Do human intestinal microorganisms make their hosts fat? (New York Times Magazine)

“Homegrown U.K. terror is a growing threat, multicultural ‘tolerance’ can’t combat it, and the war in Iraq will only make it worse.” — Andrew Brown (Salon)

And: Inside the Iraqi Forces Fiasco: “The U.S. effort to train Iraqi forces — and bring our troops home — is mired in bureaucratic mismanagement, inept recruits and astonishing shortages of equipment.” (Salon)

Start out by wondering if our universe could be a membrane floating in higher dimensional space and repeatedly smashing into a neighboring universe. Go from there. I favor no. 10 as the explanation for much I have experienced of the universe. (New Scientist)

If the scheme emanated from the UK, why are the US and the EU cancelling flights into Heathrow??

This should not be so addictive. Block falling streams of sand, salt, water and oil by building walls, planting plants, sowing fire, etc. I was clearly among that class of little boys who loved building dams across little streams in the woods or rivulets of draining water in the streets after rainstorms; this is the net version. File in the major net timewasters dept.

The powerful skill set that is eye contact. (Smart Money)

Update:

Debunked?

John Rogers is a TV and filmwriter, standup comic and former bartender. His comments on Dershowitz come with the authority of having served him at a Harvard Square restaurant (now defunct and sorely missed by me and my family). A lengthy anecdote about a Saudi prince which precedes this conclusion explains the epithet.

The neocons’ next war: Sidney Blumenthal writes in Salon that the Lebanese conflict is being supported by US provision of signal intelligence to Israel as part of the neocon proxy war on Iran and Syria, emanating as it does from the office of the vice-president-in-chief. The ineffectual and bumbling Condoleezza Rice has been ‘briefed’ on these activities but, as of her first big international crisis as secretary of state, is already marginalized because of neocon opposition to her intentions to pursue diplomatic as opposed to interventionist options regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Blumenthal says. He is certainly one of those who sees evidence that the neocon shadow government continues to dictate US foreign policy. I am not sure, however, that Rice started to arouse neocon ire by proposing to negotiate with Iran. It is more likely that the choice of an ineffectual bumbler to head the State Dept. was engineered from the first — as it was in Bush’s first term with Powell and, indeed, as it was in the choice of Cheney’s running mate in the first place in the lead-up to 2000.

Meanwhile: others find the Lebanese war to be the first trumpet blast of Armageddon. Can apocalyptic vision be driving US encouragement of our Israeli proxies? After all, the other wing of the rabid right, along with the craven neocons, are the evangelicals. But, by and large, the born-again wing of the Republican constituency is being played for patsies by the men who believe in doing their damndest during their first and only life.

The famous notebook maker shows pages from the notebooks of the famous.

I highlighted Watada’s case here awhile ago. As FmH readers know, I feel publicizing the war resistance among the military is crucially important. Forward this to those you know in the service, or post it where they might see it.

Stop those witches’ knickers flapping: Discussion of various approaches to cutting use of plastic shopping bags in Europe. Evocative title. (Guardian.UK)

Did I miss something? Here is a Der Spiegel report on an incident at a nuclear plant in Forsmark, Sweden last week triggered by an electrical short. A power outage compounded by the failure of two out of four backup generators ultimately led to the closure of the plant (and, as a “precautionary measure”, half the nuclear plants in Sweden) in what plant workers described to Swedish media as a near-meltdown. Assessments call it the worst nuclear mishap since Chernobyl. Did this get any coverage at the time in the US press? If not, why not?

Could this be a career-ending mistake? While we hear from time to time about a surgeon removing the wrong kidney or amputating the contralateral limb, the argument from symmetry makes those simpler errors to understand. Misidentifying the organ, though??

Bruce Sterling in Wired on the threat of the “two technologies that have shaped the life I lead today”:

His concern about ‘stateless aliens’ and ‘stage 4 warfare’ —

— is, somewhat paradoxically and, one might say inexplicably, counterbalanced by faith that we can ‘outthink the marauders’ and think of ways to reintegrate the Vandals.

Israel agrees to 48-hour suspension of bombing. (Yahoo! News)

<a href=”http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2” title=””>Suspension over. (ABC News)

Israel agrees to 48-hour suspension of bombing. (Yahoo! News)

<a href=”http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=2” title=””>Suspension over. (ABC News)

Or is it? Opposed in principle to the practices of the Coca Cola Corp. but compelled by their customers who crave the real thing, the managers of an alternative cinema in Bristol are on a quest to replicate the recipe themselves. (Guardian.UK)

In last month’s “Medlogs controversy” here, the anonymous commenter contrasted my printing of lengthy excerpts from the New York Times with his/her ‘true’ journalism. Apart from the fact that (a) commentary is not journalism; and (b) the commenter betrayed her/his lack of understanding that excerpting and logging is one of the original traditional forms of weblogging, a news story like this one illustrates potently how some stand on their own without need for fatuous pseudo-punditry and that I have served the purpose I intend merely by pointing you to them.

My point for a long time with regard to the atrocities committed by US forces in Iraq has been that the influences, if not the direct orders, shaping them emanate from the top, by intention, despite insidious efforts from the right to portray each of the burgeoning number of such events as attributable to some ‘rogue’ soldiers who snapped, or who were sociopaths to begin with. Draw your own conclusions. And, please, by all means, shoot the messenger once you have done so!

The fabulous furry Freakonomics brothers said:

While testosterone can be an aid in training, it is not a night-before performance enhancer, and it is much more useful in sports performance requiring explosive bursts of energy rather than the endurance challenges of the Tour de France. If Landis’ impetuous use of an illegal drug after his disastrous performance in the prior stage had been the explanation of his comeback, I would have expected him to use something like epoeitin instead. And as for the comparison with Bode Miller, Landis drank in despair, he says, for one night when he thought he was washed up. Miller’s debauchery was part of his training regimen, it seems, and one reason for his performance deficits. Why, then, is testosterone among the banned substances, one commenter to this post asks. For part of the answer, listen to the interviews with the head of the World Anti-Doping Agency and tell me if there doesn’t seem to be a veneer of religious zeaoltry and missionary zeal there. [thanks, walker]

• Nexcare Home Safety First Aid Tips, free from 800-537-2191

This is a movement spurred by civic organizations mostly concerned with — shudder! — declining consumption of US goods and declining tourist revenue, it seems. Instead of diverting the rest of the world from their largely accurate perceptions of US policy — selfish, unilateral, swaggering and exploitive — and the behavior and values of the ‘ugly Americans’ — boorish, materialistic, ignorant and xenophobic — these civic groups should be expending their effort on regime change and culture change at home. Otherwise, it is more of the same — attempting to bully the rest of the world into doing it our way, to meet our selfish ends!

Extraordinary Russian experiments suggest that many other characteristics of domesticated animals — physical characteristics such as changes in coloration, rolled tails and differences in skull shape — come along if all you breed for is ‘tameness’, i.e. tolerance of humans. This work, which has been done in foxes and rats, seems to hold across species. A relatively small number of genes — or perhaps even one — may control the traits associated with domestication. And the factor linking all this may be the embryonic neural crest, a structure which is the source of cells that will form the face, skull, pigment, elements of the nervous system and the adrenal glands, which control stress hormone release and aspects of the fight or flight reaction. If you select for animals with less constitutional fear, they may be able to see humans as social collaborators instead; they may appear ‘smarter’ than their wild forebears. It is not outlandish to speculate that selecting for tame animals is selecting for underdevelopment, or delayed development, of the neural crest.

And… there are some suggestions that humans are self-selecting themselves for domestic attributes, which may bear some genetic and embryonic similarity (although you would not know it if you look at the state of disharmony and belligerency in the world…) (New York Times via abby)

Does anyone remember the witty and clever 1980 film by Alain Resnais, Mon Uncle d’Amerique? Resnais made it as a collaboration with French biologist Henri Laborit and an homage to his theories about the ways in which the conditions of civilized life inherently conflict with our human nature. Some of the most hilarious moments of the film, in which Resnais jumpcuts from the dilemmas the main characters face to analogous vignettes with lab rats in their cages, upon which Laborit expounds, suggest that the central problem of modernity is the demand that the fight or flight reaction be inhibited. The highly original pathos of the film, and Resnais’ and Laborit’s compassion for their characters, is framed through this lens. But if we are, as the new research leads one to speculate, auto-domesticated, perhaps we ought not to be the objects of Laborit’s sympathetic gaze after all. Perhaps, instead, we should be pitied for having the spunk bred out of us altogether.

Leaked Memo: Coal Industry Coordinating Propaganda Blitz Attacking Global Warming Science (Think Progress)

Or: What has become of the Che icon? (The Sun)

“Physicist Costas Soukoulis and his research group at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory on the Iowa State University campus are having the time of their lives making light travel backwards at negative speeds that appear faster than the speed of light. “

31-year old author’s Measuring the World, whose main character is astronomer/mathematician Carl Gauss (who discovered the curvature of space), is outselling Dan Brown and J.K. Rowling. (Guardian.UK)

Ask MetaFilter thread compiling a “list of famous people with science-related qualifications.” The poster wants to persuade his students “that studying science does not mean you have to become a scientist.” Some interesting and surprising people on the list; perhaps the most unexpected is Dolph Lundgren.

Here are more:

• Famous people with a philosophy degree
• List of musicians by academic degree
• Famous “nonmathematicians”

[The full article is available only to premium subscribers, but you get the picture…]

Darn, I just saw this; otherwise there would have been 600,000,001. Did it work, I wonder?

Actually, I think the only serious debate is between those who think Bolton has been a major player in advancing the cause of US isolation and those who feel he is merely holding his own with the sorry state of global US foreign policy failure he inherited. [Click the link, it is unbelievable…literally.]

[And how should PETA be defined in the dictionary, one might ask?]

It has long been said that people with autism are fixated on imagery but have difficulty processing words and language. Confirmation comes from a new brain scanning study showing that an autistic patient’s parietal cortex, active in others only when sentences contain imagery, is relied upon even when interpreting sentences without any imagery. Ironically, ‘focusing on the picture’ may cause them to ‘miss the big picture’. (New Scientist)

[And how should PETA be defined in the dictionary, one might ask?]

Congress has held a hearing to investigate Bush’s use of the statements, a bipartisan advocacy group has condemned their use, and Democratic Rep. Barney Frank has introduced a bill that would allow Congress to override content in them that contradicts signed legislation. But stronger action is called for in the face of this most outrageous and egregious exemplar of the despotic imperial presidency. Now a task force of the American Bar Association will recommend that Congress legislate judicial review of the signing statements. This might amount to asserting a Congressional right to sue. (U.S. News)

Error rates must certainly vary by hospital! I have never seen anything like one medication error per day per patient, even adjusting for those that do not come to light, in my hospital work. In fact, I think that is inaccurate by something like two orders of magnitude.

“How Asian horror films put the fear back into America’s scary movies — and brought the A list to a B genre.” (New York Times Magazine)

Neocons Are Nuts To Join Israel-Hezbollah Conflict. I’m sorry, I can’t make a reasoned, longwinded response to this latest neocon nonsense. Gingrich is so defensive about the idiocy of this assertion, that the Israel-Hezbollah conflict is WWIII and that the US should not wait to get on the right side of the conflict — specifically by taking out Iran, Syria and while we’re at it that bastion of the worldwide anti-American Islamist conspiracy North Korea as well — that each time he defends it in the media his blowhard list of bits of evidence from around the world inflates more and more (in parallel with the inflation of his jowls and his presidential aspirations). In a sense, though, he is right, the enemies of the West, or the US in particular, are mustering, emboldened in solidarity around the world. The only problem is that the neocons do not notice that it was the US’s arrogant unilateral bellicosity they largely whipped up which engendered it.

Senate Renews 1965 Voting Rights Act (ABC News) Worth celebrating, but in a just society there would not even be a question.

Dropping out of the rat race… but where?? (Wired)

Off-the-cuff conversation between US President George W Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair during a break at the G8 conference in Russia (BBC ), an interchange which begins with Bush’s “Yo, Blair…” and encompasses Bush’s breathtaking and incisive reference to a critical geopolitical crisis as if it were excrement. As if you needed any confirmation, it reveals an ignorant boorish redneck about as far from presidential caliber as you could imagine. I expect him to appear in public with his baseball cap backward. Pity is that that appears to be what somewhere in the vicinity of half of the American people want in the way of leadership.

Addendum: a version with video, thanks to reader alireza.

Does ‘train-wreck editing’ alienate or endear listeners, Jack? (Wired) One of the best things about migrating to listening to music via iPod, IMHO, is that I keep it on shuffle almost all the time. 6000+ carefully selected songs and I am constantly surprised and almost always delighted by what comes up next.

Snakes on a Plane — another sign of Hollywood’s demise or the triumph of the blogosphere? The essay is not at all about the merits (ha!) of the film, and all about the title choice:

The grotesquerie here is, of course, Rice’s unbelievable statement. Orwellian Newspeak had nothing on the Bush administration.

Jacob has taken a stand on this issue on his own weblog:

With this, he lays to rest the anonymous complainer’s campaign to oust me from Medlogs syndication. Of course, I heartily agree, even though I did not think the complaint was ever really about the relevance of politics to medical practice but rather an attack on my particular political ‘rants’.

If I had fallen for anon.’s ‘troll’ anymore than I did, had I wanted to devote even more indignant energy to my response than I already had, it would have been along exactly the same lines. I would have written about how ridiculous it is to try to separate politics, even very specific anti-Bush and antiwar rhetoric, from healthcare concerns. It is axiomatic that the practice of medicine is embedded inherently in a political and social context, and that is particularly true of mental health care.

Most people, especially these days, fast-track from college right into medical school and then their medical careers. One of the advantages of my taking time to live a life before studying medicine and becoming a doctor was that I brought well-formulated political activist sentiments into the medical sphere. So my credentials around the inherent politicization of the practice of medicine go way back. To wit: during medical school, I became a student leader in Physicians for Social Responsibility, was privileged to be mentored by Robert J. Lifton MD and Helen Caldicott MD, and organized a national conference addressing the nuclear arms race as a public health emergency. (Yes, I studied medicine as well…)

My anonymous complainant will doubtless scoff at all this. In a comment of his/hers which I have since deleted, s/he threatens to “reveal myself” and mount a sympathy campaign for support to exclude my weblog (and, I would surmise, those of others with similar sentiments) from syndication. So we do agree on one thing at least — the advantages of taking the issue public rather than sniping from a position of cowardly anonymity. Nonetheless, I expect this is the end of this matter. I thank FmH’s readers for your patience with this idiocy.

Update: I posted this a week ago and got no responses back from Medlog readers, although there are a few comments here. I am reposting it again to solicit comments for a second week, after which I will consider myself to have discharged my responsibility and will close the matter. The anonymous poster referred to below has continued to post provocative comments here on FmH, which I have begun expunging as I threatened to do if s/he had nothing new to say on the matter. I have still heard nothing from Jacob Reider, the sysop of Medlogs. If you are reading this on Medlogs and have an opinion on this matter, please enter a comment on the copy of this post on FmH, identifying yourself as a Medlogs reader. Please don’t share the complainant’s cowardice by remaining anonymous.

Here’s the repost: For readers of FmH — unless you read the comments under the post to which this link points on my weblog Follow Me Here, you would probably not know that FmH is syndicated at medlogs.com.

For readers via Medlogs — I am posting this largely for you. Recently, an anonymous Medlogs reader, in the midst of a mutually rather acrimonious exchange with me in the comments section of FmH, let me know on FmH that s/he has complained to the sysop of Medlogs about my posts syndicated there. She/he claimed that the problem was the volume of posts with non-medical content originating from FmH; I think the issue is really that s/he does not like my political position. Her/his original derogatory comment on FmH did not even mention any supposed concern about medlogs.com:

Only when pressed about the commenter’s demeanor, and defensive, did s/he mention that s/he felt I was hogging the bandwidth at Medlogs:

You can read the rest of the exchange by scrolling down from here. (Not me at my best…)

(Ironically, this complaint about the volume of my posts and the offensiveness of my politics was in response to an item I had put up on FmH considering the decreasing volume of my posts at this point in my weblogging career. In particular, I am posting less political material, as I explain in the post in terms of “Bush fatigue.”)

But back to the issue at hand. My impression is that medlogs.com is not a weblog for medical posts but rather a weblog syndicating medical webloggers’ posts; as you can see, an important distinction. To my way of thinking, it is a dull medical professional who is interested in nothing but medical content, and most medical professionals I know are interested in a broader range of their colleagues’ thoughts. That’s my notion of the medical community crystallized by medlogs.com. FmH represents a cross-section of the thoughts and interests of a psychiatrist (albeit a leftwing antiwar anti-Bush one); seemed to have a place on Medlogs.

I would imagine that if I was offbase in that respect I would have long since heard from Jacob Reider or other Medlogs readers. The page to add a site to Medlogs says, “We will get to feed requests ASAP.” I take that to mean that Reider reviews sites applying for admission to medlogs.com to see if they are appropriate; for just this reason, it would be a great gamble not to do so. In that case, my content was deemed to be in the acceptable ballpark. In any case, I wrote to Reider about this difference of opinion and asked him to clarify. I told him that, although he might be reluctant to kick me off in response to concerns about my content because the action might have the appearance of political censorship, I offered that I would voluntarily withdraw FmH from Medlogs syndication if he thought it would be the right thing to do . I have yet to hear back from Reider.

I am posting this now because I think it would be responsible of me to solicit other Medlogs’ readers opinions about whether I am sullying their reading experience and whether I should leave Medlogs. Do you share the concerns of the scurrilous, anonymous complainant? Do you find my posts on Medlogs out of place or is the content I add acceptable in light of what you understand Medlog’s raison d’etre to be? I know there is some selection bias in phrasing a question in this manner; I ask sympathetic readers to consider replying as readily as others might do it in antipathy. You can let me know by going to the copy of this post on FmH and entering a comment. Please identify yourself as a Medlogs reader (and don’t share the complainant’s cowardice by remaining anonymous, please). Thank you for your input, and I would be happy to leave Medlogs if the preponderance of opinion supports that. I would be happy to see Anon. eat crow if the preponderance of the evidence supported that outcome… (but I will not hold my breath).

Too good not to click on [thanks, paula]

“Massachusetts officials on Wednesday ordered every road and tunnel in the city highway system examined after inspectors found at least 60 more trouble spots in the Big Dig tunnel where a woman was crushed to death on Monday by three-ton ceiling tiles.” (New York Times ) Perhaps it is because this is my city and I have driven through the new tunnels countless numbers of times, but I think everyone should be distressed by the fact that this is how it goes in one of the largest public works projects in American history. And the numerous faulty bolts (at least sixty more trouble spots as of last report) holding three-ton concrete ceiling slabs in place are probably the tip of the iceberg of the substandard and cost-cutting job done at the expense of innocent commuters’ lives. Should we have expected differently? Do we have a right to? If there is more than one way to do a job and one of them will end in disaster, someone said, than somebody will do it that way. But I suspect the fault does not lie in the engineering or technological realm as much as that of human malfeasance and sloppiness.

From the Richmond Times Dispatch

“A new theory suggests that creativity comes in two distinct types – quick and dramatic, or careful and quiet.” Wired is all over this supposedly ingenious theory of Chicago economist David Galenson, “nothing less than a unified field theory of creativity.” Only it is not a new theory at all. Writers on creativity have long distinguished the brash immature version, often a flash-in-the-pan, from the more measured mature creativity which emerges later in life and seems to build more on a lifetime’s groundwork. There also seems to be a relationship between the respective style of creativity and either iconoclasm or reverence, not surprisingly. It strikes me that it is sometimes more difficult to recognize mature creativity, and a fortiori to proclaim it genius, since it is a matter of opinion whether it is anything more than mere synthesis of, or even borrowing from, the prior creative work in whose tradition it is embedded and on which it draws. There may be an inverse correlation between the frequency with which someone is proclaimed a mature genius and the critic’s familiarity with what has already been done in the field. Perhaps that is why the Wired writer is so enamored of Galenson’s work.