In his first new album in six years, which the New York Times reviewer describes as “an ambitious and challenging work full of sonic experimentation and oblique lyrics”, Paul Simon is found working with Brian Eno.

New study endorses medication’s efficacy. In a complex design in which it was compared with behavioral treatment/counseling and acamprosate, another medication marketed for relapse prevention in alcoholism, the opiate blocker Revia (naltrexone) gets the nod as helpful. I use this medication for this purpose but have always puzzled about various aspects of how it works if it does.

First of all, as an endogenous opiate blocker, it supposedly blocks some of the activity of the internal reward system and thus diminishes the satisfaction connected with alcohol abuse. But why does it not block most satisfaction in the person’s life if that is the case? There is nothing specific about the effects of alcohol on the endogenous reward system; it responds generically to rewards.

Secondly, addictive behaviors pretty quickly pass beyond the stage of being rewarding; most people persist in abusing addictive drugs because they would be sick or in distress if they stopped. How would a reward blocker matter in such a case? I know I am speaking pretty schematically here, but I need to have some conviction I understand how a medication is supposed to work on a neurochemical basis before I will recommend it to my patients. That is partly because I believe that any medication works less well, or not at all, if the user does not have a belief in its effectiveness. In psychiatric treatment, where most classes of medications were discovered serendipitously and explanations derived after the fact, that is a particular problem.

The effects of naltrexone are modest at best; several studies have found that, while as in this study it was better than acamprosate, the combination of the two is far better than either alone in reducing the frequency and severity of alcoholic relapses. And the benefits usually are more robust in more severe alcoholism.

And: Bush CIA Pick is Domestic Spying Advocate (New York Times )

“Despite a troubled history, police across the nation are keeping tabs on ordinary Americans” (US News)

“Jews in particular need to be aware of the gift Brown has given, in all innocence, to anti-Semites.” (The Jewish Week thanks to walker)

FmH was ‘today’s blog’ a couple of days ago at Interrupting Gelastic Jew:

Actually, although I am no less dripping with contempt for Bush and Co., it seems to me I am venting it much less here these days. It is pretty well established that he is the worst president in recent history, if not in the history of the American presidency. I am far more concerned about, and contemptuous of, the sheeplike and cowardly electorate who elected him nearly elected him twice and demoralized by the futility of influencing the voters’ receptivity to be sold down the river by such an obvious scam artist.

In my earlier post on sudoku below, I referred to Brian Hayes’ column on the mathematical concepts behind it. Here is Hayes’ American Scientist essay:

A tour of 20th-century musical composition by The New Yorker‘s music critic, Alex Ross. (The Rest Is Noise)

An Indie-Rock Festival With Room for Madonna: “This was an indie-rock festival, 94 acts on five stages, and the operation was delicate: a sleek round of commerce for the taste-making class. Yet Madonna and Kanye West played here this year, and they encountered even more love than the alternative-rock groups that are at the heart of this festival.” (But, rumor has it (HuffPo ), Madonna altered the lyrics of one of her songs to tell her audience to go to Texas and “suck George Bush’s dick…”, although discreet asterisks were used in the reportage…)

Philip Weiss’ answer to the critics of Walt and Mearsheimer: “Given the paper’s parentage, the ferment over it raises political questions. How did these ideas get to center stage? And what do they suggest about the character of the antiwar intelligentsia?” (The Nation)

Add your name to Juan Cole’s petition: “This petition calls on the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations to forthrightly condemn the castigation of Professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as anti-Semites for their academic paper, ‘The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy.'”

(The Huffington Post)

“The Saddest Thing I Own invites people everywhere to share the saddest thing they own. What are these sad things? What makes things sad? Do things start off sad? Do some sad things begin as happy things that then become sad? Are some things only sad because for some sad reason we kept them? Are some things just plain sad no matter what? This is what we want to know.” [via boing boing]

Theresa has been keeping this running list; proof that many write with no ‘malice of forethought’. (Making Light)

“The Vatican stepped up its offensive against The Da Vinci Code on Friday when a top official close to Pope Benedict blasted the book as full of anti-Christian lies and urged Catholics to boycott the film.” (Yahoo News) Okay, I’ll admit it now, I’ve finally read the book, and am looking forward to the film. From the trailers I have seen, it looks to be a pretty literal adaptation. My work as an anthropological researcher with the modern-day Maya of southern Mexico when I was a college undergrad showed me firsthand how grafting Christianity on top of indigenous spiritual beliefs as a way of getting its soul-saving foot in the door inherently co-opted those beliefs. So the broad thrust of Brown’s thesis about the Christian Church’s relationship with the ‘pagan’ beliefs it supplanted makes sense to me, as does the Church’s investment in maintaining the paradigm in the face of the current challenge. Should be fun to watch all the hubhub, as it was with the Last Temptation film some years ago.

And:

The Priory of Sion

“Ed Bradley decided to find out for himself whether or not the Priory of Sion, which is central to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code was a real organization or not.” (CBS 60 Minutes thanks to walker)

The New York Times uses Google Maps for a visual display of homicide locations in New York City over the past three years. Figure out the safest places to live in the City. Wow, nothing within a large radius of the block on which I grew up in Queens. Nothing within a mile radius or so of my best friend’s home on the Upper West Side. And nothing within a several-block radius of my brother and his wife’s home in the West Village (although he was attacked twice on his street in the last five years…)

A related article describes other findings of the Times’ analysis of the murder details.

“Over the last several decades, a small group of researchers has tried to understand how a minority of maltreated children exceed expectations.” (New York Times Magazine) A good overview of a neglected topic championed by a few. “Mental health’ research is far better at looking at the pathology, but common sense says you can’t explain why someone falls victim to suffering until you compare them with those who escape that outcome.

The study was co-funded by the NIMH and Eli Lily, the manufacturer of the antipsychotic drug used in the study. This study seems to support the notion that early detection and treatment halts disease progression. However, the low completion rate among recruited subjects prompts the obvious question — is there some correlation between the potential for early stabilization and the wherewithal to hang in there with the study. Are the counterexamples simply washing out?

A new study demonstrates the first sucessful vaccine treatment of the deadly hemorrhagic Marburg disease in monkeys. Marburg is a close relative of the gruesome and untreatable Ebola virus. (New Scientist) It should not be surprising that the research was conducted at the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Will we one day in a battlefield situation see the Pentagon immunize our own fighting forces against hemorrhagic fever and somehow arrange for their opponents to be infected?

Namedropper that I am, I need to mention that the lead researcher, Charles Czeisler, was a friend of mine in college whose career of preeminence in the biology of sleep regulation and circadian rhythms I have followed with interest. The value of melatonin as a sleep aid has long been equivocal, which I think has two explanations. First, since it is sold as a dietary supplement rather than a medication, there is no quality control about the dosage or bioavailability of the active ingredient in the melatonin you buy.

Secondly, the way it works essentially involves resetting your internal clock, telling your body it is time to go to sleep. Quite simply, melatonin will not be of much use helping a person whose sleep difficulty does not relate to a circadian rhythm problem. The current study, in which thirty-six healthy participants spent three weeks living in soundproof rooms with no time clues and were put on a 20-hour sleep-wake cycle in place of the usual 24-hour cycle, showed melatonin’s efficacy in re-entraining the body’s sleep schedule. This has most relevance to shift-workers who sleep during the daylight hours and to jetlagged travellers out of synch with their new timezones, situations in which I have recommended melatonin in the past.

Walker sent me a pointer to this post from Steve Sailer’s weblog, in which he highlights a comment about the number of Mormon medical students one of his readers encountered, and how they are all so much cut from the same cloth. But there’s alot more in Steve’s post. First of all, the reader’s comment was in response to a parallel observation Steve had made about ‘Mormon Hollywood’ and in particular the ‘Mormon humor’ in the film Napoleon Dynamite (which I haven’t seen). Steve talked about the number of people in the screening laughing at jokes he didn’t get. Is the popularity of …Dynamite planting some sort of Mormon meme in teenage culture, as he implies. And I wish he had given us an example of a Mormon joke, since I would have been one of those in the audience who were clueless, I imagine.

The reader concerned about the Mormons in his medical school observes that he is encountering them everywhere in the medical world. He was beginning to surmise that the straight arrow Mormon lifestyle lent itself to a professional career path and that there are just too many professionals in Utah to hope to get a good job. That and the fact that Mormon families are having more children than the rest of the U.S. population is leading to pressure toward a diaspora of Mormons. The commenter concludes that,

“Everyone knows about the large number of Jews and Indians in medicine, but in a few years there will be a massive number of these guys too. And you probably won’t even notice it because they’ll be unassuming Northern European average white guys with nondescript last names like “Smith” and “Young.””

Now I know that Mormonism originated back east but I don’t see much evidence of it here in New England, which I assumed was because our provincialism and liberality were less hospitable ground for them. In particular, I haven’t encountered many Mormons in the academic or medical world (except for the anthropologist who was my undergraduate thesis advisor, but he was an anomaly in many ways). Could it be that they just fly below the radar, as the commenter suggests? What are your experiences with whether you notice them among you in the settings you haunt? Do I have any readers who would identify themselves as Mormons and could comment on this? I read Krakauer’s Under the Banner of Heaven several years ago and found it a terrifying revelation about Mormonism in America, but it was focused on the fundamentalist Mormons and radical polygamists much more than the proliferating mainstream of the faith. That new HBO series (which does not seem worth watching) sounds like sitcom-level voyeurism into the polygamous lifestyle rather than much insight into the sociological phenomenon. What say you? And don’t forget to comment on what “Mormon humor” might be…

See for yourself: Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”

Excerpt: “The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man’s beliefs never will. As excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News. Fox News gives you both sides of every story: the president’s side, and the vice president’s side.”

The classic, Atlantic City-based version of the game will apparently still be sold as well.

Two problems with Morris’ thesis. First, BushCo is incapable of responding effectively to a crisis, and in particular the windfall giveaway to their sponsors in the oil sector is not a trend they can buck.

Second, Bush’s rebound strategy is probably already being planned, and it will likely have more to do with engineering an ‘October surprise’ to shore up his anti-terrorist credibility. Whether that entails provoking a Tonkin-like act of Iranian aggression against US intersts which would call for massive retaliation and muster jingoistic sentiment; or — not too outlandish to rule out — facilitating a well-timed terrorist attack on U.S. soil, it will allow the Shrub an ludicrous and outrageous opportunity to try and look decisive (you know his ‘decisive monkey’ scowl?) and shore up Republican prospects.

Neil Young’s ‘Impeach the President’ Lyrics: “When ‘Living with War’ starts streaming on www.neilyoung.com on Friday, my guess is the servers will overheat. The real test will come next week, when the album is available for downloading on several sites.

For now, though, here are the lyrics many parents are going to be hearing their kids singing in the next few days. Young has been clever enough to write the catchiest protest song since Country Joe and the Fish’s anti-Vietnam ditty, “I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die.”

Here, for the first time, the lyrics to Neil Young’s “Let’s Impeach the President”:

Let’s impeach the president for lying
And leading our country into war
Abusing all the power that we gave him
And shipping all our money out the door

He’s the man who hired all the criminals
The White House shadows who hide behind closed doors
And bend the facts to fit with their new stories
Of why we have to send our men to war

Let’s impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

What if Al Qaeda blew up the levees
Would New Orleans have been safer that way
Sheltered by our government’s protection
Or was someone just not home that day?

Let’s impeach the president
For hijacking our religion and using it to get elected
Dividing our country into colors
And still leaving black people neglected

Thank god he’s cracking down on steroids
Since he sold his old baseball team
There’s lot of people looking at big trouble
But of course the president is clean

Thank God”

Update: stream the song here.

“We didn’t invite them”, says one Shiite legislator close to the prime minister-designate. (Los Angeles Times)

Acts of civilly disobedient nonviolent resistance to the war effort and militarism should always, IMHO, be highlighted and publicized widely. Spread the news.

Aggregating the aggregators.

English language hits 1 billion words: “A massive language research database responsible for bringing words such as ‘podcast’ and ‘celebutante’ to the pages of the Oxford dictionaries has officially hit a total of 1 billion words, researchers said Wednesday.” (Fresno Bee)

“There’s something to be said for working smarter, and not harder, and humans have been looking for—and finding—loopholes to enable it for centuries. A look at some of our most celebrated loophole practitioners, and their tales.” (The Morning News thanks to walker)

But a polarizing debate rages around the meaning and the validity of IAT findings.

Me, I’m perfectly happy with my binocular vision contact lens system. No bifocals or reading glasses even though I am both presbyopic and myopic.

The recent discovery of the new planet Sedna provides tantalising evidence.

Modern technology is helping parents in Asia indulge in a hideous practice – killing off their girl children. It’s never been easier to identify a female foetus and abort it.:

Scott McClellan Steps Away: “‘McClellan, Bush, Cheney, and Rove proved there were other ways. Replace news management with press nullification. Drop the persuasion model, in favor of the politics of assent. Choose non-communication to demonstrate that you ought not to be questioned (it only helps our enemies.)'” — Jay Rosen (PressThink)

The columnist starts out positing that Lara Croft brings horny adolescent male ogling to its quintessence, but ends up proposing a considerably stranger notion of How Lara Croft Steals Hearts:

Republicans to Bush: Dump Cheney for Condi: “Republicans are urging President George W Bush to dump Dick Cheney as vice-president and replace him with Condoleezza Rice if he is serious about presenting a new face to the jaded American public.

They believe that only the sacrifice of one or more of the big beasts of the jungle, such as Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, will convince voters that Bush understands the need for a fresh start.

The jittery Republicans claim Bush’s mini-White House reshuffle last week will do nothing to forestall the threat of losing control of Congress in the November mid-term elections.” (Times of London)

Related: Consider a Condi Rice wall poster to celebrate your support of dumping Cheney and Rummie?

And: Why stop at vice president?

Republicans to Bush: Dump Cheney for Condi: “Republicans are urging President George W Bush to dump Dick Cheney as vice-president and replace him with Condoleezza Rice if he is serious about presenting a new face to the jaded American public.

They believe that only the sacrifice of one or more of the big beasts of the jungle, such as Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld, the defence secretary, will convince voters that Bush understands the need for a fresh start.

The jittery Republicans claim Bush’s mini-White House reshuffle last week will do nothing to forestall the threat of losing control of Congress in the November mid-term elections.” (Times of London)

Related: Consider a Condi Rice wall poster to celebrate your support of dumping Cheney and Rummie?

And: Why stop at vice president?

Social Networks Protect Against Alzheimer’s (ScienceDaily)

Brain training can change autistic behaviour (New Scientist)

Christopher de Bellaigue is the author of In the Rose Garden of the Martyrs: A Memoir of Iran.

“In 2005 I heard that… “ (London Review of Books)

As someone who has shaved only three times in the last thirty years (on Jan. 1, 1981; Jan. 1, 1991; and Jan. 1, 2001), I am envious that I will likely not be partaking in the phenomenon of the Epicurean shave…

A review of Beckett Remembering / Remembering Beckett, Uncollected interviews with Samuel Beckett and memories of those who knew him, edited by James Knowlson and Elizabeth Knowlson:

Not that I liken myself to Beckett, but the personal resonances for me are powerful…

But this is not just about why we feel the need to ‘explain’ art:

As Perry concludes, “I wonder if a similar dialogue went on in someone’s head that started: “I fancy invading Iraq in the name of enlightened democracy.””

If there are problems with science-for-humanities-students courses (commonly referred to as “physics for poets”) (Inside Higher Ed), what about humanities for budding scientists? (New York Times )

As a Whorfian, who believes that the language we use to describe it shapes our thought about any endeavor, I have often written about the profound impact of the diagnostic system used in psychiatry, codified in the ‘bible’ (or perhaps it would be more apt to say ‘Chinese restaurant menu’) called the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Among other things, it cements the hegemony of the biological psychiatrists over the mental health field. Now a new study (by a non-psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist) reveals that “every psychiatric expert involved in writing the standard diagnostic criteria for disorders such as depression and schizophrenia has had financial ties to drug companies that sell medications for those illnesses”. The study dovetails my concern with classificatory schemes to another of my rants about modern psychiatry — how it is in the hip pocket of the pharmaceutical industry’s profit machine.

But it is not as if Big Pharma planted its hired guns on the DSM authorship committee to do its bidding, and the study does not establish whether the experts’ financial ties to the industry predated and shaped their involvement in the DSM or resulted from their visibility and achievement. I think it is more likely the latter. The psychotropic drug manufacturers tend to offer their perks — paid speaking engagements, research and consulting contracts — to established authorities in the field. For example, Eli Lily would be interested in subsidizing psychiatrists whose research serves its interests, such as someone who supports the notion that certain premenstrual problems deserve codification as psychaitric disorders when it is interested in using its drug Prozac to treat those disorders. Given that corporate penetration into psychiatric nosology has grown explosively in the past two decades or so, the planned fifth revision of the DSM due out in around five years will be the first to be appreciably tainted by this issue. The American Psychiatric Association (publisher of the DSM)’s decision to require its authors to disclose their financial ties, if there is any honesty about those disclosures, should at least answer the chicken-and-egg question of whether industry subsidy is in place at the time of a psychiatrist’s contribution to the DSM.

The weaker dismissal of concern, such as influential psychiatrist John Kane’s comment that the work of his subpanel on schizophrenia was driven only by science —

— is embarrassing. given that behavioral science research design goes to such lengths to eliminate subtle unconscious biases that shape outcomes. Perhaps it should be seen as the effort to drive the final nail into the coffin of the psychoanalytic roots of psychiatry, Freud’s notion of the mysterious and opaque power of unconscious processes?

Kane and others suggest that the mere revelation of financial ties should not undermine the public’s confidence in psychiatry. In a sense he is right; confidence has long ago been undermined. This, however, may be one of the last straws. Psychiatric care is about helping patietns to take appropriate responsibility for their actions. Physician, heal thyself.

But why Rolling Stone??

Frank Furedi’s essay takes us to task for our ‘loss of faith in humanity’ and our ‘neo-Malthusian doom and gloom’. Furedi opines that the new misanthropy threatens to make us scared of ourselves, and that we face a choice between resigning ourselves to a ‘culture of fatalism’ or rousing ourselves toward ‘taking control of our futures’. He takes heart in the idea that the human ability to recognize and label evil “shows that we are capable of rectifying acts of injustice.”

Furedi is one of the sp!ked [and isn’t the spelling ever-so-cutesy?] crew whose purpose in life seems to be waging a front-liine battle against any upwelling of the culture of fear and whose sole modus operandi the donning of rose-colored glasses. Ironically, he does not see that the misanthropic strain he decries is the very voice of that human ability to recognize wrongs, as the first step in rectification. Being scared not only of the potential to cock things up royally but — look around — the mess we have made in actuality is necessary, and I pity those who are so hellbent on avoiding that distress that they stick their heads in the sand as deeply as these folks do. Furedi pleads for faith in human potential and belief in the advantages of civilized modernity, and he sounds like nothing so much as an apologist for the status quo — a sheep in wolves’ clothing.

Almost two decades-worth of computer processor time went into figuring out what happens… (abc.net.au)

A consideration of the miraculous complexity of the clotting cascade is an opportunity to reflect on ‘intelligent design’ as the logic of ignorance: Steve Jones, paraphrasing Darwin, says that Intelligent Design proponents look at an organic being “as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond their comprehension”. It reminds me of something a philosopher patient of mine said to me today — “There is no excuse for ignorance, but even less for knowledge without action.”

New photos of ‘Argentinian Nessie’ (Cryptomundo [via boing boing])

“The 90 million chocolate bunnies made for Easter, and the millions more chocolate eggs in the basket, have focused attention again on whether chocolate is a plus or minus for health.” This comes up each year around Valentine’s Day, Easter and Halloween, although for many of us chocolate consumption knows no season. The cardiovascular and antioxidant benefits of chocolate derive from the cocoa itself, and may be offset by the fat and sugar content. Some suggest drinking a cup of cocoa instead. (Medpage Today)

D-Link spokespeople are “aware of the problem” but otherwise evasive as to why they are doing this on a scale no one else apparently has ever felt the need, or had the nerve, to do. Is the company run by an obsessional?

Who believes, first of all, that there is a distinction between policy and politics in the Bush dysadministration; and, second of all, that Rove will curtail any of his areas of advice to the Shrub just because his designation has changed? Oh, wait a minute, the American public believe that!

“Parks ‘Glide Path’ to Impoverishment Breaks Bush Campaign Pledge”