Evolution of flu strains points to higher risk of pandemic: study

Posted on by
“Some strains of bird flu are coming ever closer to developing the traits they need to cause a human pandemic, a study released Monday said.

Researchers who analysed samples of recent avian flu viruses found that a few H7 strains of the virus that have caused minor, untransmissible infections in people in North America between 2002 and 2004 have increased their affinity for the sugars found on human tracheal cells.” (Yahoo! News)

 //d.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/p/afp/20080526/capt.cps.mnt60.260508234157.photo00.photo.default-342x512.jpg?x=180&y=269&q=85&sig=iOdr3EpG2SsLuoGbwuP_wA--' cannot be displayed]

Mental illness following The Exorcist

Posted on by
“Horror movie The Exorcist remains one of cinema’s darkest and most frightening classics. So great was its power that rumours circulated about viewers running in fear, feinting, or even going mad after seeing the film. In fact, it caused such concern that it was discussed in the medical literature for its possible role in triggering mental illness.

In 1975 psychiatrist James Bozzuto wrote an article for the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease entitled ‘Cinematic Neurosis Following The Exorcist‘ that reported four cases of previously untroubled people who seemed to develop psychiatric difficulties after watching the film…” (Mind Hacks)

R.I.P. Utah Phillips

Posted on by

Family’s remembrance: “Utah Phillips, a seminal figure in American folk music who performed extensively and tirelessly for audiences on two continents for 38 years, died Friday of congestive heart failure in Nevada City, California a small town in the Sierra Nevada mountains where he lived for the last 21 years with his wife, Joanna Robinson, a freelance editor.

Born Bruce Duncan Phillips on May 15, 1935 in Cleveland, Ohio, he was the son of labor organizers. Whether through this early influence or an early life that was not always tranquil or easy, by his twenties Phillips demonstrated a lifelong concern with the living conditions of working people. He was a proud member of the Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as “the Wobblies,” an organizational artifact of early twentieth-century labor struggles that has seen renewed interest and growth in membership in the last decade, not in small part due to his efforts to popularize it.

Phillips served as an Army private during the Korean War, an experience he would later refer to as the turning point of his life. Deeply affected by the devastation and human misery he had witnessed, upon his return to the United States he began drifting, riding freight trains around the country. His struggle would be familiar today, when the difficulties of returning combat veterans are more widely understood, but in the late fifties Phillips was left to work them out for himself. Destitute and drinking, Phillips got off a freight train in Salt Lake City and wound up at the Joe Hill House, a homeless shelter operated by the anarchist Ammon Hennacy, a member of the Catholic Worker movement and associate of Dorothy Day.

Phillips credited Hennacy and other social reformers he referred to as his “elders” with having provided a philosophical framework around which he later constructed songs and stories he intended as a template his audiences could employ to understand their own political and working lives. They were often hilarious, sometimes sad, but never shallow.

“He made me understand that music must be more than cotton candy for the ears,” said John McCutcheon, a nationally-known folksinger and close friend.
In the creation of his performing persona and work, Phillips drew from influences as diverse as Borscht Belt comedian Myron Cohen, folksingers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and Country stars Hank Williams and T. Texas Tyler.

A stint as an archivist for the State of Utah in the 1960s taught Phillips the discipline of historical research; beneath the simplest and most folksy of his songs was a rigorous attention to detail and a strong and carefully-crafted narrative structure. He was a voracious reader in a surprising variety of fields.
Meanwhile, Phillips was working at Hennacy’s Joe Hill house. In 1968 he ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. The race was won by a Republican candidate, and Phillips was seen by some Democrats as having split the vote. He subsequently lost his job with the State of Utah, a process he described as “blacklisting.”

Phillips left Utah for Saratoga Springs, New York, where he was welcomed into a lively community of folk performers centered at the Caffé Lena, operated by Lena Spencer.
“It was the coffeehouse, the place to perform. Everybody went there. She fed everybody,” said John “Che” Greenwood, a fellow performer and friend.
Over the span of the nearly four decades that followed, Phillips worked in what he referred to as “the Trade,” developing an audience of hundreds of thousands and performing in large and small cities throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. His performing partners included Rosalie Sorrels, Kate Wolf, John McCutcheon and Ani DiFranco.

“He was like an alchemist,” said Sorrels, “He took the stories of working people and railroad bums and he built them into work that was influenced by writers like Thomas Wolfe, but then he gave it back, he put it in language so the people whom the songs and stories were about still had them, still owned them. He didn’t believe in stealing culture from the people it was about.”

A single from Phillips’s first record, “Moose Turd Pie,” a rollicking story about working on a railroad track gang, saw extensive airplay in 1973. From then on, Phillips had work on the road. His extensive writing and recording career included two albums with Ani DiFranco which earned a Grammy nomination. Phillips’s songs were performed and recorded by Emmylou Harris, Waylon Jennings, Joan Baez, Tom Waits, Joe Ely and others. He was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Folk Alliance in 1997.

Phillips, something of a perfectionist, claimed that he never lost his stage fright before performances. He didn’t want to lose it, he said; it kept him improving.
Phillips began suffering from the effects of chronic heart disease in 2004, and as his illness kept him off the road at times, he started a nationally syndicated folk-music radio show, “Loafer’s Glory,” produced at KVMR-FM and started a homeless shelter in his rural home county, where down-on-their-luck men and women were sleeping under the manzanita brush at the edge of town. Hospitality House opened in 2005 and continues to house 25 to 30 guests a night. In this way, Phillips returned to the work of his mentor Hennacy in the last four years of his life.

Phillips died at home, in bed, in his sleep, next to his wife. He is survived by his son Duncan and daughter-in-law Bobette of Salt Lake City, son Brendan of Olympia, Washington; daughter Morrigan Belle of Washington, D.C.; stepson Nicholas Tomb of Monterrey, California; stepson and daughter-in-law Ian Durfee and Mary Creasey of Davis, California; brothers David Phillips of Fairfield, California, Ed Phillips of Cleveland, Ohio and Stuart Cohen of Los Angeles; sister Deborah Cohen of Lisbon, Portugal; and a grandchild, Brendan. He was preceded in death by his father Edwin Phillips and mother Kathleen, and his stepfather, Syd Cohen.

The family requests memorial donations to Hospitality House, P.O. Box 3223, Grass Valley, California 95945 (530) 271-7144 http://www.hospitalityhouseshelter.org”

Gary Younge:

Posted on by
Clinton has run her campaign the same way Bush has run the country: “As the primary season draws to a close it has become increasingly apparent that Hillary Clinton has run her campaign with the same contempt for intelligence, decency and democracy that Bush has run the country. Like the Bush administration, her campaign has been sustained by cynicism, divisiveness and fear-mongering, leaving a toxic and rancorous rift in its wake. Like the White House, her aim has been to win at all costs. And like the White House, it has produced the same result. Failure.” (The Guardian)

New Class Of Antidepressants Might Be Right Under Our Noses

Posted on by
Burning Incense Is Psychoactive. “Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul. Now, biologists have learned that it is good for our brains too. An international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly understood ion channels in the brain to alleviate anxiety or depression.” (Science Daily)

Therapists volunteer to help U.S. veterans

Posted on by
“Thousands of private counselors are offering free services to troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with mental health problems, jumping in to help because the military is short on therapists.

On this Memorial Day, America’s armed forces and its veterans are coping with depression, suicide and family, marital and job problems on a scale not seen since Vietnam. The government has been in beg-borrow-and-steal mode, trying to hire psychiatrists and other professionals, recruit them with incentives or borrow them from other agencies.” (Delaware Online)

Among others, an organization of mental health professionals called Give An Hour solicits therapist volunteers to commit to one weekly treatment hour for returning veterans or their families for a minimum of a year. The objective, in conjunction with the American Psychiatric Foundation, is for 40,000 mental health care providers (around 10% of the national total) to enlist in the program over the next three years.

And Adding Insult to Injury:

“This Memorial Day, as an ever-increasing number of mentally and physically wounded soldiers return from Iraq, the Department of Veterans Affairs faces a pressing crisis: women traumatized not only by combat but also by sexual assault and harassment from their fellow service members. Sadly, the department is failing to fully deal with this problem.” (Wounded Times)

On this Memorial Day, my thoughts are certainly with the returning veterans and their families. A recent puff piece on the mental health impact of the war by the Dept. of Veteran Affairs did little more than mince words, concluding that

“there is much that is still unknown about how soldiers adjust to the enormous demands in these new war zones. it is important to appreciate the stressors and traumas of these new wars in order to raise the awareness of civilians back home, prepare loved ones for soldiers’ return, and meet the clinical needs of our newest veterans.”

In my opinion, however, not much is unknown about the toll this will take, except with respect to how badly the government will minimize and whitewash it (and how much of a priority the next, Democratic, administration will make of addressing this emergency).

The immorality and indefensibility of these wars from the outset, compounded by their justification by baldfaced lies and the execrable ineptitude in planning and devoting needed resources, does much to explain in the first place why such a large proportion of our enlistees are returning psychologically devastated. I will probably volunteer my time in this effort. But I have to say that it is with mixed feelings. To have to step in to compensate for the contemptible irresponsibility on the part of this malign Administration sticks in my craw to no end.

I would feel even better if there were an effort to organize mental health professionals not merely to give direct service but to educate other civilian health care providers (especially primary care MDs) to recognize and address the post-traumatic conditions of the returning veterans they will encounter. In addition to extending the reach of our expertise and facilitating the proper triage, referral and care of the victims, this would be an important societal consciousness-raising effort.

Docs list who would be allowed to die in a catastrophe

Posted on by
“Doctors know some patients needing lifesaving care won’t get it in a flu pandemic or other disaster. The gut-wrenching dilemma will be deciding whom to let die.In the event of a mass-casualty situation, medical resources would be have to be rationed.

Now, an influential group of physicians has drafted a grimly specific list of recommendations for which patients wouldn’t be treated. They include the very elderly, seriously hurt trauma victims, severely burned patients and those with severe dementia.” (CNN)

Hillary and the Kubler-Ross model

Posted on by
From Rafe Coburn: “With the news this morning that Bill Clinton and other Hillary Clinton supporters are openly pushing for Barack Obama to choose Hillary as his running mate, it has become apparent that the Clinton camp is going through the stages of the Kubler-Ross model of coping with death or tragedy.

Stage one is denial. I think we’ve all seen that in the fact that Hillary keeps loaning her failed campaign millions of dollars even though Obama’s delegate lead is insurmountable and the superdelegates keep shifting away from her.

Stage two is anger. We’ve seen Clinton’s anger on display for the past couple of weeks as she’s blamed the media and sexism for her failed campaign, and she’s tried to push the decertification of the Florida and Michigan primaries as some kind of civil rights issue.

It’s apparent that we’re now in stage three — bargaining. The Clinton camp are trying to bargain with the Obama campaign to get her name onto the ticket.

Personally, I’m ready for depression and then acceptance to kick in.” (rc3)

Hillary Raises Assassination to Defend Long-Running Campaign

Posted on by

“Clinton today brought up the assassination of Sen. Robert Kennedy while defending her decision to stay in the race against Barack Obama. ‘My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,’ she said, dismissing calls to drop out.” (New York Daily News)

…The assassination drumbeat mounts.

Bush Announces Agenda for Remainder of Term in Office

Posted on by
8-Month Plan To Steal Favorite Desk Lamp: “WASHINGTON—With his term in office coming to an end in less than a year, President Bush announced Monday that he will spend the remainder of his presidency implementing an initiative that will have as-yet-unknown implications for his successors: the stealing of a coveted $27 desk lamp from the East Room of the White House. ‘Securing this lamp for my den in Crawford has long been a goal of my presidency,’ Bush said of the plan, which at present consists of the president making sure no one is in the room before cramming the lamp under his shirt and hurriedly boarding a helicopter that will be waiting in the Rose Garden. ‘In order to facilitate this imperative, historic measure, I have created a new cabinet-level position whose primary responsibilities will be to act as a lookout and create any necessary diversions needed to ensure the swiping of the lamp.’ Bush’s lamp-stealing plan will reportedly cost taxpayers $3.75 billion.” (The Onion)

One in 20 patients want to kill doctor – study

Posted on by
“The survey questioned 800 Americans who were in pain, undergoing physical rehabilitation or seeking legal compensation for disability to find out their attitude towards their GP.

The researchers from the University of Miami, Florida, found that just over 1 in 20, or five per cent, admitted feeling like they wanted to murder their physician.

David Fishbain, an author of the study, found that distrust of doctors was often the cause of the problem, but understanding who was likely to have a wish to harm and why could help reduce attacks, the New Scientist magazine reports.

Few doctors are actually killed by their patients, but thousands are attacked and injured, Professor Fishbain said.” (news.com.au)

The Device

Posted on by

The only process indicating apparatus you’ll ever need! “…[A]n enigmatic beast. At first glance, one hardly knows what to make of it… and at second glance things don’t get much better. Listed below are some of the more common questions we’ve been asked, and their answers.

(…)

Q: How integral a role can the Device play in my secret plans to take over the world?

A: The Device can be used for good or evil. Please only use the Device for good.

Q: If Albert Einstein was alive today, do you think he would own The Device?

A: Yes.”

New Red Spot Appears on Jupiter

Posted on by
//imgsrc.hubblesite.org/hu/db/2008/23/images/a/formats/small_web.jpg' cannot be displayed]
“Planetary measles”: “…[A] third red spot has appeared alongside its cousins — the Great Red Spot and Red Spot Jr. — in the turbulent Jovian atmosphere. This third red spot, which is a fraction of the size of the two other features, lies to the west of the Great Red Spot in the same latitude band of clouds.” (HubbleSite)

Five things humans no longer need

Posted on by
Vestigial organs: “Probably the most famous example is the appendix, though it is now an open question whether the appendix is really vestigial. The idea that we are carrying around useless relics of our evolutionary past has long fascinated scientists and laypeople alike.

This week we tackle vestigial organs in a feature article that looks at how the idea has changed over the years, and how it has come under attack from creationists anxious to deny that vestigial organs (and hence evolution) exist at all. To accompany the article, here is our list of the five organs and functions most likely to be truly vestigial.” (New Scientist)

What’s in McCain’s medical records?

Posted on by
“He’ll be releasing everything about his repeated cancer surgeries. But he won’t release his psychiatric records, which hold clues to the effect of his Vietnam captivity.” (Salon)

There would be concerns about his fitness for the presidency even if he weren’t about to turn 72. Arguably, the President’s mental health is the aspect of his or her medical condition that has the most bearing on ability to govern. Every year, with great hoopla, the President is pronounced fit after a publicized physical exam at Walter Reed. But, as I have said repeatedly with regard to GWB (about whose emotional fitness I have had ongoing grave concerns), the double standard that bars parallel psychiatric evaluations and announcements of their results is unconscionable.

Is Harvard Just a Tax-Free Hedge Fund?

Posted on by
“Viewed purely in terms of economics, Harvard is really a $40 billion tax-free hedge fund with a very large marketing and PR arm called Harvard University that has the job of raising the investment capital and protecting the fund’s preferential tax treatment.

The trick is that this hedge fund can’t remit earnings to investors, and has to keep them in the company’s account, renaming these retained earnings as an “endowment”. So how do the insiders extract value from this business? One way is by giving themselves cushy jobs that pay a ton of dough. Those who manage Harvard’s money are well-paid…

When tax-advantaged non-profits start to accumulate billions of dollars of cash through investment gains, and the insiders seem to be doing very well, it creates legitimate pressure for some legal changes. There is a broad range of alternatives: capital gains taxes on investment income, directly taxing the endowment, placing limitations on employee compensation, and forcing the distribution of a fixed percentage of the endowment are all obvious choices. Sanctimonious talk about “the mission of the university” is not likely to stop this; unfortunately, giving lots of money to Democratic politicians very well might.” (The American Scene via walker)

Warning:

Posted on by
Don't Smile Too Much: “A German psychologist has warned ‘professional smilers’ such as flight attendants and shop assistants that too much forced smiling can cause stress, depression and even heart problems.” (Der Spiegel)

The Stealth Campaign to Delegitimize Obama

Posted on by
‘democrat_to_the_end’ writes: “Last night, I got a wake-up call. I listened to the audio of her conference call with bloggers, which a DUer was kind enough to partially transcribe, and I realized that while she may bow out on June 4 and endorse Obama and encourage her supporters to vote for him, there’s more to her strategy than meets the eye. I don’t think she is planning to take this to the Convention, and she could be angling for the VP slot. But there’s a far more troubling possibility here. From the sound of what she encouraged her bloggers to push last night, it sounds like she is trying to delegitimize him or cloud his legitimacy when he eventually clinches the nomination, as part of a stealth campaign for 2012.” (Daily Kos)

Bush Lied About Giving Up Golf

Posted on by
Video Proof: “President Bush said with a straight face this week that he gave up golf in honor of the fallen soldiers in Iraq, claiming that he quit after the bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003:

‘I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,’ he said. ‘I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.’

…In fact, Bush went golfing two months after the bombing the UN headquarters, and Keith Olbermann found the video…” (HuffPo)

Apology Project

Posted on by

A friend wrote me today describing her plan to select a dozen names at random from the Paris phone book and send each of them a postcard:

“Greetings from the USA. You don’t know me, but I selected your name and address at random from the internet white pages. I send you this note to apologize. The president of my country is an idiot. I did not vote for him. The majority of us are deeply ashamed of this man and his law-breaking regime. Let us hope for a return to sanity and intelligence in the upcoming year.

Best regards,”

She was inspired by this://i.thefairest.info/funniest_thumbs/SLctWT.jpeg' cannot be displayed]

I, in turn, am inspired to commit similar acts. We are both curious to see if anyone responds, and how. Care to join us? If so, spread the word.

Addendum: She wrote further:

“Someone replied and wanted to do this mailing of postcards to random recipients. In my previous email I failed to outline clearly how I did it. It is a bit more complicated than I let on, but actually very easy!

First, you use real postcards, not ecards: wire display-stand postcards made of paper with glossy photo on front (see attachment in previous email) They run about 50 cents new or always aplenty in thrift shops or at home. I’m afraid I wasn’t accurate in my explanation of how I ‘found’ names. For individuals’ addresses I went to this site:

http://c.asselin.free.fr/french/yellow_pages.htm

I clicked on ‘France’ and up came a search page with little browser windows for ‘name’s and ‘city’. (Note: you can’t just search name-filled pages.) Then I made up first and last names, typed them in the little browser windows along with my chosen city, ‘Paris’ until, voila! a real person’s name appeared with an address. Sometimes I had to think of several first and last name combos before I got a real person. It felt like more of a personal,prophetic connection doing it that way. Also,it might help to know a bit of whatever language so you can read the labels for the search windows.

With business addresses, you don’t use the phone book at all. It’s easier to google for example, “Pet Groomer, Paris, France” whereupon several businesses along with their addresses pop up, from which you can choose.

This method ended up working for me, anyway. Like I said, it sounds complicated, but isn’t.”

Earth to GWB:

Posted on by

The Lebanese Army isn’t on your side any more!: “So there was George Bush, telling the BBC today that he is willing to send US aid to the Lebanese Army… Doesn’t he realize that… the Lebanese Army isn’t on his side any more?? Is it any wonder that the administration led by this man is losing so badly in the Middle East these days?” (Just World News)

Fanboy Supercuts

Posted on by

Obsessive Video Montages: “… [a] genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage.” An extensive list from films and TV series, including every whacking from The Sopranos and every “dude” from The Big Lebowski. (waxy.org)

The World’s Spookiest Weapons

Posted on by
“Whether these masterpieces of destruction come from miles above Earth or millimeters below the skin, they have one thing in common: they’re spooky as hell.

Can turning animals into cyborgs ever end well? Should lasers really be strapped to planes? Is dispersing humans with the worst smell ever created a better alternative to doing it by burning their skin? You be the judge.” (Popular Science)

The Boy Who Couldn’t Sleep

Posted on by
(Literally): “‘We went to the doctor after he was born, and I kept telling him something was wrong. He didn’t sleep. They thought I was being kind of an anxious mom, and we went back and forth,’ Rhett’s mother, Shannon Lamb, said. ‘Finally, they [were] starting to realize now that he really doesn’t sleep at all. But we’ve had a lot of different diagnoses and nobody really knows.'” (ABC News)

Higher Suicide Risk for Smart MDs

Posted on by
“There’s a grim, rarely talked-about twist to all that medical know-how doctors learn to save lives: It makes them especially good at ending their own. An estimated 300 to 400 U.S. doctors kill themselves each year — a suicide rate thought to be higher than in the general population, although exact figures are hard to come by.

Some doctors believe the stigma of mental illness is magnified in a profession that prides itself on stoicism and bravado. Many fear admitting psychiatric problems could be fatal to their careers, so they suffer in silence.” (Time)

Hauntology

Posted on by
“The shades of the past become more vivid than anything turned up by the present. The spirit of the times is itself spectral. Faced with the apparent triumph of global Capital and the collapse of cultural innovation, artists and critics impatient with postmodern culture’s ‘nostalgia mode’ are forced back to a time before the End of History. They engage in mourning and melancholia for what has disappeared and what never came to be. Everyday life becomes ghostly… a saturated culture is unable to forget that things were not always like this.” (Strange Attractor)

Happy Birthday, Gary Snyder (b. 05/08/30)

Posted on by

//www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/snyder/snyder.jpg' cannot be displayed]

this poem is for deer

I dance on all the mountains
On five mountains, I have a dancing place
When they shoot at me I run
To my five mountains”

Missed a last shot
At the Buck, in twilight
So we came back sliding
On dry needles through cold pines.
Scared out a cottontail
Whipped up the winchester
Shot off its head.
The white body rolls and twitches
In the dark ravine
As we run down the hill to the car.

deer foot down scree
Picasso’s fawn, Issa’s fawn,
Deer on the autumn mountain
Howling like a wise man
Stiff springy jumps down the snowfields
Head held back, forefeet out,
Balls tight in a tough hair sack
Keeping the human soul from care
on the autumn mountain
Standing in late sun, ear-flick
Tail-flick, gold mist of flies
Whirling from nostril to eyes.

Home by night
drunken eye
Still picks out Taurus
Low, and growing high:
four-point buck
Dancing in the headlights
on the lonely road
A mile past the mill-pond,
With the car stopped, shot
That wild silly blinded creature down.

Pull out the hot guts
with hard bare hands
While night-frost chills the tongue
and eye
The cold horn-bones.
The hunter’s belt
just below the sky
Warm blood in the car trunk.
Deer-smell,
the limp tongue.

Deer don’t want to die for me.
I’ll drink sea-water
Sleep on beach pebbles in the rain
Until the deer come down to die
in pity for my pain.

Gary Snyder

this poem is for bear

“As for me I am a child of the god of the mountains.”

A bear down under the cliff.
She is eating huckleberries.
They are ripe now
Soon it will snow, and she
Or maybe he, will crawl into a hole
And sleep. You can see
Huckleberries in bearshit if you
Look, this time of year
If I sneak up on the bear
It will grunt and run
The others had all gone down
From the blackberry brambles, but one girl
Spilled her basket, and was picking up her
Berries in the dark.
A tall man stood in the shadow, took her arm,
Led her to his home. He was a bear.
In a house under the mountain
She gave birth to slick dark children
With sharp teeth, and lived in the hollow
Mountain many years.

snare a bear: call him out:
honey-eater
forest apple
light-foot
Old man in the fur coat, Bear! come out!
Die of your own choice!
Grandfather black-food!
this girl married a bear
Who rules in the mountains, Bear!

you have eaten many berries
you have caught many fish
you have frightened many people

Twelve species north of Mexico
Sucking their paws in the long winter
Tearing the high-strung caches down
Whining, crying, jacking off
(Odysseus was a bear)

Bear-cubs gnawing the soft tits
Teeth gritted, eyes screwed tight
but she let them.

Til her brothers found the place
Chased her husband up the gorge
Cornered him in the rocks.
Song of the snared bear:
“Give me my belt.
“I am near death.
“I came from the mountain caves
“At the headwaters,
“The small streams there
“Are all dried up.

— I think I’ll go hunt bears.
“hunt bears?
Why shit Snyder.
You couldn’t hit a bear in the ass
with a handful of rice!”

Gary Snyder

Census Atlas of the United States

Posted on by
“More often than not, trolling websites that end with “.gov” is about as much fun as renewing your driver’s license. But if you check out the U.S. Census Bureau’s website, you can fully access a truly awesome book: the Census Atlas of the United States.

True to the federal government’s prominent place on the trailing edge of information technology, the 302-page report, containing 800 maps populated by data compiled through 2000, is available in 18 PDF files (very Web 1.0). Sure, it’s a bit of a slog — the largest PDF weighs in at 21 MB — but it’s fun to wander such diverse sections as college dormitory population, prevalent language spoken at home, and percentage of commuters who carpool.” (Very Short List)

turtlewheels

Posted on by
“Little Bit, a young Eastern Box Turtle was hit by a car in September of 2000. Her shell was crushed and she was left partially paralyzed… After some weeks Little Bit seemed to have made a full recovery except for the use of her hind legs. So some wheels seemed to be the way to go. Some lightweight model airplane wheels on a wire frame did the trick… She was eating, drinking, and exploring all the rooms of my house. Eventually she was able to move around outside as well.” (via kottke)

visualcomplexity.com

Posted on by
A visual exploration on mapping complex networks: “VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project’s main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.

Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.” (thanks, abby)

R.I.P. Jimmy Giuffre

Posted on by

//graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/25/obituaries/giuffre-190.jpg' cannot be displayed]

Adventurous clarinetist, composer and arranger dead at 86. His “50-year journey through jazz led him from writing the Woody Herman anthem “Four Brothers” through minimalist, drummerless trios to striking experimental orchestral works…

Among the half-dozen instruments he played, from bass flute to soprano saxophone, it was the clarinet that gave him a signature sound; it was a dark, velvety tone, centering in the lower register, pure but rarely forceful. But among the iconoclastic heroes of the late ’50s in jazz, he was a serene oddity, changing his ideas as fast as he could record them.” (New York Times)

Linking spiral arms…

Posted on by
//apod.nasa.gov/apod/image/0804/arp272_hst_c800.jpg' cannot be displayed]

“…two large colliding galaxies are featured in this Hubble Space Telescope view, part of a series of cosmic snapshots released to celebrate the Hubble’s 18th anniversary. Recorded in astronomer Halton Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 272, the pair is otherwise known as NGC 6050 and IC 1179. They lie some 450 million light-years away in the Hercules Galaxy Cluster. At that estimated distance, the picture spans over 150 thousand light-years. Although this scenario does look peculiar, galaxy collisions and their eventual mergers are now understood to be common, with Arp 272 representing a stage in this inevitable process.” (APOD)

Dumb as We Wanna Be

Posted on by
Thomas Friedman: “It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks.” (New York Times op-ed)

PBS breaks ‘media blackout’ of NYT story on Pentagon propaganda

Posted on by
“On Sunday, The New York Times published an explosive report exposing the Pentagon’s secret campaign to use analysts in order to “generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.” Since that time, TV news organizations have largely been silent on their role in the propaganda. Ari Melber notes that last night, PBS’s Newshour finally broke this blackout, but couldn’t convince the other networks to participate.” (Think Progress)

R.I.P. Albert Hofmann

Posted on by

//graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/30/world/hoffman190.jpg' cannot be displayed]

‘Father of LSD’ Dies at 102: “Dr. Hofmann first synthesized the compound lysergic acid diethylamide in 1938 but did not discover its psychopharmacological effects until five years later, when he accidentally ingested the substance that became known to the 1960s counterculture as acid.

He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.” (New York Times)

R.I.P. Jimmy Giuffre

Posted on by

//graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/25/obituaries/giuffre-190.jpg' cannot be displayed]

Adventurous clarinetist, composer and arranger dead at 86. His “50-year journey through jazz led him from writing the Woody Herman anthem “Four Brothers” through minimalist, drummerless trios to striking experimental orchestral works…

Among the half-dozen instruments he played, from bass flute to soprano saxophone, it was the clarinet that gave him a signature sound; it was a dark, velvety tone, centering in the lower register, pure but rarely forceful. But among the iconoclastic heroes of the late ’50s in jazz, he was a serene oddity, changing his ideas as fast as he could record them.” (New York Times)

Parts Unknown

Posted on by

As in, “I’m off to…”. My family and I will be out of the country and I will not be posting or responding to comments for the next two weeks. See you at the end of April, and thank you for your continued visits here.

White House Torture Advisers

Posted on by
Dan Froomkin: “Top Bush aides, including Vice President Cheney, micromanaged the torture of terrorist suspects from the White House basement, according to an ABC News report aired last night.

Discussions were so detailed, ABC’s sources said, that some interrogation sessions were virtually choreographed by a White House advisory group. In addition to Cheney, the group included then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, then-defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, then-secretary of state Colin Powell, then-CIA director George Tenet and then-attorney general John Ashcroft.” (Washington Post op-ed via dangerousmeta)

The Greenest Way to Die

Posted on by
“Cremation uses somewhere on the order of 250 kWh of power, and is anything but emission-free; most burials in the western world involve a big clunky coffin sporting plenty of metals that aren’t going to break down anytime soon; it’s essentially littering! But the awesomely-named Magnus Hølvold over at Ecogeek just turned me on to a new way to die: resomation.” (Mental Floss)

Su last year

Posted on by
“Sudoku has furrowed the brows of a generation of commuters, but will it be replaced by a new puzzle from Japan? …Like sudoku, the smaller kenken consists of a numbers square where the figures cannot be duplicated within rows and columns.

But with the new puzzle, there’s the added dimension of having to reach certain target numbers inside smaller blocks by adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing the numerals in the cells within…” (BBC)

Whisky and Soda Man

Posted on by
Thomas Jones on JG Ballard: “When I was 12, I read a story by J.G. Ballard about a boy who has lived all his life in a vast city. One day, he decides to take a train out of the metropolis, to find a wide open space where he can fly a kite. But after many days on the train, he starts to recognise landmarks from the window that he has seen earlier in the journey: he has travelled all the way around the world without leaving the city. There are no wide open spaces left.” (London Review of Books)

Calling Al Gore

Posted on by
“Any number of top Democrats have attempted to step in and bring some order to this process, but none possess the stature to help the candidates, the superdelegates and the rest of the party structure come together. Former President Bill Clinton is compromised, of course, former nominee John Kerry has been marginalized and most other high-level Democrats have already endorsed a candidate, undermining their credentials as impartial brokers.” — Dan Schnur, who was the national communications director for John McCain’s presidential campaign in 2000 (New York Times op-ed)

Clinton Praises Gordon Brown for Beijing Boycott

Posted on by
//observer.cast.advomatic.com/files/imagecache/article/files/040908_hillary3_web.jpg' cannot be displayed]
“Hillary Clinton just reacted to the announcement from London that British prime minister Gordon Brown will not attend the opening of the Beijing Olympics. She said she ‘congratulated’ Brown on what she termed ‘an important decision’ and called on Barack Obama and John McCain to join her in urging President Bush to also boycott the ceremony.” (The New York Observer)

(Emphasis added.) ‘Beijing boycott’, I mouthed excitedly after reading the headline… Kudos to Clinton for getting out in front on this, but skipping the opening ceremony alone is an empty gesture. The call should be for an outright boycott of the entire Olympics. [The piece is accompanied by what has to be one of the most unflattering pictures of the unphotogenic Clinton I have seen in awhile. Zombified, no?]

Cause for alarm

Posted on by
…[T]he most ingenious alarm clocks on the market – from the pleasantly surprising to the downright sadistic: “Finally, perhaps the ultimate in snooze-punishments, the SnuzNLuz is a ridiculously monikered but utterly dastardly way of stopping anyone from getting ‘just ten minutes more’. Press snooze and the clock will connect to your bank account and start making donations to a pre-chosen charity or organisation. In order to spur you on all the more, it is suggested that you make the beneficiary of your generosity a cause – political, ethical, whatever – you do not support in the slightest. If you sleep in, they’ll receive donations of your hard-earned cash. You want to hit them where it hurts? Get out of bed.” (Guardian.UK)

The Federman Collection at Spineless Books

Posted on by

“Federman’s masterful and economical utilization of strange loops, mise-en-abime, and other metafictionalist maneuvers will be received by readers versed in writing of this type with a smile of familiarity and a nod of admiration. Like Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino, Federman has internalized this type of writing to the point where the use of innovative and challenging narrative techniques such as metalepsis and hypodiegesis never seems contrived.” –Jeffrey R. di Leo

US Army toyed with telepathic ray gun

Posted on by
Recently declassified DoD document details developments in maturing nonlethal technologies for warfare: “Some of the technologies are conceptual, such as an electromagnetic pulse that causes a seizure like those experienced by people with epilepsy. Other ideas, like a microwave gun to ‘beam’ words directly into people’s ears, have been tested. It is claimed that the so-called ‘Frey Effect’ – using close-range microwaves to produce audible sounds in a person’s ears – has been used to project the spoken numbers 1 to 10 across a lab to volunteers’.” (New Scientist)

A number of the schizophrenic patients with whom I work, some of whom have similar explanations for the voices they hear in their heads, would be interested in the report, which is available here (pdf). ‘Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you’, the saying goes. Perhaps it should be ‘Just because you are paranoid means they are out to get you’?

Robot aliens?

Posted on by
Does TV sci-fi get it right?: “Some aspects of the [Battlestar] Galactica universe may be as bogus as other science-fiction creations (such as spaceships with artificial gravity that instantly jump from one star system to another). But when it comes to the idea that the first intelligent aliens we meet may actually be machines, astronomers say the show is definitely on the right track.

‘There are two kinds of encounters with aliens you can have,’ said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the California-based SETI Institute. ‘Either you pick up a signal, or you pick them up on the corner. But I think it’s safe to say that in both instances they will be synthetic. They will be artificial constructions.'” (MSNBC)

Drug Makers Near Old Goal:

Posted on by
A Legal Shield: “The Bush administration has argued strongly in favor of the doctrine, which holds that the F.D.A. is the only agency with enough expertise to regulate drug makers and that its decisions should not be second-guessed by courts. The Supreme Court is to rule on a case next term that could make pre-emption a legal standard for drug cases. The court already ruled in February that many suits against the makers of medical devices like pacemakers are pre-empted.” (New York Times )

A very bad idea for anyone other than Big Pharma, in my opinion. The drug companies are sitting pretty if pro forma approval by an overwhelmed agency that has not effectively regulated in decades is the sole legal standard.

In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop

Posted on by
“They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.

A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.” (New York Times)

You know I am enslaved to you, serving up tidbits ’round the clock, day in and day out, dear readers…

Unrecognized Heroes

Posted on by
“Amid all the bad news surrounding Nouri al-Maliki’s failed offensive against the Sadr militia in Basra, no one has noticed that about thousand people did the right thing. Maliki asked the army and police force to break a cease fire and attack their countrymen and fellow Shi’ites. About a thousand of them, including 100 officers, refused.

No one in the media will call these men heroes. For them, deserters on our side are always either traitors or cowards. Just as deserters on the other side are always loyal and brave. Fuck that. If you are given an inhumane, destructive order, and you decide to put down your gun and walk away, you are a hero.” (Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk)

Eating Octopus

Posted on by

//www.glaucus.org.uk/Octopus3.gif' cannot be displayed]

An ethically dubious proposition? “It seems that you can’t go to a chic restaurant nowadays without encountering octopus on the menu. Like its cephalopod cousins, octotpus is best cooked according to the “two-minute or two-hour” rule. You can either grill the octopus quickly, imbuing it with a meaty smoke flavor, or you can braise it for hours until its tentacle chewiness gives way to a pleasing tenderness. Serve with some bold Mediterranean flavors, like tapenade, paprika or oily beans.

Now I happen to really enjoy eating octopus. But I can’t help but wonder if it’s an ethically dubious proposition. The problem is that octopi are really, really smart. Dr. Jennifer Mather and Roland Anderson have done some interesting research on the surprising cognitive talents of these short-lived, utterly unsocial, yet rather cunning invertebrates. They’ve demonstrated, in a series of experiments and field studies, that octopi play with toys, have short and long-term memory, exhibit rudimentary tool use and have distinct, individual personalities. See here for a nice summary of their work.

What do you think? Is it wrong to eat such an intelligent creature? I’m pretty certain that octopi are the smartest species I consume. While I like all farm animals, and I’m pretty disciplined about only eating humanely raised beef and poultry, I struggle to imagine a chicken or cow using tools. I thought David Foster Wallace, in his essay “Consider the Lobster,” made a pretty compelling case that the ability of a creature to experience pain should alter the moral calculus of eating that creature. (That said, I still eat lobster every chance I get.) But shouldn’t the intelligence of a creature be even more important? After all, intelligence correlates with so many other variables that are clearly relevant to the ethics of food.” (Frontal Cortex)

The Elusive Allure of Messiaen

Posted on by
//graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/04/06/arts/06tomm600.1.jpg' cannot be displayed]
“Originality may be overrated in the arts. All creators emulate the masters and borrow from one another. Big deal! The composer and critic Virgil Thomson routinely debunked what he called the ‘game of influences,’ which he considered ‘about as profitable a study as who caught cold from whom when they were standing in the same draft.’

But the French modernist master Olivier Messiaen, who died in 1992 at 83, was truly an original. No other music sounds quite like his, with its mystical allure, ecstatic energy and elusive harmonic language, grounded yet ethereal. Rhythmically his pieces slip suddenly from timeless contemplation to riotous agitation then back again, sometimes by the measure. In the introduction to his 1985 book on Messiaen the critic Paul Griffiths calls him ‘the first great composer whose works exist entirely after, and to a large degree apart from, the great Western tradition.’ ” (New York Times)

Guitar Licks That Resonate and Lyrics That Linger

Posted on by

What Billy Bragg is listening to. “There are some albums that take you back to your early teens — before they invented Guitar Hero III — when you’d get by with your bedroom mirror and a tennis racket for a guitar. This would be my tennis racket album of the year.” I usually find these New York Times “listening with…” pieces interesting; I just wish they discussed more than 5-6 selections. (New York Times )

Right at the End

Posted on by
William F. Buckley’s last gift to conservatism may have been his opposition to the Iraq War. “Soon after Bill Buckley died, William Kristol published a column called “The Indispensable Man” in the New York Times. He celebrated Buckley as the founder of the conservative movement, and his tone was not only celebratory but affectionate. And surely Kristol was right: Buckley was indispensable. Without his leadership there would have been no conservative movement. Yet at the end of his life, Buckley believed the movement he made had destroyed itself by supporting the war in Iraq.” (The American Conservative via walker)

Man After My Own Heart

Posted on by

I just thought I would give a plug for the assembled writings, at Texts and Connections, of my incisive online acquaintance Steve Silberman. I have linked to a number of these articles when they have appeared in Wired online in the past. Silberman and I have corresponded online and share alot of interests and sensibilities, although he has rubbed shoulders with them (the members of the Grateful Dead; other psychedelic, counterculture and Beat luminaries; Oliver Sacks and other neuropioneers; among others) while I just worship them from afar.

If anyone notices the online appearance of any new Silberman materials before I do, please send me a link and I will probably be impelled to take note of it here.

‘Gelwan’ Discoveries

Posted on by

Those of you with more common family names, or with appreciable extended families, may have a hard time seeing the point of this post. But, as I’ve noted before, there are very very few Gelwans. I have always wondered, or you might even say obsessed around, how/if those I find are related to me. I have very little in the way of extended family; I guess this preoccupation of mine reflects an envy of those with large extended families and a thirst for deeper family connection, especially so that my children might come to feel embedded in a broader web.

I subscribe to a Google alert for new Gelwan references on the web, and just received a link to this page (gendrevo.ru). It appears to me to be from a Russian genealogy site in which survivors post remembrance pages for their relatives who died in the Holocaust. On my paternal side, the generation of immigrants were my grandparents, in the early 20th century; my father’s older siblings and he were born in the U.S. between 1910-1915. I have always assumed that Gelwan was an Ellis Island anglicization of something else and thus that researching my family’s roots would become squirrely because the family name of anyone related to me might not have precisely the same pronunciation or spelling. It was explained to me that, as the part of the world from which my ancestors emigrated shifted back and forth between Slavic and Germanic dominance, between Cyrillic and Roman alphabets, so too did the rendering of family names. I would have to pursue the Gelvans, the Gelmans, and even the Hellmans for relatives. [I may have made this up, but I think I learned somewhere along the way that we are actually distantly related to the Hellman’s mayonnaise family…]

The flip side of that coin is that literal Gelwans might not be related to me. For example, there is a Deborah Gelwan in the public relations industry in Sao Paulo, Brazil who is referred to on the web. When I was a child, a Brazilian tourist with the last name Gelwan, possibly from her family, arrived on our doorstep, having looked up Gelwan in the phonebooks on arriving in New York City. It appears that my parents and the visitor determined that it was unlikely we were related (although I cannot imagine how they did this, as my parents spoke no Portugese and rumor has it this visitor spoke no English). I’ve written to Deborah, without getting a response. I would at least love to figure out if these South American Gelwans descended from Eastern European immigrants. I am aware that eastern European Jews did go to South America in the diasporas, but I am not sure about Brazil per se.

I have even discovered two other Gelwans in the New York area where I grew up, interestingly enough both physicians as I am: Jeffrey, a gastroenterologist and Mark, an ophthalmologist. We’ve spoken by phone but cannot establish a common background. I assumed that it might merely be an accident that we share our name, that Gelwan might be a final common pathway of anglicization from diverse unrelated family names in eastern Europe.

I was told that my family originated in Riga, Latvia. Given that, I’ve written to Vladimir, or Wladimir, Gelwan, who I learned was the principal dancer in the Latvian National Ballet and who now runs a ballet school in Berlin, suggesting that we may be related, but have never gotten a reply back. (What is it with these nonresponses? Someone writing me from afar suggesting they might be my relative, with such a rare name, would immediately pique my interest and would surely get a response, although that might just be me. Do you think the recipients might have worried that my messages represented some kind of con?) I have seen a picture of Vladimir Gelwan on the web and can even imagine a certain family resemblance. I have determined that I will drop in on him if I am ever in Berlin. [Do I have any readers in or near Berlin?]

Given the waves of upheaval that repeatedly washed over eastern Europe in the 20th century, with ever-changing political hegemony over various regions, large scale displacement of populations, the Holocaust, the destruction of records, the changing of names, etc., conventional genealogical research is not possible. It is not as if there is an established family tree, with records waiting around for the taking, as is the case for at least some families with western European origins. My father’s older brother, now deceased, once returned to eastern Europe to try to find some of our roots. Despite a reputation for being extremely resourceful, he apparently had no success at all. Lamentably, I cannot find any notes from his research; otherwise I (acknowledged as someone with no lack of resourcefulness myself!) might pick up the trail where he left off, despite the passage of time having added fifty further years of obfuscation.

But now, here are remembrances literally of Gelwans! And they come from Poland and Riga. So it seems excitingly credible that these remembered Gelwans are somehow relatives of mine, but I am at a loss as to where to go from this point. The entries in this registry were made by a surviving sister, Miriam Bergman, in the mid-’50’s. Bergman is a common name, and I suspect it would be impossible to locate this woman or anyone connected to her. Do any readers have some suggestions as to how I could proceed in pursuing this?

[Perhaps one day someone googling their family name will be linked to this post and wonder how they might be related to Eliot Gelwan. Hurry up, Google, crawl this post and index it!]

Iraq Veterans Testify at Their Own ‘Winter Soldier’

Posted on by
Organizers Modelled Event After Vietnam Investigation. “On three frigid days in early 1971, more than 100 Vietnam veterans gathered at a Detroit hotel to indict the most contentious American war of the 20th century. In measured tones, occasionally quivering with emotion, they described what the war had done to them as much as what the war had done to the country… Sponsored by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, they called their investigation the Winter Soldier project, after a line from Thomas Paine’s famous denunciation of “the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot [who] will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country.”

…On March 13, Iraq Veterans Against the War, an organization inspired by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, [convened] at the National Labor College just outside of Washington to say, in so many words, that it’s all happening again…

The critique that the Winter Soldier investigation presents is both subtle and incendiary. Throughout the course of the war, the public has become agonizingly familiar with its excesses, most notably the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the deliberate killing of civilians at Haditha. Winter Soldier, according to the veterans’ group, won’t expose the next big Iraq scandal. What it will do instead is argue, through testimony from soldiers and Marines who fought the war, that standard military behavior in Iraq can look more like Abu Ghraib or Haditha than the public perceives…” (Washington Independent)

I’m sorry I am late in noticing this. As readers of FmH know, I think that the witness of conscience against American military adventurism is a high purpose and deserves to be propagated widely.