Friday, April 27, 2007

Lease Super Strength 

Fight Crime With Rented Robotic Exoskeleton: "Need to move a piano? Picked on by bullies? Want to uproot trees in the backyard? Not to worry. Soon you'll be able to RENT A HAL-5 EXOSKELETON for just $590 per month. The robotic suit gives its wearer super strength." (The Raw Feed)

4/27/2007 07:35:00 AM   •  

Into A Shadowy World 

"The director Robinson Devor apparently would like viewers who watch his heavily reconstructed documentary, Zoo, to see it as a story of ineluctable desire and human dignity. Shot on Super 16-millimeter film, with many scenes steeped in a blue that would have made Yves Klein envious, Zoo is, to a large extent, about the rhetorical uses of beauty and metaphor and of certain filmmaking techniques like slow-motion photography. It is, rather more coyly, also about a man who died from a perforated colon after he arranged to have sex with a stallion." (New York Times )

Labels: bestiality, film

4/27/2007 06:18:00 AM   •  

If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You So... 

...It’s in His Tail (New York Times)

4/27/2007 06:14:00 AM   •  

Putin to Suspend Pact With NATO 

"President Vladimir V. Putin said Thursday that Russia would suspend its compliance with a treaty on conventional arms in Europe that was forged at the end of the cold war, opening a fresh and intense dispute in the souring relations between NATO and the Kremlin.

The announcement ...underscored the Kremlin’s anger at the United States for proposing a new missile defense system in Europe, which the Bush administration insists is meant to counter potential threats from North Korea and Iran." (New York Times )

I would quibble with the Times calling this an issue between NATO and Russia. It seems to me that Putin's enmity, and the responsibility for potentially restarting the Cold War, should be laid squarely at the feet of our national-embarrassment-in-chief in Washington. This may well prove to be one of the most enduring facets of the Bush legacy, along with the destruction of Iraq, the squandering of most of the international community's goodwill toward the US, the sabotaging of a consensus against climate change, irreparable domestic polarization, and the visitation of the burdens of his fiscal irresponsibility on a generation to come in the US. Am I forgetting anything?

Labels: arms race, Bush, legacy, missile defense, Russia

4/27/2007 05:40:00 AM   •  

All systems go for Hawking 

"A jet carrying astrophysicist Stephen Hawking took off yesterday from the Kennedy Space Center on a flight to simulate zero gravity and make Hawking the first disabled person to experience weightlessness. ...'As you can imagine, I'm very excited,' Hawking told reporters before the flight. 'I have been wheelchair-bound for almost four decades. The chance to float free in zero-g will be wonderful.'" (The Calgary Sun)

4/27/2007 05:32:00 AM   •  

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Why Cho Was Not Committed 

Psychologist Jonathan Kellerman writes a thoughtful Wall Street Journal op-ed piece , with which I largely agree, grappling with the ethical responsibility of the mental health profession with respect to violence:

"If the Virginia Tech shooter had been locked up for careful observation in a humane mental hospital, the worst-case scenario would've been a minor league civil liberties goof: an unpleasant semester break for an odd and hostile young misanthrope who might've even have learned to be more polite. Yes, it's possible confinement would've been futile or even stoked his rage. But a third outcome is also possible: Simply getting a patient through a crisis point can prevent disaster, as happens with suicidal people restrained from self-destruction who lose their enthusiasm for repeat performances."

Kellerman does, however, place too much responsibility at the feet of the "liberationists" and "libertarians", exemplified by R.D. Laing and Thomas Szasz for the historic failure of the mental health system to effectively address such issues. Would that Laing's thought had had more of an influence! Kellerman summarizes the Laingian perspective as the principle that "[not] only wasn't psychosis a bad thing, it was evidence of a superior level of consciousness". But Laing's opposition to psychiatric medication and hospitalization were just the window dressing on his more essential contribution — an existential perspective which gives inroads into the inner world of our psychotic patients that inherently humanizes our care. This is not incompatible with the responsible mainstream practice of clinical psychiatry, IMHO, and I can cherish Laing's influence on my psychiatric philosophy without cognitive dissonance even though I medicate and hospitalize patients. About Szasz I have less kind things to say, especially given his collaboration with the Scientologists.

Deinstitutionalization and the failure of the community mental health system were not driven nearly as much by such idealistic philosophical vision as they were by the fiscal betrayal of the severely mentally ill — a socially insignificant constituency without serious advocates, and one our society is all too ready to shun and stigmatize — in the service of budgetary constraint. As Kellerman observes, "this was baby-and-bathwater time." The crux of the matter, he goes on to observe,

"...[the] basic premise of Community Psych--that severely mentally ill people could be depended on to show up for treatment voluntarily--never made sense to me. The core of the most common and debilitating psychosis, schizophrenia, is degradation of thought and reason. So the idea that people with fractured minds could and would make rational, often complex decisions about self-care seemed preposterous."

I would amplify on that; schizophrenia (and other major mental illness) involves not only a general degradation of reasoning but also a specific loss of insight into the nature of one's illness and recognition of the need for treatment, known as anosognosia, that can be understood both in terms of psychological denial and neurochemical dysfunction of particular brain regions, and which makes noncompliance with followup treatment and medication the single most important cause of deterioration and relapse.

While exercising due diligence in raising caveats, Kellerman infers that Cho had a serious mental illness and, unfortunately, all we will have is speculation:

"Diagnosis from afar is the purview of talk-shows hosts and other charlatans, and I will not attempt to detail the psyche of the Virginia Tech slaughterer. But I will hazard that much of what has been reported about his pre-massacre behavior--prolonged periods of asocial mutism and withdrawal, irrational anger and hatred, bizarre writing and speech--is not at odds with the picture of a fulminating, serious mental disease. And his age falls squarely within the most common period when psychosis blossoms."

I would be the first to assert that psychiatry is a markedly imperfect tool at best for the prediction and prevention of violence, and that once on the slippery slope of preventive detention the dangers outweigh the benefits. But Kellerman's conclusion, that

"Penning up and carefully scrutinizing the killer was never an option. Not in Virginia or California or any other state in the union. Because in our well-intentioned quest to maximize personal liberty, we've moved conceptual eons away from taking the concept of dangerousness seriously"

should give us pause.

Labels: Cho, Laing, psych, violence, Virginia Tech

4/26/2007 10:32:00 AM   •  

Lamest Technology Mascots Ever 

"Creatures such as Tux the penguin have become bizarrely treasured icons, while others, such as recent roadside-autopsy subject Jeeves, are better off in the hereafter. And some, such as the freakishly terrifying jester touting Adobe's new Creative Suite 3, are an indication that vector-based illustration software should probably come with consumer warning labels, just like those found on drugs, circular saws and guns. From the charmingly pixelated to the hideously misguided, join us on a tour of the good, the bad and the ridiculously lame of technology mascots." (Wired)

4/26/2007 01:34:00 AM   •  

'Deja Moo' Dept. 

i.e. 'I feel like I've heard this bull before...' World Bank chief still has Bush's support (WorldNetDaily)

4/26/2007 01:13:00 AM   •  

'Deja Moo' Dept. 

i.e. 'I feel like I've heard this bull before...' Bush Reiterates Support for Gonzales (New York Times)

4/26/2007 01:12:00 AM   •  

"My family did not raise me to do what is popular..." 

Memorial stone for gunman reappears: "A senior at Virginia Tech said moral responsibility led her to add a stone for gunman Seung-Hui Cho to a memorial for his 32 shooting victims that was set up at Virginia Tech late last week. The stone was later removed, but was restored by Wednesday morning." (Houston Chronicle)

4/26/2007 12:57:00 AM   •  

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Extrasolar planet may be able to support life 

"European astronomers say they have found the first Earth-sized planet beyond this solar system with temperatures mild enough to allow liquid water -- a crucial step toward answering whether our cradle of life is unique in the universe.

The planet circles the star Gliese 581, which at 20 light years away is among the 100 stars closest to Earth. Dubbed Gliese 581c, the planet orbits very close to its star -- closer than Mercury is to our sun. But astronomers with the European Southern Observatory say the star is dim enough that average temperatures on the planet would fall in the range of an ordinary Chicago spring day.

Click here to find out more!
If the planet has water -- a big unknown -- its size and climate could make it habitable, experts said. The planet appears to be about 50 percent larger than Earth and has five times more mass, making it one of the smallest far-off planets ever detected.

The conditions look promising enough that officials with the California-based SETI Institute, which looks for signs of radio communication from alien civilizations, said they hope to give the planet a fresh look this summer. Previous radio observations of Gliese 581 in the 1990s turned up nothing unusual." (Orlando Sentinel )

4/25/2007 12:22:00 AM   •  

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Support of Gonzales affirms power play 

Boston Globe news analysis: "Since so much depends on favorable rulings from Justice, the administration can't possibly look forward to having to justify its actions to a new team of lawyers. But that's almost certain to happen if Gonzales is replaced by someone outside Bush's inner circle. Bush would be very hard-pressed to get an inner-circle appointee confirmed by Democratic-controlled Senate. He or she would have had to withstand days of public grilling by Democratic senators, who would try to raise the curtain on any of the administration's secret programs.

More likely, Bush would be obliged to choose an attorney general with a reputation for independence, such as a former Republican senator with credibility on Capitol Hill. But such a figure would almost certainly be more skeptical of the administration's assertions of executive power than Gonzales, a close Bush associate from the president's Texas days."

4/24/2007 07:48:00 PM   •  

Executed in US may be awake as they suffocate 

"Some prisoners executed by lethal injection in the United States may die of suffocation while they are still conscious and in pain, University of Miami researchers said in a study that concluded the drugs do not work as intended.

The study, published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine, raised new questions about whether the lethal cocktail violates the US constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment." (Stuff.NZ)

4/24/2007 07:36:00 AM   •  

Singer's toilet paper musings leave Rove untouched 

Sheryl Crow attempts to debate carbon credits: "As he turned to leave, Crow reached out to touch his arm. 'Karl swung around and spat, 'Don't touch me',' recounted Crow and fellow eco-celebrity Laurie David in another blog.

'How hardened and removed from reality must a person be to refuse to be touched by Sheryl Crow?'

But the singer was not deterred. 'You can't speak to us like that, you work for us,' she thundered to the departing Mr Rove, who responded, 'I don't work for you, I work for the American people.'

'We are the American people,' the singer shot back." (Guardian.UK)

4/24/2007 07:34:00 AM   •  

Hallelujah Indeed 

Debating Handel's Anti-Semitism: "Scholars have too little investigated questions of religious meaning in Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ particularly the work’s manifest theological anti-Judaism. Previously unknown historical sources for the work’s libretto compiled and arranged by Charles Jennens (1700-73) reveal the text’s implicit designs against Jewish religion. Handel’s musical setting powerfully underscores these tendencies of Jennens’s libretto and adds to them, reaching a euphoric climax in the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus." — Michael Marissen at the American Handel Festival (New York Times )

4/24/2007 12:11:00 AM   •  

Soldier: Honor troops like Va. Tech dead 

Deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan are 'mere blips on the TV screen': "An Army sergeant complained in a rare opinion article that the U.S. flag flew at half-staff last week at the largest U.S. base in Afghanistan for those killed at Virginia Tech but the same honor is not given to fallen U.S. troops here and in Iraq." (Yahoo! News)

I have reacted to the lionization of the VT victims much as I did to those who died in the 9/11 attacks. These are victims, not heroes. To celebrate their heroism cheapens heroism. I am not saying their deaths are not tragic, but they did not come about, with rare exceptions, as a result of any exceptional display of courage. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

It would be tempting to think of this as a distinction between these victims and our casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq. Given that we have an all-volunteer military, the latter chose to put themselves in harm's way for a greater cause and may in fact deserve more, not less, esteem when they fall, this line of reasoning goes. And I am not sure it is not correct.

But on the other hand, much as I believe Kerry intended in his much-ballyhooed bungled comments last year, many of those serving in the US occupation forces in Afghanistan and Iraq can be considered no less victims, virtually compelled — no less than they would be with conscription — to join the service by the lack of other opportunities in the inequitable American society. The old men who send our forces to war still exploit the least fortunate in our society, not the sons and daughters of privilege. I remind myself of that whenever I am tempted to get on my moral high horse and suggest that the troops should have the ethical sophistication to refuse to participate in an unjust war.

[While we are on the topic of courage, I am of course unambivalent about the courageous stance represented by war resistance. Ironically, this is often seen as its diametrical opposite, cowardice.]

Labels: Iraq, war

4/24/2007 12:00:00 AM   •  

Monday, April 23, 2007

Alcohol damages women's brains faster than men's 

"The brain-damaging effects of alcohol strike women more quickly than men, a new study conducted in Russia confirms.

Female alcoholics performed worse on a number of tests of neurocognitive function compared with males, Dr. Barbara Flannery from RTI International in Baltimore and her colleagues found.

However, Flannery cautioned in an interview with Reuters Health, the findings aren't good news for alcohol-dependent men. 'Women are vulnerable to the extent to which they will experience the negative consequences of alcohol abuse and alcoholism more rapidly than men, but men will also experience it -- the same kinds of effects,' she said.

Other physiological effects of alcoholism, such as heart and liver damage, are known to occur more quickly in women than in men, a phenomenon known as 'telescoping,' Flannery and her team note in ournal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research." (Yahoo! News)

4/23/2007 11:58:00 PM   •  

Drawing a Line from Movies to Murder 

Was Seung-Hui Cho "shooting a John Woo movie in his head"? (New York Times )

4/23/2007 01:21:00 PM   •