If you didn’t already have enough reasons to avoid soft drinks (Yahoo! News)

In addition to my longstanding RSS feed, I have just set up a prettier FeedBurner feed here.

…Preventing Human-to-Human Transmission (Scientific American)

Mind Hacks comments on a strange Guardian story of a man who is still ‘a wreck’ seven years after he stopped his nine-year binge on MDMA (XTC; Ecstasy).

It reveals some of the methodological problems in establishing how harmful MDMA is, since (a) we may not be entitled to extrapolate from extreme use to more moderate recreational use; (b) one has to rule out that observed effects are from the MDMA rather than any concurrent use of other substances. But the most telling point is their last one — “what kind of man would take 40,000 ecstasy pills?”

And so, again, we face the age-old psychiatric equivalent of the chicken and the egg question. Does drug use per se cause the psychopathology (on any of a number of measures) found in substance abusers; or does the psychopathology come first? Durng my residency, I remember one year during which I was supervised by two senior luminaries of psychiatry whose offices were at opposite ends of the corridor I inhabited. The late Norm Zinberg claimed that the psychological alterations were results of the ‘drug, set and setting’ of the drug user; and Ed Khantzian claimed that much of drug abuse was ‘self-medication’, knowingly or unknowingly, of an underlying mental disorder, and thus that the drug abuse could be stabilized or prevented by treatment of the underlying condition. A corollary of this was the ‘drug of choice’ hypothesis, which said that one gravitated to a particular preferred drug in accordance with the nature of one’s underlying diagnosis. Being literally (and memorably) caught in the middle, I sometimes think that my real psychiatric training that year consisted in learning how to be diplomatic, synthetic and integrative in the face of these insistent, and mutually incompatible, didactic stances…. [Here, by the way, Khantzian writes a brief remembrance of Zinberg…]

Related: The Trip of a Lifetime: a new generation researches the medical benefits of the deprecated hallucinogenic drug LSD. (BBC)

Benetton’s magazine Colors has a special issue on the treatment of mental illness around the world. Ignore their pompous commentary and focus on the striking photographs.

Camera connected directly into optic nerves; “I just call myself the robo-chick…”

Firefox Past 10 Percent Share (BetaNews)

Within three years, 95% of the state’s uninsured will have health coverage under the provisions of the bill! Of course, the biggest political compromise required to get the bill through was the obvious one — it bypasses a single-payor system and perpetuates the historical accident by which health coverage in the US has been largely an employee benefit. The bill establishes a per-employee penalty for any employer that does not provide health insurance for its employees, which as I understand it will subsidize the state free-care pool. Political maneuvering has whittled the size of the penalty down from a proposed $800 to only $295 a year, and Romney (who has line-item veto power on budget measures) says he will excise that provision all together, although that is a line item veto that the legislature will override.

Chronological Oddity to Hit Digital Clock (Yahoo! News)

The Ultimate Consequences of Bush’s Coming War Crimes: “I recoil from my own logic. No sane person can look at the possibility of such horrors and not shiver with revulsion. But recent history shows that there are no sane people making these decisions. When sanity again prevails in the White House, I will gladly dismiss the unthinkable as impossible. For now, I fear Armageddon.” — Jon Steinberg (Raw Story) The short version: Iranian military capabilities would make an American fleet sitting ducks. We need to question our assumption that even Bush is not crazy enough not to find that a deterrent, though. Given his administration’s inherent immorality, its need for a war to resurrect jingoistic support, belief in preemption and Manichaean convictions about the Axis of Evil,

The only preemptive power the American people have would be an explosive antiwar outburst dwarfing the Vietnam-era movement, encompassing all outraged right-thinking Americans and bringing the war machine to a halt with acts of resistance, disobedience and rage. Before it is too late. Do we have it in us?

My webhost changed a security setting that broke Blogger’s publishing efforts for the past two days. Finally tracked down the problem, and regular updates should now resume…

A book review by Malcolm Gladwell (The New Yorker).

Walt and Mearsheimer singled out Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz as an apologist for the ‘Israel Lobby.’ Dershowitz’s response, in part, was to smear them for using quotes he says were drawn from Neo-Nazi hate sites (New York Sun). Dershowitz is not saying they originate with neo-Nazis, just that they are ‘commonly found’ there. I don’t know how he knows it, but he insists that “…[the authors] cite them to the original sources, in order to disguise the fact that they’ve gotten them from hate sites.” The fact that David Duke lauds the paper, as the Sun delights in publicizing, tars with the same brush. Of course, the London Review of Books, which published Walt and Mearsheimer’s article, has to defend itself against accusations of anti-Semitism (Guardian.UK )as well.

As FmH readers will discern, I have become unbearably bored by coverage of what is wrong with American foreign policy. Enough already; it does no good, even if the damnable public opinion polls establish to their heart’s content that the public have finally turned against the Iraqi debacle (and, BTW, there is far less evidence that the public are seriously questioning the broader premise of the War onTerror® as a whole…), there seems to be no way that translates into stopping the killing.

I normally derive a great deal of satisfaction from saying ‘I told you so’ [hint: FmH’s archives go back to November, 1999] but am suffused with impotent rage that no one was listening even to far more cogent voices than mine who were horrified from the moment it was clear what a central role imperious bullshitting bullying adventurism would play in the Bush administration’s gameplan.

What’s wrong with the psyche of the American people for swallowing all the pig swill for so long is an immensely more relevant question, especially because they are about to do it again.

“Imagine the tallest 25 buildings in the world all in one skyline… here they are complete with a key on what’s what in scale standing alongside each other.” Click on the image to enlarge it.

Wikipedia runs down the notable net hoaxes of the day.

Wikipedia runs down the notable net hoaxes of the day.

A New Scientist review raises the same hue and cry I have been voicing in posts here and in my worklife:

Ed Fitzgerald, at unfutz, lays out several thinkers’ defining characteristics of fascism. Don’t point a finger at Washington as you read; the proper direction for scrutiny should be inward, at the question of our own susceptibility.

The answer appears to be yes, at least with respect to dimensions of extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness. (Science and Consciousness Review)

“…[A]bnormal prion proteins implicated in the development of transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, such as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, may be markers for disease rather than the infectious agents.” (Medpage Today)

“He wrote about 650 pieces; why do we always hear the same old six?” (Seattle Weekly)

Impeaching Bush is Just the Start: “…[I]n the end there will be plenty of abstentions, and some nastiness and hurt feelings, and Brookline will congratulate itself for sticking it to Bush. That’s the easy part.” — Dennis Fox (Brookline Tab)

April 1st; no fooling! National “I’m Still Embarrassed by My President” Day. Wear a brown ribbon to protest the BS from the White House.

And thanks, Seth, for suggesting readers go to www.itmfa.com as well.

They should have conferred with novelist Jonathan Lethem, whose most extraordinary achievement, IMHO, was his portrayal of a petty gangster with Tourette’s syndrome, the main character of Motherless Brooklyn. (Lethem, as far as I know, does not himself have Tourette’s.) He nailed this issue of the dialectic between disinhibition and increased control, and what it does to one’s experience of self in relationship to the world.

Tourette’s and obsessive-compulsive disorder have some epidemiological intersection and some phenomenological similarity, nevertheless they are not exactly the same thing psychiatrically. My only quibble with Lethem’s character is that his Tourette’s has alot of OCD to it.

“The court that made Massachusetts the first state to legalize gay marriage ruled Thursday that same-sex couples from other states where gay marriage is prohibited cannot marry here.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled in a challenge to a 1913 state law that forbids nonresidents from marrying in Massachusetts if their marriage would not be recognized in their home state.” (Boston Globe) And Gov. Mitt Romney breathes a sigh of relief vis á vis his 2008 Republican Presidential aspirations…

Parity is one of the rallying cries of the battle for fair treatment and against societal stigmatization of mental health problems.

McCain Drain: “E.J. Dionne hits the nail on the head today when he says that the positions that John McCain will need to take in order to win the Republican primary may very well lose him the support of the more moderate voters who’ve hailed him as a maverick, to his perhaps permanent electoral or reputational detriment…” (Tapped)

A User Guide to Adolescence by Luke Jackson, a 13-year old with Asperger’s Syndrome. Social morés in adolescence are difficult enough, but the lack of interpersonal perceptual skills in autistic-spectrum disorders can make it an unmitigated disaster from which recovery is difficult. Some of this was gotten at in Mark Haddon’s poignant novel Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but this gets at it more explicitly.

Fenwick, doing ongoing research on deathbed phenomena, feels they are common, they are not attributable to medication effects, and they are more diverse than the stereotypical “going toward the light” phenomenon.

It is a complicated story, but the movement to close the asylums was originally supposed to have gone fist-in-glove with the community mental health movement. This supremely humane reform effort was co-opted by the budget mavens, however, who did the former without supporting the latter. Among other things, the story of homelessness in America is in large measure the story of the bereft and abandoned deinstitutionalized mentally ill turned out to the streets with no provision for fending for themselves. In fact, this current proposal for a new hospital grew out of Governor Romney’s budget-slashing effort to close one of the remaining three hospitals in further deinstitutionalization. Indeed, the new hospital will replace two crumbling existing ones and will result in an overall reduction in the number of state hospital beds in Massachusetts. Nevertheless, it is the first new expenditure for the sickest of the chronically mentally ill in a long time in this state. I am no fan of mental health bureaucrats, but the Department of Mental Health under its current commissioner Elizabeth Childs MD seems truly dedicated to its constituency. It is at the forefront of the nationwide effort to eliminate involuntary medication, seclusion, and restraints from the practice of hospital psychiatry as well.

After Moussaoui’s gift to the prosecution, his defense attorneys scrambled to put on testimony from high-ranking al Qaeda detainees that he was a poseur and a nuisance who did not have the role of which he boasted in the 9-11 attacks. Moussaoui now says that his previous denials that he had been involved in the 9-11 plot were lies designed to facilitate the fruition of the attack despite his arrest. It is not much of a stretch to join in speculation that, in making the prosecution’s case and undercutting his attorneys’ efforts to defend him, he may be seeking a martyr’s death.

“Only Bush would see Bolten as the kind of official in need of a promotion.” (Carpetbagger)

“At least five justices appeared ready to reject the administration’s argument that the court has no jurisdiction in a detainee case.” (New York Times )

The NCM has looked for around a decade for an appropriate plaintiff to sue for relief from the obligations of paternity after unintentionally conceiving a child. Now they have one…

As some have suggested, it seems a worthy cause to contribute to, if the Oglala people are soliciting donations. If anyone knows, please send me a link, thanks.

A rundown of rock’n’roll s*c*i*e*n*t*o*l*o*g*i*s*t*s (Guardian.UK)

A list compiled by Forbes Magazine, garnered from motor vehicle dept. records, on the 10 richest people on their 2005 list, to whet the appetites of the superrich-watchers while waiting for the 2006 list. Forbes observes,

It feels like a stretch to me. True, there are no Ferraris, Lamborghinis, or even BMWs. However, you will find a number of Porsches, some Bentleys and of course the Lincoln town cars. How about concluding that some billionaires are more ostentatious than others? Here’s an exercise for you to do. Before you check out the cars themselves, look at the list of ten illuminati and rank them based on your intuitive sense of where they fall on a continuum between ostentation and humility.

“Give her any date, she said, and she could recall the day of the week, usually what the weather was like on that day, personal details of her life at that time, and major news events that occurred on that date.” [via dangerousmeta]

From Dave Pollard’s weblog of the same name. Ever since the demise a few years ago of the Whole Earth Review/CoEvolutionary Quarterly, to which I subscribed from its outset to its final issue, it has been more difficult to access this sort of ethic in the media. We could do worse than reading Pollard.

“In March 2004 we asked you to vote for the top 50 things everyone should try a bite of in their lifetime. This is how you voted.” (BBC [via …Clever Name]) I have seven to go.

He is pleasantly surprised with the audio quality he gets from his iPod, having been given one as a present after turning up his nose at the whole idea. He goes on to tell you how to tweak your settings for maximal listening enjoyment.

A list compiled by Forbes Magazine, garnered from motor vehicle dept. records, on the 10 richest people on their 2005 list, to whet the appetites of the superrich-watchers while waiting for the 2006 list. Forbes observes,

It feels like a stretch to me. True, there are no Ferraris, Lamborghinis, or even BMWs. However, you will find a number of Porsches, some Bentleys and of course the Lincoln town cars. How about concluding that some billionaires are more ostentatious than others? Here’s an exercise for you to do. Before you check out the cars themselves, look at the list of ten illuminati and rank them based on your intuitive sense of where they fall on a continuum between ostentation and humility.

• List of cognitive biases
• Logical fallacies
• Self-deception
• Statistical bias
• Media bias
• True-believer syndrome
• Wishful thinking
• Doublethink

Want to see things in true perspective instead? Or at least become more realistic? (wikipedia)

A New Generation of Conspiracy Theorists are at Work on the Secret History of 9/11 — Mark Jacobson (New York Magazine)

“…[A] report published in the British Medical Journal this week has thrown doubt on the health promoting properties of omega 3.” (Telegraph.UK)

Bush shuns Patriot Act requirement. In signing the renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act, Bush stipulated that he did not feel bound by the requirement in the law that he inform Congress of the FBI’s use of its expanded powers. (Boston Globe) Chilling enough, but it is part of an enraging and ominous — and seemingly unstoppable — trend, when placed in the context of other recent events. Consider his continued assertion that he can ignore the requirement that the government obtain warrants for wiretaps when he deems it necessary; and the ‘signing statement’ he included when reluctantly forced to accept the bill forbidding torture of any US detainee declaring he could bypass the law when in his judgment it was necessary for national security. We are talking about imperial power, about contempt for or ignorance of basic principles of the structure and function of the American government learned in elementary school civics classes. We are in for a new civics lesson — how easy it appears to be to bully oneself into a brazen Presidential power grab beyond the pale of what is allowed; how utterly unopposable it seems to be if someone in the Presidency is willing to be completely criminal; how the only recourse is not to elect someone so transparently an inept and unscrupulous fool, a faith-based airhead, in the first place.

Listen to any emphatic public statement he makes to the American people. In every case, his rationale for a nomination, a policy pronouncement, a war, is nothing but an insistence we should support it because of his conviction and his conviction alone, because he knows that such and such a nominee is a good man, because he knows that such and such represents a threat to national security, because he know that such and such is the right thing to do. Such omnipotent self-referential assertions without any reasoned argument to back them up are the province of those operating on an infantile level in which there is no distinction between wish, fantasy and reality, between belief and knowledge — yes, the province of the faith-based fundamentalist. Bush is, as Sidney Blumenthal points out in echoing Kevin Phillips, the founder of the first American religious party, institutionalizing his cognitive deficits. It is both our interactions with our significant others and our education that occasion a developmental leap away from that infantile omniscience. One can only speculate on the twisted influence growing up with his parents imposed; insofar as educational influences go, it has long been clear that he slept through most of his schooling. Let us hope the American people do not sleep through this civics lesson, or that they awaken by the first Tuesday in November…

A six-year study of more than a million subjects headed by psychiatrist Daniel Kripke establishes that those who sleep an average of 6-7 hours a night function no worse and have no added health consequences than those getting the mythical 8 hours a night. Indeed, the mild sleep deprivation may extend their life, as well as making them more productive. The myth that we are a nation of zombies walking around bleary-eyed, making more mistakes, having more accidents and showing more emotional instability may be mostly a sales pitch for the lucrative pharmaceutical trade in hypnotics (sleeping pills). (Yahoo! News)

I routinely sleep more like 6 hours a night than 8 during the week, and (although you might argue that I would be the last to know) I don’t feel I suffer for it. If I get down to 4-5 hours, I do see the difference, especially in terms of irritability and especially if I do so for several nights in the same week. (There’s also no such thing as making up a cumulative sleep deficit by sleeping in on the weekend, I am convinced…)

And, in my psychiatric practice, both because of physiological addictiveness and the risk of rebound insomnia, I strictly adhere to the practice of only prescribing sleeping pills for my patients for acute use (less than about two weeks at a stretch, better if used intermittently than consistently). Because of the development of physiological tolerance, most of the medications lose their effectiveness if used for longer anyway, although patients become psychologically dependent on them and physicians often renew their prescriptions indefinitely. If the patient ever tries to go off the medication, indeed they have trouble sleeping and they never sustain their abstention for long, concluding that the drug-free trial confirmed their ongoing need for sleeping medication. However, all it really shows is the phenomenon of rebound insomnia, which would probably abate if they remained drug-free for long enough. And “a poor night’s sleep never killed anyone…”

Newer sleeping pills are marketed as less addictive and effective for lengthier use, but don’t believe it. There are few free lunches in brain chemistry. Zolpidem (Ambien®) and the others are really not very different from the benzodiazepine sleep aids (Halcion®, Dalmane® etc.) they are supplanting, in my opinion. Medications that interact with the benzodiazepine receptor — which all of these medications do — interfere with the acquisition of new learnng while under their influence and, at high doses, can cause the somnambulist activities so much in the news these days, such as “sleep driving” and “sleep eating”. There is nothing special about Ambien in this regard except that it is now so broadly prescribed. Other hypnotic medications do the same thing. At high doses, especially in combination with alcohol, they are respiratory suppressants (read: lethal in overdose), and they accumulate to high levels in the systems of those with impaired ability to metabolize them, such as the medically ill and the elderly. Not benign at all…

But, of course, we can try to compensate for all these hypnotic effects with the daytime-alertness drug that is all the rage these days, modafinil (Provigil®), right?

New Insight into How We Count: A recent functional MRI study gives us a new appreciation for the fact that specific brain circuitry underlies processing ‘how many’ (and that it is different from how we process ‘how much’). The intraparietal sulcus lights up with the former taks but not the latter when they are cleverly distinguished by the study design. The region may be involved with the learning disorder called dyscalculia, which affects perhaps 6% of the public and involves difficulty envisioning numerical sequences and even distinguishing which of two numbers is bigger. Dyscalculia is not the only way in which someone might have difficulty with calculation and other mathematics, but it is the most severe. (Yahoo! News)

That would be about as exciting a Democratic choice as the last two were, and probably less effective.

Why Physicians Participate in Executions. An opinion piece by Atul Gawande, one of my favorite physician-writers. Hopefully of interest to non-MDs as well.

Gawande interviews several physician-executioners, all but one cloaked by anonymity, pointedly examining the slippery slope that led each one to their induction into the role, and their ethical qualms, such as they are. Gawande himself takes pains to note that he is not an opponent of the death penalty, although one of the physicians he interviews, who has so far participated in six executions, is. Interestingly, ironically, troublingly, this MD sees his role as akin to not abandoning any other patient with a terminal illness in their final moments. Gawande isn’t buying that argument, and comes down on the side of advocating a legal ban on the participation of physicians and nurses in performing executions. (New England Journal of Medicine)

Even though the case went (IMHO) the right way, the heated disputation does not bode well for some of the other contentious issues facing the Roberts Court, especially as Alito (who was not on the Court when this arguments in this case were heard) begins to join the deliberations.

In typically melodramatic fashion, the journalist feels he has exposed “deep divisions” because he has gotten quotes on both sides of the issue. The unfortunate reality is that there is too little division over the issue of the necessity of medication in a psychiatric profession in the hip pocket of the pharmaceutical industry. The divisions tend to fall between the medical practitioners (psychiatrists) and the non-medical mental health caregivers; the author of the current study is a pforessor of social work. In making the cse for a portion of the schizophrenic population who do not need antipsychotic medication, he speculates that perhaps they have a milder form of the disease. I think it is even more likely that they do not have schizophrenia at all. Psychiatry has labored mightily to establish a credible diagnostic schema but few realize that it is a work in progress and deeply flawed.

Part of the problem is that the research edifice requires slavish adherence to the diagnostic system to conduct studies. This leads to a misplaced sense of concreteness. “If I say the patient is a schizophrenic (carries the diagnosis of schizophrenia), then they have the disease of schizophrenia…” In other words, making the diagnosis implies, and I would say falsely, that all subjects who share a diagnosis have something meaningful in common, so that research findings on that class of individuals are meaningful. But if you are really lumping together unlikes, the research findings will either be trivial, coincidental, or inconclusive. As an example, if a researcher set out to measure, say, the citric acid content in the fruits he called “oranges”, and included the oranges with the thick pockmarked orange skins as well as those with the smooth thin red skins (more commonly known as “apples”), his findings would be meaningless. If we were uncertain about the distinctions between apples and oranges, in other words, we would be comparing apples and oranges.

It may not be immediately obvious to the public, even the erudite readers of the New York Times, that diagnoses are not etched in stone. There are problems with diagnostic clarity elsewhere in medicine, of course, but none as severe as in psychiatry, where we peer into the ‘black box’ that is the workings of the brain and mind. The situation is particularly acute with schizophrenia, which I find to be a wastebasket diagnosis among the members of which class I discern patients with several distinct clinical entities varying along a number of dimensions including medication-responsiveness. In a less tortured diagnostic system, many of them should not be called schizophrenic at all. Compounding the imprecision of the diagnostic system is the fact that clinicians and researchers vary in the acumen with which they make diagnoses. While particularly egregious with the schizophrenic diagnosis, this is a problem throughout the field of psychiatric diagnosis. Patients who are not responding to treatment x are often referred to me with diagnosis y, for which treatment x would be totally appropriate, only I do not find them to have diagnosis y. There is another factor as well, which becomes most clear when one studies the history of psychiatric classification over the last century or century and a half. The world of psychopathology is parsed up into different diagnoses in an everchanging way. Styles of classification change; we are more inclusivist or exclusivist, more ‘lumpers’ or ‘splitters’ in different eras. Vastly different numbers of patients, different proportions of those with mental illness, were diagnosed with schizophrenia, for example, at some times than at others. Given diagnostic categories expand or contract over time, bumping up against both ‘normals’ and other diagnostic categories. There is a sort of Darwinian competition for niches in the mental health ecology; diagnoses are always trying to maximize their ‘fitness’.

Equally true is that there are cross-cultural differences. The rates of classification with given diagnoses vary significantly between European and American practitioners, even when they are seeing the same patients, as in one famous study where diagnosticians were brought across the Atlantic to compare their skills and styles.

One of the reasons diagnostic categories expand and contract is the development of new medications. If the only tool you have is a hammer, it pays to see everything as if it is a nail, I am fond of saying. The most dramatic example of this was the expansion in those who were seen to be bipolar (manic depressive) after the introduction of lithium, the first effective modern mood stabilizer, in the ’50’s. Most of the newly-recognized manic depressives would have been called schizophrenics previously, when in essence the distinction had not mattered as much. But one has to be wary of arguing that the new diagnostic distinction is driven entirely by newfound utility. The refinements in diagnostic classification are by no means inevitably improvements. It is equally likely, and more worrisome, that change is driven by marketing pressures to sell the new drug. We have seen something similar with depressive diagnoses since the development of the SSRI antidepressants, and their descendants, in the last two decades. No only do the antidepressants reach more depressed people, but more people are defined as having a depressive condition in order to be eligible for medications. No one is doing this consciously, but it happens inexorably nonetheless. Furthermore, as psychiatrists scramble for market share in the face of competition from competing nonmedical mental health professionals, it pays to expand the definitions of medication-responsive diagnoses so they have more people to treat.

This leads me to subscribe to a “one-third” rule, almost regardless of diagnosis. One third of patients diagnosed with a given disorder will respond to the appropriate treatment; one third will be poor responders; and one-third would get better regardless of, or without, treatment. Part, but not all, of this is based on the diagnostic issues I have discussed above (for example, do the one third who would respond anyway, as the ‘schizophrenics’ in the study under current consideration, really have the condition in question? In essence, is the treatment wrong for the diagnosis or is the diagnosis wrong for the treatment? We ignore either wing of this quandary at our peril.).

As I grow older, I become much more of a diagnostic nihilist, finding the misplaced concreteness of the system and of my colleagues increasingly painful to bear. At least as far as my professional work as a psychiatrist goes, the older I get, the less I know. The important question: does that make me of more or less help to my patients?

Intel-based Mac boots Windows XP

Via the null device, this Guardian piece about the latest rock revival genre: soft rock, believe it or not.

Okay, the joke is funny, but the more intriguing discussion in this old CNN article is about cultural differences in what is found to be funny, especially between American and European humor:

I had previously blinked to the world’s funniest joke article but revisited it after reading this recent Ask MetaFilter thread asking people to post their funniest joke that is not offensive to any class of people. Some of them are to laugh out loud over.

What is to become of NPR now that it has some resources? (New York Times )

Intel-based Mac boots Windows XP

Place a link to this page full of nonexistent email addresses somewhere on your web page and help defeat spambots.

“Lawyers for two airlines being sued by 9/11 victims prompted a federal attorney to coach witnesses in the Zacarias Moussaoui death penalty trial so the government’s case against the al-Qaida conspirator would not undercut their defense, victims’ lawyers allege.” (Free Republic)

“Watch in amazement as this GIF that Russ prepared shows Bush’s approval ratings plunge lower and lower month by month. ” (Daily Kos)

Andy Budd’s ingenious implementation of iTunes’ smart playlists:

A new CD release of Edward Elgar’s music conducted by the composer includes a 1933 overture in “accidental stereo”.

(Some of these findings, of course, support the old assertion that ignorance is bliss. Given that the study deems around one third of the American public truly happy, what does that say about the American ignorance quotient??)

Does rodent brain study point to a candidate model for ’cause’ of Alzheimer’s disease? The derivative of amyloid-beta precursor protein (APP), which is linked to the “plaques” and “neurofibrillary tangles” that are characteristic of the Alzheimer’s brain, is well on the way to meeting Koch’s postulates, the formal requirements that allow us to say that a substance has a causal role in a disease. First, it is found regularly in the brains of animals affected with a form of memory loss that is considered an animal model of Alzheimer’s. It is not found in the brains of unaffected animals. When extracted from affected brains and given to healthy animals, they develop signs of memory loss. And the same protein appears in human brains. The mild cognitive deficits which precede the development of fullblown Alzheimer’s dementia could be caused by this protein demonstrated to cause transient memory deficits in rodents. It might be the first step in the cascade of changes to brain proteins that underlie the degenerative process in Alzheimer’s. If this finding is borne out, it holds out the promise of early detection of the Alzheimer’s disease process before dramatic cognitive deficits develop. Identification of the protein could also lead to the development of medications which block its actions or vaccines to immunize patients against the development of Alzheimer’s. (MedPage Today)

“Democratic senators, filing in for their weekly caucus lunch yesterday, looked as if they’d seen a ghost.” — Dana Millbank (Washington Post)

A controversial new theory depicts pregnancy not as a harmonious relationship between the pregnant mother and the fetus she is carryng but as a struggle over the nutrients she will provide.

Haig argues that evolutionary selection should favor fetuses the invasiveness of whose sprouting placental blood vessels is more effective in wresting nutrients from their hosts, while mothers who restrain the incursion to have several successful pregnancies to spread their genes would similarly have an advantage. This theory appealingly explains the baffling condition of late-pregnancy high blood pressure called pre-eclampsia, which affects around 6% of pregnancies, as an extreme version of this struggle in which the fetus causes maternal hypertension to pump more blood in through the relatively low-pressure placenta. But be sure to read to the end of the article for the even more intriguing discussion of how this maternal-fetal conflict, played out in the arena of control of fetal gene expression, may shape the offspring’s behavior and social functioning postnatally.

Will ’round things out’ with a moment of observance a little after 1:59 this afternoon. And it is also Einstein’s birthday.

“…[T]he theory put forth in Freakonomics examined why crime had fallen all over the country, not just in New York, and one of the many arguments against “broken windows” as a major cause was the fact that such innovative policing wasn’t being practiced elsewhere—and yet crime was falling in those places as well. A smaller point to also consider: Gladwell left out one other major reason that, according to Levitt’s research, crime did begin to fall in the 1990’s: the waning of the violent crack trade.”