3D representation of brodmann areas

“It has not been know exactly how ECT works. It is known that ECT reduces brain activity and raises seizure threshold (makes it less likely to have a seizure). This implies that overall neuronal activity is reduced, so perhaps ECT is inhibiting overactivity in a part of the brain that is driving the depression. That hypothesis is supported by a recent study that uses fMRI scanning to look at brain activity in nine patients with major depression before and after ECT. They found:

A comparison of pre- and posttreatment functional connectivity data in a group of nine patients revealed a significant cluster of voxels in and around the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortical region (Brodmann areas 44, 45, and 46), where the average global functional connectivity was considerably decreased after ECT treatment (P < 0.05, family-wise error-corrected). This decrease in functional connectivity was accompanied by a significant improvement (P < 0.001) in depressive symptoms

Once way to interpret this result is that some patients with major depression have overactive connectivity between that part of the brain that generates the emotion of depression and the part of the brain involved in cognition and concentration. In these patients, therefore, their depressed mood has a significant effect on their thoughts and ability to concentrate. ECT appears to reduce this hyperconnectivity, which should significantly reduce the symptoms of depression.

This is all consistent with prior research on depression, and makes good sense. Still, it’s a small study that needs to be replicated and the whole question further explored.” (via NeuroLogica Blog ).

“When traveling across the United States, it sometimes feels like the locals are speaking a whole different language. That’s where the Dictionary of American Regional English comes to the rescue. The last installment of this staggering five-volume tome, edited by Joan Houston Hall, was published last month, and let me tell you, it’s a whoopensocker.

In celebration of slang, here’s a list of 19 delightful obscure words from around the U.S. that you’ll want to start working into conversation.” (via Mental Floss).

“A blind woman who did not realise the novel she was writing was blank after her pen ran out has been saved after a police force used forensic techniques to recover the words. Forensics experts agreed to use a special scientific process to recover what Trish Vickers had written by examining the dents she had made in the pages.

Mrs Vickers, 59, was left devastated when she learned that her pen had run out and there was nothing on the first 26 pages of the book. She lost her sight seven years ago through diabetes and decided to write a novel to pass the time and keep her mind active. She quickly penned the opening chapters while using a system of elastic bands to keep the lines separated on the pages of paper she was using. She waited for her son Simon to visit so he could read it back to her. But when he arrived he had to tell her that the pages were blank.

Incredibly, however, the manuscript was recovered after the family took it to their local police HQ and asked for help. Forensic experts worked in their spare time to read the indentations left on the A4 pages using a system of lights. It took five months of painstaking work, but the forensic team was able to recover the whole text – and they said how much they had enjoyed it and couldn’t wait for the rest. A Dorset police spokesman said a member of staff had completed the work during her lunch hours.” (via Telegraph.UK, with thanks to Steve)

“The wind map is a personal art project, not associated with any company. We’ve done our best to make this as accurate as possible, but can’t make any guarantees about the correctness of the data or our software. Please do not use the map or its data to fly a plane, sail a boat, or fight wildfires…” (via Wind Map)

Related:

• Wind and water current maps by van Gogh (kottke.org)
• Live, Interactive Wind Energy Map is a Thing of Beauty (ecogeek.org)
• This Undulating US Wind Map Is Utterly Hypnotic [Maps] (gizmodo.com)
• Beautiful Interactive Animated Wind Map of the U.S. (treehugger.com)
• QuickThing15: dazzling wind map (itsallonething.com)

Nietzsche, summer 1899

‘Henri is the anti-Hello Kitty, a morose French feline who spends his time dissecting the absurdity of his daily grooming rituals and the despair of his solitary existence. Oh, and sometimes he updates his Facebook page. “I suppose that’s my lot in life,” he sighs. “To be watched endlessly, but never understood.” After seeing this, you’ll either immediately click to get to Henri’s first video or spend the afternoon wondering whatever happened to your Nietzsche-reading sophomore year roommate.’ (via msnNOW).

Richard Metzger wishes Samuel Beckett a happy 106th birthday on Dangerous Minds.

Single-exposure shot from the photographer’s apartment window. Wow. (Laughing Squid)

“One hundred years after Alan Turing was born, his eponymous test remains an elusive benchmark for artificial intelligence. Now, for the first time in decades, it’s possible to imagine a machine making the grade…. There is reason to believe that code kernels for the first Turing-intelligent machine have already been written.” (via Wired.com).

“…The Map of the Dead from Doejo… overlays zombie danger zones and potential supply locations on a Google Map of your local haunts. Red areas denote population centers where zombies might graze, while dark gray zones cover parks and wilderness areas, which are most likely to be walker-free. Supply locations are annotated with helpful descriptions — liquor stores, hospitals, gun shops, military bases and cemeteries are just some of the locations highlighted.”  (via Wired.com).

“Connecticut is set to become the fifth American state in as many years to abolish capital punishment, in one of the less commented trends in recent years. It would mean that over a third of the Union’s states are free of capital punishment, but the real coup would be if abolition campaigners won the battle in California, which will decide in November.”  (via Telegraph.UK)

…a phenomenon attracting more attention in the European press than the US.

“We’re probably in a bubble in terms of the way we talk about reading longer pieces of writing. But where did #longreads and longform come from?” (via BuzzFeed).

‘In what is being touted as “the world’s largest dream experiment,” a psychologist from Britain’s University of Hertfordshire is inviting volunteers to try using an iPhone app to control their dreams.’ (via GizMag).

”

“A very happy birthday to the great Paul Krassner (left, with Tuli Kupferberg and unidentified party)! The father of the underground press (although he demanded a paternity test), editor of The Realist, Yippie co-founder and inspiration to two generations of rabble-rousers, turns 80 today.” (via Dangerous Minds)

Review of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone by Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist at New York University:

“…[S]ingle living [is] not a social aberration but an inevitable outgrowth of mainstream liberal values. Women’s liberation, widespread urbanization, communications technology, and increased longevity—these four trends lend our era its cultural contours, and each gives rise to solo living. Women facing less pressure to stick to child care and housework can pursue careers, marry and conceive when they please, and divorce if they’re unhappy. The “communications revolution” that began with the telephone and continues with Facebook helps dissolve the boundary between social life and isolation. Urban culture caters heavily to autonomous singles, both in its social diversity and in its amenities: gyms, coffee shops, food deliveries, laundromats, and the like ease solo subsistence. Age, thanks to the uneven advances of modern medicine, makes loners of people who have not previously lived by themselves. By 2000, sixty-two per cent of the widowed elderly were living by themselves, a figure that’s unlikely to fall anytime soon.

What turns this shift from demographic accounting to a social question is the pursuit-of-happiness factor: as a rule, do people live alone because they want to or because they have to?”  (via The New Yorker).

Related:

• Why More Americans Are Living Alone | PBS NewsHour | March 27, 2012 | PBS (rajcairnsreport.wordpress.com)
• Is Living Alone the New Shacking Up? (theatlanticwire.com)
• 20-Something Solo Dwellers Are Actually Helping The Economy (businessinsider.com)
• The New Normal: Living Alone (brandtstandard.com)
• Going Solo (csmonitor.com)
• Are Single People Discriminated Against? (thedailybeast.com)
• Better single than married? New book suggests yes (ctv.ca)

“Tom Lehrer – mathematician, satirist, singer-songwriter and hero to geeks taking chemistry tests everywhere – was born on April 9, 1928, making today his 84th birthday! …Mr. Lehrer, from all of the geeks who loved (and were educated by) your songs as kids, and who now teach those songs to our own children – thank you, and a very happy birthday to you!” (via Wired.com).

Related:

• Tom Lehrer “The Masochism Tango” (pinkbananaworld.com)
• Presty the DJ for April 9 (steveprestegard.com)
• Happy Birthday, Tom Lehrer!!! (kidzrockinc.co)

“Across the country, more than 7,700 daily temperature records were broken last month, on the heels of the fourth warmest winter on record.

While it might be time to lie on a blanket in the park, climate scientists are worried. They say all these sunny days are actually an extreme weather event, one with local and global implications.” (via NPR).

Related:

• March Shatters Heat Records (myfoxphoenix.com)
• Weather Is ‘Stunning’ Evidence Of Global Warming (huffingtonpost.com)
• Start of 2012, March shatter U.S. heat records (washingtontimes.com)
• It’s already been a very record-breaking hot year (kansascity.com)

Thirty-four years after California’s Proposition 7 sailed through, making the state’s death penalty one of the toughest in the country, the two men who were the driving force behind its crafting are leading the charge to repeal the death penalty in that state. Their reasons are partly moral, but good politics as well. (via New York Times)

Death-penalty

Related:

• Connecticut may be latest state to repeal death penalty (claimyourinnocence.wordpress.com)
• Texas Prisoner Burials Are a Gentle Touch in a Punitive System – NYTimes.com (policyabcs.wordpress.com)

“There’s no easy way to say it. You’ve probably been playing Hangman wrong your entire life.” (via  Lifehacker). And, it turns out, I have.

Related:

• Help>>Hangman Project. I am a beginner to c++. (daniweb.com)
• Hangman online (str17.wordpress.com)
• Great blog post on optimal Hangman strategy. TL;DR our usual… (benjaminste.in)
• Hangman tips (andrewgelman.com)

Won’t make you look like Robocop: “The good news: Google has started testing those augmented reality glasses we heard about earlier in the year. The bad news: if the artsy shots of the test units are to be believed, they won’t make you look like some ’80s cinematic anti-hero. In fact, the things wouldn’t look too out of place in a New York Times style story. The software giant let it be known that, while it hasn’t quite got a sale date on the wearables, it’s ready to test ProjectGlass amongst the non-augmented public. The company is also looking for feedback on the project, writing in a post today, “we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input.” Want some idea of what ProjectGlass might offer the public? Sure, it’s not quite as good as strapping a pair on your own eyes, but interested parties can check out a video of Google’s vision…”  at the link (Engadget).

“Violence Transformed is an annual series of visual and performing arts events that celebrate the power of art, artists and art-making to confront, challenge and mediate violence.

Based primarily in the center and surrounding neighborhoods of Greater Boston and drawing upon the creative energies of artists throughout New England, Violence Transformed documents the ways in which our diverse communities harness art’s potential to effect social change and materially transform our environments.

Violence Transformed also represents a unique collaboration among artists, activists, museum professionals, academics, and community service providers from diverse segments of the greater Boston area. We share the conviction that art and art-making are essential to the well-being and vibrancy of our communities.”

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“I am the world crier, & this is my dangerous career… I am the one to call your bluff, & this is my climate.” —Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972).

“I wrote a program that takes any text and tries to find any accidental limericks that might be hiding within (based on syllable counts and rhyme, ignoring punctuation and intent).

Limericks have a fairly loose form. The rhyme scheme is always AABBA, but the syllable count can be anything along the lines of 7-or-8-or-9/7-or-8-or-9/5-or-6/5-or-6/7-or-8-or-9. And as if that weren’t loosey-goosey enough, they can have either anapaestic meter (duh-duh-DUM, duh-duh-DUM) or amphibrachic meter (duh-DUM-duh, duh-DUM-duh)!

…(So) Nantucket is set to look for limericks that are AABBA (rhyme scheme) and 8/8/5/5/9 (syllable count per line). It currently ignores meter, but I may add that requirement in later. It also only looks at words through an American English accent.” (Danielle Sucher, via Neal Stephenson)

“James McCartney Looking to Form Band with Sean Lennon, Dhani Harrison and Zak Starkey…” (via Cool Album of the Day). Do those names mean anything to you? Do you expect that the music would be very good?

Think Again : “Everybody knows that there’s just one moon orbiting the Earth. But a new study by an international team of astronomers concludes that everybody is dead wrong about that.” (via NPR).

21 of them, in the Telegraph.UK’s opinion. On the other hand, I don’t know much about architecture but about half of these inspire admiration and wonder, not revulsion or derision, in me.

‘

At Cult of Mac, John Brownlee writes about Girls Around Me, a creepy app that exploited geolocation APIs to make it easy to stalk women.

These are all girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare. Girls Around Me then shows you a map where all the girls in your area trackable by Foursquare area. If there’s more than one girl at a location, you see the number of girls there in a red bubble. Click on that, and you can see pictures of all the girls who are at that location at any given time. The pictures you are seeing are their social network profile pictures.

See also Charlie Sorrel’s guide to kill the Facebook and FourSquare features that enable apps like this.’ (via Boing Boing, with thanks to kerry).

Tell your daughters, wives, significant others, friends about this.

Exiles mourn latest in string of self-immolation suicide protests: “Dozens of Tibetans have self-immolated in the past year to protest Chinese oppression. In addition to dousing themselves with fuel, some drink kerosene, so that the flames will explode from within.” (via Boing Boing). Why is this phenomenon being largely ignored by the world press?

Related:

• Wave of Tibet Immolations Among History’s Biggest (abcnews.go.com)
• Opinon: Why Tibetans burn themselves (cnn.com)
• Tibet Protester Who Set Himself Alight Dies (news.sky.com)
• Thousands mourn at Jamphel Yeshi’s funeral (photoblog.msnbc.msn.com)
• Wave of Tibet immolations among history’s biggest (thehimalayantimes.com)
• Horrific‚ anti-China protests become Tibet’s norm (thehimalayantimes.com)
• Tibetan Monk, 20, Latest to Self-Immolate in China (abcnews.go.com)

“MIT researchers have shown, for the first time ever, that memories are stored in specific brain cells. By triggering a small cluster of neurons, the researchers were able to force the subject to recall a specific memory. By removing these neurons, the subject would lose that memory.As you can imagine, the trick here is activating individual neurons, which are incredibly small and not really the kind of thing you can attach electrodes to. To do this, the researchers used optogenetics, a bleeding edge sphere of science that involves the genetic manipulation of cells so that they’re sensitive to light. These modified cells are then triggered using lasers; you drill a hole through the subject’s skull and point the laser at a small cluster of neurons.” (via ExtremeTech).

‘Think of Jennifer, or as we like to call her, “Jen.” Jen of the dazzling smile, Jen of the gorgeous chin, Jen with her hair down, Jen tousled, Jen as Rachel, Jen with Brad; Jen without Brad, Jen with Vince, Jen at the Oscars, and, of course, Jen as a neuron in the medial part of the temporal lobe.

Maybe you missed that last Jen.’ (via Krulwich Wonders… : NPR).

A review of T. M. Luhrmann’s When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God: “Luhrmann is a well-qualified guide: an anthropologist specializing in esoteric faiths. Her dissertation was on witch-and-warlock cults in contemporary England. Later, she wrote a book on the Parsis, a Zoroastrian community in India. Her most recent book was the highly praised Of Two Minds, a study of psychiatric residents and their handling of patients who had visions, among other problems. Almost always, Luhrmann has written with sympathy, not scorn, for these convinced people.

Nevertheless, she is a scientist, and believes in evidence. She spent two years as a full-time member of an evangelical church in Chicago, and another two years in a congregation in Palo Alto. (Those are the cities where she was teaching during that period, first at the University of Chicago, then at Stanford.) Both churches were part of the Vineyard Christian Fellowship, which came together in California in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, and now has about fifteen hundred congregations around the world. Most of the members of the churches that Luhrmann attended were white, middle class, college-educated, and centrist. They weren’t Pentecostals (that is, most of them didn’t speak in tongues or heal the sick). But neither were they just conservative Christians. In Luhrmann’s words, they placed “a flamboyant emphasis on the direct experience of God.” If you made contact with him, they believed, he would become your intimate, someone “who loves and cuddles you.

How do you find this God?” (via The New Yorker)

A review of War and the American Difference by Stanley Hauerwas: “…the American version of modernity is uniquely defined by two special errors: the illusion that modern freedom and Christian witness are reconciled in America and the belief that America’s wars are redemptive, replacing the truly redemptive sacrifice of Christ with the blood sacrifices of soldiers who kill and die from one American generation to the next.

These two errors become one error: American patriotism becomes a false form of Christian piety, and killing for the nation becomes a dark and devilish project of killing for God. War, as Hauerwas puts it, is America’s altar.” (via First Things)

Related:

• Stanley Hauerwas on Abortion (mikefriesen05.wordpress.com)
• What Would A Just War Look Like? (mikefriesen05.wordpress.com)

April 2 has been designated as World Autism Awareness Day (did you know?). But Steve Silberman explains why that is not enough:

“No matter where you stand on the rising numbers, there is one undeniably shocking thing about them. Once that 1-in-88 kid grows to adulthood, our society offers little to enable him or her to live a healthy, secure, independent, and productive life in their own community. When kids on the spectrum graduate from high school, they and their families are often cut adrift — left to fend for themselves in the face of dwindling social services and even less than the meager level of accommodations available to those with other disabilities.

Meanwhile, the lion’s share of the money raised by star-studded “awareness” campaigns goes into researching potential genetic and environmental risk factors — not to improving the quality of life for the millions of autistic adults who are already here, struggling to get by. At the extreme end of the risks they face daily is bullying, abuse, and violence, even in their own homes…”

He goes on to ask a group of self-advocates, parents and teachers how to go beyond once-a-year ‘awareness’ to create a truly neurodiverse society. (via NeuroTribes)

“As an American, I demand the basic freedom to walk my streets in safety — including the freedom to go to the store and buy Skittles without getting shot.” (via Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence; thanks, laurie)

“The recent remark by Mitt Romney’s senior adviser Eric Fehrnstrom that upon clinching the Republican nomination Mr. Romney could change his political views “like an Etch A Sketch” has already become notorious. The comment seemed all too apt, an apparent admission by a campaign insider of two widely held suspicions about Mitt Romney: that he is a) utterly devoid of any ideological convictions and b) filled with aluminum powder.

The imagery may have been unfortunate, but Mr. Fehrnstrom’s impulse to analogize is understandable. Metaphors like these, inexact as they are, are the only way the layman can begin to grasp the strange phantom world that underpins the very fabric of not only the Romney campaign but also of Mitt Romney in general. For we have entered the age of quantum politics; and Mitt Romney is the first quantum politician.” (via NYTimes)

A home-made heroin substitute is having a horrific effect on thousands of Russia’s drug addicts. (via Independent.UK)

Related:

• Desomorphine aka Krokodil The drug that eats junkies (disclose.tv)
• Catching the krokodil (mindhacks.com)
• Graphic effects of NEW DRUG! Krokodil rots flesh off bones! (disclose.tv)
• Crocodile: Drugs And Consequences (undeadinfinity.wordpress.com)
• Krokodil (pandemicpgh.com)

“The origins of April Fools’ Day are shrouded in mystery, experts say.” (via National Geographic).

“A controversial type of pesticide linked to declining global bee populations appears to scramble bees’ sense of direction, making it hard for them to find home. Starved of foragers and the pollen they carry, colonies produce fewer queens, and eventually collapse.

The phenomenon is described in two new studies published March 29 in Science. While they don’t conclusively explain global bee declines, which almost certainly involve a combination of factors, they establish neonicotinoids as a prime suspect.

“It’s pretty damning,” said David Goulson, a bee biologist at Scotland’s University of Stirling. “It’s clear evidence that they’re likely to be having an effect on both honeybees and bumblebees.” (via Wired)

“Poor little guy. Starting in the fall, Canada’s government will stop producing the lowly Canadian penny. The fact that pennies are expensive to make and are virtually worthless in today’s economy led them to fall victim to Ottawa’s budget cuts. The government says the measure will save around $11 million a year because each new penny costs 1.6 Canadian cents to produce. (One Canadian dollar is essentially equal to $1 in the U.S.) And a Canadian penny buys you only about 1/20th of what it could when it was introduced in 1858: A penny that could hypothetically buy a whole loaf of bread then would only buy a few bites of bread now.

Canadian consumers will be able to use the 1¢ coins indefinitely, but the government is encouraging businesses to start rounding to the nearest nickel. Lest people forget their arithmetic lessons, the government has put out a fact sheet on proper rounding techniques.

The Canadian move, which cites costs and inflation, follows the long-held logic trumpeted by many economists to get rid of 1¢ pieces in the U.S. Economist Stephen Dubner alone has nearly 20 entries on his Freakonomics blog begging for a U.S. penny death. “Can we please be next?” he wrote this morning after learning of Canada’s move.

A 2008 New Yorker article lays out the counterarguments that have prevented the penny’s seemingly inevitable extinction. There are objections to rounding, which one economist estimated could cost U.S. consumers as much as $1.5 billion over five years. Also, cutting out the penny may just put more reliance on the nickel—which is even more expensive to produce. In the U.S. loses 1.4¢ on each penny it makes and 6.2¢ on each nickel, according to Coin Update, an industry news source. Plus, plenty of Americans like pennies and their Honest Abe heritage. Those enthusiasts, along with industry lobbies, have rallied to support the coins when there has been movement to kill them.” (via Businessweek)

Anti-fascists mobilise against English Defence League summit in Denmark: “Hundreds of demonstrators will confront the English Defence League tomorrow as the far-right group holds its first ever European summit in a bid to set up a Continent-wide alliance of anti-Islamic organisations.

Danish activists claimed that as many as 4,000 anti-fascist activists would make their way to the town of Aarhus, where the meeting is due to take place tomorrow afternoon, from the UK, Denmark and Germany.

Organisers said they would march one hour before an EDL rally in the town, in what they predicted would be the country’s largest anti-fascist mobilisation in 15 years.” (via Independent.UK)

Image from the backscatter advanced imaging technology (AIT) machine used by the TSA to screen passengers. This is what the remote TSA agent would see on their screen.

A reader wrote to see if my audience would be interested in seeing this well-done infographic about TSA waste. (Thanks, Tony)  If you think the tax dollars you have contributed to funding the TSA have made you safer, I’ve got a bridge to sell you.

Related:

• You Don’t Have To Be A Criminal Sexual Deviant To Work For The TSA… But It Helps (mountainrepublic.net)
• Bruce Schneier hands former TSA boss his ass (boingboing.net)
• TSA Manager Arrested For Running Prostitution Ring (thedaleygator.wordpress.com)
• End the TSA! (virginiaconservative.wordpress.com)
• Prison Planet.com ” TSA Blocks Security Expert From Testifying To Congress (gunnyg.wordpress.com)
• Lawmakers call airport screeners ineffective, rude (mercurynews.com)
• TSA Employees: Tell Me Your Story (tsaoutofourpants.wordpress.com)
• Congressional Testimony on the TSA (schneier.com)

“…Searches are geospecific and social network-dependent. All of which is fine and useful, but that’s not what made us love Google’s search engine. The more the search engine — and the web more generally — adjust themselves to us, the less they represent a collective idea of what is known….” (via The Atlantic).

It is not a simple question, and it matters. Good discussion of why. (via Neurotic Physiology).

“Explorer-filmmaker reaches Mariana Trench on deepest ever solo sub dive.” (via National Geographic).

Josemaría Escriva

“In January 2002, prominent Catholics from around the world gathered in Rome to celebrate the Spanish priest who founded one of the church’s most conservative and devout groups, Opus Dei.The event drew cardinals, bishops and other powerful Vatican officials. And among those invited to speak was a future presidential candidate: Rick Santorum, whose faith had become so essential to his politics that on federal documents he listed the trip, paid for by an Opus Dei foundation, as part of his official duties as a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. In a speech at the gathering, Santorum embraced the ideas of Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriva, who had urged ordinary Catholics to bring an almost priestly devotion to Catholic principles in every realm of life and work.” (via The Washington Post, thanks to Perry).

Nederlands: Scheveningen Circusplein. Kunstwerk "Icarus" (1999) van Jan Steen, detail. The Hague/The Netherlands. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Using videogame controllers, an Android phone and custom-built wings, a Dutch engineer named Jarno Smeets has achieved birdlike flight. Smeets flew like an albatross, the bird that inspired his winged-man invention, on March 18 at a park in The Hague. “I have always dreamed about this. But after 8 months of hard work, research and testing it all payed off,” Smeets said on his YouTube page.” (via Wired.com).

‘ “Give me the child until he is seven, and I will show you the man.” This Jesuit maxim epitomises how many of us perceive religion: as something that must be imprinted on young minds.

The new science of religion begs to differ. Children are born primed to see god at work all around them and don’t need to be indoctrinated to believe in him (see “The God issue: We are all born believers”).

This is just one of many recent findings that are challenging standard critiques of religious belief. As we learn more about religion’s biological roots, it is becoming clear that secularists are often tilting at windmills and need to rethink.

Another such finding is that belief in a god or gods does appear to encourage people to be nice to one another. Humans clearly don’t need religion to be moral, but it helps (see “The God issue: Religion is the key to civilisation”).

An interesting corollary of this is a deeply held mistrust of atheists (see “In atheists we distrust”). In fact, atheists might consider themselves as unrecognised victims of discrimination. In a recent opinion poll, Americans identified atheists as the group they would most disapprove of their children marrying and the one least likely to share their own vision of American society. Self-declared atheists are now the only sizeable minority group considered unelectable as president.

Such antipathy poses a dilemma for opponents of religion, and may explain why “militant atheism” has failed to make headway.’ (via New Scientist).

 

The new issue of New Scientist, of which the piece linked above is the foreword, is “the God issue,” and is worth your time if you ever think about religion and its impact, or grip, on us, whether you believe or not.

“Earlier this month, organisers of a physics meeting requested that the Higgs boson – the still-hypothetical particle thought to endow other particles with mass – instead be referred to as either the BEH or scalar boson. The name change might seem esoteric, but it hints at a complex past – and trouble ahead over credit for the boson, if it is found.To understand, rewind about 50 years.” (via New Scientist).

“Recent much-publicized studies have claimed that scepticism about free will makes people behave less morally. “Disbelief in Free Will Increases Aggression and Reduces Helpfulness” as the title of one of hese papers puts it.

In his article (free pdf), British ‘independent researcher’ James B. Miles says that these experiments are flawed, because they didn’t distinguish between determinism (lack of free choice) and fatalism (lack of the ability to change events).

More fundamentally, though, Miles says that free will is used to justify things, such as punishment and poverty, that would otherwise be seen as scandalous…” (via Neuroskeptic).

 

“The Toynbee tiles (also called Toynbee plaques) are messages of mysterious origin found embedded in asphalt of streets in about two dozen major cities in the United States and four South American capitals.[1][2] Since the 1980s, several hundred tiles have been discovered. They are generally about the size of an American license plate, but sometimes considerably larger. They contain some variation on the following inscription: 

TOYNBEE IDEA

IN Kubrick’s 2001

RESURRECT DEAD

ON PLANET JUPITER.

Some of the more elaborate tiles also feature cryptic political statements or exhort readers to create and install similar tiles of their own.” (via Wikipedia)

NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is finding hundreds of new objects at the very edge of the electromagnetic spectrum. Many of them have one thing in common: Astronomers have no idea what they are. (via NASA Science).

“This close examination of Stanley Kubrick’s science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey theorises that Kubrick was working on this film with a “double narrative” structure. Thus, the imagery, set design and camera shots created a complex story all of their own that was separate, and sometimes in direct opposition to, the commonly accepted themes of the Arthur C. Clarke screenplay.

Ager’s work falls on just the right side of conspiracy-culture to be of interest to skeptics and conspiracist’s alike, and with this particular film analysis he is careful to avoid any “tin foil hat” readings of the text, which can be a major downfall of “critical” videos of this kind.

What Ager does posit is that Kubrick was working with a language of imagery that spoke directly to the subconscious and could be in contrast to the spoken words. This is more than a little believable when you take into account that Kubrick’s incredible talent and the huge amounts of time and effort that he spent on the various different aspects of his craft.” (via Dangerous Minds).

I haven’t watched this yet — waiting for a spare hour — but I am eager. I saw 2001 eleven times in the weeks after it came out in 1968 and several more times in the decades since. I think it was my introduction to having my mind blown, and it was also the occasion for my first work of film exegesis; I wrote a review about how profound it was for my high school newspaper, which I fantasized introduced my classmates to layers of meaning they otherwise would not have appreciated. Cocky me. I no longer recall what I said but perhaps I was responding to the unconscious narrative Ager posits here. I’ll see if it makes sense once I watch.

‘Just when you thought the religious right couldn’t get any crazier, with its personhood amendments and its attacks on contraception, here comes the academic left with an even crazier idea: after-birth abortion.

No, I didn’t make this up. “Partial-birth abortion” is a term invented by pro-lifers. But “after-birth abortion” is a term invented by two philosophers, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva.’ (via Slate)

“The UN special rapporteur on torture has formally accused the US government of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment towards Bradley Manning, the US soldier who was held in solitary confinement for almost a year on suspicion of being the WikiLeaks source.” (via guardian.co.uk)

“More often than not, neutrino experiments throughout history have turned up perplexing results. While most of these experiments didn’t get the high-profile attention that disputing Einstein provides, they’ve challenged scientists and helped them learn ever more about the natural world.

In this gallery, we take a look at some of the strangest historical neutrino results and the findings that still have scientists scratching their heads.” (via Wired.com)

Forget the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – we need a new system based on brain physiology, says psychiatrist Nick Craddock.

You don’t believe we should update the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) used to classify mental illness. Why not?

“There are many reasons we should pause. The DSM checklist of symptoms is not fit for purpose: its categories don’t map onto the emerging science of emotion and cognition, yet the DSM-5 rewriters plan to pull in more areas in the new categories and over-medicalise the situation further. Obviously the people rewriting DSM are not stupid, but the project is the wrong thing now. There are lots of great findings coming out of biology, neuroscience and psychology. We will need a new diagnostic system based on these…” (via New Scientist)

 

How Typing May Shape the Meaning of Words: ‘ “We know how a word is spoken can affect its meaning. So can how it’s typed,” said cognitive scientist Kyle Jasmin of the University of College London, co-author of a study about the so-called “QWERTY effect” in Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. “As we filter language, hundreds or thousands of words, through our fingers, we seem to be connecting the meanings of the words with the physical way they’re typed on the keyboard.”

The effect may arise from the fact that letter combinations that fall on the right side of the keyboard tend to be easier to type than those on the left.

“If it’s easy, it tends to lend a positive meaning. If it’s harder, it can go the other way,” Jasmin said.’ (via Wired.com).

“In the 21st century, it can feel as if the future has already arrived. But we’re only getting started. It’s fashionable to be pessimistic about our prospects, yet our species may very well endure for at least 100,000 years. So what’s in store for us?” (via New Scientist)

‘To an outsider, it might seem like stage-fighting with battery-powered lightsabers, but to Mr. Michael, it is aspiring righteous warriors communing with the Force, that energy that gives the Jedi his power and binds the galaxy. So what if the place attracts, as Mr. Michael said, “a bunch of ‘Star Wars’ dorks.” ‘ (via NYTimes)

“While we have systems in place for literary citation, image attribution, and scientific reference, we don’t yet have a system that codifies the attribution of discovery in curation as a currency of the information economy, a system that treats discovery as the creative labor that it is.

This is what The Curator’s Code is – a system for honoring the creative and intellectual labor of information discovery by making attribution consistent and codified, the celebrated norm.

It’s an effort to make the rabbit hole open, fair, and ever-alluring.” (via curator’s ǝpoɔ)

‘RepRap is a free desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic objects. Since many parts of RepRap are made from plastic and RepRap can print those parts, RepRap is a self-replicating machine – one that anyone can build given time and materials. It also means that – if you’ve got a RepRap – you can print lots of useful stuff, and you can print another RepRap for a friend…

RepRap was the first of the low-cost 3D printers, and the RepRap Project started the open-source 3D printer revolution. It is described in the video on the right.’ (via RepRapWiki).

Does anyone have one of these and want to print me out one?

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” is a grammatically valid sentence in the English language, used as an example of how homonyms and homophones can be used to create complicated linguistic constructs. It has been discussed in literature since 1972 when the sentence was used by William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University at Buffalo. It was posted to Linguist List by Rapaport in 1992. It was also featured in Steven Pinker’s 1994 book The Language Instinct. Read on to parse the sentence. (via Wikipedia).

Is it akin to a perpetual motion machine? Does it violate the first law of thermodynamics? No; it turns out that it sucks in ambient heat energy to make up the difference. Commercial application is unlikely, though. (via Wired UK).

”

The Japanese people will be recovering from this catastrophe for years to come. For those of us outside of Japan, however, it’s all too easy to forget. That’s why, to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami, GOOD will join the Japan Society of New York in observing a moment of silence led by Ambassador Shigeyuki Hiroki, Japan’s consul general in New York, at 2:46 p.m. this Sunday, March 11. We invite you to join us, wherever you are. At 2:46 p.m. in your time zone, take a minute to reflect on the incredible challenge facing Japan.” (via GOOD).

Many questions, no answers (via Winnipeg Free Press)

Maggie Koerth-Baker writes on Boing Boing:

“Yesterday, I got to host an eye-opening Q&A with Dan Edge, a PBS FRONTLINE producer who just finished a documentary about what happened at Fukushima during the first few days of the nuclear crisis there.

During that discussion, we touched a bit on the psychological impact all of this—the earthquake, the tsunami, the nuclear meltdowns—has had on the Japanese people. From studies of what’s happened to the people who lived near Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, we know that the fear and stress associated with these kinds of disasters can have complex and long-ranging health effects.

Today, Paul Voosen, a journalist with Greenwire, emailed me a story he wrote last year, during the first month of the Fukushima crisis, that delves into some of the science behind how disasters (and especially nuclear disasters) affect the human psyche. If you’ve already read it, it’s worth reading again.”

“Bruce Levine, a clinical psychologist, has written on Mad in America about his colleagues’ propensity for diagnosing anti-authoritarians with mental illness. Levine says diagnoses like oppositional defiant disorder, attention deficit hyperactive disorder and anxiety disorder are applied to people who question authority’s legitimacy by mental health practitioners who are, themselves, unconsciously deferential to authority.” (via Boing Boing)

China Miéville on the contradictions in modern London on the eve of the Olympics (via NYTimes)

Theologian Susannah Cornwall of Manchester: “…[T]hose who met and interacted with Jesus seem to have had no doubt that he was a man – but, crucially, this is not the same as certainty that he was biologically male. Most of us will meet people on a regular basis who identify as completely unremarkable men or women, but who also have an interest condition. There will hardly ever be any need for us to know about the specificities of someone else’s chromosomes, gonads, hormone levels or sex cells – but if we did, we might be surprised by the number of people whose physical sex varies in some way from what we consider “normal”.

Some of those who argue that women should not be consecrated as priests or bishops do so because they believe that there is something intrinsic to maleness which makes males able to govern and lead in a way females cannot. Others who oppose women priests and bishops argue that a priest or bishop somehow participates in Jesus’ own priesthood, standing in Jesus’ place, and that since Jesus was male, a female cannot take on this role.

However, I believe that most people who argue in this way never make the distinction between sex and gender which I have outlined above.” (via Boing Boing)

“Rush Limbaugh’s statement on Sandra Fluke was a textbook example of what not to say.” (via Slate).

Also: The Advertisers Sticking By Limbaugh

Advertisers really know their demographics. I would of course never listen to Rush Limbaugh and, with his latest offensive idiocy, was all set to stop patronizng his sponsors. But apparently they don’t want me as a customer either, because none of the advertisers on this list from The Atlantic Wire.have the least bit of appeal to me. The sole exception, and they say they do not really support Limbaugh, is Netflix.

Related:

• “People In My Position Never Apologize”: Is Rush Limbaugh Too Big To Fail? (mykeystrokes.com)
• Sandra Fluke Rebukes Rush Limbaugh’s Apology (pinkbananaworld.com)
• Jacoby: Rush needs better apology (bostonglobe.com)
• “From The Mouth Of A Bully”: Rush Limbaugh’s 53 Smears Against Sandra Fluke (mykeystrokes.com)
• If you believe Rush Limbaugh’s apology was ‘sincere,’ how’s that Tooth Fairy working out for you? (thehill.com)
• Rush Limbaugh Advertisers’ Exodus Hits 29 (newser.com)
• Sandra Fluke On Limbaugh Apology “I Don’t Think [It] Changes Anything” (alan.com)

“We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. A growing body of evidence from both science and history suggests that the eight-hour sleep may be unnatural.

In the early 1990s, psychiatrist Thomas Wehr conducted an experiment in which a group of people were plunged into darkness for 14 hours every day for a month.

It took some time for their sleep to regulate but by the fourth week the subjects had settled into a very distinct sleeping pattern. They slept first for four hours, then woke for one or two hours before falling into a second four-hour sleep.” (via BBC News).

26 Epic Retro Horror Movie Posters; how many of these have you seen? By my count, I’m 18:26. This collection includes my all-time favorite, The Crawling Eye (1958). (via WebUrbanist)

“…Military commanders pressure clinicians to issue unwarranted psychiatric diagnoses to get rid of troops.” (via NYTimes). In civilian psychiatry, as well, the status of personality disorder diagnoses is dubious. Especially when applied loosely, these diagnoses are little more than pejorative.

‘The Composites blog takes descriptions of literary characters and runs them through police composite sketch software to produce composite sketches… This is one of those “why didn’t I think of this?” projects…well done,’ says kottke.

Robert Krulwich: There are people who live long enough to create a link — a one-generation link — to figures from what feels like a distant past, and their presence among us shrinks history. When “Long Ago” suddenly becomes “So I said to him …,” long ago jumps closer.

There are many examples of people who shrink history this way. The blogger Jason Kottke has been collecting examples. He calls them “human wormholes,” because these people help us leap across space/time. Here are my favorites.’ (via NPR)

For instance:

— ”I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them other people’s money. I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn their money and provide for themselves and their families. The best way to do that is to get the manufacturing sector of the economy rolling.”

—

“(Same-sex marriage) is an issue just like 9-11. We didn’t decide we wanted to fight the war on terrorism because we wanted to. It was brought to us. And if not now, when? When the supreme courts in all the other states have succumbed to the Massachusetts version of the law?”

[via Addicting Info (thanks, jill)]

Hollywood Illuminati explains that Madonna’s Superbowl halftime show was actually an elaborate homage to Baphomet.

Evgeny Morozov: “The other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 — published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today — caught my eye. Celebrating the rise of the “cyberflâneur,” it painted a bright digital future, brimming with playfulness, intrigue and serendipity, that awaited this mysterious online type. This vision of tomorrow seemed all but inevitable at a time when “what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur.”

Intrigued, I set out to discover what happened to the cyberflâneur. While I quickly found other contemporaneous commentators who believed that flânerie would flourish online, the sad state of today’s Internet suggests that they couldn’t have been more wrong. Cyberflâneurs are few and far between, while the very practice of cyberflânerie seems at odds with the world of social media. What went wrong? And should we worry?” (via NYTimes.com)

‘Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft is en route to intercept a comet– and to make history. In 2014, Rosetta will enter orbit around comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenkoand land a probe on it, two firsts.

Rosetta’s goal is to learn the primordial story a comet tells as it gloriously falls to pieces.

Comets are primitive leftovers from our solar system’s ‘construction’ about 4.5 billion years ago. Because they spend much of their time in the deep freeze of the outer solar system, comets are well preserved—a gold mine for astronomers who want to know what conditions were like back “in the beginning.” ‘ (via NASA Science)

Doug Schoen: “Today’s jobs report that the unemployment rate has fallen from 8.5% to 8.3% while total nonfarm payroll employment rose by 243,000 in January is just one of many reasons why there is an increasing air of optimism in the White House.” (via Forbes).

“It took Vermont officials four years to notice a little creative editing by one or more inmates. Look at this police decal:

Look at the cow underneath the tree. Embedded within the cow’s spots is an image of a pig, which as the Burlington Free Press reminds us is the ’60s-era epithet used by protesters to refer to police.

Reuters reports that it was likely put there by inmates. The state, Reuters adds, “contracts with correctional facilities employing prisoners to make some print products, including the cruiser decals.” One or more inmates somehow accessed the computer program holding the image and rejiggered it. The quality assurance department failed to notice it and as far as the state police know, the modified decal was used on as many as 30 Vermont State Police cruisers.” (via NPR).

Self-guided bullet could hit laser-marked targets from a mile away: “A group of researchers at Sandia National Laboratories have built a prototype of a small-caliber bullet capable of steering itself towards a laser-marked target located approximately 2,000 meters (1.2 miles) away. The dart-like design has passed the initial testing stage… The four-inch (10 cm) long projectile is to be used with smoothbore arms, meaning ones with non-rifled barrels. Rifling involves cutting helical grooves in the barrel to give the bullet a spin that, thanks to the gyroscopic effect, improves its aerodynamic stability and accuracy. In a self-guided projectile, however, such spinning movement would prevent the bullet from reliably turning towards the target when in flight. For this reason, the group of researchers lead by Red Jones and Brian Kast decided to use a dart-like design that includes tiny fins to allow the projectile to fly straight, without a spin.” (via Gizmag).

“It turns out that if you didn’t grow up with Oreos and develop an emotional attachment to the cookie, it can be a weird-tasting little thing. And this started a whole process in the Chinese division of Kraft of rethinking what the essence of an Oreo really is.” (via Planet Money : NPR).

Psychologist L. Alan Sroufe,  professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development: “Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.”  (via NYTimes.com)

‘ “Chemical imbalance is sort of last-century thinking. It’s much more complicated than that,” says Dr. Joseph Coyle, a professor of neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. “It’s really an outmoded way of thinking.”

…Still, the story of serotonin remains. Why does it continue to have such a powerful grip on the popular imagination?’ (via NPR).

Related?

• New Research on the Antidepressant-Versus-Placebo Debate (healthland.time.com)
• How Does Prozac Work? (wired.com)
• Prozac in the water makes shrimp go crazy (thestar.com)
• ‘Prozac defence’ stands in Manitoba teen’s murder case (news.nationalpost.com)
• Serotonin cell discoveries mean rethink of depression (newscientist.com)
• What if the drugs don’t work? (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
• Serotonin: 9 Questions and Answers (webmd.com)
• Big Pharma’s ‘Antidepressants’ Don’t Work (lewrockwell.com)
• Longevity Proteins Linked To Anxiety (medicalnewstoday.com)
• Antidepressants used by 11 percent of Americans (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• Margot and the Nuclear So & So’s – “Prozac Rock” (donewaiting.com)
• Why Prozac Is Still a Mystery (bigthink.com)
• Fearless Youth: Prozac Extinguishes Anxiety by Rejuvenating the Brain (scientificamerican.com)
• Chemical imbalance myth takes a big public fall (no, antidepressants do NOT correct an imbalance of serotonin, nor do other psychiatric drugs correct anything at all) (beyondmeds.com)
• Psychiatry’s Grand Confession (victimsofatoscorruption.wordpress.com)
• Depression: How Long Should You Take Antidepressants? (webmd.com)

“False memories can be distinguished from real ones with a simple physiological test, report researchers from Germany.” (via Guardian.UK)

“The standout of this year’s Sundance and among the best films to play at the festival in two decades, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” isn’t an obvious studio-dependent title. Directed by Benh Zeitlin, who wrote the screenplay with Lucy Alibar, the film is a magical realist tale, as well as a hero’s journey, set in a gloriously mythologized part of southern Louisiana nicknamed the Bathtub. There, a 6-year old girl, Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis, a sensational find), lives in a state of grace and wonder with her hard-boozing father, Wink (Dwight Henry), amid wandering (and later cooked) chickens, stumbling drunks and rampaging creatures.

This is the first feature from Mr. Zeitlin, a Queens native who grew up in Westchester County, graduated from Wesleyan University and counts among his influences Mr. Malick, John Cassavetes and Emir Kusturica. After a stint working in the Czech Republic for another inspiration, the animator Jan Svankmajer, Mr. Zeitlin made his way, post-Katrina, to southern Louisiana, where he shot “Beasts” with a collective called Court 13. (“More of an idea than an organization,” as Mr. Zeitlin puts it, Court 13 takes its name from a Wesleyan squash court that he and some friends commandeered.) Shot on Super 16-millimeter film, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” is hauntingly beautiful both visually and in the tenderness it shows toward the characters, who live on the edge and perhaps somewhat in Hushpuppy’s head.” (via NYTimes)

“The Navy is testing an autonomous plane that will land on an aircraft carrier. The prospect of heavily armed aircraft screaming through the skies without direct human control is unnerving to many.” (via LA Times)

‘Whenever someone plays all coy like “I know something you don’t know, nah-nah-na-nah-nah” it’s always maddening, but when the subject of the withheld secret is disgraced former Speaker of the House, Newton Leroy Gingrich, and the holder of the keys to that mystery taunting the American electorate is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—who was on a House ethics committee that investigated Gingrich for a year and who looked at thousands of pages of documents—it’s got to be pretty explosive.

So far Pelosi has twice—not once, but twice—come right out and point-blank told the country that she knows “something” about Gingrich that insures that he will never become the President of the United States. As in never, ever, it ain’t gonna happen, no way, Jose, never, nope, sorry, uh-uh.’ (via Dangerous Minds).

“In a bitter skirmish over the definition of depression, a new report contends that a proposed change to the diagnosis would characterize grieving as a disorder and greatly increase the number of people treated for it.” (via NYTimes).

As readers know, I have done intermittent coverage of the proposed revisions to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), the official ‘bible’ of psychiatric diagnoses in US practice and currently awaiting its 5th edition. While lat week’s scandal was about the possible contraction of the definition of autism (which has many parents and patient advocates up in arms about the potential loss of qualifications for services for thousands), most of the suggested changes have one thing in common. They broaden the criteria for various disorders or create new, questionable diagnoses. In so doing, many more aspects of emotional life become medicalized or pathologized and subject to treatment with powerful drugs. Proponents of these changes claim they will allow the more rapid, preemptive identification of people deserving treatment. Critics claim that millions would be labelled mentally ill for behaviors previously conceived as normal, with insufficient evidence that they would benefit from treatment and needless exposure to the malignant side effects of powerful medications. Not to mention lining the pockets of Big Pharma.

‘Hollywood is acting like the Big Bad Wolf by portraying the animals as violent man-eating killers in the controversial action thriller The Grey, wildlife experts are complaining.Liam Neeson’s big-budget gore-fest, which shows a wolf pack picking off plane-crash survivors on the Alaskan tundra, couldn’t be further from the truth, said Maggie Howell, managing director of the Wolf Conservation Center in Westchester County.“Wolves don’t hunt humans — they actually shy away from them,” said Howell, a biologist.’ (via NYPost).

No matter how much Neeson appeals to you, please boycott this film.

In 2006, Adam Sternbergh wrote a memorable and snarky piece in New York magazine, “Up With Grups“, disparaging “40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old”:

“This is an obituary for the generation gap. … It’s not about a fad but about a phenomenon that looks to be permanent. It’s about the hedge-fund guy in Park Slope with the chunky square glasses, brown rock T-shirt, slight paunch, expensive jeans, Puma sneakers, and shoulder-slung messenger bag, with two kids squirming over his lap like itchy chimps at the Tea Lounge on Sunday morning. It’s about the mom in the low-slung Sevens and ankle boots and vaguely Berlin-art-scene blouse with the $800 stroller and the TV-screen-size Olsen-twins sunglasses perched on her head walking through Bryant Park listening to Death Cab for Cutie on her Nano.”

But, while there are certainly some ‘grown-ups’ whose undying affectation of youth culture comes from some pitiful Peter Pan complex, I think the explanation often has more to do with this phenomenon. As Kurt Anderson observed recently in Vanity Fair, popular culture simply may not have changed that much in the past twenty years or so:

“Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.” (via kottke)

It seems to me that this isn’t across the board, of course. Music and casual dress seem to have changed less than, for instance, literary style, cuisine, automobile design, or film, off the top of my head. It is no accident that Sternbergh focuses mostly on what his so-called ‘grups’ wear and listen to.

A mind-boggling piece on Tatiana and Krista, 4-year old sisters in rural British Columbia, which mounts a serious challenge to our “one-person-one-mind” convictions:

“Twins joined at the head — the medical term is craniopagus — are one in 2.5 million, of which only a fraction survive. The way the girls’ brains formed beneath the surface of their fused skulls, however, makes them beyond rare: their neural anatomy is unique, at least in the annals of recorded scientific literature. Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus is a kind of switchboard, a two-lobed organ that filters most sensory input and has long been thought to be essential in the neural loops that create consciousness. Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.” (via NYTimes).

“This month, researchers are inaugurating the Event Horizon Telescope, a project that will try to take the first detailed pictures of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.

This observation would be a remarkable achievement, underscoring the progress that has been made in black-hole research in just the last few decades. As recently as the 1970s, astronomers still argued over whether black holes were theoretical constructs or real physical objects. They now have ample evidence that black holes are not only real, but abundant in the cosmos.” (via Wired)

“…a growing subculture of Americans who refer to themselves informally as “preppers.” Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm.

They are following in the footsteps of hippies in the 1960s who set up communes to separate themselves from what they saw as a materialistic society, and the survivalists in the 1990s who were hoping to escape the dictates of what they perceived as an increasingly secular and oppressive government.

Preppers, though are, worried about no government.” (via Reuters).

Related:

• ‘Preppers’ the New American Subculture? (thewesternexperience.com)
• Preppers: suburban survivalists (boingboing.net)