‘Okay, I had no idea that lemons and grapefruit are actually hybrid mixes of other fruits. How did I get to age 31 and miss this? Better yet, both citruses were born accidentally, of illicit love affairs not arranged by human hands. Lemons are the love child of citron and orange. Grapefruit the natural daughter of Asian pomelo and Barbados sweet orange.’ (Boing Boing).

I only recently learned this myself after starting to eat pomelos and wanting to research what relationship they have to grapefruit.

‘A kerfuffle has broken out between philosophy and physics. It began earlier this spring when a philosopher (David Albert) gave a sharply negative review in this paper to a book by a physicist (Lawrence Krauss) that purported to solve, by purely scientific means, the mystery of the universe’s existence. The physicist responded to the review by calling the philosopher who wrote it “moronic” and arguing that philosophy, unlike physics, makes no progress and is rather boring, if not totally useless. And then the kerfuffle was joined on both sides.

This is hardly the first occasion on which physicists have made disobliging comments about philosophy. Last year at a Google “Zeitgeist conference” in England, Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was “dead.” Another great physicist, the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, has written that he finds philosophy “murky and inconsequential” and of no value to him as a working scientist. And Richard Feynman, in his famous lectures on physics, complained that “philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.”

Why do physicists have to be so churlish t’ward philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, have been much nicer about science….’  — Jim Holt, author of the forthcoming book Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story (NYTimes).

For extra credit: who’s with Hawking in the photo?

‘The comic mechanics on NPR’s “Car Talk” are pulling in to the garage.Brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi said Friday they will stop making new episodes of their joke-filled auto advice show at the end of September, 25 years after “Car Talk” began in Boston. Repurposed versions of old shows will stay on National Public Radio indefinitely, however.The show airs every Saturday morning and is NPR’s most popular program.”We’ve managed to avoid getting thrown off NPR for 25 years, giving tens of thousands of wrong answers and had a hell of a time every week talking to callers,” Ray Magliozzi said. “The stuff in our archives still makes us laugh. So we figured, why keep slaving over a hot microphone?” ‘ (Huffington Post with thanks to Kathleen).

“Warning: Below are spoilers that will enter your system and burst out of your chest…” (NextMovie).

The Answer, Once and for All  (NextMovie).

Theoretical Physicist S. James Gates: “For the past five years, I and a group of my colleagues (including Charles Doran, Michael Faux, Tristan Hubsch, Kevin Iga, Greg Landweber and others) have been following the geometric-physics path pioneered by Kepler and Gell-Mann. The geometric objects that interest us are not triangles or octagons, but more complicated figures known as “adinkras“, a name Faux suggested. The word “adinkra” is of West African etymology, and it originally referred to visual symbols created by the Akan people of Ghana and the Gyamen of Côte d’Ivoire to represent concepts or aphorisms. However, the mathematical adinkras we study are really only linked to those African symbols by name. Even so, it must be acknowledged that, like their forebears, mathematical adinkras also represent concepts that are difficult to express in words. Most intriguingly, they may even contain hints of something more profound — including the idea that our universe could be a computer simulation, as in the Matrix films.” (On Being).

Colson Whitehead: “Growing up on the Upper East Side in the nineteen-seventies, I was a bit of a shut-in. I would prefer to have been a sickly child. I always love it when I read a biography of some key Modernist or neurasthenic Victorian and it says, “So-and-so was a sickly child, forced to retreat into a world of his imagination.” But the truth is that I just didn’t like leaving the house. Other kids played in Central Park, participated in athletics, basked and what have you in the great outdoors. I preferred to lie on the living-room carpet, watching horror movies.” (The New Yorker).

Siri’s answer to “I want to kidnap a child”: “I found 20 kid-friendly restaurants… 14 of them are fairly close to you.” What other evil things will Siri consent to do? (Jezebel.com)

“If you liked the George W. Bush administration’s education reforms, you will love the Romney plan. If you think that turning the schools over to the private sector will solve their problems, then his plan will thrill you.

The central themes of the Romney plan are a rehash of Republican education ideas from the past thirty years, namely, subsidizing parents who want to send their child to a private or religious school, encouraging the private sector to operate schools, putting commercial banks in charge of the federal student loan program, holding teachers and schools accountable for students’ test scores, and lowering entrance requirements for new teachers. These policies reflect the experience of his advisers, who include half a dozen senior officials from the Bush administration and several prominent conservative academics, among them former Secretary of Education Rod Paige and former Deputy Secretary of Education Bill Hansen, and school choice advocates John Chubb and Paul Peterson.”  (Diane Ravitch,  The New York Review of Books).

“Ventriloquist Nina Conti shows us how to get a man to do exactly what you want. Her act usually involves a talking monkey puppet, but this twist brings something different to the art of throwing one’s voice. Meaning, this is funny.” (Neatorama).

Yes, very funny. Sort of reminiscent of Stanley Milgram.

“Making waves… is what Haneke has become famous for. Over the last two decades, the director has developed a reputation for stark, often brutal films that place the viewer — sometimes subtly, sometimes explicitly — in the uncomfortable role of accomplice to the crimes playing out on-screen. This approach has made Haneke one of contemporary cinema’s most reviled and revered figures, earning him everything from accusations of obscenity to a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art next month. “Funny Games,” the movie Haneke was shooting in New York and Long Island, is the American remake of a highly controversial film by the same name that he directed in 1997. It was from its beginnings targeted at the American moviegoing public — and no other word but “targeted” will do. “Funny Games” is a direct assault on the conventions of cinematic violence in the United States, and the new version of the film, with its English-speaking cast and unmistakably American production design, makes this excruciatingly clear. More surprising still, Haneke remade this attack on the Hollywood thriller for a major Hollywood studio, Warner Independent Pictures, and refused to alter the original film’s story in the slightest.” (New York Times).

… as well as 31 other ‘Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow’ (NYTimes). 

This is the abstract of a recent journal article by psychiatrist brothers Joel Gold (NYU) and Ian Gold (McGill).

“Introduction. We report a novel delusion, primarily persecutory in form, in which the patient believes that he is being filmed, and that the films are being broadcast for the entertainment of others.

Methods. We describe a series of patients who presented with a delusional system according to which they were the subjects of something akin to a reality television show that was broadcasting their daily life for the entertainment of others. We then address three questions, the first concerning how to characterise the delusion, the second concerning the role of culture in delusion, and the third concerning the implications of cultural studies of delusion for the cognitive theory of delusion.

Results. Delusions are both variable and stable: Particular delusional ideas are sensitive to culture, but the broad categories of delusion are stable both across time and culture. This stability has implications for the form a cognitive theory of delusion can take.

Conclusions. Cultural studies of delusion have important contributions to make to the cognitive theory of delusion.” (Cognitive Neuropsychiatry).

However, as a psychiatrist specializing in the treatment of delusional conditions, I just don’t buy it. There is nothing so unique or novel about this delusion. I wrote about it here three years ago. As a matter of fact, there was an episode of the television show The Twilight Zone, oh probably in the ’50’s, depicting similar themes. Then there’s the related trope of The Adjustment Bureau, in which life is orchestrated behind the scenes for obscure purposes. Being controlled or manipulated, being observed or monitored — these have always been the essence of paranoid delusions. All that changes is the technology the affected individual fears, according to what they know: the written or printed word, radio surveillance, implanted bugs, computer chips, television cameras, spy satellites. As sophisticated as one is about technology, that is how sophisticated and modern one’s delusions will be.

It is also worth noting that, to a careful and discerning clinician, some patients’ presentations of the ‘Truman Show’ sensation about reality may not really represent a delusion, in other words the patient may not warrant a psychotic diagnosis. It may arise from the terribly disquieting and often unrecognized, thus underdiagnosed, condition called derealization, in which a person feels distanced from their experience, as if they are watching a movie or a cartoon of the world instead of being engaged in life. This is a dissociative, rather than a psychotic, condition. For those who are interested in learning more, here is a Wikipedia article on the phenomenon, and another one on the related condition of depersonalization, which may be the flip side of the same coin phenomenologically.

Related articles

• The World’s Strangest Mental Delusions (bigthink.com)
• Everyone Around You Is An Impostor: Inside the Mind’s Most Bizarre Delusions (talkingmonkeynews.wordpress.com)
• Cases of ‘Truman Show’ delusions on the rise as more people believe they’re the stars of their own reality TV programs (dailymail.co.uk)
• “The Folk Epistemology of Delusions” (kolber.typepad.com)
• “Delusions, Levels of Belief, and Non-doxastic Acceptances” (kolber.typepad.com)
• The Time-Keepers (edshortstory.wordpress.com)

“As access to devices has spread, children in poorer families are spending considerably more time than children from more well-off families using their television and gadgets to watch shows and videos, play games and connect on social networking sites, studies show.

This growing time-wasting gap, policy makers and researchers say, is more a reflection of the ability of parents to monitor and limit how children use technology than of access to it.” (NYTimes).

So wasting time online is restricted to the underprivileged?

“What if a deadly epidemic was burgeoning and almost nobody noticed? In the latest issue of PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, a distinguished group of virologists, epidemiologists and infectious-disease specialists say that’s not a hypothetical question. They argue that Chagas disease, a parasitic infection transmitted by blood-sucking insects, has become so widespread and serious — while remaining largely unrecognized — that it deserves to be considered a public health emergency. Extending the metaphor, they liken Chagas’ stealth spread to the early days of AIDS…” (Wired Science ).

Related articles

• McKenna on Chagas disease (crofsblogs.typepad.com)
• Parasitic Infection ‘the New AIDS’? (abcnews.go.com)
• Chagas Disease, An Incurable Infection, Called The ‘New AIDS Of The Americas’: Report (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
• End Of Days: Insect Infection Being Called The “New HIV/AIDS” Spreads Across America And Doctors Have No Cure (bossip.com)

“You can now greet by name two new residents of the period table of elements: Flerovium and Livermorium.

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry officially approved names for the elements – which sit at slot 114 and 116, respectively — on May 31. They have until now gone by the temporary monikers ununquadium and ununhexium.

Both elements are man-made, having first been synthesized at the Joint Institute of Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia, in 1998 and 2000. The discoveries were confirmed with further work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. Suggested names for the two elements have been pending since they were submitted to the IUPAC last year.” (Wired Science).

‘ “Arsenic is the number one environmental chemical for human health,” Joshua Hamilton tells me during a recent phone call. We’re talking about his latest research, a just-published study in PLoS ONE which found that this naturally occuring poison causes harm in an astonishingly small dose — 10 parts per billion.Hamilton’s study looked at arsenic’s effect on mother mice and their offspring. But he chose the 10 ppb dose for a very human reason. It’s the safety standard the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets for arsenic in drinking water. Why does EPA need such a standard? Because an estimated 25 million Americans mostly on private well systems drink water contaminated by arsenic-rich bedrock. I’ve put an arsenic map of the United States at the top of the post. Note that micrograms per liter is the same thing as parts per billion. This tells you that a lot of private wells — which are not held to public water supply regulations — run above the EPA standard.’ (Wired Science)

Related articles

• New concerns over safety of arsenic in drinking water (newscientist.com)
• Is There Arsenic In Your Energy Bar? (ecocentricblog.org)
• Arsenic in Apple Juice (healthcaredocs.wordpress.com)
• ‘Safe’ levels of arsenic in drinking water found to compromise pregnant/lactating mothers, offspring (medicalxpress.com)
• Rice scrutinized for arsenic levels (cbsnews.com)

Responding to “cannibal fever,” CDC denies existence of zombies“

‘CDC does not know of a virus or condition that would reanimate the dead (or one that would present zombie-like symptoms),” wrote the US government agency spokesman David Daigle in an email to The Huffington Post.’

Cannibal news: MMA fighter, high on ’shrooms, ate friend’s still-beating heart

‘A
California judge has determined that a 27-year-old mixed martial arts
fighter accused of killing his friend and sparring partner “by ripping
his still-beating heart from his chest after gruesomely beating and
torturing” him is mentally fit to stand trial. Prior to the attack, the
two had consumed mushroom tea. There have been an awful lot of news
stories like this one, this week.‘

Another cannibal in the news

‘A professor at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute is being held for
reportedly cutting off his wife’s lips and eating them, according to the
Sydney Morning Herald. She was allegedly having an affair. From the Baltimore college student who allegedly ate his housemate’s brain and heart to Miami’s nude face-eater to Montreal’s animal-torturing, human dismembering porn star, it’s quite a week for grotesque murders and crazed cannibalism.’

Teaching machine, designed by B. F. Skinner

“B. F. Skinner’s notorious theory of behavior modification was denounced by critics 50 years ago as a fascist, manipulative vehicle for government control. But Skinner’s ideas are making an unlikely comeback today, powered by smartphone apps that are transforming us into thinner, richer, all-around-better versions of ourselves. The only thing we have to give up? Free will.”  (The Atlantic).

Related articles

• Can B.F. Skinner Make Us Skinny? (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)
• Big Brother Is Watching You: The New Wave of Weight-Loss Apps [Science] (jezebel.com)
• B.F. Skinner: Scientist, Celebrity, Social Visionary (psychologicalscience.org)
• Live Chat With David H. Freedman (theatlantic.com)

 

Steven Pinker on the false fronts in the language wars: ‘Nature or nurture. Love it or leave it. If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.If you didn’t already know that euphonious dichotomies are usually phony dichotomies, you need only check out the latest round in the supposed clash between “prescriptivist” and “descriptivist” theories of language. This pseudo-controversy, a staple of literary magazines for decades, was ginned up again this month by The New Yorker, which has something of a history with the bogus battle. Fifty years ago, the literary critic Dwight Macdonald lambasted the Third Edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary for aiming to be “a recording instrument rather than … an authority” and insufficiently censuring such usages as “deprecate” for depreciate, “bored” for disinterested, and “imply” for infer. And in a recent issue, Joan Acocella, the magazine’s dance critic, fired a volley of grapeshot at the Fifth Edition of the American Heritage Dictionary and at a new history of the controversy by the journalist Henry Hitchings, The Language Wars. Acocella’s points were then reiterated this week in a post by Ryan Bloom on the magazine’s Page-Turner blog. The linguistic blogosphere, for its part, has been incredulous that The New Yorker published these “deeply confused” pieces. As Language Log put it, “Either the topic was not felt to be important enough to merit elementary editorial supervision, or there is no one at the magazine with any competence in the area involved.” ‘ (Slate Magazine).

“The new book Immortality warns against the quest for eternal life…” (Reason)

“We all know the adage that dogs are man’s best friend. And we’ve all heard heartwarming stories about dogs who save their owners—waking them during a fire or summoning help after an accident. Anyone who has ever loved a dog knows the amazing, almost inexpressible warmth of a dog’s companionship and devotion. But it just might be that dogs have done much, much more than that for humankind. They may have saved not only individuals but also our whole species, by “domesticating” us while we domesticated them.

One of the classic conundrums in paleoanthropology is why Neandertals went extinct while modern humans survived in the same habitat at the same time. (The phrase “modern humans,” in this context, refers to humans who were anatomically—if not behaviorally—indistinguishable from ourselves.) The two species overlapped in Europe and the Middle East between 45,000 and 35,000 years ago; at the end of that period, Neandertals were in steep decline and modern humans were thriving. What happened?

…In every respect, modern humans surpassed Neandertals. In fact, the
greater success of modern humans was so clear that… the human population increased tenfold over
the 10,000-year overlap period. Modern humans thrived and Neandertals
did not—even though Neandertals had lived in the European habitat for
about 250,000 years before modern humans “invaded.” Why weren’t
Neandertals better adapted to their environment than the newcomers?

There is no shortage of hypotheses. Some favor climate change, others
a modern-human advantage derived from the use of more advanced hunting
weapons or greater social cohesion. Now, several important and disparate
studies are coming together to suggest another answer, or at least
another good hypothesis: The dominance of modern humans could have been
in part a consequence of domesticating dogs—possibly combined with a
small, but key, change in human anatomy that made people better able to
communicate with dogs.” (American Scientist).

“Yesterday, 14-year-old Snigdha Nandipati from San Diego won the Scripps National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling the word guetapens, which means “ambush.” To celebrate Nandipati’s impressive achievement, here are 17 of the most interesting words from the Bee’s 87-year history.” (Mental Floss).

Have many of these have you even heard of before?

… to New York City readers. (Wikipedia)

“…North Carolina legislators are now tossing around bills that not only protect themselves from concepts that make them uncomfortable, they’re DETERMINING HOW WE MEASURE REALITY.” (Plugged In, Scientific American Blog Network).

A thoughtful debate between Sam Harris and Bruce Schneier. In the end, Schneier succinctly summarizes what is wrong with racial profiling:

“There are other security concerns when you look at the geopolitical

context, though. Profiling Muslims fosters an “us vs. them” thinking

that simply isn’t accurate when talking about terrorism. I have always

thought that the “war on terror” metaphor was actively harmful to

security because it raised the terrorists to the level of equal

combatant. In a war, there are sides, and there is winning. I much

prefer the crime metaphor. There are no opposing sides in crime; there

are the few criminals and the rest of us. There criminals don’t “win.”

Maybe they get away with it for a while, but eventually they’re caught.

“Us vs. them” thinking has two basic costs. One, it establishes that

worldview in the minds of “us”: the non-profiled. We saw this after

9/11, in the assaults and discriminations against innocent Americans who

happened to be Muslim. And two, it establishes the same worldview in

the minds of “them”: Muslims. This increases anti-American sentiment

among Muslims. This reduces our security, less because it creates

terrorists—although I’m sure it is one of the things that pushes a

marginal terrorist over the line—and more that a higher anti-American

sentiment in the Muslim community is a more fertile ground for terrorist

groups to recruit and operate. Making sure the vast majority of

Muslims who are not terrorists are part of the “us” fighting terror,

just as the vast majority of honest citizens work together in fighting

crime, is a security benefit.

Like many of the other things we’ve discussed here, we can debate how

big the costs and benefits I just described are, or we can simplify our

system and stop worrying about it.

One final cost. Security isn’t the only thing we’re trying to optimize;

there are other values at stake here. There’s a reason profiling is

often against the law, and that’s because it is contrary to our

country’s values. Sometimes we might have to set aside those values,

but not for this.”

(Sam Harris)

I think I’m good with my commas. It just seems intuitive to me. Punctuation errors have a close relationship to imprecision of thought, but people are not given permission to use their common sense when they are taught grammar and punctuation. There is also, as the article points out, a relationship with voicing a sentence internally while you are writing it. Notice your pauses. Here’s a rundown of how to think about some comma decisions. (Ben Yagoda, NYTimes)

“The US Department of Homeland Security has released a list of the keywords and phrases the agency monitors online to find potential threats. Obviously posting “Al Queda” and “dirty bomb” online will get the government to start looking at you real closely, but “pork” and other oddly normal words are also on the list.

In response to a freedom of information request, the department posted its Analyst’s Desktop Binder (a manual for the agency’s security analysts) containing this hotlist. The keywords cover domestic security, HAZMAT and nuclear, health concern, infrastructure security and other threats.

According to the Daily Mail, the Department of Homeland Security says it only uses this keyword list to look for genuine security threats, not signs of general dissent. Nobody wants Big Brother looking over her shoulder—and you shouldn’t have to feel like you need to censor yourself in this way—but if you’re particularly paranoid about the government spying on you, you might reconsider using too many of these keywords together when you post something online. Here’s the full list.” (Lifehacker).

‘On April 25, somewhere in the ocean off Great Britain, a remotely operated video camera near a deep sea oil rig caught a glimpse — at first it was just a glimpse — of an astonishing looking sea creature. It was a green-gray blob of gelatinous muscle, covered with a finely mesh-like textured skin, no eyes, no tentacles, no front, no back. It moved constantly, floating up to the camera, then it backed off and disappeared. The camera operator tried to find it, and then, suddenly, out of the darkness, back it came.’ (Krulwich Wonders… )

‘”Plants smell,” says botanist Daniel Chamovitz. Yes, they give off odors, but that’s not what Chamovitz means. He means plants can smell other plants. “Plants know when their fruit is ripe, when their [plant] neighbor has been cut by a gardener’s shears, or when their neighbor is being eaten by a ravenous bug; they smell it,” he writes in his new book, What a Plant Knows. They don’t have noses or a nervous system, but they still have an olfactory sense, and they can differentiate. He says there’s a vine that can smell the difference between a tomato and a stalk of wheat. It will choose one over the other, based on…smell!’  (Krulwich Wonders… )

“English spelling is notoriously inconsistent, and some have gone further, calling it “the world’s most awesome mess” or “an insult to human intelligence” (both these from linguists, one American, one Austrian). Maybe this is just because our alphabet only has twenty-six letters to represent more than forty phonemes, or distinctive speech-sounds, and some of those – notably q and x – are not pulling their weight, while j is not allowed to (see “John” but also “George”). If we gave s and z a consistent value (“seazon”) and extended this to k and c (“klok” and “sertain”), we could free c up for other duties, such as maybe representing ch, as once it did. But then there are all the vowels . . . .

How did this unsystematic system come about? And is it really that bad? Some say that there are only a few hundred deeply irregular words, but the trouble is that most of them are common…” (TLS).

Supreme Court Justice Stevens reviews legal scholar Jeremy Waldron‘s The Harm in Hate Speech:

“We should all do our best to preserve President Ford’s conception of America as a place where we can disagree without being disagreeable. An understanding of the arguments in Waldron’s book may help us to do so.” (The New York Review of Books).

Related articles

• the harm in free speech (3quarksdaily.com)
• The Harm in Hate-Speech Laws (txwclp.org)
• Should Hate Speech Be Outlawed? (3quarksdaily.com)
• One Man’s Case For Regulating Hate Speech (wnyc.org)
• Down With ‘Hate-Speech’ Laws (txwclp.org)
• Legal Theory Bookworm (lsolum.typepad.com)

“The Kardashian is a unit I proposed a few classes back as a measure of attention. Conceptually, the Kardashian is the amount of global attention Kim Kardashian commands across all media over the space of a day. In an ideal, frictionless universe, we’d determine a Kardashian by measuring the percentage of all broadcast media, conversations and thoughts dedicated to Kim Kardashian. In practical terms, we can approximate a Kardashian by using a tool like Google Insights for Search – compare a given search term to Kim Kardashian and you can discover how small a fraction of a Kardashian any given issue or cause merits.

(I choose the Kardashian as a unit both because I like the mitteleuropean feel of the term – like the Ohm or the Roentgen – and because Kardashian is an exemplar of attention disconnected from merit, talent or reason. The Kardashian mentions how much attention is paid, not how much attention is deserved, so naming the unit after someone who is famous for being famous seems appropriate. Should the unit be adopted, I would hope that future scholars will calculate Kardashians using whatever public figure is appropriate at the time for being inappropriately famous.)” ( …My heart’s in Accra via kottke)

“This is the saddest thing you’ll read all day. YOU LET THIS HAPPEN! YOU!”  (Buzzfeed via rich).

I dare you to make it to the bottom of the list in one piece.

“A fistulated cow has a hole cut into her side, providing access to the rumen, one of the four chambers of her stomach. A fitting, known as a cannula, lines the hole and has a removable plug allowing access to the inside of the rumen.” (via wikiHow).

Have you ever heard of these? Do you know there was a fistulated human?

Public views of the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision

“2012 is the first presidential election year since Citizens United. And that means ExxonMobil, the Koch brothers, and all of Wall Street can spend unlimited amounts of money to influence our democracy. Because the limitless spending has been protected by Supreme Court, the only way we can stop it is by amending the Constitution to reverse Citizens United and get big money out of politics for good.

That means we need to build overwhelming support from lawmakers at both the state and federal level. Right now we have an opportunity to convince politicians to get on board if they want to earn our votes before the election.

Sign the petition to your state legislators, governor, and members of congress asking them to declare their support for a constitutional amendment to get big money out of politics permanently.” (via MoveOn)

Related articles

• Big Money Corporate Spending in Elections May Lose in Supreme Court: Citizens United Ruling Faces Imminent Reversal (prweb.com)
• | Citizens United Constitutional Amendment backed by Vermont Legislature! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
• Want to Ditch Citizens United? A DIY Guide (motherjones.com)

(via Buzzfeed).

“Although the patient received a prescription for Prozac to treat her postpartum depression, her family also advised her to undergo an exorcism. She reportedly drank six glasses of a mixture of 1 kg table salt in a liter of water! That’s more than what’s in your average container of Morton salt.” (via The Neurocritic). Before she died, the patient’s serum sodium was 255, the highest ever reported. (Normal is below 140 or so.)

“If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs.

If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009.

Shortly after amphetamine-a-like stimulant drugs, largely based on variations on pipradrol and the cathinones appeared, and now ketamine-like drugs such as methoxetamine have become widespread.

Since 1997, 150 new psychoactive substances were reported. Almost a third of those appeared in 2010.

Last year, the US government banned several of these drugs although the effect has been minimal as the legal high laboratories have over-run the trenches of the drug warriors.” (via Mind Hacks).

“Tomorrow, a tyrannosaur will go up for auction in New York City. It shouldn’t. The Tarbosaurus – lot 49315 – was illegally collected and smuggled out of Mongolia.” (via Wired, with thanks to hal)

Tom Waits narrates a short film about “master of appropriation” John Baldessari. (via Youtube).

‘In 1987, he was invited to a White House dinner by Ronald Reagan. Few of the guests appeared to know who he was. During dinner, Nancy Reagan turned to him and asked what he’d done with his life to merit an invitation. Straight-faced, Davis replied: “Well, I’ve changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done except fuck the president?” ‘ (via Boing Boing)

 

Carl Elliott: “Wittgenstein is a notoriously difficult philosopher, and anyone approaching his work will inevitably ask themselves the question: Is it going to be worthwhile? It’s a common problem, of course. Do I really want to set aside the enormous amount of time and effort that it will take to understand Heidegger, or Derrida, or Deleuze? Often the answer is no (and for good reason). Part of what convinced me early on that Wittgenstein would be worth the effort was the portrait of Wittgenstein that emerges in Malcolm’s memoir: a man of fierce, extraordinary intelligence who was driven by the very deepest questions of human life.

And, of course, who despised being a philosophy professor.” (via The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Todd Gitlin

“I have no idea whether the three young men in Chicago charged with terrorism-related felonies are guilty as charged. Prosecutors say they are “members” of “the ‘Black Bloc’ group,” which is not so much a group that has members as a shifting population of enragés who take advantage of large demonstrations which they haven’t organized to break things. …

God knows, I was warning against violence on the fringe of peaceable assemblies in Chicago in 1968, and against violent agents provocateurs, who produce the same results. (They did.) I was recently worrying aloud that this week’s Chicago protests would be sabotaged by incendiaries, literal ones or not.

In the fullness of time, we’ll know more about what “22-year-old Brian Church, of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; 27-year-old Jared Chase, of Keene, N.H.; and 24-year-old Brent Betterly, who told police he resides in Massachusetts” were up to. In the meantime, Chicago’s police are trampling liberties and this is an unwarranted outrage.” (via The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Related articles

• From the Sixties to Occupy: A Conversation With Todd Gitlin (Part One) (vol1brooklyn.com)
• From the Sixties to Occupy: A Conversation With Todd Gitlin (Part Two) (vol1brooklyn.com)
• Chicago braces for major protests as NATO summit looms – msnbc.com (usnews.msnbc.msn.com)
• Demagoguery and the Responsibility of a Bureaucrat (delong.typepad.com)
• The Port Huron Statement: Still Radical at 50 (inthesetimes.com)
• Occupy enthralls world of academia Social scientists study protests through survey data, oral history (tech.mit.edu)

‘The paper “Industrial Society and Its Future” makes the case that modern technology has restricted freedom, ruined the environment, and caused untold human suffering. People have become overstressed and oversocialized. Humanity, the author writes, is at a crossroads, and we can either turn the clock back to a happier, more primitive time or face destruction.

The author has occasionally been praised for understanding the unforeseen consequences of technology in modern life. Kevin Kelly, a co-founder of Wired magazine who, even though he disagrees with the author’s conclusion, devotes a section of his latest book to these ideas, calling the paper “one of the most astute analyses” of technological systems he has ever read.

But for the most part the 35,000-word manifesto, first published in September 1995, has been dismissed as a rant.

That’s because the author is Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, who terrorized academics for nearly 20 years by sending a series of mail bombs that killed three people and injured 23. His demand, accepted by authorities in the hope that granting it would unearth clues to his whereabouts, was for a major newspaper to publish that manifesto.

Media profiles from the time of his capture, several months after the manifesto’s publication, paint Kaczynski as a kind of comic-book villain, a scruffy loner in a hooded sweatshirt whose failure in relationships drove him to insane acts of violence.

But when David F. Skrbina, a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Michigan here, read the manifesto in The Washington Post on the day it was published, he saw value in the message. He was particularly impressed by its clarity of argument and its references to major scholars on the philosophy of technology. He saw a thinker who wrongly turned to violence but had an argument worthy of further consideration. That argument certainly wasn’t perfect in Skrbina’s view, and he had some questions.’ (via The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Related articles

• These Insane Billboards Use The Unabomber And Osama Bin Laden As Arguments Against Global Warming (businessinsider.com)
• Big donors ditch rightwing Heartland Institute over Unabomber billboard (bfreenews.com)
• Conservative Think Tank Links Global Warming-Believing Liberals To The Unabomber (alan.com)

 

Reviewed by Joe Queenan: “In 299 sometimes illuminating, sometimes screwy, but always self-referential pages, Koestenbaum the Deconstructor attempts to link Harpo’s work with Adolf Hitler, Charles Dickens, Marcel Duchamp, John Milton, Richard Strauss, Gilbert and Sullivan, André Breton, Frederic Chopin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Frank O’Hara, Henri Bergson, Gérard de Nerval, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Arnold Schoenberg and John Kennedy Jr.” (via The Globe and Mail).

‘Antonin Scalia once said that no one had ever been executed in the US for a crime they didn’t commit. Well, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review is devoting its entire spring issue to the case of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed by the state of Texas in 1989 for the murder of Wanda Lopez. Their investigation reveals that another Carlos, Carlos Hernandez, actually committed the murder.’  (via kottke).

“We all believe that death is bad. But why is death bad? In thinking about this question, I am simply going to assume that the death of my body is the end of my existence as a person. But if death is my end, how can it be bad for me to die? After all, once I’m dead, I don’t exist. If I don’t exist, how can being dead be bad for me?” — Shelly Kagan, professor of philosophy at Yale University and author of Death, published last month by Yale University Press (via The Chronicle of Higher Education).

“An innocuous-seeming U.S. Air Force press release. A serendipitous satellite image in Google Earth. Snapshots from a photographer on assignment at a Spanish air base. The crash of an Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bomber in the United Arab Emirates. These are some of the fragments of information that Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti has assembled to reveal the best picture yet of the Pentagon’s secretive war in the Arabian Peninsula and East Africa.

In a series of blog posts over the past two weeks, Cenciotti has described in unprecedented detail the powerful aerial force helping wage Washington’s hush-hush campaign of air strikes, naval bombardments and commando raids along the western edge of the Indian Ocean, including terror hot spots Yemen and Somalia. Cenciotti outlined the deployment of eight F-15Es from their home base in Idaho to the international air and naval outpost at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, north of Somalia.

Over the years there have been hints of the F-15s’ presence in East Africa, but “their actual mission remains a (sort-of) mystery,” Cenciotti writes. Based on the evidence, he proposes that the twin-seat fighter-bombers — one of the Air Force’s mainstay weapon systems in Afghanistan — are dropping bombs on al-Qaida-affiliated militants in Yemen. If true, that means the U.S. intervention in the western Indian Ocean is far more forceful, and risky, than previously suggested.” (via Wired).

‘Most of us have done it – told someone their performance was great when it was in fact woeful. But whose ego were we protecting? Theirs or our own? A new study has teased these possibilities apart by inviting 263 undergrad participants to read and provide feedback on an essay by another student on media violence and aggression.’ (via BPS Research Digest). 

It’s Winter in New York

and I’m flyin’ the friendly sky

and I can’t seem to make up my mind

O my melancholy baby

I’m undecided now

for you took away my heart

and left me with the hesitation blues

Can’t seem to make up my mind

you know you know

you could be my jazz baby

beyond the blue horizon

you could even be my satin doll

until I wouldn’t even know what time it is

O baby you stir my fire

I’m just sayin’ gimme time gimme time baby-face

’cause I’ve got the hesitation blues

and this poem is for you

You could be my Tokyo

even by my Janis my Billie

and bayybee I could be your Bobby McGee

but I’m still tryin’ to tame the lion for real

doin’ the money-musk farewell to whiskey

and stompin’ at the Pink Pony

so even tho the heat is on

and I’m moanin’ buried alive in the blues

afraid but thinkin’

of a second time around

I just can’t make up my mind

knowin’ there’ll never be another you

it’s as simple as that

just one of those things

like blues in the nite

I think I’ll have to get outta town

go about 500 miles away

all boogied out and bewildered

so for now I’m just sayin’

I’m undecided now

but remember

love can move mountains

and this poem is for you

— Herschel Silverman

“One of the universe’s greatest injustices is that poets, whose minds dwell far beyond the middling realities of the mundane world, have to worry about making a living. Poetry—even more than other arts—is a notoriously unprofitable endeavor, and in recent history great poets have spent their weekdays working as dreamy doctors, unlikely insurance salesmen, disaffected journalists—the list goes on. It’s probably safe to assume, however, that among them there was only one candy store owner, and that’s Herschel “Hersch” Silverman, who is turning 86 this year.” (via Tablet Magazine).

”Portrait of Dr. Gachet (1st version)” 1890

‘It is hard to pinpoint when exactly Vincent van Gogh crossed over from being a mere titan of modern art to a general symptom of our culture—a painter whose name adorns bottles of vodka and whose supposedly liberating madness is regarded with worshipful reverence. Twenty-five years ago, his paintings ushered in the era of stratospheric prices for leading Modernists, with the sale of “Sunflowers” for $39.7 million and “Irises” for $52.9 million—at the time, three- and fourfold increases over the previous world record for any work of art. Not long after that, Japanese industrialist Ryoei Saito set a new mark again by paying $82.5 million for “Portrait of Dr. Gachet” and then suggested that he might have it cremated and buried with him.

But despite continual invocation in exhibitions, movies and books, little of the legend of mad Vincent withstands serious scrutiny. If anything characterizes Van Gogh’s intensely felt landscapes and portraits, the critic Robert Hughes long ago observed, it is lucidity, not lunacy. And the scrupulous recent biography by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, while continuing the tradition of viewing the artist’s work as an expression of his “fanatic” personality, nevertheless concludes that his untimely death by a gunshot wound was more likely an accident than a raving suicide. What is perhaps more surprising is that almost as many questions surround the art as the life. In the past two decades, museums around the world have quietly downgraded some 40 works formerly attributed to the artist, and doubts have been raised about even highly sought-after paintings like the record-breaking “Sunflowers.” ‘ (via WSJ.com).

Related articles

• How Van Gogh went from being an abject failure to a hero (macleans.ca)
• Autumn Landscapes by Van Gogh (artsnapperrecs.wordpress.com)
• Museum discovers ‘new’ Van Gogh painting (cnn.com)

The Moral Limits of Markets: “…[H]ow long will it be before a severely cash-strapped government will be tempted to sell people-killing licenses? There are sure to be people out there who would pay to shoot, say, a condemned murderer. One could add to the fun by setting the the murderer free in the fields, and the shooters could go after him in helicopters — an updated version of the Roman circus where gladiators dispose of those already given the thumbs-down. Come to think of it: what about creating a market in killing Taliban, allowing people to buy an opportunity to do so from a drone-control center in the safety of Texas? The variations and possibilities are legion. But if (as I hope we do) we think these are horrible suggestions, then we think that there are moral limits to markets…” (via The Barnes & Noble Review).

‘Contrary to myth, Christianity’s concept of marriage has not been set in stone since the days of Christ, but has constantly evolved as a concept and ritual. Prof. John Boswell, the late Chairman of Yale University’s history department, discovered that in addition to heterosexual marriage ceremonies in ancient Christian church liturgical documents, there were also ceremonies called the “Office of Same-Sex Union” (10th and 11th century), and the “Order for Uniting Two Men” (11th and 12th century).’ (via anthropologist)

“You wouldn’t know it, not right away, but there is something strange about this picture. It’s a sunset, yes, but notice the blush of color right above the sun. It’s blue. And as you look up, the blue fades into a faint rose or pink.

Now think about the sunsets you’ve seen, how often the sky can turn golden, or orange, sometimes pink, red, but when you look up, away from the setting sun, those colors fade back to a pale, twilight blue? It’s rare to see a sunset dipped in blue.

So this photo is a puzzle: it’s blue where the red should be and red where the blue should be. Why?” (via Krulwich Wonders… : NPR).

Tikal

“In a striking find, archaeologists in Guatemala report the discovery of a small building whose walls display not only a stunningly preserved mural of a brightly adorned Mayan king, but also calendars that destroy any notion that the Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012… The mural is the first Mayan painting found in a small building instead of a large public space. And it’s also the oldest known preserved Mayan painting. ” (via Washington Post).

So if you were planning to rack up massive amounts of credit card debt in the waning part of the year, think again.

Related articles

• The Mayans must surely be laughing at us. No, mocking us! (atwistedcrownofthorns.com)
• Late Night FDL: Mayan Art and Their Remarkably Accurate Calendar (my.firedoglake.com)

Timeless Photography of Past and Present: Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose (via WebUrbanist)

“On May 8th, the people of North Carolina voted in support of Amendment One, a constitutional amendment that discriminates against LGBT people, couples & their families. In protest, the Democratic National Convention Committee should MOVE its convention (September 2012) to a state that upholds values of equality & liberty, and which treats ALL citizens equally.” (via Change.org).

Hans Baldung Grien, Witches, woodcut, 1508.

“A month after the authorities began taxing Romania’s witches and fortunetellers on their trade, Parliament is considering a new bill that would subject them to fines or even prison if their predictions do not come true. Superstition is taken seriously in Romania, and officials passed the tax bill in an effort to increase revenues. The new bill would also require witches to have permits and provide their customers with receipts, and it would bar them from practicing near schools and churches. Witches argue they should not be blamed for the failure of their tools.” (via NYTimes with thanks to rich)

“…[M]embers of the animal kingdom dig the 9.7-inch tablet too — particularly a clan of six orangutans at the Miami Zoo.

At the Miami Zoo’s Jungle Island, handlers are interacting with orangutans using the iPad. The apes use the tablet to identify items they’re familiar with, and express their wants and needs. This is done primarily through an app designed for autistic children that displays an array of object images onscreen.

“We’ll ask them to identify ‘Where’s the coconut?’, and they’ll point it out,” Linda Jacobs, who oversees the Jungle Island program, told Wired. “We want to build from that and give them a choice in what they have for dinner — show them pictures of every vegetable we have available that day, and let them pick, giving them the opportunity to have choices.”

Orangutans are very intelligent, but lack voice boxes and vocal cords, which can make communication difficult. Up until now, zoo keepers have been using sign language to communicate with them. Using the iPad gives the orangutans another form of communication with humans, provides them with mental stimulation, and also gives those who don’t know sign language a chance to interact with humans.” (via Wired.com).

“The fight for fairness and equal treatment under the law for all Americans took a critical step forward today when President Obama went on record stating that he believes the freedom to marry should be extended to same sex couples. Please join us in thanking him.” (via American Civil Liberties Union)

NFL conferences

“The NFL is done for the year, but it is not pure fantasy to suggest that it may be done for good in the not-too-distant future. How might such a doomsday scenario play out and what would be the economic and social consequences?

By now we’re all familiar with the growing phenomenon of head injuries and cognitive problems among football players, even at the high school level. In 2009, Malcolm Gladwell asked whether football might someday come to an end, a concern seconded recently by Jonah Lehrer.

Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist. The original version of Napster no longer exists, largely because of lawsuits. No matter how well a business matches economic conditions at one point in time, it’s not a lock to be a leader in the future, and that is true for the NFL too. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.

The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits….” (via Grantland).

‘Claude is 100 times bigger than a standard UK shore crab. Yet he is still a juvenile and will grow to double his weight. Claude was caught off the coast of Tasmania last month, but was sold to the Sea Life group along with two other Tasmanian giant crabs.’ (via Mail Online, with thanks to lloyd).

‘…[W]hen the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date… This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It’s that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts.

But some of his most interesting work has to do with power dynamics. He says that by analyzing language you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status. “It’s amazingly simple,” Pennebaker says, “Listen to the relative use of the word “I.” What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word “I” less….. We use “I” more when we talk to someone with power because we’re more self-conscious. We are focused on ourselves – how we’re coming across – and our language reflects that….’ (via NPR).

“Why did guys stop wearing headgear in midcentury America? Think Of A Three Letter Word Beginning With ‘I’ “.  (via Krulwich Wonders… : NPR, with thanks to Si). Krulwich describes the theory of his father, who was a hatmaker. By the way, for all who care, I have gotten back into headwear in my dotage (and I don’t mean baseball caps).

…You Put Your Hand in the LHC Beam? (via Life’s Little Mysteries).

Every day

I see or hear

something

that more or less

kills me

with delight,

that leaves me

like a needle

in the haystack

of light.

It was what I was born for –

to look, to listen,

to lose myself

inside this soft world –

to instruct myself

over and over

in joy,

and acclamation.

Nor am I talking

about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,

the very extravagant –

but of the ordinary,

the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.

Oh, good scholar,

I say to myself,

how can you help

but grow wise

with such teachings

as these –

the untrimmable light

of the world,

the ocean’s shine,

the prayers that are made

out of grass?

— Mary Oliver

“Astronomers have gathered the most direct evidence yet of a supermassive black hole shredding a star that wandered too close.

Supermassive black holes, weighing millions to billions times more than the Sun, lurk in the centers of most galaxies. These hefty monsters lay quietly until an unsuspecting victim, such as a star, wanders close enough to get ripped apart by their powerful gravitational clutches.

Astronomers have spotted these stellar homicides before, but this is the first time they can identify the victim. Using a slew of ground- and space-based telescopes, a team of astronomers led by Suvi Gezari of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md., has identified the victim as a star rich in helium gas. The star resides in a galaxy 2.7 billion light-years away.” (via HubbleSite)

Lunar perigee and apogee apparent size comparison

“The full Moon has a reputation for trouble. It raises high tides, it makes dogs howl, it wakes you up in the middle of the night with beams of moonlight stealing through drapes. If a moonbeam wakes you up on the night of May 5th, 2012, you might want to get out of bed and take a look. This May’s full Moon is a “super Moon,” as much as 14% bigger and 30% brighter than other full Moons of 2012.

The scientific term for the phenomenon is “perigee moon.” Full Moons vary in size because of the oval shape of the Moon’s orbit. The Moon follows an elliptical path around Earth with one side (“perigee”) about 50,000 km closer than the other (“apogee”). Full Moons that occur on the perigee side of the Moon’s orbit seem extra big and bright.” (via NASA Science).

Related:

• Get ready to be moonstruck (again) this Saturday (news.cnet.com)
• Moon at perigee this weekend (go.theregister.com)
• Overstated in orbit – Sydney Morning Herald (drugstoresource.wordpress.com)
• The Biggest Supermoon in Years is Coming Saturday Night (blogs.smithsonianmag.com)
• Super Full Moon Expected Saturday Night (fox2now.com)

Antonin Scalia

Anders Breivik

David Barash, University of Washington psychologist: “What to do with psychopaths? They’re the Anders Breivik’s, the Ted Bundy’s, the people who kill without remorse, sometimes for sport, profit, out of boredom, or for no particular reason at all, their despicable actions lubricated by a literally inhuman lack of empathy. And, as I noted earlier, there is no known treatment for psychopathy.

For all of my oft-expressed lefty political positions (on war – especially nuclear weapons – social justice, environmental protection, health care, etc.) the more I know about psychopathy the more readily my opinion on one issue at least converges with such hanging judges as the right-wing lunatic Antonin Scalia. Thus, even though I am against the death penalty generally, believing that the state shouldn’t kill people in an effort to demonstrate that people shouldn’t kill people, I’m not so sure I feel that way when it comes to clearly diagnosed, murderous psychopaths.

Given that psychopaths appear to derive their behavior from nervous systems that function differently than the rest of us, they raise an interesting question: Can such people be held legally responsible for their actions? To tell the truth, I don’t really care. To my mind, psychopaths are so dangerous (and intractable) that I’m much less concerned about their rights than about our rights to be protected from their depredations.” (via The Chronicle of Higher Education).

Related:

• Female Psychopaths (psychologytoday.com)
• The psychopath among us (psychopathresistance.wordpress.com)
• Psychopath Vs Sociopath (mademan.com)
• The Psychopath and the Rest of Us (jl10ll.wordpress.com)
• Psychopaths are Inconsistent and Contradictory (phoenixsphere.wordpress.com)
• The psychopath: Facts and research resources (drjezphillips.wordpress.com)

…you’re in the wrong room. (Google search)

Have you heard about this?

“BPA is a chemical used in something that passes through our hands every day, the cash register receipt. But even though Canada has declared BPA to be toxic, many companies continue to use this chemical in receipt paper manufacturing as well as in many other common everyday household items. Why haven’t companies quit using BPA in their products; after all does BPA really pass through a person’s skin?

Does BPA really get absorbed through contact with your skin?

Recent research has proven that this harmful chemical really does pass through your skin and can be absorbed into your blood stream. In the case of cash register receipt paper, BPA is in a powdered form that coats the paper and then can be rubbed off onto your skin. The pores in your skin can absorb the chemical and then it can be transmitted throughout your body through your blood stream.” (via Yahoo! Voices ). 

Perhaps it is not a stage of decline but a crowning achievement of human evolution? (via The Washington Post.)

Related:

• Middle Age Is the Secret Weapon of Mankind (patospapa.wordpress.com)
• 10 biggest puzzles of human evolution (newscientist.com)
• Middle-aged prodigies: Seven poster children over 40 (newscientist.com)
• Good news if you’re middle-aged! You’re at evolution’s peak, according to scientists (dailymail.co.uk)
• Paul Vallely: That’s me – at the pinnacle of evolution (independent.co.uk)
• Why the middle-aged are most impressive life-forms of all time (thesun.co.uk)
• The Advantages of the Middle-Aged Brain (ideas.time.com)
• I’m loving being middle aged (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)
• The Middle-Aged Man (lewrockwell.com)

‘Did Neanderthals sing? Is there a “music gene”? Two scientists debate whether our capacity to make and enjoy songs comes from biological evolution or from the advent of civilization.’ (via The Atlantic).

The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop… – YouTube.

Kooser was recovering from cancer and a crisis of faith in poetry when he began to take early morning walks and was inspired to begin sending a friend short poems on postcards. This is one. It is National Poetry Month and today is Poem in Your Pocket Day. If you like this poem, print it out, carry it around in your pocket today, pass it around, unfold it at some time and share it. Or do so with a different poem.

The quarry road tumbles before me

out of the early morning darkness,

lustrous with frost, an unrolled bolt

of softly glowing fabric, interwoven

with tiny glass beads on silver thread,

the cloth spilled out and then lovingly

smoothed by my father’s hand

as he stands behind the wooden counter

(dark as these fields) at Tilden’s Store

so many years ago. “Here,” he says smiling,

“you can make something special with this.”

— Ted Kooser (thanks, Barbara)

Courtesy of the incomparable pipes of Grace Slick, backed by Jorma’s soaring guitar. Jefferson Airplane on the Dick Cavett Show on 08-19-1969, the day after Woodstock. If they paid attention to the lyrics, this might have been the end of the line for the Airplane’s credibility with some Cavett viewers (and the beginning of their cred for others). (via Dangerous Minds). [Do these terms mean anything to you: Grace Slick? Jefferson Airplane? Dick Cavett? Woodstock? ‘Up against the wall, motherfucker’?]

“If you visit a Northwest ocean beach this summer, you’ll likely run across objects from last year’s Japanese tsunami.

The things you’ll likely see include milk jugs, detergent bottles, tooth brushes and bottles for water, pop or juices with Japanese stamps, marks and labels. Perhaps a soccer ball or a volleyball — two that washed up on an Alaskan island have been claimed by their Japanese owners.

The things you are highly unlikely to see are human remains, refrigerators or anything else that would have to be sealed to float or can come apart, like bigger parts of houses. Months on the ocean will breakup anything with parts, experts say.” (via KPLU News for Seattle and the Northwest).

 

Paul Krugman: “So Mitt Romney gave a speech at a closed Ohio drywall factory, which he tried to use as a symbol of Obama’s economic failure. The symbolism was perfect — not as an illustration of Obama’s failure, but as an illustration of just how stupid Romney thinks we are.

Even regular reporters noticed that the factory in question closed under, yes, George W. Bush — a fact Romney failed to mention, although his campaign scrambled to cover for him afterwards.

What I didn’t see mentioned was the point that this was a drywall factory — that is, a supplier of a product largely used in home construction. It’s one thing to say that Obama should have revived the economy as a whole; it’s another to say that he should have brought back the housing bubble!

Finally, why should we believe that Romney’s policies — basically tax cuts for the rich, as usual — would yield great economic results? Well, I guess you can point to Bush’s example; how did his administration at this point compare with Obama? From BLS data:

You can offer various excuses for Bush’s record, I guess. But on the face of it, what possible reason is there to think that Bush-like policies would be an improvement?” (via NYTimes.com).

“While baboons can’t read, they can tell the difference between real English words and nonsensical ones, a new study reports.” (via NYTimes).

The name of the author is the first to go

followed obediently by the title, the plot,

the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel

which suddenly becomes one you have never read,

never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor

decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,

to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye

and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,

and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,

the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,

it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,

not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river

whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,

well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those

who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night

to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.

No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted

out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

 — Billy Collins

Very funny. How many of these have happened to you? (via The New Yorker)

“As you educate yourself about your own talent and ambitions, you graduate from doing a task right to doing the right task. It takes some experience to realize that a lot of work is better left undone. It might be busywork that is performed out of habit, or it might be work that is heading in the wrong direction. Working smart means making sure you are spending your time on jobs that are effective and that actually need to be done.” (via Smarterware).

“I’m typically a year or two behind any cultural trend, so you probably already know about gender-reveal parties. I first heard of them over the weekend: a couple, strangers to me, had invited friends and relatives over to bite into cupcakes at the same instant and share the moment when the blue or pink custard inside would inform them all of the sex of the baby. (The sonogram result had gone from lab to baker without being seen by anyone else, including the parents-to-be.) Other couples choose different methods of revelation: grip the knife together and cut into a cake with blue or pink filling. Open a sealed box that releases pink or blue helium balloons. Then put the scene on the Web so that everyone not invited can participate vicariously.

These events are becoming more and more popular. The first video of a gender-reveal party was posted on YouTube in 2008, but in just the last six months almost two thousand have been uploaded. You can watch one from last month. (Spoiler alert: it’s a girl.)

Maybe it was the context—I happened to hear about the gender-reveal party in a rundown inner-city café full of ex-felons who were having a very hard time finding jobs—but my initial take was incredulity trending negative. These parties seem to marry the oversharing of Facebook and Instagram with the contrived ceremonies that modern people in search of meaning impose on normal life events: food journaling, birthday parties for grownups, workout diaries, birth-experience planning. (One birth-planning center offers a “baby gender selection kit” involving three safe and natural steps that turn sex itself into a gender-reveal party.)

In the case of gender-reveal parties, couples take a private moment made possible by science and oblige others to join in, with the result—as in so many invented rituals of our day—that the focus turns from where it ought to be (in this case, the baby) to the self. At a bris or christening, the emotional emphasis falls on the arrival of a new life in the embrace of family and community. At a gender-reveal party, the camera is on the expectant father tearing up at the sight of pink cake.

That’s the nature of manufactured customs and instant traditions. They emerge from an atomized society in order to fill a perceived void where real ceremonies used to be, and they end by reflecting that society’s narcissism. Is it too much to say that gender-reveal parties are a mild symptom of cultural despair?” (via The New Yorker)

“Last Friday, …we asked readers to propose a single English word that should be eliminated from the language. Suggestions were made via Facebook or Twitter, with the hashtag #tnyquestion. We started the contest with high hopes that readers would help to streamline the language, but the first wave of responses was not auspicious…” (via The New Yorker).

Some of the scurrilous suggestions are not surprising, but the runaway favorite is.

 

The Forty-Year Itch (Adam Gopnik):  “So it seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past. (And the particular force of nostalgia, one should bear in mind, is not simply that it is a good setting for a story but that it is a good setting for you.)” (via The New Yorker).

Here’s something I said on FmH ten years ago today:

“In case any FmH readers were wondering how I’ve come by my opinionated gall, it may have something to do with the fact that I turn 50 years old today. (Others may be thinking I probably shouldn’t be doing this at my age…). And my son turns eight today…”

So today my son is eighteen, and I’ve put on a few years too. Thanks to everyone for all the wonderful birthday greetings.

‘Dmitri Krioukov, a senior research scientist at UCSD, successfully appealed his failure-to-stop ticket using a physics and math argument that ultimately swayed a San Diego judge.

In the paper, entitled “The Proof of Innocence,” Krioukov offered a series of equations and graphs to show that it was physically impossible for him to have broken the law, as an officer claimed.

The judge was “very, very smart,” Krioukov told The Times. “She got my point, I think, very precisely.”

Krioukov compared the problem to the way a person sees a train approaching from the platform and thinks it is moving slowly, when in fact it is barreling down the track. Using math and physics, Krioukov determined that a car moving at a constant speed can appear to move in the same way as a car that is moving fast but stops for a short time and then accelerates again.

In other words, a car that appears to be moving at a constant speed through a stop sign could have actually stopped at the stop sign, before speeding up again.’ (via LATimes).

Levon Helm performing with The Band. Hamburg, May 1971.

Sad news. Levon Helm is near death, according to this note posted on his website by his family:

“Dear Friends,

Levon is in the final stages of his battle with cancer. Please send your prayers and love to him as he makes his way through this part of his journey.

Thank you fans and music lovers who have made his life so filled with joy and celebration… he has loved nothing more than to play, to fill the room up with music, lay down the back beat, and make the people dance! He did it every time he took the stage…

We appreciate all the love and support and concern.

From his daughter Amy, and wife Sandy”

The Band‘s brown album would be one of my ten desert island discs, for sure, and always has heavy rotation on my iPod. My best friend, if anything a more intense fiend for the Band, and I were always planning to get to one of the Midnight Rambles Helm had been holding on his farm. Sorrowfully, not to be. Saving grace is that he is soon to join Richard Manuel and Rick Danko in the Angel Band. (via Levon Helm Studios, with thanks to abby for the original heads-up).

And: Levon Helms’ finest musical moments. (via Recordonline)

“Exactly one hundred years ago Sunday, an ocean liner struck a block of ice and sank in the North Atlantic. The story of the ocean liner has been told hundreds of times. This story is about the block of ice.

[These] photos … are quite possibly the only known photographic evidence of the actual iceberg that struck the Titanic. Understandably, nobody had bothered to snap any photographs while the ship was actually sinking, so it’s impossible to make an absolutely confirmed positive identification. But both photographs feature the telltale sign of a collision with a ship, and likely a recent one at that: a streak of red paint.” (via Wired)

“A massive genetics study relying on fMRI brain scans and DNA samples from over 20,000 people has revealed what is claimed as the biggest effect yet of a single gene on intelligence…” (via New Scientist).

But that is not the most significant aspect of this finding. The effect, although real, was miniscule, accounting for less than 2 points in IQ. So, is it any surprise that the authors conclude that, to the extent that genetics influences intelligence, it is a function of the interplay of multiple genes, not just one?

“An incredibly stunning solar flare erupted from the sun’s surface, throwing charged particles and searing plasma millions of miles out into space on Apr. 16.

NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory captured data from the flare — a medium-sized M-class event — which was turned into a movie by Steele Hill, media specialist at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The blast was not directed at the Earth and is unlikely to hit any of the planets in our solar system….

The sun is currently entering a time of renewed activity, following a quiet period in its 11-year solar cycle. Peak action is expected from early- to mid-2013. Though it is predicted to be one of the least active cycles in the last 100 years, we have already witnessed several massive flares this year.” (via Wired).

Michael Apted

‘The latest installment of the Up Series of documentary films is due out in the UK in May. The films have followed the development of fourteen British children since 1964 with a new film appearing every seven years…the participants are now 56.

…

This may be the last film in the series…director Michael Apted will be 78 when the next film is due and he’s unwilling to pass it off to someone else to finish.” (via kottke) 

Any documentary lover and any Anglophile (I count myself as both) should have been following this fascinating and unprecedented series of films.

Language Log discusses the New York Times’ relationship with obscenity. Update here. 

“The New York Times won two Pulitzer Prizes on Monday, for its reporting on Africa and for an investigative series on obscure tax code provisions that let the wealthiest Americans and corporations avoid paying taxes. And in a sign of the changing media landscape, online news outlets made a significant mark among the winners, with The Huffington Post and Politico capturing their first Pulitzer Prizes.

Also notable this year was the absence of prizes in two categories. The Pulitzer Prize Board at Columbia University in New York, which administers the awards, did not name a winner in the editorial writing category and more notably declined to name a winner of the coveted prize for fiction. The last time no winner was named for fiction was in 1977.” (via NYTimes).

Related:

• Pulitzer Committee Confirms: Editorial Writing Is Worthless [Media] (gawker.com)
• Pulitzer prizes announced; no fiction? (newsday.com)