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“It’s Self-Defeating Behavior That Done Them Wrong”
“Of all human psychology, self-defeating behavior is among the most puzzling and hard to change. After all, everyone assumes that people hanker after happiness and pleasure. Have you ever heard of a self-help book on being miserable?
So what explains those men and women who repeatedly pursue a path that leads to pain and disappointment? Perhaps there is a hidden psychological reward…” (New York Times )
An Absence of Class…
…in the G.O.P.: “Some of the images from the run-up to Sunday’s landmark health care vote in the House of Representatives should be seared into the nation’s consciousness. We are so far, in so many ways, from being a class act.” — Bob Herbert (New York Times op-ed)
Snake oil?
Scientific evidence for popular health supplements depicted visually. The size of the ‘bubble’ for each supplement indicates its relative popularity, as measured by Google hits. Coloration indicates credibility of evidence. Of course, this is just the opinion of one source, but it largely parallels my own impressions from following the literature. (Information is beautiful)
Beyond the Box Tops
Paul Westerberg on the passing of Alex Chilton: “How does one react to the death of one’s mentor?” (New York Times op-ed)
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Hollywood movies follow a mathematical formula
Psychologist Professor James Cutting and his team from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, analyzed 150 high-grossing Hollywood films released from 1935 to 2005 and discovered the shot lengths in the more recent movies followed the same mathematical pattern that describes the human attention span. The pattern was derived by scientists at the University of Texas in Austin in the 1990s who studied the attention spans of subjects performing hundreds of trials. The team then converted the measurements of their attention spans into wave forms using a mathematical technique known as the Fourier transform.
They found that the magnitude of the waves increased as their frequency decreased, a pattern known as pink noise, or 1/f fluctuation, which means that attention spans of the same lengths recurred at regular intervals. The same pattern has been found by Benoit Mandelbrot (the chaos theorist) in the annual flood levels of the Nile, and has been seen by others in air turbulence, and also in music.’ Hollywood movies follow a mathematical formula.’ (phys.org via kottke)
Famous Movie Quotes Graphed
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/yapb_cache/underload_12.dp9uolnyy3ccossc880w0gogc.bxj7bs82axw0g448owg4gc8so.th.png' cannot be displayed]](http://flowingdata.com/wp-content/uploads/yapb_cache/underload_12.dp9uolnyy3ccossc880w0gogc.bxj7bs82axw0g448owg4gc8so.th.png "figure 'em out")
(FlowingData via kottke)
The Secret Society for Creative Philanthropy
Team creates biggest quantum object by factor of billions
‘Researchers have created a “quantum state” in the largest object yet.
Such states, in which an object is effectively in two places at once, have until now only been accomplished with single particles, atoms and molecules.
In this experiment, published in the journal Nature, scientists produced a quantum state in an object billions of times larger than previous tests.’ (BBC)
Feeling animals’ pain
‘Jonathan Balcombe believes that we have allowed intelligence to become the measure with which we determine how well to treat animals when what we should be using is how they feel.’ (New Scientist)
Clarence Thomas’s Wife Joins ‘Tea Party’
“The nonprofit run by Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, is likely to test notions of political impartiality for the court.” (LA Times) Thomas, a self-professed Rush Limbaugh fan, refers to her new constituents as “new American patriots.” Nice to see that Justice Thomas married someone who would not challenge his intellectual shortcomings.
French bread spiked with LSD in CIA experiment
‘A 50-year mystery over the ‘cursed bread’ of Pont-Saint-Esprit, which left residents suffering hallucinations, has been solved after a writer discovered the US had spiked the bread with LSD as part of an experiment.’ (Telegraph.UK via Boing Boing)
It’s money that matters
“If you like to think of America as The Greatest Country on Earth, and you’d rather not examine its claim to that title too closely, The Spirit Level will not be your favorite new book. On nearly every one of its 250-plus pages, a stark, unflattering graph shows the USA topping the charts among developed countries for some social ailment: drug use, obesity, violence, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, illiteracy. But authors Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, a pair of British social scientists, have another, more enlightening point to make. With striking consistency, they say, the severity of social decay in different countries reflects a key difference among them: not the number of poor people or the depth of their poverty, but the size of the gap between the poorest and the richest. (Boston Globe)
Weaponizing Mozart
Weaponizing How Britain is using classical music as a form of social control. “Britain might not make steel anymore, or cars, or pop music worth listening to, but, boy, are we world-beaters when it comes to tyranny. And now classical music, which was once taught to young people as a way of elevating their minds and tingling their souls, is being mined for its potential as a deterrent against bad behavior.” (Reason Magazine)
Related:
- Mozart the big stick for U.K. school (cbc.ca)
- Theory of optimal punishment, Stanley Kubrick edition (marginalrevolution.com)
Saluting Cops with One Finger
Legal, Not Advised: ‘…[An] Oregon man is suing suburban Portland cops (.pdf) over his use of the gesture, claiming civil rights violations. Twice he flipped them off for no apparent reason while driving and was pulled over each time — resulting in what he said was a “bogus” traffic citation that was later dismissed, and a tongue lashing he still remembers.
“The guy flew into a road rage,” Robert Ekas, a retired Silicon Valley systems analyst, said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Lawrence Wolf, a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney, said there was no law against flipping off cops. And in most instances when it leads to an arrest or conviction, the charges are dismissed. But the gesture invites police confrontation, he said.
“It’s certainly not the smartest thing one can do,” Wolf said.
American University legal scholar Ira Robbins has written a definitive paper on flipping the bird: “Digitus Impudicus: The Middle Finger and the Law.” (.pdf)…’ (Wired)
Giant Iceberg Collision as Seen From Space
“The collision in early February of the 60-mile-long B-9B iceberg with the protruding tongue of the Mertz Glacier in East Antarctica is captured here in a series of satellite radar images.
The crash created a second massive iceberg nearly 50 miles long and 25 miles wide, named C-28. The name means that it’s the 28th glacier since 1976 that has broken off from the quadrant of Antarctica that faces Australia.
The two icebergs have since drifted into a polynya, which is an area of open water that’s surrounded by sea ice but stays unfrozen for much or all of the year. The bergs are obstructing the ocean circulation created by the polynya, and could deprive local marine life of oxygen if they don’t move.
The images were taken by the synthetic-aperture-radar instrument aboard the European Space Agency’s Envisat satellite.” (Wired)
How Big Waves Go Rogue
“An extra-tall wave struck a cruise ship off the Mediterranean coast of Spain this week, claiming two lives and injuring one person on board. Though the wave may not qualify as a “rogue wave,” it could have been created by the same forces.” (Wired)
Related:
- Massive wave strikes cruise ship in Mediterranean, kills 2 (inquisitr.com)
- Cruise Ship Hit by Rogue 33ft Wave (VIDEO) (blippitt.com)
And:
World’s Biggest Recorded Tsunami
1720 feet-tall – Lituya Bay, Alaska, July 9, 1958 (geology.com). Yes, that’s 1720 feet, 1/3 of a mile high.
Washington Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage
‘Washington is now the sixth place in the nation where same-sex marriages can take place. Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont also issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.’ (New York Times)
24 Shakes
Wellesley College Tries to Read Complete Works of Shakespeare in 24-Hour Marathon. “On Friday, March 5, at 3 pm the students will launch “24 Shakes,” an all day and night literary adventure, as they read aloud all of Shakespeare’s works:14,000 lines, 154 sonnets and 39 plays. The event, which is free and open to the public, will take place in the Shakespeare House, the small Tudor cottage by the Davis Museum and Cultural Center on Wellesley’s campus.”
Huge Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic Too
‘Billions of bits of plastic are accumulating in a massive garbage patch in the Atlantic Ocean—a lesser known cousin to the Texas-size trash vortex in the Pacific, scientists say.
“Many people have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” said Kara Lavender Law, an oceanographer at the Sea Education Association in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. “But this issue has essentially been ignored in the Atlantic.”
The newly described garbage patch sits hundreds of miles off the North American coast. Although its east-west span is unknown, the patch covers a region between 22 and 38 degrees north latitude—roughly the distance from Cuba to Virginia…’ (National Geographic)
Related:
- A Sea of Plastics (usnews.com)
- New floating garbage patch found in Atlantic Ocean (telegraph.co.uk)
- Ocean Garbage Patch Found in the Atlantic Ocean (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)
- Study finds plastic trash collection in Atlantic (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- ‘Rubbish patch’ blights Atlantic (news.bbc.co.uk)
Republicans red-faced over fundraising on fear
‘US Republicans drew fire this week after the disclosure of an internal fundraising memo that portrays President Barack Obama as the Batman films’ crazed killer “The Joker.”
The Republican National Committee document, first revealed by the online politics publication Politico, also describes fanning fears that Obama is a socialist as a good way to get donors to open their wallets.
“What can you sell when you do not have the White House, the House or the Senate…? Save the country from trending toward Socialism!” it declares, urging fundraisers to harness givers’ “fear” and “reactionary” sentiments.
The document, a 72-page PowerPoint presentation, says wealthy donors can also be motivated by “ego-driven” appeals, peer pressure, and “tchochkes!!!!!!!!!” — inexpensive knick-knacks often given as rewards.
On page, headlined “The Evil Empire” — a former moniker for the Soviet Union — shows an Obama poster altered to make him look like The Joker from the 2008 Batman blockbuster “The Dark Knight” with the caption “socialism.”
It also likens Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to the “Cruella” villain from Disney’s “101 Dalmatians,” who hopes to turn the films’ titular animals into a fur coat, and compares Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to the bumbling animated dog “Scooby-Doo.” ‘ (AFP).
Now this is the high-minded incisive political debate I have been looking for on the American scene!
The Chile Earthquake Deformed The Earth And Shortened Our Days
“Megathrust quakes like Chile’s are so huge, and cause such a giant release of energy, that they change the shape of the Earth. In the case of Chile’s subduction quake, the planet became slightly denser and more compact. Mass was pulled closer to the Earth’s center as one plate was thrust under the other. And that affected the Earth’s spin. It made the planet spin slightly faster, to be precise, and shortened the length of the Earth day” (io9)
The mystery of the silent aliens
“Sixty years ago, space aliens were the preserve of lunatics and eccentrics, thanks to decades of sci-fi schlock, flying-saucer nonsense and Lowellian fantasies of Martian canals. Then, in 1950, came Enrico Fermi and his paradox – “Where the hell is everyone?” – and, 10 years later, the first attempts to put the search for ET on a scientific footing, courtesy of Frank Drake, who pointed a radio telescope at Tau Ceti and heard… silence.
Since then, a modestly funded programme to detect alien radio transmissions has stepped up a gear, and we have made significant astronomical discoveries pertinent to the question of alien life. Despite this, Fermi’s paradox has deepened, as the sheer size and antiquity of the universe has become increasingly apparent.
Today it is rare to meet an astronomer who doesn’t believe that the universe is teeming with life. There is a feeling in the air that light will soon be shed on some of science’s most fundamental questions: is Earth’s biosphere unique? Do other minds ponder the universe?
In April, the world will celebrate the quinquagenary of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, so it seems a good time to take stock of the silence. Three new books tackle the issue in three different ways. One, an immensely readable investigation of the SETI enterprise (with a surprising conclusion); the second, a technical guide to what we should be looking for and how; and the third, a left-field argument that the alien question has already been answered…” (New Scientist)
Depression’s Upside
Wonderful behavioral science writer Jonah Lehrer (Proust Was a Neuroscientist) writes for the New York Times Magazine on the idea that depression may be adaptive. It is not a new idea; I have followed the intriguing literature about possible evolutionary reasons for the persistence of depression ever since I was a psychiatric resident troubled by how readily we in the field want to obliterate any signs of the condition whenever our patients present with it. Some theories have focused on the advantages of resource preservation, given the social isolation, decreased motivation and lessened self-indulgence the depressed person displays. It has also been suggested that the depressive alteration in cognition, in the direction of impaired self-esteem, decreased sense of efficacy and control over one’s circumstances, and pessimism , may actually be more realistic, at least in some circulstances, than the rose-colored glasses with which we usually walk around.
But recent research adds neuropsychological evidence of increased brain activity in depressed patient in regions of the prefrontal cortex associated with problem-solving, proportional to the degree of depression. It is certainly not the whole explanation, as critics counter, because some of the maladaptive impact of depression, including poor self-care, impairment in childrearing, increased susceptibility to other illness, and last but not least suicide, will outweigh the problem-solving advantages it might confer. Furthermore, there are many different kids of depression both in terms of precipitant and symptomatology. At one extreme, a person may become depressed in response to an acute recent loss (or even a future anticipated one); on the other hand, some people can develop either a dense acute depression or a smouldering chronic one without substantial stresses or losses. The imprecisions in both the lay person’s use of the term depression and its more technical clincal utilization muddy the waters in this regard.
Still, it is worth asking why a condition that is so painful and takes such a heavy toll would persist if it were not at least some of the time of some use… and whether, at least some of the time, we do more harm than good in leaping to treat it. Except, of course, the unequivocal good done to the pockets of the shareholders and executives of the pharmaceutical companies, reaping the profits from the explosive growth in antidepressant sales of the last few decades. (New York Times Magazine)
The mystery billboard
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/assets_c/2010/02/missmeyet-thumb-450x366.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/news_cut/assets_c/2010/02/missmeyet-thumb-450x366.jpg "Miss me yet?")
Miss me yet?
“It was late at night and I wasn't sure I'd seen the billboard correctly as I whizzed past it on I-35 in Wyoming last week on the way back from Wrenshall. But an e-mailer confirms I saw what I thought I saw.
It's beginning to sweep along the Internet, accompanied by various claims that it's a Photoshop fake. But it's not. It's real.
There's no billboard ownership plate on this particular billboard, making tracing the person who had the cash to post it difficult to find. It's time to crowdsource this puppy.” (Minnesota Public Radio)
Carl And Ann’s Ultimate Mix Tape Of The Human Experience
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‘…[H]ow do you decide what to put on the ultimate mix tape of the human experience? What do you do if you have one shot at describing humanity to an unknown life form? That was the charge of Carl Sagan — astronomer, astrophysicist and famed popularizer of science. Of course, Sagan had a lot of help, including the creative director of the project, Ann Druyan.
“It was a chance to tell something of what life on Earth was like to beings of perhaps 1,000 million years from now,” Druyan says. “If that didn't raise goose bumps, then you'd have to be made out of wood.”
For Druyan, though, the summer of 1977 and the Voyager project carry a deeply personal meaning, too. It was during the Voyager project that she and Sagan fell in love.’ (Radiolab: NPR).
Happy Holi
Killer Whale Attack: The Cove star calls for federal investigation of SeaWorld
‘There’s an eerily timely connection between the death of SeaWorld trainer Dawn Brancheau, 40, who was killed Wednesday by the killer whale she was training, and the documentary The Cove, which is the frontrunner to win the Oscar for best documentary feature next Sunday, March 7. The documentary is about dolphins that are slaughtered by fishermen outside a town in Japan after they are rejected by aquatic theme park operators looking for the next dolphin star. The film’s main subject, Ric O’ Barry, trained the famous dolphin Flipper, but has since dedicated his life to freeing dolphins and other sea mammals from theme parks. Today, O’ Barry and David Phillips, of the Earth Island Institute, released a statement about Brancheau’s death, and called for a federal investigation into SeaWorld’s actions surrounding the tragedy.
“It was with great sadness that we learned of the death of Dawn Brancheau, who by all accounts was a loving and talented caretaker for Tilikum (Tilly), the killer whale who took her life at SeaWorld Orlando just days ago,” the said in a statement. “Along with sadness of this tragic event we can’t help feeling anger toward those who insist upon exhibiting these wild creatures in habitats that can drive them to violence. Dependent on sonar/sound to navigate their vast ocean homes, dolphins and whales are in constant state of distress living in cramped pools, bombarded by noise, stressed by food deprivation and forced to perform…” ‘ (EW.com)
I’ve just seen The Cove, which is not to be missed, a damning indictment of an annual Japanese dolphin capture and slaughter the Japanese have gone to great lengths to conceal from the world.
Related:
Chile earthquake much stronger than Haiti’s but far less damaging
Why? (Christian Science Monitor)
The Philosophy of Punk Rock Mathematics
“It is this:
1) People use the average Joe’s poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically fuck him over.
2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with a minimum of equipment.
Therefore, if you are concerned with the empowerment of everyday people, and you believe that it’s probably a good idea to be skeptical of authority you could do worse than to develop your skills at being able to talk math in such a way that anyone can ask questions, can express curiosity, can imagine applying it in the most weird-ass off-the-wall ways possible.
This does not entirely mesh well with the actual practice of learning mathematics, because that is mostly time spent alone or in small groups being very very confused almost all the time, but it’s still the bullseye I keep in mind.” — Tom Henderson (Technoccult).
The Narcissus Society
“…Thrown together for two weeks at Brooklyn Supreme Court with 22 other jurors, I was struck by how rare it is now in American life to be gathered, physically, with an array of other folk of different ages, backgrounds, skin colors, beliefs, faiths, tastes, education levels and political convictions and be obliged to work out your differences in order to get the job done.
…
America could use more of that kind of experience. As it is, everyone’s shrieking their lonesome anger, burrowing deeper into stress, gazing at their own images — and generating paralysis.” — Roger Cohen (New York Times op-ed)
The Surreal World of Chatroulette
“Nothing can really prepare you for the latest online phenomenon, Chatroulette. The social Web site, created just three months ago by a 17-year-old Russian named Andrey Ternovskiy, drops you into an unnerving world where you are connected through webcams to a random, fathomless succession of strangers from across the globe. You see them, they see you. You talk to them, they talk to you. Or not. The site, which is gaining thousands of users a day and lately some news coverage, has a faddish feel, but those who study online vagaries see a glimpse into a surreal future, a turn in the direction of the Internet.” (New York Times )
Related:
80 Extreme Advertisements
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Of course, an industry that survives only if it captures your attention almost instantaneously will have its extremes. These are ads that conceptually or visually shock. Since the ad industry are today’s de facto experts in the collective unconscious, this can be read as a catalogue of many or most* of the dominant categories of revulsion and offensiveness to which we respond. (*To my knowledge, no one has used goatse imagery in advertising…) (Onextrapixel).
Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead
“The Grateful Dead Archive, scheduled to open soon at the University of California at Santa Cruz, will be a mecca for academics of all stripes: from ethnomusicologists to philosophers, sociologists to historians. But the biggest beneficiaries may prove to be business scholars and management theorists, who are discovering that the Dead were visionary geniuses in the way they created “customer value,” promoted social networking, and did strategic business planning.” (The Atlantic, March 2010).
Related:
- The Grateful Dead invented freemium (smlxtralarge.com)
- Grateful Dead Archivist wanted at UC Santa Cruz (boingboing.net)
- Empire State Building TIE-DYE! (huffingtonpost.com)
Man appears free of HIV after stem cell transplant
“A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.” (CNN)
The Death of Fiction?
![from darkness into the light... [08/52]](https://i0.wp.com/farm5.static.flickr.com/4026/4377017759_719c4fe74b_m.jpg "from darkness into the light... [08/52]")
“After more than a century of founding and subsidizing literary magazines as a vital part of their educational missions, colleges and universities have begun off-loading their publications, citing overburdened budgets and dwindling readership. Despite the potentially disastrous consequences to the landscape of literature and ideas, it’s increasingly hard to argue against. Once strongholds of literature and learned discussion in our country, university-based quarterlies have seen steadily declining subscriber bases since their heyday a half-century ago—and an even greater dent in their cultural relevance.” (Mother Jones)
Paying Zero for Public Services
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/blogs.worldbank.org/files/publicsphere/rupees_front.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://blogs.worldbank.org/files/publicsphere/rupees_front.jpg "5th Pillar's zero-rupee bribes")
A powerful new weapon against institutionalized bribery in Indian society: the zero-rupee note (Worldbank.com)
John R. Bowen: Nothing To Fear
“Islam, [numerous recent books] argue, has shocked Europeans, the shock comes from Islamic values, and the clash is unlikely to subside. These three themes—Islamic shock, value conflict, and unending struggle—evoke Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations,” but with added urgency: Muslims are now on the wrong side of the Huntingtonian line. We need to take this argument seriously and understand what is wrong with it. And—to cut right to the chase—it is wrong on every detail that matters.” (Boston Review).
Related:
- Implication of Hijaab and Beard. (teabreak.pk)
- Creating The Clash (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
- AP Exclusive: Muslim Countries Seek Blasphemy Ban (abcnews.go.com)
In case you thought V-Day was just about hearts and flowers
V-Day is a global movement [founded by writer and performance artist Eve Ensler] to stop violence against women and girls. V-Day is a catalyst that promotes creative events to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. V-Day generates broader attention for the fight to stop violence against women and girls, including rape, battery, incest, female genital mutilation FGM and sexual slavery.Through V-Day campaigns, local volunteers and college students produce annual benefit performances of The Vagina Monologues, A Memory, A Monologue, A Rant and A Prayer, and screenings of V-Day’s documentary Until The Violence Stops, to raise awareness and funds for anti-violence groups within their own communities. 2009 V-Day events had the option to introduce a new V-Day theatrical event, Any One Of Us: Words From Prison, which reveals the connection between women in prison and the violence that often brings them there. This new event brings forth raw voices of fierceness and honesty written by women from prisons across the nation and performed by local women. In 2009, over 4200 V-Day benefit events took place produced by volunteer activists in the U.S. and around the world, educating millions of people about the reality of violence against women and girls.
Related:
- The Vagina Monologues: A Valentine’s Tradition at SMU (smudailymustang.com)
- Brilliant: ‘Vagina Monologues’ Creator Tells Palin to Look at ‘Earthquakes and Tsunamis’ for Global Warming Proof (newsbusters.org)
- Eve Ensler: Vagina Monologues Playwright Tackles Violence Against Women (usnews.com)
- Girl power can save the world (cnn.com)
- Marianne Schnall: Eve Ensler’s Mission: Awaken the ‘Girl Self’ (huffingtonpost.com)
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What Came ‘Before’ the Big Bang?
Leading Physicist Presents a Radical Theory: “String theorists Neil Turok of Cambridge University and Paul Steinhardt, Albert Einstein Professor in Science and Director of the Princeton Center for Theoretical Science at Princeton believe that the cosmos we live in was actually created by the cyclical trillion-year collision of two universes (which they define as three-dimensional branes plus time) that were attracted toward each other by the leaking of gravity out of one of the universes.” (Daily Galaxy)
Feckless Hypocrisy Dept.
Are GOPers Deliberately Lying About the Stimulus? “At the White House this week, the main narrative in the press room was this: Has President Barack Obama lost the message war over the $862 billion stimulus? Noting the one-year anniversary of the enactment of that legislation, reporters again and again asked press secretary Robert Gibbs some version of this question. What could the guy say? Especially when the answer is yes. He’s not going to concede the White House got its clock cleaned by the feckless congressional Republicans on this front — even though public opinion polls apparently show that there’s only person in the entire United States of America who believes the Recovery Act has created jobs. So Gibbs repeatedly said that it’s understandable that at a time of nearly 10 percent unemployment most Americans are skeptical that Obama’s stimulus package did much good — no matter that economists widely credit it for spurring part of the recent economic growth and that it’s darn obvious that the package did fund private sector projects that spawned jobs and that it prevented teachers, firefighters, cops, and others from being canned.
Still, Gibbs couldn’t escape the journos who were fixated on this political story and who wanted to squeeze an admission of defeat out of the White House. There’s nothing wrong with a who’s-up/who’s down story. After all, a White House is responsible for implementing and promoting its policies. But there was a bigger story at hand: not who won the battle of the stimulus, but who was right?” (Politics Daily)
Related:
- White House: On “Better Offense” with New Twitter Icons, Charges of GOP Hypocrisy (blogs.abcnews.com)
- STIMULUS WATCH: Unemployment eclipses fiscal jolt (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
- Defending the stimulus — the administration wastes its breath (powerlineblog.com)
- Happy 1st Birthday Recovery Act! (blogs.abcnews.com)
- Obama Starts Push to Cast Stimulus Bill as a Success (nytimes.com)
- Biden Says Stimulus Good for Michigan, Rest of US (abcnews.go.com)
Why is the Obama Administration Rolling Over on This One?
DOJ Review Finds No Misconduct by Memo Authors (New York Times ). The egregious misconduct of Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two DOJ attorneys under Bush, who essentially green-lighted the Bush administration’s torture practices by some legal sleight-of-hand, should have lost them their licenses, as an earlier DOJ review had established. But it has been overruled by a new finding by a senior DOJ lawyer that it was merely ‘bad judgment’. As you know, Obama has already proclaimed that CIA interrogators who relied on the memo to guide their interrogation practices will not be prosecuted, save for ongoing criminal investigations into a handful of cases in which prisoners died during interrogation.
President Obama campaigned on a pledge to abolish waterboarding but left it open whether there would be consequences to the Bush torturers. I would love to get an insider’s views on the wheeling and dealing that must have happened in the back rooms of Washington to make this one go away. In my opinion, ceding the moral high ground on this one ought not to be an acceptable price paid in the interest of bipartisanship! Senator Patrick Leahy is not amused, however, and plans to conduct hearings on the matter next week.
People treat one another better in nice-smelling rooms
New Research: “The mere scent of a clean-smelling room can take people down a virtuous road, compelling them to choose generosity over greed and charity over apathy. Meanwhile, the darkness of a dimmed room or a pair of sunglasses can compel people towards selfishness and cheating.” (Not Exactly Rocket Science)
Democrats and Republicans Can Be Differentiated by Their Faces
Abstract: “Here we found that individuals’ political affiliations could be accurately discerned from their faces. In Study 1, perceivers were able to accurately distinguish whether U.S. Senate candidates were either Democrats or Republicans based on photos of their faces. Study 2 showed that these effects extended to Democrat and Republican college students, based on their senior yearbook photos. Study 3 then showed that these judgments were related to differences in perceived traits among the Democrat and Republican faces. Republicans were perceived as more powerful than Democrats. Moreover, as individual targets were perceived to be more powerful, they were more likely to be perceived as Republicans by others. Similarly, as individual targets were perceived to be warmer, they were more likely to be perceived as Democrats.” (PLoS ONE).
R.I.P. Fred Morrison
Creator of Frisbee Dies at 90: “Walter Fredrick Morrison, who at 17 sent the lid of a popcorn tin skimming through the air of a California backyard and as an adult remade the lid in plastic, in the process inventing the simple, elegant flying disc known today as the Frisbee, died Tuesday at his home in Monroe, Utah. He was 90.” (New York Times obituary)
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/13/us/13morrison_CA0/13morrison_CA0-articleInline.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/02/13/us/13morrison_CA0/13morrison_CA0-articleInline.jpg "Fred Morrison, R.I.P.")
Revising Book on Disorders of the Mind
FmH readers know of my preoccupation with psychiatric diagnosis, its follies and abuses, about which I am more likely to rant here than any other topic (other than George W. bush and his administration). Today, the American Psychiatric Association posted on the web the details fo the next proposed revision, version V, to the DSM (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual), which is the ‘bible’ of accepted psychiatric diagnoses and their criteria. DSM-V is currently scheduled to come out in 2013 after a period of public comment on the revisions and several years of field trials. The release date has already been pushed back because of controversy about the proposals and the revision process, some of which is pointed to in this NYTimes.com piece.Several different things happen in these revisions. First, the universe of existing mental illnesses is reparsed and some of the afflicted end up going into different pigeonholes. By and large, this is a trend I welcome, as the new distinctions made, and the old distinctions collapsed and erased, appear to be generally in line with the clinical experience of frontline practitioners like myself who spend all our time actually treating the mentally ill. Some of my pet peeves, like the overdiagnosis of attention deficit disorder, of childhood bipolar disorder, and of posttraumatic stress disorder, may be improved. As Gregory Bateson defined it, information is a “difference that makes a difference”, and some of the refined distinctions here will of course be more useful to psychiatric research than to practice, but by and large I find them meaningful.
However, the other thing that goes on from revision to revision of the DSM is a proliferation of diagnoses, leading to a relentless expansion of the scope and incidence of mental disorders among the population. This is what has been referred to as the medicalization of ‘normal’ human variability and of personality differences. If a broader net is cast and more people are diagnosable with mental disorders, you can imagine some of the consequences, which include the increasing use of medications for more and more benign variations; changes in social stigmatization; insurance reimbursement for various states of distress; and various diminished responsibility defenses in criminal proceedings. More profoundly, we are rewriting the concepts of personal responsibility and autonomy and the balance between free will and determinism.
I already have far too much work to do to welcome such a broader net, but then again I don’t make a fortune on the basis of how many prescriptions are written. (Estimates are that anywhere from 50-70% of those working on the revisions derive substantial income or research funding from the pharmaceutical industry.)
Tonight, because one of their reporters has been a reader of FmH, I was interviewed by the BBC about my impressions about the DSM-V proposals. It remains to be seen whether I gave them any juicy quotes they can use.
Related:
- Psychiatrists weigh diagnostic manual revision (cbc.ca)
- Psychiatrists’ bible to get new conditions, names (calgaryherald.com)
- Hypersexual Disorder, Autism, Addiction: The New Psych Manual (blogs.wsj.com)
- APA announces draft diagnostic criteria for DSM-5 (scienceblog.com)
- Revised psychiatry manual targets autism, substance disorders (cnn.com)
- Big Changes for Psychiatrist’s ‘Bible’ (abcnews.go.com)
- Psychiatry’s draft new ‘bible’ goes online (newscientist.com)
- DSM-V Task Force Releases Proposed Diagnostic Criteria (bilerico.com)
- Changes proposed in how psychiatrists name illnesses (ctv.ca)
- Rewriting The DSM: Binge Eating And Our Broken Health-Care System [Mental Illness] (jezebel.com)
- Asperger’s, Bipolar Disorder Diagnoses May Change in New Manual (businessweek.com)
- DSM-V To Remove “Retardation” Reference (riehlworldview.com)
- Pediatric Bipolar Disorder & DSM-5 : “Temper Dysregulation Disorder” (bipolarsoupkitchen-stephany.blogspot.com)
- Big changes proposed in eating disorder diagnoses (the-f-word.org)
Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis
Jacob Weisberg: “In trying to explain why our political paralysis seems to have gotten so much worse over the past year, analysts have rounded up a plausible collection of reasons including: President Obama’s tactical missteps, the obstinacy of congressional Republicans, rising partisanship in Washington, the blustering idiocracy of the cable-news stations, and the Senate filibuster, which has devolved into a super-majority threshold for any important legislation. These are all large factors, to be sure, but that list neglects what may be the biggest culprit in our current predicament: the childishness, ignorance, and growing incoherence of the public at large.” Slate Magazine
Phil Agre found
In November, I wrote about his disappearance. As someone who was a participant in and subscriber to his ‘Red Rock Eaters’ mailing list for the duration, I wanted to repost the missing person’s alert about him to spread the word. He was certainly someone who would know how to drop off the grid if he wished to, but I worried, as did many, that something more dire had happened to him.Now the UCLA police dept. posts this update (pdf).
Extreme cuisine
Top 10 ‘exotic’ tastes: I’ve eaten one of the items on this list from Lonely Planet; can you guess which?
Old Medicine is New
Maggots and Leeches: Patients may be initially repulsed but they sort of grow on you. (LiveScience)
R.I.P. Howard Zinn
“The author, teacher and political activist whose book “A People’s History of the United States” became a million-selling leftist alternative to mainstream texts, died Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif.” NY Times Obituary.
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/01/28/us/28zinnimg/articleInline.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2010/01/28/us/28zinnimg/articleInline.jpg "R.I.P. Howard Zinn")
The Loudness Wars
Why Music Sounds Worse (NPR)
Why the Haiti quake killed so many
‘In 1988, the Spitak magnitude-6.9 earthquake in Armenia took more than 25,000 lives. By contrast the magnitude-7.1 Loma Prieta earthquake in California in 1989 caused only 63 deaths. “The difference in the numbers of fatalities illustrates the huge effect that high building standards can have in saving people’s lives,” says DeMets.
The multi-storey concrete buildings that made up much of Port-au-Prince proved to be death traps when the earthquake struck. “The buildings were brittle and had no flexibility, breaking catastrophically when the earthquake struck,” says Ian Main, a seismologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
And the disaster was compounded by the earthquake’s shallow source. “With deep earthquakes the primary waves arrive first, giving you a bit of warning before the shear waves [responsible for shaking the ground from side to side] arrive,” says Uri ten Brink, an expert on earthquakes in the Caribbean from the US Geological Survey in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In Haiti the epicentre was so close to the surface that the primary and shear waves arrived almost at the same time.’ (New Scientist)
‘Don’t give money to Haiti’
This is not your Pat Robertson rant about Haiti deserving to go under because of its pact with the Devil. What do you think of this argument?
‘…For one thing, right now there’s very little that can be done with the money. There are myriad bottlenecks and obstacles involved in getting help to the Haitians who need it, but lack of funds is not one of them. For the next few weeks, help will come largely from governments, who are also spending hundreds of millions of dollars and mobilizing thousands of soldiers to the cause. But with the UN alone seeking to raise $550 million, it’s going to be easy to say that all the money donated to date isn’t remotely enough.
The problem is that Haiti, if it wasn’t a failed state before the earthquake, is almost certainly a failed state now — and one of the lessons we’ve learned from trying to rebuild failed states elsewhere in the world is that throwing money at the issue is very likely to backfire.
What’s more, charities raising money for Haiti right now are going to have to earmark that money to be spent in Haiti and in Haiti only….
…It’s human nature to want to believe that in the wake of a major disaster, we can all do our bit to help just by giving generously. And if there’s a silver lining to these tragedies at all, it’s that they significantly increase the total amount of money donated to important charities by individuals around the world. But if a charity is worth supporting, then it’s worth supporting with unrestricted funds. Because the last thing anybody wants to see in a couple of years’ time is an unseemly tussle over what happened to today’s Haiti donations, even as other international tragedies receive much less public attention…’ — Felix Salmon (Reuters opinion)
Related:
- Donate, But Not To Haiti (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
- State warns Haiti donors to beware of scams (seattlepi.com)
Limbaugh: Don’t give Haitians a penny
“Amid the rash of appeals for Haiti donations has come a call from one of the most prominent voices on the American right for people to hang on to their cash because Barack Obama might steal it.Rush Limbaugh, the most popular radio talkshow host, who is sometimes described as the real leader of the Republican party, says Americans should not give a penny to a population struggling for survival after the earthquake.” (Guardian.UK)
How to Give to the Haitian Relief Effort
This massive catastrophe, on our doorstep and on an unimaginable scale of tragedy, requires an urgent relief effort now. Please give, generously and immediately. Here is a list of many agencies to whom you can donate.
The Americanization of Mental Illness
“For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.” (New York Times Magazine)
Related:
- Are American psychiatrists (and Chinese media) to blame for anorexia in China? (trueslant.com)
- In search of Hasan’s syndrome (powerlineblog.com)
Good reasons why you shouldn’t mess with nature
APOD: 2010 January 5 – A Roll Cloud Over Uruguay
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1001/rollcloud_eberl.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/1001/rollcloud_eberl.jpg "Roll cloud, Uruguay")
Has anyone ever seen a roll cloud? I haven’t. (APOD via julia)
The Mystery of the Missing Sea Lions Is Solved!
Anyone who has ever visited San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf has probably hung out with the sea lions of Pier 39, who first appeared after the 1989 earthquake. You should have heard by now about their recent mysterious mass departure, which had left some speculating that they had some sixth sense about an impending disaster such as another major quake. Now, it appears, it has been determined that there is a simpler explanation. In this El Nino season, they have simply gone after their shifting food source. (SFist) This is not to say, it seems to me, that they are not canaries in a coalmine with respect to a different sort of impending disaster, climate change.
Elusive Supermassive-Black-Hole Mergers Finally Found
“Observations have shown that nearly every galaxy has a supermassive black hole — a black hole with a mass of one million to one billion times that of the sun — at its center and that galaxies often collide and merge to create larger galaxies. Astronomers have expected to find many mid-merge galaxies by focusing on the two supermassive black holes, which should be orbiting each other in the middle.”
Now, innovative observational techniques have identified 33 of the ‘waltzing’ black hole pairs. (Wired News)
Centuries-Old Star Mystery Coming to a Close
Artistic rendering of e-Aurigae system.
The bright star Epsilon Aurigae, visible to the naked eye in the northern hemisphere, has long puzzled scientists because of a 27-year cycle of dimming and brightening. This suggested that it was an eclipsing binary system. However, the spectral signature of the bright component, suggesting that it was a supermassive giant star, made it difficult to build a model that would account for what might be eclipsing it. Now, the NASA Spitzer Space Telescope may have put the mystery to rest with some ingenious observation techniques.
[Does anyone, apart from my friend abby, whom I have to thank for sending me many such links, enjoy these arcane astronomical items?]
5 Theories That Explain Why Avatar Was Such A Huge Hit
Now that Avatar is on track to be the second biggest film of all time, pundits are starting to wonder if there’s more to its success than Art Nouveau pterodactyls in 3-D. Here are five explanations they’ve come up with. (io9)
Court to Cops: Stop Tasing People into Compliance
“The use of Tasers has become increasingly controversial over the last year, following high-profile cases such as the Tasering of a 10-year-old girl who had refused to take a shower and video of a 72-year-old great-grandmother who was Tasered following a driving offense. Now a federal appeals court in San Francisco has set down new rules for when police officers are allowed to use Tasers. In particular, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Tasers can’t be used simply to force a non-violent person to bend to an officer’s will. The court’s reason was that Taser’s X26 stun gun inflicts more pain than other “non-lethal” options….”It sounds like this court is attempting to raise the bar for non-lethal use of force,” retired Los Angeles Police Department Captain Greg Meyer told the Los Angeles Times. The ruling specifies that the Taser X26 and similar devices should only be used where there is “strong government interest [that] compels the employment of such force.” This rules out any situation in which there are alternative means of dealing with the situation. Some may see the new ruling as a great step forward for human rights. But there are reasons to be a little more cautious.
A recent study in the American Journal of Public Health looked at 24,000 cases in which police officers had used force, including Tasers, pepper spray, batons and manual methods. After controlling for factors such as the amount of resistance shown by the suspect, the study found that Taser use reduced the overall risk of injury by 65 percent. In other words, restricting Taser use could triple the number of injuries caused in this sort of incident.
It would be naïve to assume that there will not be any market response to the ruling. We have recently seen a rash of new devices aimed at police forces, including assorted laser dazzlers and pepper ball guns as Taser alternatives. There are also portable pain beams in prospect, both microwave and infrared laser varieties, not to mention various acoustic blasters. The ruling is likely to lead to more experimentation, both technical and in the courts, to find out just what the acceptable level of pain and suffering is and how it can best be delivered.” (Wired)
Angry people in local newspapers
“I feel sorry for local news photographers. They are hugely skilled and poorly paid, and sent out to photograph miserable people pointing at dog turds. Here, we celebrate their work…“
New Year’s Customs and Traditions
This is the my annual New Year’s post, a tradition I started early on on FmH:
I once ran across a January 1st Boston Globe article compiling folkloric beliefs about what to do, what to eat, etc. on New Year’s Day to bring good fortune for the year to come. I’ve regretted since — I usually think of it around once a year (grin) — not clipping out and saving the article. Especially since we’ve had children, I’m interested in enduring traditions that go beyond getting drunk [although some comment that this is a profound enactment of the interdigitation of chaos and order appropriate to the New Year’s celebration — FmH], watching the bowl games and making resolutions.
A web search brought me this, less elaborate than what I recall from the Globe but to the same point. It is weighted toward eating traditions, which is odd because, unlike most other major holidays, the celebration of New Year’s in 21st century America does not seem to be centered at all around thinking about what we eat (except in the sense of the traditional weight-loss resolutions!) and certainly not around a festive meal. But…
Traditionally, it was thought that one could affect the luck they would have throughout the coming year by what they did or ate on the first day of the year. For that reason, it has become common for folks to celebrate the first few minutes of a brand new year in the company of family and friends. Parties often last into the middle of the night after the ringing in of a new year. It was once believed that the first visitor on New Year’s Day would bring either good luck or bad luck the rest of the year. It was particularly lucky if that visitor happened to be a tall dark-haired man.
![//tonos.ru/images/articles/dragon/ouroboros.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://tonos.ru/images/articles/dragon/ouroboros.jpg "Ouroboros")
“Traditional New Year foods are also thought to bring luck. Many cultures believe that anything in the shape of a ring is good luck, because it symbolizes “coming full circle,” completing a year’s cycle. For that reason, the Dutch believe that eating donuts on New Year’s Day will bring good fortune.
“Many parts of the U.S. celebrate the new year by consuming black-eyed peas. These legumes are typically accompanied by either hog jowls or ham. Black-eyed peas and other legumes have been considered good luck in many cultures. The hog, and thus its meat, is considered lucky because it symbolizes prosperity. Cabbage is another ‘good luck’ vegetable that is consumed on New Year’s Day by many. Cabbage leaves are also considered a sign of prosperity, being representative of paper currency. In some regions, rice is a lucky food that is eaten on New Year’s Day.”
The further north one travels in the British Isles, the more the year-end festivities focus on New Year’s. The Scottish observance of Hogmanay has many elements of warming heart and hearth, welcoming strangers and making a good beginning:
“Three cornered biscuits called hogmanays are eaten. Other special foods are: wine, ginger cordial, cheese, bread, shortbread, oatcake, carol or carl cake, currant loaf, and a pastry called scones. After sunset people collect juniper and water to purify the home. Divining rituals are done according to the directions of the winds, which are assigned their own colors. First Footing:The first person who comes to the door on midnight New Year’s Eve should be a dark-haired or dark-complected man with gifts for luck. Seeing a cat, dog, woman, red-head or beggar is unlucky. The person brings a gift (handsel) of coal or whiskey to ensure prosperity in the New Year. Mummer’s Plays are also performed. The actors called the White Boys of Yule are all dressed in white, except for one dressed as the devil in black. It is bad luck to engage in marriage proposals, break glass, spin flax, sweep or carry out rubbish on New Year’s Eve.”
Here’s why we clink our glasses when we drink our New Year’s toasts, no matter where we are. Of course, sometimes the midnight cacophony is louder than just clinking glassware, to create a ‘devil-chasing din’.
In Georgia, eat black eyed peas and turnip greens on New Year’s Day for luck and prosperity in the year to come, supposedly because they symbolize coppers and currency. Hoppin’ John, a concoction of peas, onion, bacon and rice, is also a southern New Year’s tradition, as is wearing yellow to find true love (in Peru, yellow underwear, apparently!) or carrying silver for prosperity. In some instances, a dollar bill is thrown in with the other ingredients of the New Year’s meal to bring prosperity. In Greece, there is a traditional New Year’s Day sweetbread with a silver coin baked into it. All guests get a slice of the bread and whoever receives the slice with the coin is destined for good fortune for the year. At Italian tables, lentils, oranges and olives are served. The lentils, looking like coins, will bring prosperity; the oranges are for love; and the olives, symbolic of the wealth of the land, represent good fortune for the year to come.
A New Year’s meal in Norway also includes dried cod, “lutefisk.” The Pennsylvania Dutch make sure to include sauerkraut in their holiday meal, also for prosperity.
In Spain, you would cram twelve grapes in your mouth at midnight, one each time the clock chimed, for good luck for the twelve months to come. (If any of the grapes happens to be sour, the corresponding month will not be one of your most fortunate in the coming year.) The U. S. version of this custom, for some reason, involves standing on a chair as you pop the grapes. In Denmark, jumping off a chair at the stroke of midnight signifies leaping into the New Year. In Rio, you would be plunging into the sea en masse at midnight, wearing white and bearing offerings. In many northern hemisphere cities near bodies of water, they will have a tradition of people plunging into the cold water on New Year’s Day. The Coney Island Polar Bears Club in New York is the oldest cold-water swimming club in the United States. They have had groups of people enter the chilly surf since 1903.
Ecuadorian families make scarecrows stuffed with newspaper and firecrackers and place them outside their homes. The dummies represent misfortunes of the prior year, which are then burned in effigy at the stroke of midnight to forget the old year. Bolivian families make beautiful little wood or straw dolls to hang outside their homes on New Year’s Eve to bring good luck.
In China, homes are cleaned spotless to appease the Kitchen God, and papercuttings of red paper are hung in the windows to scare away evil spirits who might enter the house and bring misfortune. Large papier mache dragon heads with long fabric bodies are maneuvered through the streets during the Dragon Dance festival, and families open their front doors to let the dragon bring good luck into their homes. The Indian Diwali festival, welcoming in the autumnal season, also involves attracting good fortune with lights. Children make small clay lamps, dipas, thousands of which might adorn a given home. In Thailand, one pours fragrant water over the hands of elders on New Year’s Day to show them respect.
![//www.elanguages.org/images/16245' cannot be displayed]](http://www.elanguages.org/images/16245 "Revelry")
- a stack of pancakes for the New Year’s breakfast in France.
- banging on friends’ doors in Denmark to “smash in” the New Year, where it is also a good sign to find your doorstep heaped with broken dishes on New Year’s morning. Old dishes are saved all years to throw at your friends’ homes on New Year’s Eve.
- going in the front door and out the back door at midnight in Ireland.
- making sure the First Footer, the first person through your door in the New Year in Scotland, is a tall dark haired visitor.
- water out the window at midnight in Puerto Rico rids the home of evil spirits.
- cleanse your soul in Japan at the New Year by listening to a gong tolling 108 times, one for every sin
- it is Swiss good luck to let a drop of cream fall on the floor on New Year’s Day.
- Belgian farmers wish their animals a Happy New Year for blessings.
- In Germany and Austria, lead pouring” (das Bleigießen) is an old divining practice using molten lead like tea leaves. A small amount of lead is melted in a tablespoon (by holding a flame under the spoon) and then poured into a bowl or bucket of water. The resulting pattern is interpreted to predict the coming year. For instance, if the lead forms a ball (der Ball), that means luck will roll your way. The shape of an anchor (der Anker) means help in need. But a cross (das Kreuz) signifies death.
- “It’s a bit bizarre when you think about it. A short British cabaret sketch from the 1920s has become a German New Year’s tradition. Yet, although The 90th Birthday or Dinner for One is a famous cult classic in Germany and several other European countries, it is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, including Britain, its birthplace.”
Some history; documentation of observance of the new year dates back at least 4000 years to the Babylonians, who also made the first new year’s resolutions (reportedly voews to return borrowed farm equipment were very popular), although their holiday was observed at the vernal equinox. The Babylonian festivities lasted eleven days, each day with its own particular mode of celebration. The traditional Persian Norouz festival of spring continues to be considered the advent of the new year among Persians, Kurds and other peoples throughout Central Asia, and dates back at least 3000 years, deeply rooted in Zooastrian traditions.Modern Bahá’í’s celebrate Norouz (”Naw Ruz”) as the end of a Nineteen Day Fast. Rosh Hashanah (”head of the year”), the Jewish New Year, the first day of the lunar month of Tishri, falls between September and early October. Muslim New Year is the first day of Muharram, and Chinese New Year falls between Jan. 10th and Feb. 19th of the Gregorian calendar.
The classical Roman New Year’s celebration was also in the spring although the calendar went out of synchrony with the sun. January 1st became the first day of the year by proclamation of the Roman Senate in 153 BC, reinforced even more strongly when Julius Caesar established what came to be known as the Julian calendar in 46 BC. The early Christian Church condemned new year’s festivities as pagan but created parallel festivities concurrently. New Year’s Day is still observed as the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision in some denominations. Church opposition to a new year’s observance reasserted itself during the Middle Ages, and Western nations have only celebrated January 1 as a holidy for about the last 400 years. The custom of New Year’s gift exchange among Druidic pagans in 7th century Flanders was deplored by Saint Eligius, who warned them, “[Do not] make vetulas, [little figures of the Old Woman], little deer or iotticos or set tables [for the house-elf] at night or exchange New Year gifts or supply superfluous drinks [another Yule custom].” (Wikipedia)
The tradition of the New Year’s Baby signifying the new year began with the Greek tradition of parading a baby in a basket during the Dionysian rites celebrating the annual rebirth of that god as a symbol of fertility. The baby was also a symbol of rebirth among early Egyptians. Again, the Church was forced to modify its denunciation of the practice as pagan because of the popularity of the rebirth symbolism, finally allowing its members to cellebrate the new year with a baby although assimilating it to a celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus. The addition of Father Time (the “Old Year”) wearing a sash across his chest withthe previous year on it, and the banner carried or worn by the New Year’s Baby, immigrated from Germany. Interestingly, January 1st is not a legal holiday in Israel, officially because of its historic origins as a Christian feast day.
Auld Lang Syne (literally ‘old long ago’ in the Scottish dialect) is sung or played at the stroke of midnight throughout the English-speaking world (although I prefer George Harrison’s “Ring Out the Old”). Versions of the song have been part of the New Year’s festivities since the 17th century but Robert Burns was inspired to compose a modern rendition, which was published after his death in 1796. (It took Guy Lombardo, however, to make it popular…)
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
For auld lang syne, my dear,
for auld lang syne,
we’ll take a cup of kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot
and days of auld lang syne?
And here’s a hand, my trusty friend
And gie’s a hand o’ thine
We’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet
For auld lang syne
![//www.sfgate.com/chronicle/pictures/2005/02/09/ga_lunar01.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://www.sfgate.com/chronicle/pictures/2005/02/09/ga_lunar01.jpg "Wake Up!")
Here’s how to wish someone a Happy New Year around the world:
- Arabic: Kul ‘aam u antum salimoun
- Brazilian: Boas Festas e Feliz Ano Novo means “Good Parties and Happy New Year”
- Chinese: Chu Shen Tan
- Czechoslavakia: Scastny Novy Rok
- Dutch: Gullukkig Niuw Jaar
- Finnish: Onnellista Uutta Vuotta
- French: Bonne Annee
- German: Prosit Neujahr
- Greek: Eftecheezmaenos o Kaenooryos hronos
- Hebrew: L’Shannah Tovah Tikatevu
- Hindi: Niya Saa Moobaarak
- Irish (Gaelic): Bliain nua fe mhaise dhuit
- Italian: Buon Capodanno
- Khmer: Sua Sdei tfnam tmei
- Laotian: Sabai dee pee mai
- Polish: Szczesliwego Nowego Roku
- Portuguese: Feliz Ano Novo
- Russian: S Novim Godom
- Serbo-Croatian: Scecna nova godina
- Spanish: Feliz Ano Neuvo
- Swedish: Ha ett gott nytt år
- Turkish: Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
- Vietnamese: Cung-Chuc Tan-Xuan
However you’re going to celebrate, my warmest wishes for the year to come… and eat hearty! [thanks to Bruce Umbaugh for research assistance]
Related?
Blue Moon on New Year’s Eve
![[Image 'http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:qTBNeD-sbH22mM:http://api.ning.com/files/1edgfT45wsn-veMuyde8uTkmoqcQGYAIG8vlI-hSELcqnJTMxjjMvaGA81RER1s-8nMAEIrwt*W-0oZQCq3Z2oy9h2Fp19zW/blue_moon1.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:qTBNeD-sbH22mM:http://api.ning.com/files/1edgfT45wsn-veMuyde8uTkmoqcQGYAIG8vlI-hSELcqnJTMxjjMvaGA81RER1s-8nMAEIrwt*W-0oZQCq3Z2oy9h2Fp19zW/blue_moon1.jpg)
For the first time in almost twenty years, there's going to be a Blue Moon on New Year's Eve.
…Don't expect the Moon to actually turn blue, though. “The 'Blue Moon' is a creature of folklore,” explains [professor Philip Hiscock of the Dept. of Folklore at the Memorial University of Newfoundland]. “It's the second full Moon in a calendar month.” (NASA).
Related:
- Folklore of the Blue Moon — by Philip Hiscock of the Dept. of Folklore, Memorial University of Newfoundland
- Blue Moons and Lavender Suns — (Alaska Science Forum) yes, the Moon can really turn blue
- What’s a Blue Moon? According to the editors of Sky & Telescope, the definition of “blue moon” as the second full Moon in a month is a mistake, prompting some to cry “Bah, Humbug!”
Going to Bed
I check the locks on the front door
and the side door,
make sure the windows are closed
and the heat dialed down.
I switch off the computer,
turn off the living room lights.
I let in the cats.
Reverently, I unplug the Christmas tree,
leaving Christ and the little animals
in the dark.
The last thing I do
is step out to the back yard
for a quick look at the Milky Way.
The stars are halogen-blue.
The constellations, whose names
I have long since forgotten,
look down anonymously,
and the whole galaxy
is cartwheeling in silence through the night.
Everything seems to be ok.
— George Bilgere
R.I.P. Vic Chesnutt
Singer and Songwriter Dies at 45: Vic Chesnutt, whose darkly comic songs about mortality, vulnerability and life’s simple joys made him a favorite of critics and fellow musicians, died Friday in a hospital in Athens, Ga., a family spokesman said. He was 45 and lived in Athens.
He had been in a coma after taking an overdose of muscle relaxants earlier this week.
Mr. Chesnutt had a cracked, small voice but sang with disarming candor about a struggle for peace in a life filled with pain. A car crash at age 18 left him partly paralyzed, and he performed in a wheelchair.
The accident, he has said, focused him as a songwriter, and it became the subject of some of his earliest recordings. “I’m not a victim/Oh, I am an atheist,” Mr. Chesnutt sang in “Speed Racer,” from his first album, “Little,” produced by Michael Stipe of R.E.M. and released in 1990.
In a recent interview on the public radio show “Fresh Air,” he told Terry Gross: “It was only after I broke my neck and even like maybe a year later that I really started realizing that I had something to say.”
Although he never had blockbuster record sales, Mr. Chesnutt was a prolific songwriter who remained a mainstay on the independent music circuit for two decades, making more than 15 albums.
Musicians flocked to work with him: he recorded with the bands Lambchop, Widespread Panic and Elf Power, as well as the jazz guitarist Bill Frisell, and in a recent burst of creative activity he made two albums with a band that included Guy Picciotto of Fugazi and members of the Montreal indie-rock group Thee Silver Mt. Zion.
Because of Mr. Chesnutt’s fondness for simple guitar chords — after his accident his fingers could no longer form the jazzier ones, he has said — his work was often described as a variant of folk-rock. But the sound of his albums changed with their revolving collaborators, from stark recordings of Mr. Chesnutt alone to finessed full-band arrangements.
…He sings about suicide in “Flirted With You All My Life,” from his recent album “At the Cut,” describing death as a lover he must break up with because his accomplishments in life are incomplete:
When you touched a friend of mine I thought I would lose my mind
But I found out with time that really, I was not ready, no no, cold death
Oh death, I’m really not ready.
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/26/nyregion/26chesnutt_CA0/articleInline.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/26/nyregion/26chesnutt_CA0/articleInline.jpg "Vic Chesnutt, R.I.P.")
(New York Times obituary)
R.I.P. James Gurley, Big Brother Guitarist
“James Gurley, who played guitar in Big Brother and the Holding Company, the psychedelic rock band that brought Janis Joplin to fame, died on Sunday at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 69. One of the central groups of San Francisco’s fertile mid-1960s rock scene, Big Brother and the Holding Company took blues-based songs on long, strange, electric trips that often featured Mr. Gurley’s protracted solos. In an interview in 2007 with The Desert Sun, in Palm Springs, Calif., Mr. Gurley said that his approach was inspired by the music of John Coltrane.” (New York Times obituary)
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/25/arts/25gurley_CA0/articleInline.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/12/25/arts/25gurley_CA0/articleInline.jpg "James Gurley, R.I.P.")
Happy Yule
“I salute you. I am your friend, and my love for you goes deep.
There is nothing I can give you which you have not already, but there is much, very much, which though I cannot give it, you can take.
No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today.
Take heaven.
No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this precious little instant.
Take peace.
The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach is joy. There is radiance and courage in the darkness could we but see; and to see, we have only to look.
Life is so generous a giver, but we, judging its gifts by their coverings, cast them away as ugly or heavy or hard. Remove the covering, and you will find beneath it a living splendor, woven of love, and wisdom, and power. Welcome it, greet it, and you touch the angel’s hand that brings it.
Everything we call a trial, a sorrow, a duty, believe me, that angel’s hand is there, the gift is there, and the wonder of an overshadowing Presence.
Our joys, too, be not content with them as joys. They, too, conceal diviner gifts.
Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty beneath its covering, that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven.
Courage, then, to claim it, that is all! But courage you have, and the knowledge that we are pilgrims wending through unknown country our way home.
And so, at this Christmas time, I greet you, not quite as the world sends greeting, but with profound esteem now and forever.
The day breaks and the shadows flee away.”
— Christmas greeting from a letter written by Italian friar and painter Giovanni da Fiesole (Fra Angelico) 1387-1455
The vast left-brain conspiracy
‘I use the term “neuro-enthusiasta” for those given to excessive excitement over what brain science teaches. I have been warning, often in these pages, of its mostly amusing excesses and its tendency to produce newspaper headlines exclaiming that the brain “lights up” when people think and feel various things.
Still, I did not foresee “neuro-” becoming a universal prefix. We have neuro-economics, neuro-theology, neuro-aesthetics and now, if Iain McGilchrist is to be believed, neuro-history.’ — Owen Flanagan (New Scientist)
Snakefly Snatches “Ugliest Bug” Title
First prize in this year’s Arizona State University (A.S.U.) annual Ugly Bug Contest. [I actually think she’s kinda cute.] Did you vote when I posted the link to the contest last week? (Scientific American)
Getting at the Texture of Inner Experience
“Maybe it is possible with our modern technology to take a flash picture in the dark.” — Russell T. Hurlburt (New York Times via abby)
New Scientist 2009 trivia quiz
“If you want to read about the big science stories of the year, you have come to the wrong place – turn back to the news review gallery. Here we are celebrating the science trivia of 2009. Read on and test your mental mettle in New Scientist's annual end of year quiz, and we will see whether 2009 has truly been the Year of Science as promoted by the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science, or rather a Year of Superstition, Ignorance and Minds Like a Sieve.” (New Scientist)
Charity Navigator…
…works to advance a more efficient and responsive philanthropic marketplace by evaluating the financial health of over 5,400 of America’s largest charities.
Related:
- Be a smarter charitable giver (money.cnn.com)
- FTC Announces Operation False Charity Law Enforcement Sweep (ftc.gov)
Think You’re a Film Buff?
Name That Movie puts up six iconic drawings, by Paul Rogers, from classic films. Figuring out which film each set references is harder than you would think.
Marburg Fever Survivor Puzzles Scientists
“The Marburg virus had never before reached North America, as far as experts know. It is a close relative of Ebola, and the diseases these viruses cause are among the world’s most dreaded, because they can have horrific symptoms and high death rates and are easily transmitted by bodily fluids. There is no vaccine, cure or even specific treatment.
Infectious disease experts had warned for years that someday an infected person might board a plane and carry one of these deadly viruses halfway around the world, potentially exposing countless others along the way. Now it had happened.
But Ms. Barnes survived, and no one else became infected, even though epidemiologists calculated that 260 people — hospital and lab workers, friends and family — had potentially been exposed.” (New York Times )
Can you really be “addicted” to shopping or using the Internet?
“Despite the scientific implausibility of the same disease—addiction—underlying both damaging heroin use and overenthusiasm for World of Warcraft, the concept has run wild in the popular imagination. Our enthusiasm for labeling new forms of addictions seems to have arisen from a perfect storm of pop medicine, pseudo-neuroscience, and misplaced sympathy for the miserable.” — Vaughan Bell (Slate)
Top 25 Censored Stories for 2010
- 1. US Congress Sells Out to Wall Street
- 2. US Schools are More Segregated Today than in the 1950s
- 3. Toxic Waste Behind Somali Pirates
- 4. Nuclear Waste Pools in North Carolina
- 5. Europe Blocks US Toxic Products
- 6. Lobbyists Buy Congress
- 7. Obama’s Military Appointments Have Corrupt Past
- 8. Bailed out Banks and America’s Wealthiest Cheat IRS Out of Billions
- 9. US Arms Used for War Crimes in Gaza
- 10. Ecuador Declares Foreign Debt Illegitimate
- 11. Private Corporations Profit from the Occupation of Palestine
- 12. Mysterious Death of Mike Connell—Karl Rove’s Election Thief
- 13. Katrina’s Hidden Race War
- 14. Congress Invested in Defense Contracts
- 15. World Bank’s Carbon Trade Fiasco
- 16. US Repression of Haiti Continues
- 17. The ICC Facilitates US Covert War in Sudan
- 18. Ecuador’s Constitutional Rights of Nature
- 19. Bank Bailout Recipients Spent to Defeat Labor
- 20. Secret Control of the Presidential Debates
- 21. Recession Causes States to Cut Welfare
- 22. Obama’s Trilateral Commission Team
- 23. Activists Slam World Water Forum as a Corporate-Driven Fraud
- 24. Dollar Glut Finances US Military Expansion
- 25. Fast Track Oil Exploitation in Western Amazon
via Project Censored.
One-Liners Of The Decade
The short quips, phrases and exclamations that defined the '00s.
How many can you identify?:
- “Wassup?”
- “The Tribe has spoken.”
- “The American people have now spoken. But it’s going to take a little while to determine exactly what
- they said.”
- “Holy Fucking Shit.”
- “There are known knowns… we also know that there are known unknowns… There are also unknown unknowns.”
- “Shock and awe.”
- “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.”
- “Wardrobe malfunction.”
- “He’s just not that into you.”
- “Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits.”
- “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”
- “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”
- “I wish I knew how to quit you.”
- “What are you doing?”
- “F—-ing Jews… The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.”
- “An iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator: These are not three separate devices, this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone.”
- “Leave Britney alone!”
- “Yes, we can.”
- “I drink your milkshake.”
- “The difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.”
- “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.”
- “You lie!”
- “Yo Taylor, I’m really happy for you, and Imma let you finish, I’m sorry, but Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time.”
For the attributions, go here. (Buzzfeed via walker)
[Are you as glad as I am that that decade’s done?]
The Strange Consensus on Obama’s Nobel Speech
“Obama puts a pretty, intellectual, liberal face on some ugly and decidedly illiberal polices. Just as George Bush’s Christian-based moralizing let conservatives feel good about America regardless of what it does, Obama’s complex and elegiac rhetoric lets many liberals do the same. To red state Republicans, war and its accompanying instruments (secrecy, executive power, indefinite detention) felt so good and right when justified by swaggering, unapologetic toughness and divinely-mandated purpose; to blue state Democrats, all of that feels just as good when justified by academic meditations on “just war” doctrine and when accompanied by poetic expressions of sorrow and reluctance. When you combine the two rhetorical approaches, what you get is what you saw yesterday: a bipartisan embrace of the same policies and ideologies among people with supposedly irreconcilable views of the world.” — Glenn Greenwald (Salon)
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
“…[W]ith his garish, pointless and downright inept rendering of Alice Sebold‘s 2002 novel, The Lovely Bones, Peter Jackson has hit a new low in the annals of movie adaptations.” (Salon)
“Copenhagen is about doing as little as possible”
‘An interview with Dennis Meadows, whose 1972 book The Limits of Growth was an early warning of global crisis.’ (Salon)
Deepest View of Universe
“NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has made the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that formed 600 million years after the Big Bang. No galaxies have been seen before at such early times. The new deep view, taken in late August 2009, also provides insights into how galaxies grew in their formative years early in the universe’s history. The image was taken in the same region as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), which was taken in 2004 and is the deepest visible-light image of the universe. Hubble’s newly installed Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) collects light from near-infrared wavelengths and therefore looks even deeper into the universe, because the light from very distant galaxies is stretched out of the ultraviolet and visible regions of the spectrum into near-infrared wavelengths by the expansion of the universe.” (HubbleSite)
Living Off Found Money
“For the past 10 years, Jesus Leonardo has been cleaning up at an OTB parlor in Midtown Manhattan, cashing in, by his own count, nearly half a million dollars’ worth of winning tickets from wagers on thoroughbred races across the country.
During his glorious run, Mr. Leonardo, 57, has not placed a single bet.
“It is literally found money,” he said on a recent night from his private winner’s circle. He spends more than 10 hours a day there, feeding thousands of discarded betting slips through a ticket scanner in a never-ending search for someone else’s lost treasure.
“This has become my job, my life,” he said. “This is how I feed my family.”
Leonardo, who favors track suits and wears his graying hair and bushy beard in long ponytails, is what’s known in horse racing parlance as a stooper — a person who hangs around racetracks and betting parlors picking up tickets thrown away by others. Most tickets are losers, but enough are winners to make it worth his while.” (New York Times [thanks, abby])
Ugly Bug Contest
“The biologists from Dow AgroSciences, NAU Imaging and Histology Core Facility, ASU International Institute for Species Exploration and W. M. Keck Bioimaging Laboratory are pleased to present the Ugly Bug contestants for 2009. Each of the bugs are anxious to be crowned champion so be sure to vote soon and vote often… and remember…Ugly is only cuticle deep.” (ASU-Ask A Biologist)
And:
- Pick World’s Ugliest Insect (scientificamerican.com)
Ezekiel’s Wheel Over Norway?
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/spaceweather.com/swpod2009/09dec09/Jan-Petter1.jpg' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/spaceweather.com/swpod2009/09dec09/Jan-Petter1.jpg)
“This morning in arctic Norway, onlookers were stunned when a gigantic luminous spiral formed in the northern sky. “We are used to seeing lots of auroras here in Norway, but this was different,” says Nick Banbury of Harstad who witnessed the phenomenon on his way to work “between 7:50 and 8:00 a.m. local time.” Onlooker Jan Petter Jorgensen took this photo:
The first reaction of many readers when they see this picture is Photoshop! Surely this must be a fake. But no, many independent observers witnessed and phtotographed the apparition. It is real.
Banbury continues: “It consisted initially of a green beam of light similar in color to the aurora with a mysterious rotating spiral at one end. This spiral then got bigger and bigger until it turned into a huge halo in the sky with the green beam extending down to Earth. According to press reports, this could be seen all over northern Norway and must therefore have been very high up in the atmosphere to be seen hundreds of km apart.”
UPDATE: Circumstantial evidence is mounting that the phenomenon was caused by a malfunctioning rocket, possibly an ICBM launched from a Russian submarine. A Navtex no-fly alert was issued for the White Sea on Dec. 9th, and photographers appear to have recorded the initial boost phase of a launch below the spiral (see inset). A rocket motor spinning out of control could indeed explain the spiral pattern, so this explanation seems plausible, although it has not yet been confirmed.” (SpaceWeather.com via julia)
Related:
- That Crazy Spiral in the Sky? It Might Be Real (wired.com)
- WTF Is the Norway Spiral? UFO? (blippitt.com)
Social scientists build case for ‘survival of the kindest’
“Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, are challenging long-held beliefs that human beings are wired to be selfish. In a wide range of studies, social scientists are amassing a growing body of evidence to show we are evolving to become more compassionate and collaborative in our quest to survive and thrive.” (Science Daily)
The Talented Ms. Highsmith
Review of Joan Schenkar’s The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith: “She kept 300 snails as pets. She drank a quart of gin a day. She considered robbery worse than murder. She left the United States to live in Europe because of what she called ‘the Negro problem’ — by which she did not mean discrimination against Negroes, but the civil rights movement that had Negroes demanding their rights.
A houseguest once left her window open; she threw a dead rat inside. She took tips left on restaurant tables. She’d drive 60 miles to get a cheaper spaghetti dinner. She called Hitler’s extermination policy a ‘semicaust’, because only half the world’s Jews died.
She thought that ‘life didn’t make sense without a crime in it.’ Her idea of happiness was to write a murder. At 1:30 in the morning, standing in a lover’s apartment, she didn’t hesitate to make a booty call to another woman. ‘I am a man and I love women,’ she wrote. She liked young blonds, very made up.
A mental health professional, observing her for only a few minutes, pegged her as a psychopath. Another writer described her as ‘a black cloud.’ Her own assessment: ‘If I were to relax and become human, I could not bear my life.’
…Why would you even think of reading more than 600 pages about such a monster?” (Head Butler)
What Do Facebook Quizzes Really Know About You?
“Ever take one of those Facebook quizzes to find out which superhero most resembles your dog, or have a friend who seems to spend most of their life doing so? Then you might be in for a surprise when you take this quiz and learn just how much of your personal information these quizzes can access.Even if your Facebook profile is “private,” when you take a quiz, an unknown quiz developer could be accessing almost everything in your profile: your religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, pictures, and groups. Facebook quizzes also have access to most of the info on your friends’ profiles. This means that if your friend takes a quiz, they could be giving away your personal information too.But don’t take our word for it – take this quiz and see for yourself! And, yes, we know it’s a little weird to warn you about Facebook quizzes by asking you to take a Facebook quiz – but at least you know who we are and that we have a real privacy policy that we’re committed to upholding. Can you say the same for every unknown author of every quiz you or your friends take?” (ACLU)
Humans Wonder, Anybody Home?
Clues to consciousness in nonmammals: “Many people (some scientists among them) would like to believe that consciousness sets the human mind apart from the rest of the animal kingdom. But whether in humans or other creatures, behavioral signs of cognizance all arise from the tangled interactions of neurons in the brain. So a growing number of scientists contend that animals with brain structures and neural circuitry similar to humans’ might experience something like human awareness, even if a bit less sophisticated.” (Science News)
Related?
- Debunking the Big Brain Myth (geeksaresexy.net)
- Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans (biosingularity.wordpress.com)
- Man Actually Conscious Throughout Two Decades of “Coma” (neatorama.com)
- Terri’s Press Release: Doctors Misdiagnose Patient Thought to be in 23 Year “Persistent Vegetative State” (deaconforlife.blogspot.com)
Death to smiley
“…When I see a smiley, my first thought is, “What are you, 12 years old?” What is it about the emoticon that fills me with such loathing? Maybe it's the wastefulness of the enterprise, the redundancy of it, the implied lack of confidence in the writer's ability to communicate, or mine to comprehend. If you say, “I'm looking forward to seeing you tonight,” I think you're looking forward to seeing me. If you say, “I'm looking forward to seeing you tonight. :-),” I think you're not sure I understand the extent of sentiment in that seven-word message. And if you write, “I'm looking forward to seeing you tonight ;-),” I think your assumption of getting laid this evening may have been a bit premature, Winky.” — Mary Elizabeth Williams (Salon)
Autoimmune response to pig brain mist fells slaughterhouse workers
‘Doctors at the Mayo Clinic and government public health experts have confirmed the mysterious illnesses in 24 slaughterhouse workers in Minnesota and Indiana from 2006 to 2008 was caused by an autoimmune response to a mist of pig brain tissue.
Their article was published Monday in the British medical journal Lancet Neurology. Mayo Clinic neurologist Dr. Daniel Lachance, the lead author, said it was the first comprehensive account of the outbreak and response from Mayo, the state Health Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“This was really a kind of unique experiment of nature where an unusual form of harvesting a part of an animal was utilized and inadvertently exposed individuals through their respiratory tract or their eyes or mouth and ended up triggering an autoimmune response in their own bodies”…
The immune response attacked the nervous systems of the 21 workers in Minnesota and three in Indiana from November 2006 to May 2008, causing painful symptoms that included weakness and fatigue to confusion and seizures.
All are improving and most no longer have measurable symptoms… although two may have permanent damage.
All the patients worked in or near areas where compressed air was used to extract pig brains, which are considered a delicacy in some Asian countries. It was a rarely used process then, he said, and he knows of no slaughterhouses that still use it.’ (The Associated Press)
The Wikipedia Exodus Is the Least of Our Worries
“A Web 2.0 site is one that by definition gets its value from the actions of users. But what happens when the best users stop using?
Wikipedia, which is arguably the most valuable source of information on the Internet, is written and edited almost entirely by volunteers. But what happens when those volunteers stop volunteering?We’re about to find out. In the first quarter of this year, the Wikipedia lost an incredible 49,000 editors, literally ten times the number lost in the same quarter last year.Another potential threat to Wikipedia is that its expenses could outpace costs. Currently, the site runs on donations. But if the most die-hard fans are leaving — the writers and editors — they could take their donations with them.As volunteerism goes down, successful acts of vandalism go up, and the resource becomes increasingly unreliable, which could cause even more people to leave and even fewer people to donate. Crowdsoucing is great — until the crowd goes somewhere else.Sorry to be a Debbie Downer, but the death of Wikipedia is the least of our problems. The Wikipedia exodus is the least of our worries…” — Mike Elgan (Datamation)
Related:
- Volunteers Log Off as Wikipedia Ages (online.wsj.com)
- The collaborative construction of “fact” on Wikipedia (matei.org)
- Have you stopped editing Wikipedia? And if so, is it doomed? (guardian.co.uk)
- Wikipedia’s New Editorial Line of Defense (slumpedoverkeyboarddead.com)
- Quoted – Ecommerce Times – Wikipedia to Tinge Suspect Entries With Orange Cast (scotttesta.com)
- Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales denies site is ‘losing’ thousands of volunteer editors (telegraph.co.uk)
- Wikipedia on the wane? (bbc.co.uk)
- Hiring for Social Media: The Ugly Side (altitudebranding.com)
No Longer a Civil Rights Footnote
On that supercharged day in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Ala., she rode her way into history books, credited with helping to ignite the civil rights movement.
But there was another woman, named Claudette Colvin, who refused to be treated like a substandard citizen on one of those Montgomery buses — and she did it nine months before Mrs. Parks. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made his political debut fighting her arrest. Moreover, she was the star witness in the legal case that eventually forced bus desegregation.
Yet instead of being celebrated, Ms. Colvin has lived unheralded in the Bronx for decades, initially cast off by black leaders who feared she was not the right face for their battle, according to a new book that has plucked her from obscurity.” (New York Times via abby)
Mental Illness in Academe
Elyn R. Saks is a professor of law, psychology, and psychiatry and the behavioral sciences at the University of Southern California’s law school. She is the author of a memoir, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (Hyperion, 2007). Here is her essay about ‘outing’ herself as a university faculty member suffering from schizophrenia. (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
Phil Agre Has Gone Missing
Philip Agre was an associate professor of information sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles, and for years he ran a popular technology e-mail list with thousands of subscribers. But one day the 49-year-old scholar just stopped showing up on the campus, and now colleagues have deployed Twitter, Facebook, and the Web to try to find him.
Last month the university police department put out a missing-person alert for Mr. Agre, whose absence was reported to authorities by his sister. The alert says he abandoned his apartment and his job “sometime between December 2008 and May 2009.” It also notes that he suffers from “manic depression.”
The scholar apparently had many professional contacts but few close friends. An expert on privacy, he was always guarded about his own, say those who know him.
“In his personal life, he never wanted to discuss social things,” said Charlotte Lee, an assistant professor of human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington who worked under Mr. Agre when she was a doctoral student. ‘When his behavior got more erratic, nobody felt close enough to him to help, and we thought we'd help by protecting his zone of privacy,” she said. “Respecting that zone of privacy is what allowed him to slip away.’ ” (The Chronicle of Higher Education)
As someone who was a participant in and subscriber to his ‘Red Rock Eaters’ mailing list for the duration, I am reposting this to spread the word. He is certainly someone who would know how to drop off the grid if he wished to, but I worry that something more dire has happened to him.
Related:
- Missing: Phil Agre, internet scholar (boingboing.net)
Monster Waves on the Sun
![[Image 'https://i0.wp.com/science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/images/solartsunami/twoviews_strip.gif' cannot be displayed]](https://i0.wp.com/science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/images/solartsunami/twoviews_strip.gif)
‘Years ago, when solar physicists first witnessed a towering wave of hot plasma racing along the sun's surface, they doubted their senses. The scale of the thing was staggering. It rose up higher than Earth itself and rippled out from a central point in a circular pattern millions of kilometers in circumference. Skeptical observers suggested it might be a shadow of some kind—a trick of the eye—but surely not a real wave.
“Now we know” says Joe Gurman of the Solar Physics Lab at the Goddard Space Flight Center. “Solar tsunamis are real.” ‘ (NASA -Mystery of the Solar Tsunami–Solved)
African leaders advise Bono on reform of U2
Bono thanks Commission chairman Nelson Mandela for the report.“An expert commission of African leaders today announced their plan for comprehensive reform of music band U2. Saying that U2’s rock had lost touch with its African roots, the commission called for urgent measures to halt U2’s slide towards impending crisis.
“Our youth today are imperiled by low quality music,” said Commission chairman Nelson Mandela. “We will be lending African musicians to U2 to try to refurbish their sound to satisfy the urgent and growing needs for diversionary entertainment at a time of crisis in the global music and financial sectors.”
Concerns about U2 have been growing in Africa for a while. One Western aid blogger testified to the Commission that his teenage kids found U2’s music “cheesy.” The Mandela Commission proposed that U2 follow a series of steps to recover its Edge:
1) Hire African consultants to analyze U2’s “poverty of music trap”
2) Prepare a Band-owned and Commission-approved Comprehensive U2 Reform Strategy Design (CURSD)
3) Undertake a rehabilitation tour of African capitals to field-test and ground-truth proposed reforms
4) Subject all songs to randomized experiments in which the effect on wellbeing of control and treatment groups is rigorously assessed.
Mandela expressed optimism that the Commission’s report and proposed reforms had come in time to stave off terminal crisis in U2, and restore its effectiveness in the 80s arena rock field.”
via Aid Watch.
