“A very public feud between two philosophers involving damning book reviews, professional roastings and personal slights shows how bitter, unforgiving – and unwittingly hilarious – academic spats can be…” (Guardian.UK thanks to walker)

“…the year that media-savvy lunatics took over the asylum” (Salon)

“Investigators are trying to establish how a tiger escaped from its grotto at San Francisco Zoo and attacked three visitors, killing one.” (BBC) They don’t consider the possibility that the three young male victims had played a foolhardy part in letting the tiger out.

Please do not miss this, say the stargazers at Spaceweather.com: “Tonight, just after sunset, the full Moon and Mars will rise in the east less than 2o apart. These are the two brightest objects in the evening sky; hanging so close together, they’ll look absolutely dynamite. Bundle up and look…”

Please do not miss this, say the stargazers at Spaceweather.com: “Tonight, just after sunset, the full Moon and Mars will rise in the east less than 2o apart. These are the two brightest objects in the evening sky; hanging so close together, they’ll look absolutely dynamite. Bundle up and look…”

I wish I knew where some of these places were . I wish, at least, I was a friend of someone living in one of these places and got invited to visit…

…the following records destroyed in the 3rd floor fire: (Daily Kos)

(World Topix) thanks to walker

Sad news for the fantasist and his fans: “Folks,

I would have liked to keep this one quiet for a little while, but because of upcoming conventions and of course the need to keep my publishers informed, it seems to me unfair to withhold the news. I have been diagnosed with a very rare form of early
onset Alzheimer’s, which lay behind this year’s phantom ‘stroke’.

We are taking it fairly philosophically down here and possibly with a mild optimism. For now work is continuing on the completion of Nation and the basic notes are already being laid down for Unseen Academicals. All other things being equal, I
expect to meet most current and, as far as possible, future commitments but will discuss things with the various organisers. Frankly, I would prefer it if people kept things cheerful, because I think there’s time for at least a few more books yet :o)

— Terry Pratchett

PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted as ‘I am not dead’. I will, of course, be dead at some future point, as will everybody else. For me, this maybe further off than you think – it’s too soon to tell. I know it’s a very human thing to say ‘Is there anything I can do’, but in this case I would only entertain offers from very high-end experts in brain chemistry.”

Holiday season wishlists of web celebrities ranging from almost-prosaic to fancifully outlandish (“home-based Large Hadron Collider”). There are a couple of mentions of the Amazon Kindle (has anyone tried one?). (PopSci)

“Working in partnerships to ensure the global survival of amphibians, focusing on those that can not be safeguarded in nature. Amphibian Ark is possible due to your generous support..”

Throughout the practice of medicine, the paradigm of standardizing diagnosis — knowing how to recognize when different patients have the same disease process — has allowed standardized treatment by the protocols that have the best statistical evidence of success. But this standardized and evidence-based way of treating patients has been countered by the recognition that individuals differ in their responses to treatment for a variety of reasons. So standardization has begun to be counterbalanced by a new paradigm of personalized medicine, which attempts to further refine treatment choices by analyzing what individual factors in a patient are likely to influence treatment response (although by and large the managed care companies do not like the anecdotal and amorphous nature of the approach). There has been a growing recognition of ethnic, age-related, and gender-based distinctions in disease expression and treatment response. A large part of these individual differences is based in physiological distinctions based in genetic differences, so it is not surprising that the personalized medicine movement is fist-in-glove with the genomics mavens. But even the gene sherpas recognize that, for the foreseeable future, individual genetic testing will be a piecemeal, minor contribution to predicting disease risk and treatment response relative to the more simple and time-honored medical practice of taking a family history.

In the psychiatric field, where I practice, attention to personalizing care has, of course, always been a relatively more important counterbalance to the standardization paradigm that has infected the rest of medicine. One reason, which goes without saying, is that ethnic, cultural, gender, community and family cultural differences shape illness behavior and expectancies and beliefs about treatment responses. The art of psychiatry is in large measure parsing out and mobilizing such individual factors to maximize recovery and empowerment. And genetic/constitutional variables also shape psychiatric treatment response. If you read psychiatric evaluations, you find that the family history section of the write-up is generally more attended to than in other medical fields. Conclusions about what psychiatric disease the presenting symptoms might represent are often strongly shaped by what diagnoses blood relatives have been known to have. Some of us place great stock in factoring the responses of relatives to specific medications (antidepressants, antipsychotics etc.) in choosing which therapies to prescribe to our patients.

But the atomization of communities, attenuation of family structure and dispersal of relatives have crippled our access to and familiarity with our families’ medical histories. The emphasis physicians would like to place on such factors is often defeated by patients’ impoverished awareness of their families’ histories. Deliberate, often daunting, efforts on patients’ parts are necessary to counter this. I’ve seen suggestions that patients use holiday family gatherings as an opportunity to take a detailed health history from their relatives:

While the intention is good, however, the clinical emphasis may not exactly be in keeping with holiday cheer and the clinical interview not exactly one of the joys of the season. You may want to make a point of finding another time, soon, to query relatives about their health histories, especially elderly relatives whose wealth of information could soon be lost. This site from the Dept. of Health and Human Services outliens the Surgeon General’s Family History Initiative and provides online resources for information-gathering.

As we psychiatric practitioners also find when we encourage our patients to contact relatives for their health histories, these conversations are also beneficial in other ways. Nonspecific factors of renewal of contact with family members, facilitation of communication channels, and gaining a mutual appreciation of at least some dimensions of our relatives’ struggles with adversities, are good for the soul, and good for one’s health, in general.

Operation Clambake: “This is the cracked ban lists for the Scientology censorware software (aka ScenioSitter) – all thanks go to the guys at http://fravia.org/saruma1.htm who cracked CyberSitter – and Anti-Cult who found their page. ScenioSitter is still being analyzed by critics of the cult, new information will be added to this site.”

• List of sites and domains
• List of newsgroups
• List of words and names
• More forbidden words and names

Throughout the practice of medicine, the paradigm of standardizing diagnosis — knowing how to recognize when different patients have the same disease process — has allowed standardized treatment by the protocols that have the best statistical evidence of success. But this standardized and evidence-based way of treating patients has been countered by the recognition that individuals differ in their responses to treatment for a variety of reasons. So standardization has begun to be counterbalanced by a new paradigm of personalized medicine, which attempts to further refine treatment choices by analyzing what individual factors in a patient are likely to influence treatment response (although by and large the managed care companies do not like the anecdotal and amorphous nature of the approach). There has been a growing recognition of ethnic, age-related, and gender-based distinctions in disease expression and treatment response. A large part of these individual differences is based in physiological distinctions based in genetic differences, so it is not surprising that the personalized medicine movement is fist-in-glove with the genomics mavens. But even the gene sherpas recognize that, for the foreseeable future, individual genetic testing will be a piecemeal, minor contribution to predicting disease risk and treatment response relative to the more simple and time-honored medical practice of taking a family history.

In the psychiatric field, where I practice, attention to personalizing care has, of course, always been a relatively more important counterbalance to the standardization paradigm that has infected the rest of medicine. One reason, which goes without saying, is that ethnic, cultural, gender, community and family cultural differences shape illness behavior and expectancies and beliefs about treatment responses. The art of psychiatry is in large measure parsing out and mobilizing such individual factors to maximize recovery and empowerment. And genetic/constitutional variables also shape psychiatric treatment response. If you read psychiatric evaluations, you find that the family history section of the write-up is generally more attended to than in other medical fields. Conclusions about what psychiatric disease the presenting symptoms might represent are often strongly shaped by what diagnoses blood relatives have been known to have. Some of us place great stock in factoring the responses of relatives to specific medications (antidepressants, antipsychotics etc.) in choosing which therapies to prescribe to our patients.

But the atomization of communities, attenuation of family structure and dispersal of relatives have crippled our access to and familiarity with our families’ medical histories. The emphasis physicians would like to place on such factors is often defeated by patients’ impoverished awareness of their families’ histories. Deliberate, often daunting, efforts on patients’ parts are necessary to counter this. I’ve seen suggestions that patients use holiday family gatherings as an opportunity to take a detailed health history from their relatives:

While the intention is good, however, the clinical emphasis may not exactly be in keeping with holiday cheer and the clinical interview not exactly one of the joys of the season. You may want to make a point of finding another time, soon, to query relatives about their health histories, especially elderly relatives whose wealth of information could soon be lost. This site from the Dept. of Health and Human Services outliens the Surgeon General’s Family History Initiative and provides online resources for information-gathering.

As we psychiatric practitioners also find when we encourage our patients to contact relatives for their health histories, these conversations are also beneficial in other ways. Nonspecific factors of renewal of contact with family members, facilitation of communication channels, and gaining a mutual appreciation of at least some dimensions of our relatives’ struggles with adversities, are good for the soul, and good for one’s health, in general.

1949 bootleg donated to Guthrie family (Yahoo! News)

Bush has essentially asserted that he determines what is a constitutional exercise of his power, and that the Justice Dept. is bound by his interpretation.

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” — Sinclair Lewis

“Photo-sharing for pictures taken where you are not allowed to take them.” [via boing boing]

Survival International is a worthy charity I support, which works to help indigenous peoples protect their land rights. Here is their report, Progress Can Kill. A press release highlights one horrendous pull-out fact, the dramatic spread of HIV/AIDS among tribal peoples from increased contact with ‘modernity.’

And here’s the part I find hard to believe:

I guess it depends on what your definition of ‘collect’ is.

Good things come to those who wait: “Most expensive ever Guinness advert features large-scale domino game… The advert was shot on location in a remote side village called Iruya, in the Salta region of northern Argentina, with a population of around 1,000 people.” (YouTube) Directed by Nicolai Fuglsig, who had previously created that wonderful Sony Bravia ‘Balls’ commercial.

from Bill Humphries’ More Like This Weblog. Like Humphries, I am very excited about the arrival of this film, from one of the fantasy series my family has most loved. But we are preparing to be disappointed by its Hollywoodization…

And:

More about Lisi’s work from The Economist.

Don’t read this unappetizing story until after you’ve digested your Thanksgiving meal. (CNN)

Living Walls, for gardening in small spaces. A gallery of designs by Patrick Blanc. (The Grow Spot)

Metapsychology review: “Cutting to the Core, edited by David Benatar, deals with ethical issues surrounding some of the most controversial surgeries in practice. Discussed are male circumcision and female genital cutting, sex assignment and reassignment, conjoined twin separation, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery. The book is organized into six parts, each corresponding to one of these topics. As the editor mentions in his introduction, the aim of this collection was not to present an article for each side of the subjects (i.e., one ‘for’ and one ‘against’). Rather, the goal was to highlight the ethical issues involved with these surgeries by offering the reader various views of and approaches to these issues. Even when the authors’ conclusions agree, their approaches might not… ” It sounds like an interesting book, but I am surprised that it does not appear to include anything about surgical amputation for patients with apotemnophilia, about which I have written several times in FmH.

The New York Review of Books on three new books; the titles tell it all: The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder by Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield; Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness by Christopher Lane; and Let Them Eat Prozac: The Unhealthy Relationship Between the Pharmaceutical Industry and Depression by David Healy. Essayist Frederick Crewes concludes that we have here

The technician ‘forgot about her’, leaving the room after telling her to lie still. When she eventually extricated herself from the scanner, the office was closed and dark and she was locked in.

How you can help (via Boing Boing)

10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies (PsyBlog)

The Concept of the Google-Ganger, that other person with your name you or others discover when your name is googled. (Newsweek).

‘Gelwan’ is a very rare surname and every Google reference to ‘Eliot Gelwan’ relates to this one. My grandfather and his sisters emigrated to the US early in the 20th century; my father and one childless brother were born in New York, so the only Gelwans closely related to me are my brother and my children (my wife keeps her own name).

I’ve discovered several other “Gelwans’ through Google. Perhaps uncannily, three others, all in the New York area, (a husband, wife, and brother) are physicians, like myself. I have been in e-contact with them and we cannot figure out any way in which we might be related. Probably we represent a case of convergent evolution — different names from Eastern Europe identically anglicized at Ellis Island.

There is also a Vladimir Gelwan, who used to be the principal dancer with the Latvian National Ballet and now has a ballet school in Berlin. I suspect he and I might be related, since my paternal ancestors are known to have come from Riga. And then there are the Brazilian and Lebanese Gelwans, as discovered by googling. I have written to Berlin, to Brazil and to Beirut, but have not gotten replies.

My father once told me that a Gelwan had once knocked on our door in New York when I was a young child, having come from Brazil and discovered us in a New York City phone book.

Since we have such an attenuated family, my perennial search for Gelwans online is I think motivated by a yearning for family connectivity — especially for my children’s sake — as much as the usual ego-driven pleasures of googling one’s name. Ah, well, for better or worse a fate you with more common names, or those where more geneological precision is possible, will never experience…

“Should you heart Huckabee?” (Salon News)

SETI Project has a protocol for first contact with extraterrestrials

SETI Project has a protocol for first contact with extraterrestrials

A scathing review on the CIA website of Tim Wiener’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of CIA, which is a scathing review of the US intelligence agency. Written by Nicholas Dujmovic, whose qualifications to write the review are not noted.

Accidental immersion in the life of a total stranger (Boston Globe)

This CBC opinion piece by Stephen Strauss calls for more systematic research on the hygiene hypothesis, the idea that we live in too clean a world to be good for our immune systems. The results may include the epidemic of asthma, eczema, allergies and perhaps even some autoimmune disorders like juvenile diabetes.

On the other hand, Times of London columnist Melanie Reid laments the increasing incidence of the potentially fatal bug E. Coli 0157 throughout the environment and its implication that we can no longer let our children drink free-running water from our mountain streams.

Indonesian volcano roaring to life (USAToday)

And: 

Molten rock causing ground to rise at Yellowstone

…A Surefire Strategy — Tim Darling (Amnesta via kottke)