The U.S.'s First Black President?
"Will Americans vote for a black president? If the notorious historian William Estabrook Chancellor was right, we already did. In the early 1920s, Chancellor helped assemble a controversial biographical portrait accusing President Warren Harding of covering up his family’s “colored” past. According to the family tree Chancellor created, Harding was actually the great-grandson of a black woman. Under the one-drop rule of American race relations, Chancellor claimed, the country had inadvertently elected its “first Negro president.”"
(New York Times Magazine)
Design & Mystique of the Japanese School Uniform
"The U.K., Malaysia and Ireland have nice school uniforms, but how come Japanese school attire seemingly takes it to another level, leaving the students looking like little sailors and marching band leaders? Having worked as a public school English teacher in rural Fukushima and downtown Tokyo, I’ve been amazed by the variety of uniforms as well as the ways students customise them as far as they are allowed.
PingMag shows you interesting details in fashion and the social performance that accompany this apparel to a point where the traditional Japanese school uniform has
developed beyond the schoolyard and into pop culture."
(PingMag)
Do pencils point to the Holy Grail of physics?
![...holding scaffold with graphene membrane [Image 'http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/graphics/2008/04/03/scipencil103.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/graphics/2008/04/03/scipencil103.jpg)
Scientists create material one atom thick: "The foundations of the universe have been glimpsed in Manchester by scientists who have created the thinnest possible material.
Flat, parallel sheets of carbon atoms in the graphite of pencil lead have been peeled apart by the scientists to yield a sheet
a single atom thick that has peculiar properties which made the fundamental feat possible.
...Today, in the journal
Science, Prof Andre Geim of Manchester University and his colleagues at The University of Minho in Portugal, say they have used [the material] to measure an important and enigmatic fundamental constant of nature - the fine structure constant.
Working with Rahul Nair and Peter Blake he made large suspended membranes of graphene so that one can easily see light passing through this thinnest of all materials.
The 2.3 per cent of light that it absorbed could then be used to calculate the constant, which shows the interaction between very fast moving electrical charges in the material and light, and it is close to 1/137."
(Telegraph.UK)
Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway Alone
(Video) Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do
"Gever Tulley, founder of the Tinkering School, talks about our new wave of overprotected kids — and spells out five (and really, he’s got six) dangerous things you should let your kids do. Allowing kids the freedom to explore, he says, will make them stronger and smarter and actually safer. This talk comes from TED University 2007, a pre-conference program where TEDsters share ideas.
To sum up, let children:
1. Play with fire
2. Own a pocket knife
3. Throw a spear
4. Deconstruct appliances
5. Break the DMCA / Drive a car"
(DivineCaroline) I'm not sure I would go fully 6 for 6 with my kids...
Philosophical Psychopathology
"This text is a benchmark volume for an emerging field where mental disorders serve as the springboard for philosophical insights. It brings together current research by Owen Flanagan, Robert Gordon, Robert Van Gulick and others on mental disorders of consciousness, self-consciousness, emotions, personality, and action and belief as well as general methodological questions about the study of mental disorder. Topics include the problem of despair, multiple personality disorder, autism and the theory of the mind debate, and the effectiveness of psychotherapy. An introduction shows how to interpret philosophical psychopathology as an interdisciplinary field and locates the contributions in the book conceptually and in terms of the surrounding literature. Psychopathology promises to clarify and illuminate a host of philosophical issues. The 12 chapters focus chiefly on issues in applied philosophy of mind (personal identity and self-consciousness, voluntary action and self-control, cognition and practical reasoning), in the science of mind (the medical model of mental disorders, philosophy of science and psychiatry, psychopathology and folk psychology), and in the ethical and experimential dimensions of psychopathology."
(Blackwell Press)
Why the demise of civilisation may be inevitable
Obama would consider Gore for cabinet position
English Heretic
![conspiratorial landscape interplay? [Image 'http://english-heretic.org.uk/images/gates.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://english-heretic.org.uk/images/gates.jpg)
"It is our task at English Heretic, ostensibly, to maintain, nurture and care for the psychohistorical environment of England. Availed of the services of some of the country’s very finest occult archaeologists, astral geographers and mystical toponymists, we aim to help people decode and realise the alchemical ciphers and conspiratorial interplay of the buildings and landscapes around them.
Whether it be via the transcript of an imaginal ordnance survey, documentary evidence of a psychogeographic derivé, or technical guide on passage through a liminal gateway, we aim to provide a comprehensive set of resources for both novice and experienced inner landscape investigators. With these tools at their disposal we hope to encourage more people to undertake voyages to exciting, uncanny and often terrifying interdimensional spaces."
Ex Post Facto Legal Mumbo Jumbo to Justify the Imperial Presidency
Memo: Laws Didn't Apply to Interrogators: "The Justice Department sent a legal memorandum to the Pentagon in 2003 asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators who questioned al-Qaeda captives because the president's ultimate authority as commander in chief overrode such statutes."
(Washington Post)
Rupert Sheldrake stabbed at conference while talking about thought transference
![Sheldrake [Image 'http://immaginehdv.com/thumbnails/2bdfd3e0450f61a728eafc66a05c52df.jpg' cannot be displayed]](http://immaginehdv.com/thumbnails/2bdfd3e0450f61a728eafc66a05c52df.jpg)
Police arrest suspect after attack at lecture: "...Sheldrake had been talking about how thoughts can be transferred by staring into another's eyes. During the lecture in the main ballroom on La Fonda's second floor, an Asian man left the room and when he returned, he didn't take a seat but stood near the podium with his eyes closed like he was meditating, Edwards said.
The attack came when Sheldrake called for a break about 3 p.m. Edwards said he started to leave the room when he heard a commotion. By the time he looked back, he said, an Asian man was being held on the floor by four people while a fifth held a knife in a napkin. Mecham said the knife was a folding type that hunters typically use.
Edwards said Sheldrake had a 2- or 3-inch cut on the front of his left thigh, just above his kneecap..."
(Santa Fe New Mexican) This was as much of the account as was included in Boing Boing, at which point in my reading I assumed that the assailant was probably suffering from schizophrenia. One of the cardinal, terrifying, symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia is thought control or, specifically, thought insertion, the experience that one's thoughts have been inserted into one's mind by another, that one is not in control of one's own thoughts and does not have privacy in their mind. It is often accompanied by the symptoms of thought withdrawal or thought broadcasting. Although there is some dispute about what the cardinal features of schizophrenia are, these symptoms are core in the schema of illustrious German psychiatrist Kurt Schneider, and have come to be known as Schneiderian signs. When I went from the Boing Boing excerpt to the more complete account in the New Mexican, the following illuminated the man's plight further:
"Hirano had been attending the 10th International Conference on Science and Consciousness. Other attendees said he had been acting oddly. They said he confronted Sheldrake earlier this week, telling him he heard voices and saw demons."
These frightful schizophrenic symptoms are experiences in need of an explanation to the sufferer. Often, the explanations are delusional. Delusions are outlandish, irrational but comforting theories to explain the bewildering and horrifying experiences, since any explanation is better than having none at all. Once hit upon, delusions are rigidly adhered to. A delusion is, in this sense, not a core symptom of schizophrenic experience but a compensatory effort on the sufferer's part, to my way of thinking.
Someone who claims familiarity with the techniques of thought insertion, claims of which by the psychotic sufferer have usually been scoffed at by listeners, is immediately suspect as responsible for the sufferer's symptoms.
Could we hear alien physics experiments?
"If aliens have built a massive collider to smash particles together, a new detector could soon pick up the signs."
(New Scientist)
How to transform your arm into a wing
How to be reincarnated as a queen
'They're here':
The mechanism of poltergeist activity revealed: "The sight of small blonde girls watching television is guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of anyone who has watched the movie Poltergeist.
We're right to be terrified, say physicists. Children generate poltergeist activity by channelling energy into the quantum mechanical vacuum."
(New Scientist)
Are We Really That Ill?
"America has reached a point where almost half its population is described as being in some way mentally ill, and nearly a quarter of its citizens - 67.5 million - have taken antidepressants.
These statistics have sparked a widespread, sometimes rancorous debate about whether people are taking far more medication than is needed for problems that may not even be mental disorders. Studies indicate that 40% of all patients fall short of the diagnoses that doctors and psychiatrists give them, yet 200 million prescriptions are written annually in America to treat depression and anxiety. Those who defend such widespread use of prescription drugs insist that a significant part of the population is under-treated and, by inference, under-medicated. Those opposed to such rampant use of drugs note that diagnostic rates for bipolar disorder, in particular, have skyrocketed by 4,000% and that overmedication is impossible without over-diagnosis..." — Christopher Lane, professor of English at Northwestern University and author of
Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness (The New York Sun op-ed) A plea, with which as a practicing psychiatrist (even though I have no desire to be out of a job!)I very much agree, for reining in rampant overdiagnosis, setting the bar higher to qualify for having a mental illness, and "resurrecting the distinction between chronic illness and mild suffering." Lane quite rightly observes that if everyone is mentally ill then no one is.
Hackers Assault Epilepsy Patients via Computer
Possibly the first computer attack to inflict physical harm on the victims: "Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users. The nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation, which runs the forum, briefly closed the site Sunday to purge the offending messages and to boost security."
(Wired News)
Five Things* You Need to Know to Understand the Latest Violence in Iraq | War on Iraq
"The traditional media is incapable of reporting what's going on in Southern Iraq." (AlterNet)
*(Only question I cannot for the life of me figure out is whether this, Dubya's explanation, is one of them:)
"My first reaction to watching the Iraqi government respond forcefully and to make it abundantly clear that -- I think the exact -- I can't remember the exact words of the Prime Minister, but "criminal elements" I know were a part of his declaration -- would be dealt with. I thought that was a very positive moment in the development of a sovereign nation, that is willing to take on elements that are -- you know, that believe they're beyond the law."
Related: Bush: Iraq is Returning to Normal
"Some ... seem unwilling to acknowledge that progress is taking place," Bush said in a speech at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio. He accused war opponents of constantly shifting their critique, adding: "No matter what shortcomings these critics diagnose, their prescription is always the same — retreat." (McClatchy )
Pot? Kettle? Black?
And: American Enterprise Institute's Fred Kagan:
"The civil war in Iraq is over..." (Salon)