“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.” via CNN.
“There are about 18,000 identifiable, man-made objects in space, including operational and defunct satellites, spent rocket boosters and debris. Experts said that while the risk of satellite collisions like Tuesday’s was exceptionally small, now one had occurred it made another more likely.
“The problem with collisions like this is that they don’t destroy satellites, they just create smaller ones, like fast moving shotguns, that are potentially much more damaging,” said Diego.
Andrew Brookes, an aerospace analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said the area where the collision occurred — called low-Earth orbit — was the most crowded portion of space and also one of the most important for sensitive communications, science and weather satellites.” via Reuters
“An extinct animal has been resurrected by cloning for the first time—though the clone died minutes after birth. Findings revealed January 23 in the journal Theriogenology describe the use of frozen skin in 2003 to clone a bucardo, or Pyrenean ibex, a subspecies of Spanish ibex that went extinct in 2000. Scientists had cloned endangered species before, but not one that had officially died out.” via National Geographic News.
‘South Africa’s ETV News station made a little booboo, prematurely proclaiming “George Bush is dead” in a breaking news flash that aired on TVs throughout the country. Apparently the station uses the phrase a mock-up for headlines and a butterfingered (or sneaky) technician accidently pushed the button that runs the morbid message. A station spokesman said ETV would now test banners using “gobbledegook.” Dubya also responded to the little whoopsie, saying, “South Africa obviously misunderestimated my ability to outlive y’all.” ‘ via Truemors.
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China Tower, Beijing, burning
“Every easy credit cycle sees some of the worst buildings built in the worst places and the worst possible way. For example, the crowning achievement of the 60’s boom was the decision to build a huge double tower complex in lower Manhattan. Rockerfeller controlled the State of NY and used government funds to build the WTC complex. I watched in total disgust, as this monster thing was built. I could see it had precious little internal support. Rather than being like a honeycomb, it was a pile of pancakes supported by slender steel exterior sheathes. It collapsed. Well, this cycle, even more unstable, ill-designed monstrosities are going up and just as fast, vanishing, the latest one is in China.” via EMSNews
![//emsnews.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/picture-213.png?w=550&h=345' cannot be displayed]](http://emsnews.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/picture-213.png?w=550&h=345 "The building on the left is the one that burned.")
The building on the left is the one that burned.
“Even before it was revealed Tuesday that an illegal fireworks display organized by China Central Television caused the spectacular fire that destroyed one of Beijing’s new glass-and-steel landmarks, the state-run broadcaster was already the subject of its own firestorm on the Internet.
The inferno at CCTV’s new, still-unoccupied headquarters complex laid bare a simmering anger and resentment toward the network for spending public money on grand construction projects and for continuing to broadcast government propaganda.” via Seattle Times .
‘Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and White House Chief Counsel Greg Craig discussed on Tuesday the Senator’s proposal to set up a truth and reconciliation commission to investigate potential crimes of the Bush administration.
“I went over some of the parameters of it and they were well aware at the White House of what I’m talking about,” Leahy told the Huffington Post. “And we just agreed to talk further.”
The dialogue between the Vermont Democrat and the president’s office is a new phase in a delicate process concerning how best to handle potential crimes in the previous White House. Leahy proposed an investigatory commission on Monday, after which the president — speaking at his first news conference — said he did not currently have an opinion on the plan. Obama went on to say that he would rather look forward than backward, but he promised to prosecute any crime — whether committed was a former White House official or everyday citizen.’ via Huffington Post
“Injections of a natural growth factor into the brains of mice, rats and monkeys offers hope of preventing or reversing the earliest impacts of Alzheimer’s disease on memory. The benefits arose even in animals whose brains contained the hallmark plaques that clog up the brains of patients.
By delivering brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) directly into the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus, the parts of the brain where memories are formed then consolidated, the researchers successfully tackled damage exactly where Alzheimer’s strikes first…” via New Scientist.
“Each post takedown occurred on a blog hosted by the Google-owned Blogger platform, the publishing system used by the majority of mp3 sites, particularly those founded prior to 2007, when the open-source WordPress software became the vogue. Google, the bloggers believe, has quietly changed the methods by which it enforces its user agreement. Whereas in the past, a blog owner would receive a warning before a post’s removal, Google is now simply hitting the delete button.” via Los Angeles Weekly.
“In January, 24 U.S. soldiers are believed to have committed suicide — seven confirmed cases and 17 more awaiting confirmation.
By comparison, last January there were only five suicides in the Army.
Last month’s total is not just the highest monthly total since the Army started counting in 1980; it is more deaths than were sustained in combat last month by all branches of the armed forces combined. via NPR.
“Laughing about all the nasty shit — or crying about it, kibitzing about it, whining about it, bragging about it, confessing it, writing about it, and most important, exposing it — it’s all the rage. Jezebel, the popular women’s offshoot of the Gawker empire, has been the leader of the oversharing crusade, with vibrant, aromatic and really graphic posts about everything from lodged tampons to yeast infection remedies to bloody period sex to female ejaculation. (The last, in Tracie Egan’s piece, “Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Gush,” also includes Egan’s report that “I live my life perpetually suffering between either mild dehydration or a UTI, meaning that my piss is (ab)normally cloudy, stinky, and dark” ).
But Jezebel writers are not the only ones reveling in graphic female self-revelation. Other recent, mainstream expressions of the form have included Elle magazine’s brutal piece last summer by Miranda Purves, called “The Ring of Fire,” about how giving birth to her child tore her vagina asunder. An English translation of Charlotte Roche’s German bestseller Wetlands (“It is difficult to overstate the raunchiness of the novel,” read a story in the New York Times about Wetlands, “and hard to describe in a family newspaper”) is due in April. It opens with the sentence, “As far back as I can remember, I have had hemorrhoids.” And this month, a younger iteration of the lay-it-bare form: the publication of My Little Red Book, an anthology of more than 90 women’s stories of the first time they got their period. It includes contributions from well-known authors Jacquelyn Mitchard and Erica Jong and writers of popular tween novels Cecily von Ziegesar and Meg Cabot, as well as ruby red reminiscences from 1916 to 2007, by women who first began to bleed everywhere from Connecticut to Canada, Paris to New Zealand, India to Istanbul. Unsurprisingly, there’s an accompanying Web site where others can contribute their stories.” — Rebecca Traister via Salon.
Actions like that are no doubt overdue in the minds of organizations like the 30,000-member Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network (FAAN), a Virginia-based advocacy organization that has led the fight to raise awareness about peanut and other food allergies in both children and adults. Go to its Web site and you’ll see some eyebrow-raising points.
• The incidence of food allergies has doubled over the past 10 years.
• Food allergy is believed to be the leading cause of anaphylaxis outside hospitals, causing an estimated 50,000 emergency department visits each year in the U.S.
• Each year in the U.S., it is estimated that anaphylaxis caused by food results in 150 deaths.
Those FAAN numbers get cited in nearly every news report about food allergies. The organization’s founder, Anne Munoz-Furlong, mother of a food-allergic child, is well known in the media as a food allergy expert. She has done her own research and her studies have been published in medical literature. Now major medical groups, like the American Academy of Pediatrics, have recommended that children avoid eating peanuts until age 3. As for consuming other potentially allergic foods (such as strawberries or dairy), the AAP has, until recently, suggested that kids wait until age 2.
But on closer examination, food allergies are not the epidemic we’ve been led to believe. FAAN’s advocacy may have helped to create rules and laws that are based less on sound science than on a significant misrepresentation of facts. Ironically, by accepting these facts, we may be increasing our risk of developing food allergies.” — Rahul Parikh MD via Salon.
“A fresh look at ornate 1000-year-old vases from New Mexico’s canyons has unearthed a surprise: They were used as mugs to drink chocolate. The findings are the first record of the food in North America, long before its introduction in colonial times. They also reveal that chocolate was an expensive delicacy enjoyed by few during elaborate rituals.” via Coelho 2009 (202): 3, ScienceNOW.
Fifty years ago today: On February 3, 1959, a small-plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa, United States killed, along with the pilot of the plane, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” (J. P. Richardson). , Twelve years later, Don McLean, in his song “American Pie” dubbed it The Day the Music Died.
However,
‘…The method is not particularly practical at the moment, because it fails almost all of the time. Only 1 of every 100 million teleportation attempts succeed, requiring 10 minutes to transfer one bit of quantum information.
“We need to work on that,” Dr. Monroe said.’ via NYTimes [thanks, abby].
‘Sorry, Michael Steele, but it’s going to be a while before you’re anything more than the figurehead frontman of a shipwrecked Republican National Committee. Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh remain the leaders of your party, and most Republicans are happy that way. A Rasmussen poll out today found that fully 55 percent of Republicans polled think their party should be “more like” Palin.’ — Joan Walsh via Salon.
‘Imbolc is one of the four principal festivals of the Irish calendar, celebrated among Gaelic peoples and some other Celtic cultures, either at the beginning of February or at the first local signs of Spring. Most commonly it is celebrated on February 2, which falls halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox in the northern hemisphere. Originally dedicated to the goddess Brigid, in the Christian period it was adopted as St Brigid’s Day. In Scotland the festival is also known as Là Fhèill Brìghde, in Ireland as Lá Fhéile Bríde, and in Wales as Gwyl Fair.
Imbolc is traditionally a time of weather prognostication, and the old tradition of watching to see if serpents or badgers came from their winter dens is perhaps a precursor to the North American Groundhog Day.’ via Wikipedia.
“To the extent that those who term themselves liberal consider themselves more open to change than the conservative, it would be within the spirit of their philosophy to open up to the true nature of human language and let liberal drift away as “the L-word.” “Reclaiming” has a good feisty ring to it, but don’t we have more important things to do–and even reclaim–than engage in a conceit so futile as to stop a word’s meaning from changing? Move On, indeed.” — John McWhorter via The New Republic.
Can we ever reencumber the pursuit of affluence with virtue again? via RealClearMarkets.
“Every year, hundreds of words are dropped from the dictionary to make room for new words. Lexicographers spend hours researching word usage and may drop words that have been completely neglected by the society.
To reverse this trend, Oxford University Press has launched an initiative called Save the Words that aims to prevent these lesser-known English words from becoming extinct.
Here’s how. You adopt one such word through “Save the Words” and take a pledge to use that word more often in your daily conversations or written communication.
This will directly increase the chance of that word’s survival because the moment lexicographers see discarded words being used in conversations, they may re-include them in the dictionary. Wheatgrass is one such word that was reinstated after missing from the dictionary for several years.
There are hundreds of “lost” words already – vacivity, plegnic, mingent or primifluous for example – all of them, not surprisingly, failed by the Firefox spell checker as well. So go ahead, adopt bring back a nearly-extinct word. In return, you get this nifty certificate.” via Digital Inspiration.
“After Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) re-subpoenaed Karl Rove, former aide and adviser to President George W. Bush’s, to testify before Congress on his role in the Bush administration’s politicization of the Justice Department and prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman (D), Rove’s lawyer Tuesday asked the Obama White House for guidance, The Huffington Post reports.
Does Rove’s past claim of executive privilege, which Bush backed, still exist under the new administration?” via The Washington Independent.
The Reagan administration’s attacks on the exclusionary rule — a barrage of speeches, opinion articles, litigation and proposed legislation — never gained much traction. But now that young lawyer, John G. Roberts Jr., is chief justice of the United States.
This month, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority in Herring v. United States, a 5-to-4 decision, took a big step toward the goal he had discussed a quarter-century before. Taking aim at one of the towering legacies of the Warren Court, its landmark 1961 decision applying the exclusionary rule to the states, the chief justice’s majority opinion established for the first time that unlawful police conduct should not require the suppression of evidence if all that was involved was isolated carelessness. That was a significant step in itself. More important yet, it suggested that the exclusionary rule itself might be at risk.
The Herring decision “jumped a firewall,” said Kent Scheidegger, the general counsel of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims’ rights group. “I think Herring may be setting the stage for the Holy Grail,” he wrote on the group’s blog, referring to the overruling of Mapp v. Ohio, the 1961 Warren Court decision.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined the Herring decision and has been a reliable vote for narrowing the protections afforded criminal defendants since he joined the court in 2006. In applying for a job in the Reagan Justice Department in 1985, he wrote that his interest in the law had been “motivated in large part by disagreement with Warren Court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure,” religious freedom and voting rights.” via NY Times
“John Martyn, a Scottish singer and guitarist whose gentle mix of folk and jazz and innovative use of electronic effects have influenced a broad range of musicians since the 1970s, died on Thursday in Kilkenny, Ireland. He was 60.
The cause was complications of pneumonia, said Jim Tullio, his longtime record producer.
Mr. Martyn emerged from the London folk scene of the mid-1960s with a crisp and distinctive guitar style, but he had his greatest impact in the ’70s with albums that took that sound in new directions. Inspired in part by the slow-burning, mystical jazz of the American saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, he devolved a keen sense of texture and atmospherics, transforming ballads into sensuous rhapsodies.
Making novel use of the Echoplex and other devices in songs like “Glistening Glyndebourne” (1971), he manipulated the sound of his acoustic guitar, making it pulse and throb hypnotically, an effect widely imitated throughout the ’70s and ’80s.
Although his music never had a wide appeal, Mr. Martyn released more than 20 albums and has been emulated by generations of musicians.” via NYTimes Obituary.
Solid Air and Grace and Danger have always been in heavy rotation in my listening. Today, they will be on continuous shuffle…
Stanley Kubrick allowed his then-17-year-old daughter, Vivian, to make a documentary about the production of The Shining. Created originally for the British television show BBC Arena, the documentary offers rare insight into the shooting process of a Kubrick film. A version of this film with Vivian Kubrick’s commentary can be viewed here: The Making of The Shining (by Vivian Kubrick) [via wood s lot].
‘ “Souvenir de Chine,” a video by the Swiss electronic duo Larytta, features mice, ducks, chickens, and parakeets: We assume that none of them were injured along the way. But, like us, they must have been mighty confused.’ via Very Short List.
“On May 3rd 2008, artists Robin Hewlett and Ben Kinsley invited the Google Inc. Street View team and residents of Pittsburgh’s Northside to collaborate on a series of tableaux along Sampsonia Way. Neighbors, and other participants from around the city, staged scenes ranging from a parade and a marathon, to a garage band practice, a seventeenth century sword fight, a heroic rescue and much more…
Street View technicians captured 360-degree photographs of the street with the scenes in action and integrated the images into the Street View mapping platform. This first-ever artistic intervention in Google Street View made its debut on the web in November of 2008.” via STREET WITH A VIEW: a project by Robin Hewlett & Ben Kinsley.
![//cyanatrendland.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/pedestrian-project1.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://cyanatrendland.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/pedestrian-project1.jpg "Eerily familiar...")
Eerily familiar...
“The Pedestrian Project consists of several performers wearing entirely black custom-made costumes modeled after the generic images of men, women, and children seen on public signs. Mimicking the lives of everyday people, the roaming sculptural forms inspire the imaginations of onlookers, who often find themselves mesmerized as these familiar icons assume busy lives of their own.” via The Pedestrian Project | Trend.Land.
“Views of spacious skies and purple mountain majesties in US national parks may soon be interrupted by industrial roads and power lines, after years of Bush policies that pushed commerce over conservation, reports the Los Angeles Times. And unlike the many decisions that President Obama can quickly reverse, the changes looming for national parks may be difficult or impossible to prevent.
Moves like greenlighting a uranium mine on the Grand Canyon’s doorstep or auctioning oil leases next-door to Arches National Park were met with near-universal dismay, but a “culture of fear” and “ethical failure” within the Interior Department quashed opposition…” via Newser.
“The somber, elegiac tones before President Obama’s oath of office at the inauguration on Tuesday came from the instruments of Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and two colleagues. But what the millions on the Mall and watching on television heard was in fact a recording, made two days earlier by the quartet and matched tone for tone by the musicians playing along.
The players and the inauguration organizing committee said the arrangement was necessary because of the extreme cold and wind during Tuesday’s ceremony. The conditions raised the possibility of broken piano strings, cracked instruments and wacky intonation…” via NYTimes.
“Prior to leaving the White House for the last time, George Bush left an envelope in the oval office for Barack Obama. Here in the New York bureau, I’ve asked my colleagues to guess what was inside. This is what they’ve come up with so far:
![//www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/A4-300.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/A4-300.jpg "watch out")
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via Wend Blog.
‘To those who found President Obama’s speech underwhelming, Henry Louis Gates Jr. has some advice in The Root: Read it.
“We tend to forget that Lincoln’s most famous speeches-Gettysburg and the second inaugural-read much better than they sounded,” he writes. He admits, upon hearing Obama’s speech, that he found it “less moving as a rhetorical statement than I had expected.” Upon reading the speech, Gates Jr. found “plenty of grand significance. And as I reviewed the speech, Obama’s rhetorical strategy clearly revealed itself, a strategy brilliantly calibrated between progressive chords and conservative ones, revealing him to be the president of all the people, words designed to show that, as he put it, ‘What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them-that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.'” ‘ via The Daily Beast.
“More evidence of the abominable ad market: Wired’s February issue is so thin, its binding is thicker than its actual pages. It feels startlingly flimsy to the touch. The issue numbers just 113 pages in total. Wired’s January issue contained 128 pages; the December issue, 231 pages.
Of those 113 pages, only 31.5 are ad pages. That’s miserable. The usual ratio between editorial and advertising hovers around 1:1.
31.5 ad pages is a 27% decline from the January 2009 issue, which itself was a 47% decline from January 2007.” via Silicon Alley Insider.
‘On his first day in office, President Obama put former president Bush on notice. His administration just released an executive order that will make it difficult for Bush to shield his White House records–and those of former Vice President Dick Cheney–from public scrutiny by invoking the doctrine of executive privilege.
…”[Obama]’s putting former presidents on notice that if you want to continue a claim of executive privilege that [Obama] doesn’t think is well-placed, you’re going to have to go to court,” says Anne Weismann, the chief counsel for Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW).
Obama’s executive order not only revokes “Bush’s infamous Executive Order 13233, which gave current and former presidents and vice presidents, along with their heirs, unprecedented authority to block the disclosure of White House records,” but also redefines executive privilege with a much more rigorous standard…’ via Shakesville: Suck It, Bush.
![//www.babble.com/CS/blogs/famecrawler/2008/01/oscar_statue-award.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://www.babble.com/CS/blogs/famecrawler/2008/01/oscar_statue-award.jpg "Share me...")
Now that the nominations are out, here is Waxy’s compilation of seven years of data on the pirated distribution of Oscar-nominated films.
dead leaves, some the color of cement if cement were
rust, scrape my knees on their way to the grave, buried
in gravity, the maple still full and maple leaves soft as
spring, drops begin their pattern on the pond, leaf rustle
hath a new inflection, foliate, smallest sunfish leap, dace
shimmer, scurry to every edge where arcs lap, cross, fade
back into pond, there is no pause, can be no interruption,
below words is sound, beneath sound, silence, then dark
cacophonies of need, a river, swells, above sound are the
sounds creatures make to each other by which they are
known, above these song, all this winding its way into
winter, time’s valance most acute in the fall, you’re over-
taken again, there’s nowhere to go except in, to listen as
Babels of rain sweep across the roof in a darkening room— Skip Fox
via Realpoetik
‘How valuable of [sic] an ally will John McCain be to Barack Obama? According to The New York Times, “Over the last three months, Mr. Obama has quietly consulted Mr. McCain about many of the new administration’s potential nominees to top national security jobs and about other issues” in a courtship “that historians say has few modern parallels.” Lindsey Graham has said of McCain that “that many of these appointments he would have made himself.” When McCain returned from Iraq last month, Obama called him in order to hear his thoughts on the situation. And, tonight, McCain will be the guest of honor at a black tie celebration of Obama’s inauguration.’ via The Daily Beast.
Praise song for the day.
Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others’ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.
Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, “Take out your pencils. Begin.”
We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, “I need to see what’s on the other side; I know there’s something better down the road.”
We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.
Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.
Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.
Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”
Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.
What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.
— Elizabeth Alexander, 01/20/09
I guess Chief Justice Roberts isn’t as much of a strict constructionist as we had all assumed:
‘The oath is contained in the Constitution: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
But when Roberts swore in Obama, he flipped some of the words, saying: “I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully.” ‘ via ABC News.
A friend, after watching the flubbed oath yesterday, worried that some might challenge the legitimacy of Obama’s ascension to the Presidency given that he was improperly sworn in.
“The new administration got right down to work on their first afternoon in the White House… Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel signed an order authorized by the new president freezing all new or proposed regulations at all government agencies and departments until the new administration can review them. The order puts the brakes on all the regulations the Bush administration tried to push through in its last days. But Bush can’t be mad: Obama’s taking a page from the former president’s own playbook—he did it to Clinton.” via The Daily Beast.
“For a small band of shrinks, intervening in catastrophic situations is an everyday event. But their experience at the edge has deep consequences for us all: It is altering our understanding of the true nature of human nature.” via Psychology Today.
“Obama’s popular narrative, and the way he has told it, promises to revive interest in what scholars term American exceptionalism — the idea that the American story is somehow unique. Attempts to define that quality have led foreigners to these shores, generated countless commentaries, and after World War II helped give rise to an entire academic discipline — American studies. But the topic has been notably out of fashion in the scholarly world. Now, from the well-known historian Simon Schama, we have a new, contrarian view that looks at what’s unique in the American character, putting our past in the context of the election of the new president we are just inaugurating.” via ChronicleReview.com.
‘Boehm and Carroll believe novels have the same effect as the cautionary tales told in older societies. “Just as hunter-gatherers talk of cheating and bullying as a way of staying keyed to the goal that the bad guys must not win, novels key us to the same issues,” says Boehm. “They have a function that continues to contribute to the quality and structure of group life.”
“Maybe storytelling – from TV to folk tales – actually serves some specific evolutionary function,” says Gottschall. “They’re not just by-products of evolutionary adaptation.” ‘
via New Scientist.
“Almost every community has one or two of them: persons who everyone knows, even if you have never spoken to them. Some local characters have gained nationwide recognition via internet. If your neighborhood doesn’t have one, you can follow a character from somewhere else! Here are five basic examples of different types of local characters.”
via Mental Floss.
![//blog.wired.com/cars/images/2009/01/07/verdier_02.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://blog.wired.com/cars/images/2009/01/07/verdier_02.jpg "The Verdier")
The Verdier
“Canadian designer Alexandre Verdier has given the cult-classic VW Microbus an eco-overhaul that tastefully updates the iconic breadbox on wheels. The result is a slammed diesel hybrid sure to make hippies swoon and make car camping a whole lot cooler.”
via Autopia from Wired.
I think what’ll make hippies swoon is the $129,000 price tag.
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The Hunting of the Snark
David Denby: “A strain of nasty, knowing abuse is spreading like pinkeye through the national conversation—a tone of snarking insult provoked and encouraged by the new hybrid world of print, television, radio and the Internet. This is about style and also, I suppose, grace. Anyone who speaks of grace—so spiritual a word—in connection with our raucous culture risks sounding like a genteel idiot, so I had better say right away that I’m all in favor of nasty comedy, incessant profanity, trash talk, any kind of satire, and certain kinds of invective. It’s the bad kind of invective—low, teasing, snide, condescending, knowing; in brief, snark—that I hate…
via The Daily Beast.
![//assets.nydailynews.com/img/2009/01/10/gal_obama_blackberry_8.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://assets.nydailynews.com/img/2009/01/10/gal_obama_blackberry_8.jpg "Bam 'n' Berry")
‘ “I'm still clinging to my Blackberry. They're going to have to pry it out of my hands.”
Obama uttered these now famous words – which might just be the mother all endorsements for Blackberry – in an interview with CNBC and the New York Times Wednesday.
It got us thinking, what a great ad campaign!
So we've gotten leading advertising firms to create hilarious, moving and altogether awesome ad campaigns around Bam's devotion to his Berry.’
via New York Daily News.
Interactive graphic shows the percentage of the population issued passports in each of the fifty states. I am not surprised at the regional discrepancies, which sort with so many other measures of sophistication state-by-state. I am surprised by how low the percentages are across the board. Overall, less than five percent of the American public hold passports. If that doesn’t speak to our insularity… Update: As a reader points out (see the comments), it is likely that the statistic represents the percentage of Americans who were issued passports in just one year. A Google search on “percentage of Americans who have passports” comes up with a figure more like 20-30% instead.
via Good.
“The system projects a virtual bike lane (using lasers!) on the ground around the cyclists, providing drivers with a recognizable boundary they can easily avoid.”
via Good.
Heather Havrilesky is writing here about Battlestar Galactica, about which I do not share the fascination, but her introductory remarks may be worth pondering regardless:
‘I hate hearing, “I liked their early stuff the best.” Even if it’s true, there’s something about that sentiment that’s just so overused and predictable. “Of course you liked early R.E.M. best,” I want to say. “You were 17 years old and drunk on tequila and in love with a girl who didn’t know you existed, and ‘Harbor Coat’ summed up your melancholy mood like it was written just for you.”
The truth is, we all loved early U2 and early Genesis and early “SNL” and early “Sopranos” and early reality TV and the first season of “Lost” and early Modest Mouse and some of the first webzines and the first days of Burning Man (before it got so popular) and John McEnroe (before he was everywhere) and the Dead (before the frat boys caught on) and weed (when it was cheap, remember the dime bag?) and early David Foster Wallace and early Dan Clowes and early This American Life and early Spy magazine and early, early, early, early to the party, not late! Not like everyone else, the herds, the masses! I knew about it all first, I was there, goddamn it, I was right there, discovering it. Just me, me, me!
But you weren’t alone, sugar plum. We were all there. We all liked the same crap, and then we didn’t like the stuff that came after that. And then we got fat and our hair started falling out and our backs started to hurt and we didn’t like anything at all anymore.’
…and, if you’re not there yet, take it to heart because you will be.
By the way, I beg to differ. I didn’t like the same crap, Heather. It is even more hip not to turn your nose up at things you and your crowd used to like but not to care for them in the first place. Things I never ever liked, even in their early days, include: Genesis, SNL, and especially reality TV and This American Life (and how could you forget Dave Eggers?) … And should I boast that I haven’t even heard of Dan Clowes. (You’re right about the Dead, though; I was as fanatic as they came, and I can’t listen to nearly anything past ’78.)
This is only peripherally related, I suspect, but writers on creativity have distinguished immature and mature varieties; immature creativity being brash and bold, energetic and iconoclastic, while mature creativity is more sober, reflective, integrative and synthetic. Psychologists have studied what makes some creative geniuses peak early and others continue to age constructively. As a culture, we increasingly favor the former and ignore, if not spurn, the latter (as our society does with the wisdom of age in general). I suspect the crowd-pleasers are largely of the brash variety. (It is sort of like drinking some Gallo to get smashed out of your mind as contrasted to appreciating a fine Medoc, isn’t it?)
‘According to Craig Hogan, a physicist at the Fermilab particle physics lab in Batavia, Illinois, GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time – the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into “grains”, just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in. “It looks like GEO600 is being buffeted by the microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time,” says Hogan.
If this doesn’t blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab’s Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: “If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram.”
The idea that we live in a hologram probably sounds absurd, but it is a natural extension of our best understanding of black holes, and something with a pretty firm theoretical footing. It has also been surprisingly helpful for physicists wrestling with theories of how the universe works at its most fundamental level.’
via New Scientist.
‘George Bush bought his “ranch” down in Crawford in 1999 shortly before he started running for president. And now that he’s done with politics, he is moving out of there as soon as he possibly can. The Bushes have bought a new home in a tony neighborhood (and until recently a whites-only community) in Dallas. So, what happened to retiring down to the ranch?
Well, it’s what most of us suspected — all total bullshit. He was never a cowboy. That ranch had nothing on it. No cows, no farming, just a lot of bullshit brush that Bush pretended to clear (for what fucking purpose?). The ranch was always a political gimmick. It was purchased so that Bush could play the role of the Texas cowboy when in fact he has always been the Andover cheerleader.’
Cenk Uygur via HuffPo.
Have people noticed, toward the bottom of the sidebar on this page, the ‘Top Posts’ and ‘Top Clicks’ lists? I must say, to the extent that the ‘top posts’ really reflect relative interest of my readers, I’m surprised at what appears up there on the list.
Bob Woodward: “Here are 10 lessons that Obama and his team should take away from the Bush experience” from Bush’s mistakes.
“One irresistible reality grows from Hamas’s complicated, competitive relationship with Hezbollah. For Hamas, Hezbollah is not only a source of weapons and instruction, it is a mentor and role model.
Hamas’s desire to best Hezbollah’s achievements is natural, of course, but, more to the point, it is radicalizing. One of the reasons, among many, that Hamas felt compelled to break its cease-fire with Israel last month was to prove its potency to Muslims impressed with Hezbollah.
Another reality worth considering concerns theology. Hamas and Hezbollah emerged from very different streams of Islam: Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood; Hezbollah is an outright Iranian proxy that takes its inspiration from the radical Shiite politics of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But the groups share a common belief that Jews are a cosmological evil, enemies of Islam since Muhammad sought refuge in Medina.
Periodically, advocates of negotiation suggest that the hostility toward Jews expressed by Hamas is somehow mutable. But in years of listening, I haven’t heard much to suggest that its anti-Semitism is insincere. Like Hezbollah, Hamas believes that God is opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine. Both groups are rhetorically pitiless, though, again, Hamas sometimes appears to follow the lead of Hezbollah.”
Jeffrey Goldberg, a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror, in New York Times Op-Ed.
But is this really such a good idea? A growing number of cautionary voices from the world of mental health research are saying it isn’t. They fear that the increasing tendency to treat normal sadness as if it were a disease is playing fast and loose with a crucial part of our biology. Sadness, they argue, serves an evolutionary purpose – and if we lose it, we lose out.
“When you find something this deeply in us biologically, you presume that it was selected because it had some advantage, otherwise we wouldn’t have been burdened with it,” says Jerome Wakefield, a clinical social worker at New York University and co-author of The Loss of Sadness: How psychiatry transformed normal sorrow into depressive disorder (with Allan Horwitz, Oxford University Press, 2007). “We’re fooling around with part of our biological make-up.”
Perhaps, then, it is time to embrace our miserable side. Yet many psychiatrists insist not. Sadness has a nasty habit of turning into depression, they warn. Even when people are sad for good reason, they should be allowed to take drugs to make themselves feel better if that’s what they want.
So who is right? Is sadness something we can live without or is it a crucial part of the human condition?
…there are lots of ideas about why our propensity to feel sad might have evolved. It may be a self-protection strategy, as it seems to be among other primates that show signs of sadness. …it helps us learn from our mistakes. …even full-blown depression may save us from the effects of long-term stress. Without taking time out to reflect, he says, “you might stay in a state of chronic stress until you’re exhausted or dead”. …By acting sad, we tell other community members that we need support….Then there is the notion that creativity is connected to dark moods. …There is also evidence that too much happiness can be bad for your career…” (More)
via New Scientist.
Posting articles on this theme is, readers may have noticed, a recurrent event here on FmH. I began to be introduced to this notion, that depression might serve a useful purpose and that we had to rethink our knee-jerk readiness to vanquish it (and normal sadness as well, which is difficult to disentangle from pathological depression) whenever we encountered it, early in my career. I think it has fundamentally informed my skepticism about the way we organize and administer psychiatric services in this society. In addition, there are concerns that too readily resorting to antidepressant therapy may reinforce future propensity for depressive reactions and need for medication (which I’m sure will please the pharmaceutical industry to hear). I have always said that getting people off of medications, or refraining from prescribing them, are equally important functions of a psychopharmacologist as is prescribing astutely.
“Patrick McGoohan, a multifaceted actor who spun television legend by creating and starring in the 1960s program The Prisoner, a mysterious allegory about a mysterious man in a mysterious seaside village that became a cult classic, died on Jan. 13 in Los Angeles. He was 80.”
“He said he had not only given his heart to his wife, Dawnell, but donated his kidney to save her life.”
via BBC NEWS.
“High caffeine consumption could be linked to a greater tendency to hallucinate, a new research study suggests.
People with a higher caffeine intake, from sources such as coffee, tea and caffeinated energy drinks, are more likely to report hallucinatory experiences such as hearing voices and seeing things that are not there, according to the Durham University study.
‘High caffeine users’ – those who consumed more than the equivalent of seven cups of instant coffee a day – were three times more likely to have heard a person’s voice when there was no one there compared with ‘low caffeine users’ who consumed less than the equivalent of one cup of instant coffee a day.”
via Science Daily.
“With the Bush Administration about to recede into history, a widely asked question is whether the neoconservative philosophy that underpinned its major foreign policy decisions will likewise vanish from the scene.
…The safest bet… is that we can bid adieu to the neocons and leave their role to be adjudicated by history.
But the epitaph of neoconservatism has been written before – prematurely, as it turned out, in the 1980s.
…They themselves argue that they form part of the mainstream of American history. It seems more likely that they will come to be seen as an aberration.
Two things may change this. First, the flipside of neoconservatism is what might be called neo-humanitarianism. This is the idea that US military power should be used to intervene on the ground in crises like the Rwandan genocide or in Darfur.
Some Obama officials, for example Susan Rice at the UN, will be making this case. All indications are that the Obama administration will be cautious but, if not, US unilateral military deployment may be back on the global agenda.
Secondly, the Obama administration faces unsettled business on Iran.
The neocons are arguing that Iran is the defining issue for US foreign policy and that, short of an abandonment by Tehran of its apparent nuclear weapons program, the US must use force.
Once again, the early signs are that, for the Obama team, military force is well down the agenda and a new form of engagement is under consideration.
Should this change – possibly on the back of intransigence from Tehran – the neocons will be back in business and will crow that they have survived yet another premature obituary.”
via BBC NEWS.
“As he leaves office with a record high domestic disapproval rate – 73%, according to an October ABC News/Washington Post poll – President George W Bush can perhaps take some comfort from the fact that this feeling is not uniformly shared abroad.
While the shoe-throwing incident in Iraq may come to symbolise the world’s opinion of a president who is often referred to as the worst in America’s history, some corners of the world will miss the 43rd president of the United States.
He has approval ratings of around 80% in Africa, according to some polls, and in Kosovo a main street was named after him to thank him for supporting Kosovo’s independence.
…Africa as a continent stands out as the main region in the world where Bush is most likely to be missed and where widespread support for the 62-year-old Texan mystified his critics.
…Finally, in their own way, leaders like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, Cuba’s former president Fidel Castro and Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may come to miss the man they loved to hate when they have to start dealing with his successor, the man that the world loves to love. “
via BBC NEWS.
Great mind hacks, including the Ganzfeld procedure and Purkinje lights, via the Boston Globe.
“Giving ugly creatures their day in the sun. We avoid the simply tragic, diseased, or maimed. Rather, these creatures are only as hideous as nature — or their owners — intended.”
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'Horror frog' breaks own bones to produce claws
“From a sea-slug that runs on solar power, to a bug that lives in total isolation; from the world's smallest snake to a one-tonne rodent – here are the 10 oddest species from 2008.”
via New Scientist.
“The weirdness factor is high in these articles, chock-full of silly (often idiotic) and spectacularly bizarre signage.”
via Dark Roasted Blend.
“Truman Syndrome is a form of psychological delusion in which the patient believes that he or she is trapped inside in a reality television show, or that people are monitoring his or her every move. The name for this syndrome is a reference to The Truman Show, a 1998 film which revolved around a character who was living his entire life on camera without being aware of it. To those of sound mind, Truman Syndrome might sound a bit ludicrous, but not dangerous, although this is not, in fact, the case: this condition can actually be very dangerous for the people who suffer from it.
Psychologists have suggested that Truman Syndrome is a culture-based delusion, noting that it tends to arise in developed nations where there is a high level of surveillance, and where reality television shows are easy to access. Many people living in such societies have a certain amount of nervousness about being under surveillance or watched by the government, but people with Truman Syndrome take it to a whole new level, subverting very real concerns into a complex delusion.
Patients with this condition often specifically reference The Truman Show, along with other films and books with similar premises. They claim that they are living in an entirely artificial world where nothing is real and every action is carefully documented on a camera and watched by a television audience or government agency. Like the title character in The Truman Show, they think that they are slowly breaking through to the truth, but no one believes them.
Aside from the fact that delusions in general can be psychologically harmful, Truman Syndrome can also be dangerous. For example, people may think that specific actions will release them from the show, allowing them to win prizes, and these actions may involve dangerous activities. People may also become frustrated by the repeated denials of their delusions, lashing out at friends and strangers alike in an attempt to get people to admit that they are inhabiting an artificial world. Some people also have difficulty coping with real-life events, believing that these events were manufactured as part of the reality shows they inhabit.
Treating Truman Syndrome is complex. The use of anti-psychotic drugs and anti-depressants can help, but ultimately extensive talk therapy is the best option. Because the entire delusion rests on the premise that the world isn’t real, the treating psychiatrist or psychologist may struggle initially to be accepted, especially if he or she is confrontational with the patient, and this is a good thing to keep in mind.”
via Wisegeek.
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You are being watched...
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‘William Zantzinger, the white Maryland tobacco farmer immortalized in a Bob Dylan song for the 1963 killing of a black Baltimore barmaid, has died. Zantzinger, inebriated from a night on the town, struck Hattie Carroll with a cane when she was slow bringing him a bourbon. Carroll, a 51-year-old mother of 11 children, died from a brain hemorrhage 8 hours later. Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter and served 6 months. Dylan recorded “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” in 1964.’
via Newser [thanks, walker].
Some of these are pretty egregious.
via Abducted by Design.
The Last Whole Earth Catalog, from June 1971, has been scanned in and is available for electronic browsing pleasure. I was a devotee of the mindset of these folks and a charter subscriber to the quarterly spin-off from the catalogs, known at different times as Whole Earth Review and Coevolutionary Quarterly. I visited them in Sausalito at one point, and had the pleasure of being the next-door neighbor in New Haven of their graphics editor for awhile. (My across-the-street neighbor at the time was the New Haven Zen Center. Nice neighborhood.) In many ways, they were all about hacking the world and your life long before there was electronic hacking. Their closest online literary heir is Kevin Kelly.
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Dennis Fox, psychologist colleague of mine and Middle East peace activist frames some questions on the Gaza conflict, and suggests some answers:
2. Who started the broader conflict? This is a central question, or would be if the rest of the world paid much attention. Interpretations vary depending on the starting point. Here are some possibilities: Hamas’s takeover of Gaza, Hamas’s election to office, the 1967 Six Day War leading to the Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, the 1948 establishment of Israel, the late-nineteenth century arrival in Palestine of Zionist immigrants determined to create a Jewish homeland, and even Napoleon’s plan to create a Jewish state in Palestine to defend French interests. Israel’s supporters – and Israeli negotiators in the never-ending “peace process” – refuse to go back in time, while Palestians’ supporters know that the further back you go, the more the violation of their rights is clear.
3. What kind of conflict is it? Is this a national conflict between Israelis and Palestinians? A religious conflict between Jews and (mostly) Muslims? A geopolitical conflict between Israel, the US, Western Europe, and their conservative Arab allies on the one hand, and on the other Arab states less beholden to the US, Iran, and other states at odds with US dominance? Alternatively: Does the conflict reflect the actions of two equally responsible enemies engaging in tit-for-tat retaliation, who might someday make peace as equals (the framework often adopted by “neutral” peacemakers and dialogue advocates)? Or is this a conflict between Occupier and Occupied, between a powerful nation and a weak but stubborn resistance? If the latter – as I have come to see it – are the sides so unbalanced that journalistic and academic “even-handedness” becomes a support for oppression?
4. Does Israel deserve, and does it get, exceptional treatment? This is very touchy. Is Israel held to an unjustified higher standard as its defenders claim, a standard that simply proves anti-Semitism? Or does Israel get away with actions that would not be tolerated for any other modern state, and certainly any modern democracy? Does Israel deserve a Jewish state simply because Zionists took it, following the colonial model of Western states arising over the objections of defeated native peoples, or does the development of international law and the creation of the United Nations after World War II mean statehood by conquest should no longer be tolerated even for a state that absorbed Europe’s Jewish Holocaust victims? Israel’s dismissal of international condemnation as proof of bias often seems to me a convenient excuse. Anti-Semitism exists, but doesn’t explain everything.
5. Where’s justice? As I’ve explored at length on this blog and elsewhere, there can be no final settlement until history is uncovered and justice addressed. Justice is tricky, I know, but having been on both sides of this issue over the decades, I think that defenses of Israel are more strained, more rickety, more based on exceptions to ordinary standards of justice and humanity than defenses of Palestinian rights.
For me, resort to tribal notions — often expressed as what’s best for the Jews, or the claim that only a Jewish state can defend Jews worldwide — are mired in comforting nostrums that long ago lost whatever validity they may once have had. If Palestine had really been a land without a people, a Jewish state would have gone differently, maybe even becoming the light unto the nations I learned about so long ago. But creating a Jewish state over the objections of people living on that land was a historical injustice that will never – never – be forgotten. It has led, ironically, inexorably, inevitably to Jews endangered precisely because they live in the Jewish state that was supposed to protect them. And it has led to Jews oppressing, and even today killing, innocent non-Jews in the name of that Jewish state.
Framing the conflict as tribal – the core Zionist argument — justifies Israeli actions no matter how grotesque, from this latest invasion of Gaza to the four-decade occupation to the six-decade imposition of Jewish control over Israel’s own internal Palestinians. I might add it also justifies similarly particularistic views and actions by groups such as Hamas. I would much prefer framing the conflict as one between those committed to a tribal worldview and those embracing a more universal justice-based outcome. There are Israelis and Palestinians on both sides of that divide, and any justice-based future depends on them.”
via dennisfox.net
“…[G]enuine excuse artisans — and there are millions of them — don’t wait until after choking to practice their craft. They hobble themselves, in earnest, before pursuing a goal or delivering a performance. Their excuses come preattached: I never went to class. I was hung over at the interview. I had no idea what the college application required.
“This is real self-sabotage, like drinking heavily before a test, skipping practice or using really poor equipment,” said Edward R. Hirt, a psychologist at Indiana University. “Some people do this a lot, and often it’s not clear whether they’re entirely conscious of doing it — or of its costs.”
Psychologists have studied this sort of behavior since at least 1978, when Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones used the phrase “self-handicapping” to describe students in a study who chose to take a drug that they were told would inhibit their performance on an exam (the drug was actually inert).
The urge goes well beyond a mere lowering of expectations, and it has more to do with protecting self-image than with psychological conflicts rooted in early development, in the Freudian sense. Recent research has helped clarify not just who is prone to self-handicapping but also its consequences — and its possible benefits.”
via New York Times.
“To fully understand what happens during a brain imaging experiment you need to be able to grasp quantum physics at one end, to philosophy of mind at the other, while travelling through a sea of statistics, neurophysiology and psychology. Needless to say, very few, if any scientists can do this on their own.
So the first strand involves how brain imaging experiments are reported in the media. Under the sheer weight of conceptual strain, journalists panic, and do this: “Brain's adventure centre located”.
It's a story published this morning on the BBC News website based on an interesting fMRI study looking at brain activity associated with participants choosing a novel option in a simple gambling task. But out of the four words of the headline, only the first is accurate.
And this leads to the second strand of the debate, which, until recently, has been largely conducted away from the media's gaze, amongst the people doing cognitive science themselves.
It starts with this simple question: what is fMRI measuring?”
via Mind Hacks.
“Diagnoses decided by an unelected committee in secret sessions that are legally prevented from discussing their work. Science marches on.”
Many are up in arms about the closed-doors process being used to draft the next edition of the American Psychiatric Associations’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, the ‘bible’ defining all permissible psychiatric diagnoses.
via Mind Hacks.
“How does online information on psychosis affect people’s beliefs and knowledge about psychosis? A survey of podcast listeners… If you wish to take part, you will be asked to answer several questions about psychosis, in particular what psychosis means to you and what you know about psychosis. You will be asked to answer some questions both before you listen to the audio information and afterwards. Questions will be about why you are interested in psychosis, what your knowledge and beliefs about psychosis are, and what you thought of the podcast.”
“Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt.”
— Sara Roy, at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies and author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.
‘People should ignore signs telling them that it is legal to urinate in certain public places in Nottingham, the city council said.
The signs, which were put up by pranksters in and around Nottingham, are designed to look official.
They feature a toilet sign and include the words: “Public Urination Permitted After 7.30pm”.’
via BBC .
“No! You can go back to your, what do you call it, your Google, and you figure out all that.”
— Former President George H.W. Bush, in a Fox News interview, when asked if he would elaborate on some of his son’s failures as president.
via Political Wire.
“Spike Jonze is about to make the movie of a lifetime in my opinion. The music/movie director will be releasing my (maybe everyone’s) favorite childhood book Where the Wild Things Are onto the big screen. Just look at these shots, they’re golden, and I just want to see more. Rumors around the web say that there will be no effects just large puppets, I think as a fan I couldn’t of asked for more.”
via ISO50 Blog.
via NOTCOT.ORG.
This article is clearly heavily biased and agenda-laden, yet makes points worth pondering.
“I find the current situation deeply sorrowful, harrowing. There is one aspect of it that I think needs clarification, a clarification that will help thinking about the situation as a whole, and that is the analogies between Hitler, the Nazis and Hamas.
So, as the author of Explaining Hitler, having spent some time studying the subject, I thought I would point out a few differences.”
via RonRosenbaum.com.
Recent research shows that our moods are far more strongly influenced by those around us than we tend to think. Not only that, we are also beholden to the moods of friends of friends, and of friends of friends of friends – people three degrees of separation away from us who we have never met, but whose disposition can pass through our social network like a virus.
Indeed, it is becoming clear that a whole range of phenomena are transmitted through networks of friends in ways that are not entirely understood: happiness and depression, obesity, drinking and smoking habits, ill-health, the inclination to turn out and vote in elections, a taste for certain music or food, a preference for online privacy, even the tendency to attempt or think about suicide. They ripple through networks “like pebbles thrown into a pond”, says Nicholas Christakis, a medical sociologist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has pioneered much of the new work.
via New Scientist.
What is even more remarkable is the way in which the alleged fleecing of wealthy people and charities – investors who should have known better or employed people who did – of many billions of dollars serves as a mirror for the broader culture. It shows how we went wrong and where we are left, now that we realize our errors.
The main difference really is that the purported victims, or enablers, or co-fantasists of the trader Bernard Madoff say they found out their wealth was illusory all of a sudden, whereas for most people in the English-speaking world, this is happening little by little.
via International Herald Tribune.
My only quibble is putting the speculation in the past tense. The economy will continue to be a Ponzi scheme, and the bailout program is intended to ensure that.
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.
“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.
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
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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
- Prospero Ano Nuevo
- 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]
“Well, today's the day that political expediency and anti-science stupidity combine for the banning of handheld cell phones while driving in California.
I've discussed this topic here several times before, noting that virtually every study shows no reduction in accident rates when talking on a hands-free cell phone vs. handheld units. In fact, there are concerns that people fumbling around to dial and answer hands-free units may actually make matters worse.
Even the Luddite who spent years pushing through this legislation admits that the science and studies are against him, but he's convinced that having both hands on the wheel is safer. Of course, the law doesn't require two hands on the wheel — which would be fairly difficult for stick drivers like me in any case, eh?
When I was out driving earlier today, I saw one women swerving while putting on make-up, and a guy weaving all over while apparently wolfing down a burger. Another car almost didn't make a stop while the woman inside appeared to be screaming at her kids in the back seat — all classic distractions unaffected by the new law. However, I saw several people now driving illegally but safely with handheld cell phones.
There are already laws against distracted driving. The new cell phone law (as applied to adult drivers) is both unnecessary and counterproductive — the latter by making people erroneously believe that they're safer with hands-free phones while driving.
This sort of “feel good” law that flies in the face of science, studies, and logic, is an example of our political system operating as a pandering pomposity of the most inane kind.”
via Lauren Weinstein.
Oh no. I had been listening to my Delaney and Bonnie albums again the past few years, with incredible enjoyment, especially 1971’s Motel Shot (look at these “& Friends” in “Delaney and Bonnie & Friends”: Duane Allman – guitar; Joe Cocker – vocals; Kenny Gradney – bass; John Hartford – banjo, fiddle; Eddie James – guitar; Jim Keltner – drums; Bobby Keys – saxophone; Dave Mason – guitar; Gram Parsons – guitar, vocals; Carl Radle – bass; Leon Russell – piano, keyboards; Clarence White – guitar, vocals; Bobby Whitlock – vocals!!) and the 1970 live on tour disc with Eric Clapton (who joined their band after they opened for Blind Faith and he felt they blew Blind Faith away). They are in heavy rotation in my iTunes library. I’m deeply saddened to hear this.
Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
“The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.
Four blue pills. Viagra.
“Take one of these. You'll love it,” the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.
The enticement worked. The officer, who described the encounter, returned four days later to an enthusiastic reception. The grinning chief offered up a bonanza of information about Taliban movements and supply routes — followed by a request for more pills…”
via Washington Post.
It’s about midnight and you are heading home. Suddenly, the street lamp above turns off without reason, and you find yourself in the dark. It is natural to experience a chill. But what would you think if street lamps kept turning off when you passed them by?
It is something that many of us have experienced, at least once. Many don’t take notice, but others do and wonder if the cause of such interference lies inside them…
The idea is that there appears to be an effect that is not consistent with our current knowledge of how people interact with the physical world, and which occurs in specific circumstances.
Four explanations for SLI have been proposed…”
— Massimo Polidoro, an investigator of the paranormal, author, lecturer, and cofounder and head of CICAP, the Italian skeptics group. Via The Skeptical Inquirer. I have previously mentioned SLI here, given my own experiences with a particular pair of streetlights on my block.
“In 1950, approximately 7,500 children in the United States were diagnosed with mental disorders. That number is at least eight million today, and most receive some form of medication. Is this progress or child abuse?”
— Andrew Weiss via The Skeptical Inquirer.
“…Swedish researchers show that a simple illusion can induce amputees to experience a rubber hand as their own, so that tactile stimuli directed to it produce sensations which are localized to their missing limbs. The study, which is published in an open access paper in the journal Brain, is therefore an important step towards the development of neuroprostheses which feel like real limbs.”
via Neurophilosophy.
“The new cultural prestige of disaster: A visit to a bookstore or multiplex confirms the new strain of morbidity in the air. Every other month seems to bring the publication of at least one new so-called literary novel on dystopian or apocalyptic themes and the release of at least one similarly themed movie displaying some artistic trappings. (Artsy, but not quite aspiring to be art, films like 28 Days Later and Children of Men might be called, without scorn, “B+ movies,” to distinguish them from ordinary apocalyptic crowd-pleasers.) What is striking is not so much the proliferation of these futuristic works—something that has been going on for generations—but the wholesale rehabilitation of such “genre” material for serious or serious-seeming novels and movies. If ordinary citizens are taking their direst imaginings more to heart than before, so, it would appear, are novelists and filmmakers.”
via Dissent Magazine.
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Are we having fun yet?
“Nintendo's Wii has been maiming careless gamers since the day it was launched, but an inexplicable uptick in Britain has professionals scratching their heads. According to Dr. Dev Mukerjee of Broomfield Hospital: “There has been a 100 percent increase in patients complaining of Wii-itis.” Turns out, Wii-itis is their word for playing so much Wii that you injure yourself. Astonishingly, up to ten people per week are being “hospitalized with injuries caused by playing Nintendo Wii games,” which has forced medical personnel to “issue warnings of the dangers associated with the video game system.” Some of the most common injuries are Wii-knee (seriously) and tendon stretching / tearing, both of which could likely be avoided if gamers would bother to stretch before breaking a sweat.”
via Engadget.
‘Although a number of studies have suggested that people who sleep less are at greater risk of heart disease and death, this is the first investigation to measure how much its subjects actually are sleeping, said Dr. Sanjay Patel, assistant professor of medicine at Case Western Reserve University and expert in sleep medicine. Patients’ own self-assessments can be very inaccurate, he added.
What isn’t clear is whether reduced sleep triggers physiological changes that increase heart disease risk, or whether a third, unrelated factor causes both changes, he said.
“It’s possible, for example, that people who are under more stress may be both sleeping less and at higher risk of heart disease,” Dr. Patel said.
If so, he added, “If we got those people to sleep more but they still were under a lot of stress, it wouldn’t change their risk of heart disease.” ‘
via New York Times.
“Indiana University doctors Rachel Vreeman and Aaron Carroll have debunked a group of health-related myths in an article in the medical journal BMJ. As we approach the end of the year and its attendant celebrations, bear in mind these scientific findings.”
via NPR.
“Harold Pinter, who died at the age of 78 on Christmas Eve, was very likely the only writer ever to win the Nobel Prize, the French Légion d’honneur, and inspire an episode of Seinfeld. He was also a towering enough figure in modern theater to lend his name to a word: “Pinteresque.” It was most commonly used in reference to the famous pauses written into his plays, and many a theater lover born during or after Pinter’s first period of success knew long before discovering his plays that describing the sight of an actor daring the audience to wonder if he’d just forgotten his lines as Pinteresque was an easy way of seeming smart. More generally, and more and more as Pinter’s career went on, it came to stand for the whole mysterious, threatening world he created on stage, a place where everyone seemed to be nursing a secret grudge and perpetually squaring off against and testing each other, and the balance of power kept shifting. Pinter, who attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1948, entered theater as an actor and spent twelve years struggling to get by as a member of various repertory companies; for about half that time, he performed under the name “David Baron.” His time as a starving young actor in London overlapped with that of Michael Caine, and Caine has often enjoyed telling interviewers about the time good old “David” stormed out of the pub, saying that he was bloody sick to death of this bloody business and was going home to try to write something.”
via The Screengrab.
“Archbishop Desmond Tutu launched a stinging attack on South Africa Wednesday, accusing it of failing to stand up to Zimbabwe‘s President Robert Mugabe and betraying its apartheid legacy.
Tutu, the retired archbishop of Cape Town, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and anti-apartheid campaigner, told BBC radio he was “ashamed” of his homeland.
He suggested that South Africa had surrendered the “moral high ground” which it gained in the post-apartheid era.
Tutu also told BBC radio that violence could be used to remove Mugabe, who should then be indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC).”
via The Raw Story.
“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
“Considering the possibilities of preserving the Earth during the Sun’s transition into a brighter and much larger object, the authors discuss alternatives like raising the Earth’s orbit to a safer distance or using a parasol to shield the planet from its rays. That might tide us over for a few billion years beyond the point where an unprotected Earth could survive as a habitable place. But the paper only begins here. After the sunshade, the authors go on to discuss their plan to create an artificial sun in the Kuiper Belt, where an Earth slowly moved into an outer orbit by gravitational swing-by techniques can eventually find its new home in a stable orbit around a life-giving source of heat and light. Call it an ArtSun, as they do, and ponder how much science fiction it might inspire.”
via Centauri Dreams.
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