatory agency responsible for its license and oversight placed the hospital under renewed scrutiny for these and other practices. As a result, the hospital was ordered more than a year ago to enhance the role of clinical leadership in making sure that all admissions were clinically appropriate rather than just a matter of managerial convenience. Instead of implementing the required changes, clinical management was replaced with more pliable personnel whose oversight has been pro forma.

This is a process I have seen repeated, with little variation, at a number of behavioral healthcare facilities in the for-profit sector. Those concerned with healthcare costs and any vestiges of ethical responsibility that healthcare providers have for their patients in our increasingly corporate-controlled healthcare industry would do well to look at the mental health sector and the “grey area” of practices which exploit Medicare reimbursement without on the surface of things being overtly fraudulent. Over recent decades, I shared most physicians’ concerns about the increasing intrusiveness of managed care scrutiny over their practices. My recent experiences have persuaded me, to the contrary, that such scrutiny may be the only hedge against the rapacious practices of the for-profit healthcare corporations. Those interested in cost containment would do well to advocate for a managed-care system for Medicare, the nation’s single largest underwriter of healthcare costs, similar to that which has made other insurers less exploitable by healthcare-for-profit. This would be a far more rational measure than focusing solely on fraud prevention and prosecution after the fact.

Sincerely,

Eliot Gelwan MD

Brookline, MA

Nicholas Kristof: “…this day is an opportunity to look at perhaps the most fundamental divide between America and the rest of the industrialized world: faith. Religion remains central to American life, and is getting more so, in a way that is true of no other industrialized country, with the possible exception of South Korea.

Americans believe, 58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral. In contrast, other developed countries overwhelmingly believe that it is not necessary…” NY Times op-ed

Pentagon says tough duty bonuses are budget-buster: “The Pentagon wants to cut the pay of its 148,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, who are already contending with guerrilla-style attacks, homesickness and 120- degree-plus heat.

Unless Congress and President Bush take quick action when Congress returns after Labor Day, the uniformed Americans in Iraq and the 9,000 in Afghanistan will lose a pay increase approved last April of $75 a month in ‘imminent danger pay’ and $150 a month in ‘family separation allowances.'” SF Chronicle

Derrick Z. Jackson: The Cold War Queen: “The only nuclear event going on concerning Iraq is a meltdown of the Bush administration.” Boston Globe/CommonDreams

Jonathan Schell: “Events have suddenly and unexpectedly handed the Democratic Party an opportunity to defeat George W. Bush in 2004. His main justifications for his war in Iraq (existence of weapons of mass destruction, connections with Al Qaeda) have collapsed, while the war itself intensifies. At home, his tax cuts have sent deficits out of control and jobs are disappearing at a gallop. Each of these conditions seems likely to be either chronic or permanent: The prospect of finding actual weapons of mass destruction, though conceivable, has dimmed to the vanishing point; the cost in blood and treasure of the occupation seems likely to increase; the deficit is likely to remain high or get higher. On other issues-healthcare, the environment, education-the public trusts Democrats more than it does the President. His poll numbers have fallen, from the high sixties and mid-seventies a month or two ago to the mid-fifties today.

But it’s one thing for Bush to fail, another for the Democrats to succeed.” The Nation/CommonDreams

Haroon Siddiqui: “Americans don’t quite know what they are talking about when it comes to where the reistance is coming from.” Toronto Star/CommonDreams

Tom Turnipseed: “The desperation of the U.S. military plight in Iraq was very clear when General Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander in Iraq, commented on the daily casualties of U.S. soldiers in the guerrilla war. General Sanchez said, ‘Every American needs to believe this: that if we fail here in this environment, the next battlefield will be the streets of America.’

Fighting in ‘the streets of America ‘ is typical Bush/Cheney fear-mongering hyperbole. It echoes the top down use of the fear factor by the Bushies. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq recently said, ‘I would rather be fighting them here than fighting them in New York’. Such scare tactics are reminiscent of Bush’s false admonitions of Iraq’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ and his justification of attacking Iraq to ‘prevent another 9/11’. Ironically, although no ‘ties to Al Qaeda’ have ever been proven regarding Saddam Hussein’s regime as alleged by the Bush/Cheney regime, the bumbling U.S. war machine has managed to unite the opposite extremes of Islam against the U.S. in Iraq.” CommonDreams

“Low-level activity reduces risk by 43%” National Post

Killing an 11-year-old boy to restore democracy. Boston Globe

“New findings from a Queen’s behavioural expert in eye/hand movement provide the first direct evidence that our brain patterns are similar whether we are actually doing something or simply watching someone else do it.

It’s an insight that could have significant implications for the assessment of people with various movement disorders such as some stroke victims, says Dr. Randy Flanagan, who conducted the study with Dr. Roland Johansson of Umea University in Sweden. The methods employed in the study could be used to determine whether people with impaired movement control also have problems understanding and perceiving the actions of others. The answer to this question will have implications for both diagnosis and assessment.

‘This helps to explain how we understand the movements of others,’ Dr. Flanagan says. ‘We perceive an action by running it at some covert level in our own system. An example would be when sports fans watch football on TV and move in anticipation of action on the screen.’ Although this theory is supported by previous neuro-physiological and brain imaging studies, until now there has been little direct, behavioural evidence.” EurekAlert!

There has been excitement in the neuroscience field for several years over the implication of the discovery of so-called mirror neurons in primates, about which I have posted before and which react when one is watching behaviors of others as other neurons do when the individual is performing an action. As a potential physiological basis for empathy if they operate in humans as they do in other primates, their development may have been important to making us human. The current study seems to offer parallels and may be empirical evidence that the mirroring circuitry exists in humans.

Dervala daydreams about Elvis.

I’m so glad I subscribe to the WSJ OpinionJournal if only because James Taranto is so much fun to laugh at. In today’s column, he is suspicious of reports that the French heat wave has killed 3,000 because he does not know what to make of the Health Ministry statement that this figure includes deaths “linked directly or indirectly” to the heat. It would seem to me someone who does not understand epidemiological methods is not qualified to comment on an epidemiological finding, but he takes exception to this information:

In a statement, the ministry said its estimate was partly drawn from studying deaths in 23 Paris regional hospitals from July 25-Aug. 12 and from information provided by General Funeral Services.

According to 2002 figures, the Paris regional hospitals that were surveyed could have expected some 39 deaths a day, the ministry said. But Tuesday, they recorded nearly 180, it said.

“We note a clear increase in cases beginning Aug. 7-8, which we can regard as the start of the epidemic of deaths linked to the heat,” the statement said.

Morgues and funeral directors have reported skyrocketing demand for their services since the heat wave took hold. General Funeral Services, France’s largest undertaker, said it handled some 3,230 deaths from Aug. 6-12, compared to 2,300 on an average week in the year–a 37 percent jump.

He says it does not establish a causal link between the heat and the deaths. Uhhh, calculating the “excess mortality” compared to some reference period when, you reason, the factor in question is the sole variable is the closest you can come to causality in epidemiology, and is a well-accepted technique for assessing the impact of a heatwave.

But his contorted reasoning thrusts his foot even deeper into his mouth with his next statement. He thinks the 3,000 figure was chosen to compete with the number of U.S. deaths on Sept. 11th, 2001. “A popular lunatic conspiracy theory on the “European street” has it that George W. Bush is to blame every time the weather is bad.” Oh, and the French Ministry of Health is a prime proponent of this lunatic theory? Sorry, James, there’s only one lunatic in this story, and he’s not in Paris.

By the way, in another story further down the page, Taranto derides Sen. John Kerry for being not only “haughty” but “French-looking.” Yes, that’s what he wrote.

“The specter of the Iran-Contra affair is haunting Washington. Some of the people and countries are the same, and so are the methods – particularly the pursuit by a network of well-placed individuals of a covert, parallel foreign policy that is at odds with official policy.

Boiled down to its essentials, the Iran-Contra affair was about a small group of officials based in the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that ran an “off-the-books” operation to secretly sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages. The picture being painted by various insider sources in the media suggests a similar but far more ambitious scheme at work.

Taken collectively, what these officials describe and what is already on the public record suggests the existence of a disciplined network of zealous, like-minded individuals. Centered in Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith’s office and around Richard Perle in the Defense Policy Board in the Pentagon, this exclusive group of officials operates under the aegis of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.” AlterNet

Poindexter quits Pentagon research post AP/Salon

“Few orchestras play the works of contemporary classical composers, and almost no one buys their albums. Is their music uninspired—or do we simply not get it?

…in the world of music, contemporary classical composers inhabit a dissonant ghetto all their own. Few people listen to them, few critics review them and few people understand them. Western classical music as a whole makes up only 3.5 percent of the world’s total music market (contemporary works aren’t broken out separately). In 2002, classical-album sales were down 17 percent. Orchestras rarely feature contemporary works. “If you go to a museum or dance company, the balance between old and new is completely different,” says Nicholas Kenyon, the BBC’s controller of the Proms, live events and television classical music. But is that because new music is uninspired, or just not as familiar to us as Mozart? Are the composers to blame—or are we?” MSNBC

Addendum: As Abby points out in the attached comment, if you are interested in ‘new music’, do not skip the excellent NPR American Mavericks series, to which I have previously blinked. You can listen to a streaming version of the programs over your net connection.

David Brooks: “Maybe it’s time to admit the obvious. We don’t really care about diversity all that much in America, even though we talk about it a great deal. Maybe somewhere in this country there is a truly diverse neighborhood in which a black Pentecostal minister lives next to a white anti-globalization activist, who lives next to an Asian short-order cook, who lives next to a professional golfer, who lives next to a postmodern-literature professor and a cardiovascular surgeon. But I have never been to or heard of that neighborhood. Instead, what I have seen all around the country is people making strenuous efforts to group themselves with people who are basically like themselves.

…

Look around at your daily life. Are you really in touch with the broad diversity of American life? Do you care? ” The Atlantic

“…researchers believe as many as 17 mysteriously dead whales are floating over a 125-mile stretch of ocean in Canada and the United States. In addition, three other dead whales have been spotted much closer to the New England coast, and scientists are attempting to test them for possible connections to what has become the largest mass death in this region involving large whales since 1987.” Boston Globe

Bizarre gruesome postscript on the controversial plan to cryogenically preserve the all-star’s remains. Read it before you go with Alcor Life Extension! “The silver can containing Williams’ head resembles a lobster pot and is marked in black with Williams’ patient I.D. number, A-1949, according to the SI story. Williams’ head has been shaved and drilled with holes. Verducci also reports that, before the head was placed in its present location, it was accidentally cracked as many as 10 times due to fluctuating storage temperatures…Two dime-size holes were drilled into the head to observe the brain condition and, more important, to insert sensors that could detect cracks during the freezing process. But after “a huge crack” occurred in the head in April and nine more cracks were reported in July, Williams’ head was removed from its original container and eventually placed in its current “neuro-can.”” Sports Illustrated [via Daily Rotten]

US Forces Say Believe Saddam Near Tikrit: “A senior U.S. commander said on Thursday he had good reason to believe Saddam Hussein was around his hometown of Tikrit and would be caught ‘sooner rather than later.'” Reuters

When did we start treating children like children? “A good deal of our intellectual life in the past half century has been ruled by the following pattern: First, a French person, with great brilliance and little regard for standards of evidence, promulgates a theory overturning dearly held beliefs. Second, many academics, especially the young, seize on the theory and run with it, in the process loading it with far more emotional and political freight than the French thinkerr—who, after all, was just “doing theory”—had in mind. Meanwhile, other scholars indignantly reaffirm the pre-revisionist view, and everyone calls for more research, to decide the question. In the third stage, the research is produced, and it confuses everybody, because it is too particular, too respectful of variation and complexity, to support either the nice old theory or the naughty new one.

Recent histories of the family have followed this itinerary.” The New Yorker

Jerome Groopman: Can Hypochondria Be Cured?:

“Studies show that at least a quarter of all patients report symptoms that appear to have no physical basis, and that one in ten continues to believe that he has a terminal disease even after the doctor has found him to be healthy. Experts say that between three and six per cent of patients seen by primary-care physicians suffer from hypochondria, the irrational fear of illness. The number is likely growing, thanks to increased medical reporting in the media, which devotes particular attention to scary new diseases like sars, and to the Internet, which provides a wealth of clinical information (and misinformation) that can help turn a concerned patient into a neurotic one. Nevertheless, hypochondria is rarely discussed in the doctor’s office. The ‘‘worried well,’’ as sufferers are sometimes called, typically feel insulted by any suggestion that their symptoms have a psychological basis. Most patients are given a formal diagnosis of hypochondria only after ten or so years of seeing physicians, if they get such a diagnosis at all.” The New Yorker

Groopman writes this wonderful series for the magazine in which he considers area of medical controversy with compassion and insight. I was particularly interested in his take on this topic on the border of psychiatry and ‘real’ medicine. In hypochondriasis, patients are essentially exploiting the phsician’s fallibility and wish to be reassuring for unconscious reasons; a non-psychiatrist grappling comfortably with the problem would have to be penetrating about the limitations of the doctor’s art as well as intuitive about unconscious process — no mean feat. Groopman profiles a primary care physician who is, and then turns to a depiction of the work of neuropsychiatrist Brian Fallon (whom I knew way back when before either of us went to medical school). Because it is anathema to suggest to a hypochondriacal patient that it is psychological at root, this quintessentially psychiatric problem is rarely treated by psychiatrists. Fallon has an interesting take on it, having struggled to get referrals of patients considered hypochondriacal by his non-psychiatric colleagues to study.

Fallon has reconceived hypochondria as a heterogeneous disorder: some sufferers are indeed obsessive-compulsives, whereas others are experiencing a prolonged reaction to a traumatic event, like the death of a loved one. He also believes that people who are labelled hypochondriacs can behave in diametrically opposite ways in terms of seeking medical care. For some, the fear of illness is so great that they avoid all doctors. These patients indulge in the fantasy that if a doctor doesn’t examine them, then the illness won’t appear. Another group needs to see doctors constantly, even when these visits cause more anxiety or humiliation.

What this heterogeneity hints at is that the hypochondriacal ‘label’ may have something, or as much, or more, to do with the distasteful reaction her physicians have to such a patient as it does to the underlying process in the patient herself. (This is a familiar problem in psychiatry as well, which I refer to as ‘diagnosis by countertransference’, usuallly seen when a disagreeable or difficult patient is labelled with borderline personality disorder. In my teaching and supervision with regard to both hypochondriasis/somatization and borderline personality dynamics, it is one of the most difficult issues for trainees to dea with.) Groopman’s article ends with a patient’s summation of perhaps the best approach to treating such difficult cases:

‘‘Hypochondria is not at all funny, like people think,’’ she said. ‘‘It’s not a ‘Seinfeld’ episode. It’s a horrible, horrible way to live.”

“Concerns over transatlantic relations, American attitudes toward the United Nations Security Council, and the future of multilateralism stem from a single, overarching issue of the post–Cold War era: the issue of international legitimacy. When the United States wields its power, especially its military power, will world opinion and, more importantly its fellow liberal democracies, especially in Europe, regard its actions as broadly legitimate? Or will the United States appear, as it did to many during the crisis in Iraq, as a kind of rogue superpower?” — Robert Kagan, The Carnegie Endowment, Foreign Policy Ultimately a wimpy article, the main point is that the ‘legitimacy’ of our foreign policy will be judged by (drumroll) how things turn out on the ground (stability, democracy) in Iraq and the region. In the broadest terms, if the US is not invested in ‘legitimacy’, the points are moot. [Raise your hand if you think BushCo care about the stability and democracy of Iraq. I thought so.] There is no discussion of the consequences of pursuing rogue foreign policy in the modern world or how to enforce international accountability on a state like the US acting in illegitimate ways.

Maureen Dowd: “Is the internet over? …The most telling sign that the Internet is no longer the cool American frontier? Blogs, which sprang up to sass the establishment, have been overrun by the establishment.” NY Times op-ed

“With a publicly available search engine, a few well-chosen e-mail addresses, and off-the-shelf viral code, anyone can commit an act of cyberterrorism–or so says Roelof Temmingh, technical director of SensePost, a South African computer security company.

Speaking at the recent Black Hat Briefings and Defcon 11 conferences, Temmingh explained that the current methods of assailing computer networks–denial-of-service attacks (DoS) or remote break-ins–inconvenience too few people to really impact a nation’s information infrastructure. The sort of exploit that could really hurt a country, Temmingh suggests, would more likely be based on e-mail viruses, a concept he outlined in a recent paper.” ZDNet

Answer: not really:

“Bjorn3D has put together an article that answers the age old question: Will customizing your Windows PC slow down your computer?

To find out, he loaded up Object Desktop components such as WindowBlinds, ObjectBar, IconPackager, and WinStyles and then put on CursorXP to top it off.

He then ran it thorugha host of benchmarks comparing it to his clean setup. Benchmarks included 3DMark, PCMark, UT2K3, and others.

The result? No discernable performance hit.” WinCustomize

Gamma-ray weapons could trigger next arms race: “An exotic explosive that blurs the distinction between conventional and nuclear weapons could shift the global balance of power.” New Scientist

The critic is appalled by a survey of Monet’s middle years that cheapens his reputation: “Monet was a virtuoso, like the composer Rossini. Both were prolific with their enormous talents. Ravishing though it is, their work needs to be taken in small doses so that you don’t notice how formulaic and repetitive it can be.” Telegraph/UK

“The chromatic scale — the musical scale that follows the notes of the piano and of which the Western seven-tone do-re-mi scale is a subset — may not be based on number ratios, as many physicists and mathematicians have proposed, but rather on human speech, according to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of Neuroscience.” LA Times

“Blender magazine has named the ’50 Worst Artists in Music History’ – and the list is bound to infuriate pop fans, because along with expected names like Celine Dion and Vanilla Ice are legends like The Doors and Mick Jagger.

Even current top-selling acts, such as the Goo Goo Dolls, Creed and the Gipsy Kings, get savaged.” New York Post

“I used the CTX 5500 to keep bombs off your plane. I also go elbows deep in your underwear.” Wired

“The Arctic ice cap will melt completely within the next century if carbon dioxide emissions continue to heat the Earth’s atmosphere at current rates, according to an international study.” ABC News

“A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in ‘fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity’.

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report’s four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talkshow host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them ‘preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality’.

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition [link is to a .pdf of the paper], received $1.2m in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.” Guardian/UK [via CommonDreams]

Thousands of doctors back proposal in JAMA: “Thousands of US physicians have endorsed a broad proposal that would abolish for-profit hospitals and insurers and transfer all Americans into an expanded and improved Medicare program for all ages, reigniting the debate over universal health care a decade after President Clinton’s failed plan.

While the four physicians who wrote the plan — three of whom are affiliated with Harvard Medical School — are members of a nonprofit organization that has long pushed for universal health coverage, the new proposal is important for two reasons: It was published today in one of the country’s most prestigious and its most widely circulated medical journal, the Journal of the American Medical Association, and because of the large number of doctors — nearly 8,000, including two former surgeons general — who endorsed it.” Boston Globe

“Climate Change Threatens the Future of Humanity, but we Refuse to Respond Rationally” — George Monbiot, CommonDreams

“For over a decade, the military has been shifting its supply and support personnel into combat jobs and hiring defense contractors to do the rest. And the process has accelerated under Defense Secretary Rumsfeld.

And despite the alleged wonders of private enterprise, those companies have left soldiers in filth, heat, and garbage.” CommonDreams

Not considering for the moment the fact that they were sent into the lions’s den on false pretenses and are paying for it daily with their life and limb; see their lives flashing in front of their eyes in the form of an open-ended occupation; have bounties placed on their heads by the people they have ‘liberated’; are succumbing to a mysterious multi-organ failure disease that may be a result of toxic exposure; etc. etc.,

The Progressive Case for Howard Dean: “Yes, I’ve read the unfavorable commentaries on Howard Dean by writers whose opinions I greatly respect, like Norman Solomon and Alexander Cockburn. And yes, I know that I disagree with some critical components of Dean’s platform. Progressives should be well aware that they’re going to disagree on a range of issues with every individual who has a chance at being in the White House two years from now. Our choice is not between Howard Dean and the-even-better-candidate who-has-a-shot-at-winning the-Democratic-nomination and-defeating-George-Bush; that other candidate doesn’t exist. Neither Kucinich nor Al Sharpton nor Carol Moseley Braun nor any Green will be President. Progressives should incorporate these realities into their electoral strategy, however disappointing they may be.” AlterNet

Until I realized it was Hitchcock‘s (August 13, 1899, Leytonstone, England — April 28, 1980) birthday today, I puzzled over this change in the Google logo:

Here is a Hitchcock filmography; find your favorite(s). [Do you prefer the British or the American period?] Here’s a list of all his cameos in his films.

From Destiny-land:

“Al Franken committed a brilliant publicity stunt.

He renamed his new book ‘Fair and Balanced‘ — prompting Fox News to sue him.

Of course, they’re angry because the book is partly about Fox News. But this means they’re suing him to get the book’s title changed back to ‘Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.’

Update: In an apparent show of solidarity, the liberal blog Atrios has changed its tagline to ‘Fair and Balanced.’ If you look at the top of this page, you’ll see Destiny-land is following suit…”

Will this become a new webloggers’ meme?

“Michael A Ledeen, resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he works closely with the better-known former chairman of the Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, has been a fixture of Washington’s neo-conservative community for more than 20 years. But he is now out front, in a public campaign for the United States to confront Iran, warning that Tehran will cause Washington problems in both Iraq and Afghanistan and that ‘the mullahs are determined to obliterate Israel’. ” Asia Times [props to walker] Ledeen is apparently the international affairs analyst Karl Rove consults when he wants a ‘fresh idea’, and he increasingly sees his fax transmittals to Rove turned into official policy statements.

Of course, the American authorities regret this ‘serious’ mistake. But, of course, no one will be held culpable for this war crime [and I will be flamed for even calling it so.]

““I wish Saddam (Hussein) would return and kill all Americans,” Anwaar Kawaz said. Under Saddam, “we used to go out at one in the morning. We went out at 9 now and they killed us.” Guardian/UK

Related: Saddam’s Followers Raise Bounty for Dead Americans ABC News

Texas ANG George W Bush Action Figure: “Why wait until the redesign of Mount Rushmore?

Now you can own a piece of American history; the Texas Air National Guard George W Bush Action Figure.

This figure probably stands 14′ in height, and is exactly as the future Leader of the Western World(tm) appeared during his service defending our Nation’s borders from Mexicans and Bahamians.

Comes with detailed uniform (as imagined by base commander), sealed discharge papers, Coors Light keg, and ‘licensed to chug’ bumper sticker.

Now you can have George in your home every day, even after November 2004!

This fully pose-able action figure of the Commander in Chief is likely correct down to the slightest detail. Our highly skilled Chinese craftspeople have been in the action figure industry for years, and trained under a generous re-education program. They make the best, most desirable action figures in the Free Market, or die tryin’!

Winning bidder will be notified of upcoming GWBANG accessories; pile of dried branches, action pretzel, overstuffed bags with ‘$’ printed on them, blindfold, bible with real, highlighted passages, and earplugs.

The winning bidder will also receive TWO bonus gifts: the George W. Bush ‘Afternoon of September 11th 2001’ tennis ensemble, and a genuine “First Lady Laura Bush Serving Sandwiches at a VA Hospital” action figure!

Supplies are limited; don’t let yours disappear!”

Click on the link to view (or, if I am sadly mistaken about my readers, to bid on) the item; it is not what you think. [thanks, Adam]

GIs flood US with war-weary emails: “An unprecedented internet campaign waged on the frontline and in the US is exposing the real risks for troops in Iraq… (amidst) rising fears that the conflict is now a desert Vietnam.” Guardian/UK

Rebecca Blood points with obvious distress to this story about an eight-year-old sex symbol. Her parents approve; her father is — shall we say? — ‘pimping’ her in the sense that she works for his modelling agency in Brisbane. Rebecca reminds us of the furor over Brooke Shields’ suggestive prepubescent modelling, but forgets to draw the parallels to Jon-Benet Ramsay, rest her soul.

Democratic Presidential hopeful Howard Dean is getting the treatment. The acerbic physician and former governor of Vermont has raised more money and gained more popularity than expected. As a result, the pundits who examine political candidates’ viability have turned their gaze on him. In June, Tim Russert and a clique of Washington pundits and reporters who follow Russert’s lead pronounced Dean unfit. According to a flurry of news stories and columns, Dean’s appearance on Meet the Press with Russert on June 22 was an embarrassment for the candidate and a disaster for his campaign.

People who saw the show or read the transcript might well ask: What was the big deal? — Ruth Conniff, The Progressive [via Alternet]

Screenwriter/director Frank Pierson’s commencement address to the 2003 USC film school graduating class; “What has happened in Hollywood has happened to us all. In life as in movies, we are seeing the disappeance of the odd, the old, the personal, the traditional and the idiosyncratic…” Alternet

Big beast extinction blamed on prehistoric fire starters: “Analysis of ancient eggshells suggests giant Australian animals suddenly became extinct because people burned their habitat.” New Scientist

Dial the world: “The Web and E-mail are second nature to PC owners. Jeff Pulver hopes the same will soon apply for Internet phone calls. A 40-year-old pioneer in the field, Pulver is a passionate, fast-talking crusader trying to sell a skeptical public on the future of Net telephony. His latest venture is a no-charge service called Free World Dialup.” US News

“An electronic glove that can turn American Sign Language gestures into spoken words or text, designed to help the deaf communicate more easily with the hearing world, is under development.

Researcher Jose Hernandez-Rebollar of George Washington University has demonstrated that his ‘AcceleGlove’ can translate the rapid hand movements used to make the alphabet and some of the words and phrases of sign language.” Houston Chronicle

Paris heat wave ‘kills 100’: “At least 100 people have died from heat-related causes in the last eight days in the Paris area as scorching temperatures continue to bake much of Europe, according to a French medical official.” CNN

One of the most alarming aspects of the heatwave, showing what a thin veneer our most ‘advanced’ technological achievements place over environmental disaster, is embodied in this story: France Frets Over Nuke Plants and Heatwave Toll: “Temperatures have hit around 104 degrees Fahrenheit in the past few days, spelling trouble for France’s nuclear reactors, many of which are cooled by river water. The plants pour water back into the rivers but only once it has been cooled to a certain temperature to protect the environment. With river levels falling and the mercury rising, authorities face the choice of spewing out hotter water, risking ecological damage, or cutting output, potentially leading to blackouts.” UN-Cast News Wire

Herbs for Hot Flashes: “Stunned by the string of negative studies about hormone replacement, including research released last week that emphasized the risk of heart attacks and breast cancer, millions of menopausal women are searching for safe substitutes. Their quest for relief from hot flashes, night sweats and other symptoms has coincided with the first wave of results from studies begun over the last several years of popular herbs and other nonpharmaceutical treatments.

But to the dismay of enthusiasts of alternative medicines, the evidence of the benefits has been limited and mixed. As a result, experts are urging caution in using products that are just beginning to be understood, are of inconsistent quality and are sold in nontraditional ways.” NY Times

“To the growing numbers of medical experts who preach evidence-based medicine — the discipline that insists on proof that time-honored medical practices and procedures are actually effective — there is no more inviting target than the annual physical.

Checkups for people with no medical complaint remain the single most common reason for visiting a doctor, according to surveys by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention…

Yet in a series of reports that began in 1989 and is still continuing, an expert committee sponsored by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, found little support for many of the tests commonly included in a typical physical exam for symptomless people.

It found no evidence, for example, that routine pelvic, rectal and testicular exams made any difference in overall survival rates for those with no symptoms of illness.

It warned that such tests can lead to false alarms, necessitating a round of expensive and sometimes risky follow-up tests. And even many tests that are useful, like cholesterol and blood pressure checks, need not be done every year, it said in reports to doctors, policy makers and the public.” NY Times

‘Evidence-based’ is ominously synonymous with ‘cost-effective’, of course, and its findings cannot measure intangible mutual benefits of an annual physical such as deepening the rapport between a patient and her/his physician, continuity of care, etc., unless they have a measurable impact on a statistic being studied. There is a branch of medicine which attempts to quantify the value of “quality-of-life” changes from medical interventions, but I doubt their data bearing on the annual physical checkup, if there is any, would be included in this purview.

“Not too long ago, it was easy for an armchair astronomer to keep up to speed on the moons of the solar system. There was the Moon, of course, and the four Jovian satellites spotted by Galileo, those two around Mars, and some odd ones here and there — that weird fractured cue ball orbiting Uranus, for instance.

These days, though, it is tough to tell the moons without a scorecard. In the past six years, dozens of satellites have been discovered around the giant planets, more than doubling the total in the solar system. Jupiter is the current leader, with 61, followed by Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The tally for these four planets is 124 (the other five planets have only four among them), but that number is sure to change in the next year or two.

…

(S)cientists say these moons offer some of the only clues to the early years of the solar system. They are a window into the past, some 4.5 billion years ago, when the planets formed from a swirling nebular disk of gas and dust.”

“A drug given to Parkinson’s patients may have an unexpected side-effect — compulsive gambling, U.S. researchers said on Monday.

An unusually large number of patients taking Mirapex gambled themselves into debt, while patients taking other drugs did not, the team at the Muhammad Ali Parkinson Research Center in Phoenix, Arizona reported.” Reuters

Some Doubt the Value And Safety of the Latest Pill, Crestor: “For patients who have tried and failed to lower their level sufficiently with lifestyle changes — diet and exercise — physicians generally recommend a statin, says Pasternak. However, with five such drugs already on the market, ‘I don’t think we desperately need an additional statin,’ he says.

Judging by the hundreds of millions the company spent developing Crestor and the effort it has put into winning approval, AstraZeneca disagrees. The company had to delay the drug’s introduction by a year when alarming toxicity was discovered at the highest dose of Crestor — 80 milligrams a day. People taking that dose were more likely than people on lower doses to have serious side effects such as muscle and kidney damage.” Washington Post

Audio of high court cases is ready for download: “Getting audio recordings of landmark legal arguments is becoming as easy as downloading the latest Snoop Dogg single. For the first time, Internet users can download, edit, and swap many of the US Supreme Court’s greatest hits.

Oral arguments available include those for the Roe v. Wade abortion rights case and the disputed 2000 presidential election.

The audio files come from the OYEZ Project, a multimedia archive that gets its name from the phrase used to open a session of court.” Boston Globe

“Forced to cut spending to balance state budgets, legislatures are coming down hardest on higher education, an odd move for a nation that believes its special advantage in global competition is its ‘knowledge workers,’ who are billed as so well educated that they are capable of turning out products and services other nations cannot match.” NY Times

This, about the mental basis of the physical, harmonizes nicely with my piece below about the physical basis of the mental.

The Patient’s Knowledge About a Therapy Affects the Therapy Outcome. This is essentially an empirical demonstration that the placebo effect plays an important role in the effectiveness of medical treatment. Most studies are “placebo-controlled”, that is they hold constant the impact of the subject’s knowledge that they are receiving a treatment and compare the ‘objective’ differences between treatments. This study does the opposite, holding the ‘objective’ effects constant and comparing their effects on two groups of subjects. Those in one group knew they were receiving a treatment and from those in the other group that fact was hidden. To put it succinctly, this overwhelmingly significant finding is that “the hidden administrations of pharmacological and nonpharmacological therapies are less effective than the open ones.”

I am not at all surprised. I have long maintained that the placebo response should not be dismissed as a null hypothesis (‘That treatment only works because the patient believes it does’), but rather that enlisting the patient’s intrinsic healing abilities by enrolling them in a shared belief system is a core element of the healer’s work. This is true whether we are talking about a tribal shaman or a lab-coated modern physician-scientist. And it is true whether we are talking about supposedly ‘physical’ ailments or psychological ones. This is another, important, nail in the coffin of the outmoded notion of mind-body distinctions. I’m going to beg the question of whether we are necessarily talking about some kind of mind-over-matter effects when appreciating the importance of belief to healing, or whether it is a meaningful question to ask. I personally get enough mileage out of my conviction that the material interactions of the CNS with the rest of bodily processes are infinitely more complicated and interwoven than we can conceive of.

It is not a new notion emerging out of recent research findings only, of course — mind-body unity is a core conceptual fundament of the abiding and ubiquitous human practices we refer to as mystical or spiritual pursuits across cultures — and this paper will not be revolutionary, in a very important sense. This is such a recondite provocation to conventional, paradigmatic ways of thinking about things that I predict you will see very little mention of it anywhere. The whole premise of mind-body unity challenges the conceptual framework under which most people operate (and have operated, perhaps, ever since the origins of consciousness and the development of the essentially human capacity for a ‘theory of mind’) so profoundly that it can only be ignored, resisted, marginalized or trivialized wherever it rears its ugly head to threaten the mainstream.

Related:

“Arnold, what the heck are you doing? You’re getting out of Hollywood to go into politics? Well, then forget agents and studio bosses—now you’re dealing with real predators. But since your mind is made up, I hope you won’t mind a little advice from someone who’s been there.

…(B)e yourself. Be Arnold. Be the guy who can sit and have a cigar with the crew. Be honest. Don’t worry if you don’t know the answer to every question asked. Just say, “I don’t know,” if you don’t know. When I did this during my campaign in Minnesota, people were amazed. How revolutionary—a politician who stands in front of the people and doesn’t feed them pre-canned answers!” — Jesse Ventura, Time Magazine

Robert Burke’s Photo Album on the Web:

“It would only take one group of flash mob organizers to abuse the ample trust of their participants for this whole phenomenon to come crashing to a halt. But I suspect that so long as the flash mob objectives remain innocuous and clever, these events will continue to be a good laugh. I’d attend again if I can; I mean, what do I have to lose? If I decide at the last minute I don’t want to take part — surely I can still enjoy my pint!” [via Interesting People]

Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, ‘prequel’ to The Cryptonomicon and vol. 1 of the projected ‘Baroque Cycle’, arrives on September 23. The first chapter is online for you to preview.

Related:

This blow-by-blow account was created for all the Neal Stephenson readers who, in anticipation of his upcoming book, Quicksilver, took it upon themselves to try to solve the cryptographic puzzle they encountered at the Baroque Cycle Web site. If you had difficulty making heads or tails of it or are simply curious as to what it all means, what follows is an explanation of how one person arrived at the solution. Bear in mind that this narrative will reveal the translation of the code written in Wilkins’s script, so if you are still interested in solving it for yourself, you may want to reconsider reading further. — Stephenson fan Todd Garrison

As Stephenson explains, the cryptographic “… inscription on the splash page is written in Real Character, a system of writing invented in the 1660’s by John Wilkins—an English bishop, natural philosopher, and SF writer who appears as a character in The Baroque Cycle.” What is perhaps most remarkable about Garrison’s cracking the code is that he was totally unfamiliar with the existence of Real Character.

Poet Aram Saroyan reflected in 1999 on his early publishing history:

“Over thirty years ago, in the dark, violence-riddled spring of 1968, Random House brought out my first book of poems. Actually, that’s not quite the case; I should say that they published my first mainstream book of poems, since, like many New York poets of my generation, I was active in the small press scene chronicled recently in the New York Public Library’s exhibit and book, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side. What was distinctively different about that April publication was that now I could walk Manhattan with my typewriter-page-size book, printed in typewriter facsimile, in virtually every bookstore that I passed. The book, called only Aram Saroyan, comprises thirty minimal poems, also without titles, and can be read easily from cover-to-cover [here on the web — FmH] in a minute or two.

Soon after it appeared, in fact, the book was read from cover-to-cover, on the local Six O’Clock NBC News, by Edwin Newman wearing his cultural commentator hat. My editor at Random House, Christopher Cerf, alerted me to this unprecedented phenomonon—which I had missed*—with a certain astonishment but with his perennial good cheer. In the Art News Annual of that year, John Ashbery noted his surprise at catching the event, and then remarked ruefully that, since the media was wont to pass from ‘put down to panegyric without an interval of straight reportage,’ he expected that I might soon be appearing on the Johnny Carson Show with Andy Warhol and the rest of the avant-garde.

That was not to be, needless to say. I was 24 years old, just wading into the deeper waters of a relationship that would lead to my marriage that fall, regularly seeing a psychoanalyst, and more than a little troubled by the phenomonon of my book. For one thing, in stalwart sixties fashion, I wasn’t certain whether it was correct to be published by a mainstream publisher at all. Simultaneously, and in seeming contradiction, I was troubled by the fact that while the book was selling well for a book of poems, the ratio of copies sold to the numbers of readers who read the volume cover-to-cover while in the bookstore, as evidenced by the increasingly soiled condition of many of the unbought copies, was easily ten to one. While one might congratulate oneself on thereby undercutting corporate profits, at the same time one was a near-penniless young poet who could have used a royalty check. The longest poem, the first, goes:

a man stands

on his

head one

minute–

then he

sit

down all

different

This fourteen-word opener is followed by 29 more poems, scarcely any of which exceed a dozen words, and a number of which are only one word. Of the latter, the most notorious is probably this one:

lighght

Awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Award of $750 after its appearance in The Chicago Review, this poem seems to have induced in Jesse Helms, among others, a state of apoplexy that has yet to abate in, lo, these thirty years hence. In my own defense, one wonders if Mr. Helms and other members of Congress who haven’t taken kindly to my minimalist exposition of light in the sixties, are more warmly disposed in the universally celebrated artistic precincts of, say, Picasso.”

*More recently, on a small poetry mailing list to which I subscribe, he revealed more about the circumstances around his missing that reading of his first book of poems:

In a room at UCLA’s Special Collections Library, I’m set up with an old

fashioned spool-to-spool tape recorder in order to listen to a radio

interview I did one night in Morningside Heights thirty five years ago when

I was a sixties poet. I hear the voice that once was my own: the slow,

irritating, callow voice of my budding self.

Why am I doing this? I wonder. I’m 57, happily married, three times a

father, my children grown up, my father long gone to the hereafter, my

mother recently gone. Something must be sadly amiss for it to come to this

pointless self-scrutiny. Who was I? Or rather, who cares? Walking out of

the building into the evening chill of a warm November day in Los Angeles, I

feel belatedly apologetic toward the interviewer–a decent, stolid sort

saddled with this weirdo of post-modern manners. I owe him, and I haven’t

seen or heard from him since that fateful night.

I walk to my car parked on LeConte in the darkening twilight. The night the

radio program was broadcast in New York City, I took an all-night acid trip

with some friends in a cold-water flat on the Lower East Side. I’d eagerly

anticipated hearing my voice over the airwaves, and the opportunity, in my

altered state, to discover in it nuances that would otherwise be

unascertainable. As it turned out, my friend Derek had not been able to

find the station that broadcast the interview–a lame excuse, yet another

signature of his passive aggressive jealousy, an old wearying story by now,

but not one I’d allow to interfere with the psychedelic main event of the

evening.

What a great favor poor Derek had done me. I find 12 minutes left on the

two hour meter where I parked. I would have hated myself, perhaps for the

entire intervening 35 years, had I listened to the interview that night.

Instead I focused on the grain of the parquet floor, and saw slowly emerge

from it, a tiny, stately procession–on floats–of Semite kings bedecked

with crowns and scepters.

I wake up in the middle of the night, still roiling with inner torment.

With my head cushioned against my upper arm, lying full-length on the floor

of that third-floor apartment on the corner of Avenue A and Sixth Street,

how I had scrutinized the extraordinary detail of those Semite kings. A Jew

on acid, I think, and the words “camp concentration” come to me. In the

dark, I reach out for my notebook and pen by the bed.

Even the Pentagon admits the program is in trouble. “If the generals in charge of the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency followed the wispiest trail of logic, they would have slashed the program and moved on to more promising pursuits long ago. This month brings yet another bit of news indicating not only that the program has scant chance of producing a workable missile-defense system, but that its managers know of its dim prospects.” — Fred Kaplan, Slate You should be following the missile defense debate as if your life depended on it. It does. NMD is the single factor that would most profoundly destabilize the balance of weapons terror and plunge us into a new nuclear arms race. Dubya’s legacy may well be written in ashes blowing in a contaminated wind if he and his henchmen push this through despite all reason.

Experts Say Juvenile Justice System is Now Tougher on Females: “More and more girls under 18 are being arrested for violent crimes. They’re still far less likely than boys to get picked up for things like robbery and assault. But the gap is narrowing. That’s led to the perception that girls have become much more violent in recent decades. But as NPR’s Jonathan Hamilton reports in Part Three of the series Girls and the Juvenile Justice System, experts on juvenile crime have another theory.” NPR