Saturday, October 20

The evangelical crisis of faith that threatens to sink the Republicans 

"Disillusioned Christian conservatives may hand presidency to Democrats by backing third-party candidate " (Guardian.UK) One can only hope...

10/20/2007 10:35:00 PM   •  

Death Knell, or Death-Knell, for the Hyphen? 

"The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, the scaled-down, two-volume version of the mammoth 20-volume O.E.D., just got a little shorter. With the dispatch of a waiter flicking away flyspecks, the editor, Angus Stevenson, eliminated some 16,000 hyphens from the sixth edition, published last month. “People are not confident about using hyphens anymore,” he said. 'They’re not really sure what they’re for.'" New York Times

10/20/2007 07:16:00 PM   •  

Friday, October 19

Bigfoot Film: 

Happy Fortieth Anniversary (Cryptomundo )

10/19/2007 09:08:00 PM   •  

The 23 Phenomenon 

Reprint of a 1977 article by Robert Anton Wilson, in light of his death and the release of the (pretty awful) film The Number 23. (Fortean Times)

10/19/2007 08:50:00 PM   •  

World Privacy Forum: Top Ten Opt Outs 

"As privacy experts, we are frequently asked about “opting out,” and which opt outs we think are the most important. This list is a distillation of ideas for opting out that the World Privacy Forum has developed over the years from responding to those questions. The list below does not contain all opt outs that are available. Rather, it contains the opt outs that we believe are the most important and will be the most useful to the most consumers:

• 1. National Do Not Call Registry
  


• 2. Prescreened offers of credit and insurance
  


• 3. DMA opt outs
  


• 4. Financial institution opt outs
  


• 5. CAN SPAM
  


• 6. Credit freeze
  


• 7. FERPA
  


• 8. Data broker opt outs
  


• 9. Internet portal opt outs
  


• 10. NAI opt out"

10/19/2007 07:57:00 PM   •  

Unbroken Chain 

"On November 16-18, 2007 UMass Amherst will host Unbroken Chain, the largest conference on the legacy of the Grateful Dead, and the first to be held by a major university. Scholars, artists, performers, students and members of the extended Grateful Dead family will gather for the event featuring more than 50 presenters for 20 panel sessions ranging from music composition and improvisation to an examination of the band’s business model – as well as a musical performances, gallery exhibits, and presentations."

Related:

UMass course on the history of the Grateful Dead, taught by Robert Weir (no, not that one). (Boston Globe [thanks, Janet])

10/19/2007 12:50:00 PM   •  

Best Documentary Films 

Top 25 according to the membership of the International Documentary Association. I love the documentary form factor and have seen more than my share of these, especially those of the Maysles brothers, Errol Morris, and Wiseman.

10/19/2007 12:44:00 PM   •  

Thursday, October 18

Silent Minds 

Jerry Groopman, one of my favorite physician-writers, on persistent vegetative state and related conditions. PET and fMRI scanning of some patients shows they are still having complex cognitive functions. Unlike Terry Schiavo's supporters' assertions, the issue is not that we are wrong about what goes on in a vegetative state. It is that some, or even many, patients are misdiagnosed:

"According to several American and British studies completed in the late nineties, patients suffering from what is known as “disorders of consciousness” are misdiagnosed between fifteen and forty-three per cent of the time. Physicians, who have traditionally relied on bedside evaluations to make diagnoses, sometimes misinterpret patients’ behavior, mistaking smiling, grunting, grimacing, crying, or moaning as evidence of consciousness. A neuroscientist showed me a video on the Internet of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who spent fifteen years in what most doctors agree was a vegetative state—tests revealed almost no activity in her cortex—and whose death, in 2005, provoked fierce debate over the rights of severely brain-damaged patients. (Schiavo died after the Supreme Court rejected her parents’ appeal of a judge’s decision approving her husband’s request that her feeding tube be removed. An autopsy showed extensive brain damage.) In the video, a man’s voice can be heard praising Schiavo for opening her eyes in response to his instructions, and the neuroscientist told me that he was impressed until he muted the sound. “With the sound off, it is clear that her movements are random,” the neuroscientist said. “But, with the voice-over, it is easy to make a misdiagnosis.” (The prognosis for patients such as Schiavo, who suffered brain damage owing to oxygen deprivation following cardiac arrest, is much worse than for those who suffer brain damage as the result of a head injury.)" (The New Yorker)

10/18/2007 09:56:00 PM   •  

The 'nutrimetabonomic' approach suggests that... 

...you are a chocoholic because of a "complex interplay between genes, environment, diet, lifestyle, and symbiotic gut microbial activity..." (Journal of Proteome Research) via Book of Joe

10/18/2007 07:12:00 PM   •  

Monday, October 15

Spinning Dacner Illusion 

It appears I am right-brain-dominant, whatever that means.

10/15/2007 01:14:00 PM   •  

White House Is Leaning on Interim Appointments 

"With only 15 months left in office, President Bush has left whole agencies of the executive branch to be run largely by acting or interim appointees — jobs that would normally be filled by people whose nominations would have been reviewed and confirmed by the Senate. In many cases, there is no obvious sign of movement at the White House to find permanent nominees, suggesting that many important jobs will not be filled by Senate-confirmed officials for the remainder of the Bush administration. That would effectively circumvent the Senate’s right to review and approve the appointments." (New York Times )

10/15/2007 12:19:00 AM   •  

Progress Cited in Alzheimer’s Diagnosis 

Preliminary but exciting progress towards a lab test for Alzheimer's Disease, which to now is only diagnosed impressionistically (until post-mortem):

"The researchers gathered more than 200 blood samples from people with Alzheimer’s and those without. Using 83 of the samples, they measured the abundance of 120 proteins involved in cell signaling and found they could distinguish the Alzheimer’s samples from the controls using 18 of the proteins.

They then tested their 18-protein signature on an additional 92 samples. The tests agreed with the clinical diagnosis about 90 percent of the time.

Perhaps most intriguing were the results of the test on 47 blood samples taken from people with mild cognitive impairment, a minor loss of memory that can be a precursor of Alzheimer’s. The test was able to predict with about 80 percent accuracy whether a patient went on to develop Alzheimer’s two to six years after the blood sample had been collected." (New York Times )

10/15/2007 12:16:00 AM   •  

Sunday, October 14

A Person Could Develop Occult 

"There must be a rational explanation for all the supernatural phenomena on television. There must.

Because it is weird, and even a little freaky, that so many shows this season prey on the paranormal. Vampires have day jobs as detectives, store clerks reap souls for the Devil, reporters time-travel to get their stories straight, cheerleaders walk through fire and people of all kinds talk to dead people, sometimes quite chattily. " (New York Times )

10/14/2007 04:50:00 PM   •  

Unraveling the Knots of the 12 Tones 

"...[T]he invention of the 12-tone system was arguably the most audacious and influential development in 20th-century music. Its impact can be heard today in works far removed from the knotty scores of composers like Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, Charles Wuorinen and its other formidable practitioners during its heyday in the third quarter of the last century. Elements of 12-tone style turn up even in Broadway shows and film scores. Yet an overwhelming majority of music lovers have no idea what the technique is, what exactly the music sounds like or what the fuss was all about." (New York Times )

10/14/2007 02:44:00 PM   •  

Israel Struck Syrian Nuclear Site, Say Analysts 

"Israel’s air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports." (New York Times )

10/14/2007 02:42:00 PM   •