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Archive: OTHER >please note: some links may no longer be active.
Good Point The gas station I stopped at on my way to work has a sign advertising 2 Krispy Kreme donuts for $2, which means that the all-important dollars to donuts exchange rate is now one to one. Mike Terry's Yet Another Damn Blog
Music, Medicine, and More
At first glance, music seems like an unlikely theme for Sacks. He's hard of hearing, and has to turn down his beloved air conditioner during our conversation. There's also something distinctly unmusical about Sacks's movements. He is charmingly clumsy, and his fingers are constantly fumbling with things, be it a mug of tea or that rod of tungsten. Sacks bears the scars of numerous falls, and says that he's so accident-prone his friends were convinced he wouldn't make it past the age of 30. It's hard to imagine his hands playing a piano (which, very occasionally, they do). And yet, Sacks has always been enthralled by music. One of his earliest childhood memories is the sound of his mother singing Schubert Lieder in the drawing room. As a teenager, he spent endless hours "trembling" to Mozart symphonies, transfixed by feelings he couldn't comprehend. Music has also played a crucial role in Sacks's work as a neurologist. In his writings, he uses music as a metaphor for his unusual approach to medicine. He cites a Novalis aphorism—"Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution"—in several books, usually when discussing the therapeutic powers of music. But it's clear that Sacks also believes in a deeper, less literal connection between medicine and music, which is why Musicophilia reads like a retrospective. Music encapsulates two of the most essential aspects of his work: listening and feeling. The art form is the model for his method. As a doctor, Sacks is exquisitely attentive, not just to the symptoms, but also to the person. He treats each patient like a piece of music, a complex creation that must be felt to be understood. Sacks listens intensely so that he can feel what it's like, so that he can develop an "intuitive sympathy" with the individual. It is this basic connection, a connection that defies explanation, that allows Sacks to heal his patients, letting them recover what has been lost: their sense of self. Much more about the fascinating Oliver Sacks can found in this excellent piece by Jonah Lehrer in Seed Magazine
No Surprise
Click here for an enlarged version (via Oliver Willis)
The Downside of Detailed Knowledge Being married to a professional botanist has its ups and downs. It's nice on day hikes, for instance, having someone around who can instantly identify every plant we see. On the other hand, I don't need to be notified of every ecological incongruence in the films we watch. The Queen spent much of the Lord of the Rings trilogy leaning over to me in the theater and whispering, "pfff, I can see why they call this a fantasy--they have polystichum munitum growing in a tropical upland climatic zone." Last night we went to a wreath-making party last night. Our host provided us with wire frames, fir boughs, holly, and pine cones; before dinner, while I read stories to Squiggle and put him to bed, everyone else got all elfy in the garage. At the end of the evening we collected our wreath. Ours, while beautiful, was the least ornate of the bunch, consisting only of boughs. As we carried a sleeping Squiggle out to the car, I asked The Queen about this. Me: Why didn't you put holly in our wreath? Queen: Because holly berries are poisonous, and when Squiggle saw them he pointed excitedly and yelled "cherries!" M: Ah, good call. But what about the pine cones? You could have put a few of those on there. Q: No I couldn't. They were the wrong kind. M: What do you mean? Q: The boughs were from one species of tree and the pine cones were from another. It would look weird to have them on the same wreath. M: What, seriously? Nobody would know but you. Q: Yes, it would look weird to me. That's what I'm saying. M: Oh, come on. What's the big deal? Q: Let me put this into terms you can understand: imagine if you went to a Star Trek convention and saw a bunch of people dressed as Jedi. M: Oh, god. Right. Gotcha. Matthew Baldwin's Defective Yeti
I Suddenly Have The Urge... to join the Ukranian military!
Showing Skin Since my early parole from jail -- where I’ve done forty of a ninety-day sentence for public lewdness – will take effect on the condition that I attend group therapy, I hardly demurred. It wasn’t the first time I’d been invited into a behavior mod routine, and I entered it gladly, full of powerful knowledge: I could resist any amount of reprogramming while making a fine show of compliance. Besides, I’m an artist with a keen eye for physiognomy, curious to learn whether a gaggle of women with nothing in common but the wish to pare down their jail sentences shared any telltale facial quirks. A salacious, slack-jawed grin, for instance? Darting eyes? Or a certain dignified reserve, like my own. I was given emphatic instructions not to bring my sketchbook along to the first session, so I felt downright naked – and said so. That raised a laugh. At least half the women there, like me, had done time for disrobing in public, a regal offense having nothing to do with actual unprotected nakedness. One doesn’t disrobe on the teeming streets to achieve vulnerability – like the panic I feel when the means to make art are forbidden me – but to force one’s nakedness upon others, as Louis XIV did, and LBJ. To fascinate, to subjugate, it is necessary to show skin. That, according to the group leader, who hand-waved us into a circle of paddle desks while seating herself on a table like a platform, was the whole problem. We were a roomful of women in late middle age – the youngest among us was fifty – who had arrogated unto ourselves the right to show society exactly that which it conspires never to see: our flesh falling from the bone, our graying pubes, our every last unseemly ripple. We were assembled, she assured us, not because we were garden-variety exhibitionists – oh, no -- but women with an important message, albeit one that we must find some other way of delivering. You know, she averred, leaning back against the blackboard and – probably inadvertently -- showing us a triangle of panty, I do understand the meaning of all this, and I don’t exactly disapprove. Well. I’m sure she’s very enlightened – twenty-nine, toned, and eager for cred with cons. But I dislike it when anyone in the hire of the County makes up to me, and I do not require her inexact disapproval for the things I may need to do. Startled eyes around me locked, however, lips pursed. It was something new for the others in the group to consider the meaning of their actions, whereas I consider little but the meaning of mine. read the rest of Elatia Harris' superb piece at 3 Quarks Daily
Dwight
Basketball was my favorite sport to play, and to watch when I was a kid. I don't play quite so often these days, but still enjoy watching the NBA now and then. There are plenty of very talented young professional players, but none more so than Dwight Howard of the Orlando Magic. He's 21, has as impressive a body as I've ever seen on an athlete, the skills to go with it, and a good mind to top it off. Here's an amusing Howard-related anecdote written by Sports Illustrated's Jack McCallum: ... over the next 36 minutes Orlando outplayed the Suns. Howard vacuumed up every rebound in his vicinity. He dunked on follow shots, dunked on spin moves, dunked when he rolled to the basket after setting high screens for Nelson or Arroyo. Howard's athleticism is most manifest in those situations -- the passer need only throw the ball, almost blindly, in the general direction of the basket, knowing that Howard will swoop in and put it through. "If you make just a pretty good pass," says Arroyo, "he's going to do something alien with it, something out of this world." On one fourth-quarter play Howard pushed Phoenix guard Steve Nash away with his left hand and dunked with his right; on another he brushed off forward Shawn Marion and sent the Matrix flying. At one point Suns guard Raja Bell, never one to shy away from contact, asked assistant Alvin Gentry what approach to take when Howard comes steaming down the lane on a screen-and-roll. "Should I step in and plug?" said Bell. "I'd just get the hell out of the way in that situation," answered Gentry. "Just making sure we were on the same page," said Bell. via True Hoop
Criminal Justice? No, Just Criminal. Early in the morning of March 10, 2003, after a raucous party that lasted into the small hours, a groggy and hungover 20-year-old named Ryan Holle lent his Chevrolet Metro to a friend. That decision, prosecutors later said, was tantamount to murder. The friend used the car to drive three men to the Pensacola home of a marijuana dealer, aiming to steal a safe. The burglary turned violent, and one of the men killed the dealer’s 18-year-old daughter by beating her head in with a shotgun he found in the home. Mr. Holle was a mile and a half away, but that did not matter. He was convicted of murder under a distinctively American legal doctrine that makes accomplices as liable as the actual killer for murders committed during felonies like burglaries, rapes and robberies. Mr. Holle, who had given the police a series of statements in which he seemed to admit knowing about the burglary, was convicted of first-degree murder. He is serving a sentence of life without the possibility of parole at the Wakulla Correctional Institution here, 20 miles southwest of Tallahassee. A prosecutor explained the theory to the jury at Mr. Holle’s trial in Pensacola in 2004. “No car, no crime,” said the prosecutor, David Rimmer. I wish it were a joke. More from the NY Times
Charlie
Charlie is a wild-born coyote who was unexpectedly delivered to my doorstep this past April after both his parents were shot for killing sheep. Whatever reservations I had about raising a wild animal simply didn't matter - couldn't matter - when I realized his survival, at least in the short term, depended on me. At the time I write this, Charlie is nearly six months old. I don't think of him as "my pet," even though he sleeps curled against me every night (every night except the nights around a full moon), and happily rides in my truck, and adores my cat. I don't wish to own him, just to live together in harmony. And that we do. Much more about Charlie and his current guardian at their website (via neatorama)
Jonathan Schwarz Resents Evolution And best of all, he has enumerated ten reasons why that is the case. Here are the first five: 1. I resent evolution for making me mortal. Thanks a lot, evolution. 2. More precisely, I resent evolution for making me (a) be mortal, (b) be aware I'm mortal, and (c) care about my mortality. Any two of these would be okay, but adding the third creates all kinds of problems. 3. I resent evolution for making me care about other organisms which are mortal. If possible, I resent this more than #1 and #2. 4. I resent evolution for making bacon so, so delicious while also hastening one's experience of #1. Great system, evolution! 5. I resent evolution for making me—ever since I hit puberty—pay more attention to women who have the "correct" waist/hip ratio, and pay less attention to women who don't yet are more objectively interesting. the other five can be read at Jonathan's Tiny Revolution
Shaolin
For the first time in history, the notoriously guarded warrior monks of the fifteen-hundred-year old Shaolin Temple—a Chinese Buddhist sect dedicated to preserving a form of kung fu known as the “vehicle of Zen”—have allowed their secretive society to be documented. Justin Guariglia earned the trust and full collaboration of the Shaolin monks to create an astonishing, empathic record of the Shaolin art form and the individuals who consider themselves the keepers of these traditions. This amazing work by one of today’s most promising photographers provides a rare opportunity to examine the energy and spirit of Shaolin’s unique Zen practice. View the photos, of course, but don't miss the spectacular videos while you are visiting the site (via 3 Quarks Daily)
Making Pancakes Like a Junkie!
enjoy the whole step-by-step series (What would we do without the internet?)
Patriarchy and War Even the most beautiful woman is not acceptable She cowers behind make-up, made afraid for profit, However we no longer live in that jungle where sex But perhaps they are, as they claim, nothing By Vi Ransel, via Thomas Paine's Corner
And you thought that Godwits lacked Endurance
A female shorebird was recently found to have flown 7,145 miles (11,500 kilometers) nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand—without taking a break for food or drink. It’s the longest nonstop bird migration ever measured, according to biologists who tracked the flight using satellite tags. The bird, a wader called a bar-tailed godwit, completed the journey in nine days. In addition to demonstrating the bird’s surprising endurance, the trek confirms that godwits make the southbound trip of their annual migration directly across the vast Pacific rather than along the East Asian coast, scientists said. more from National Geographic
Wolcott on Mailer For those of us who grew up in his literary thrall, losing him is like losing a planet, a fire sign of the Zodiac. But the initial sadness upon seeing the news of Norman Mailer's death--his headshot flashed on cable news, followed by a few stingy words of explanation segueing into an update about a homicide case; in such high regard is American literature held by our media--gave way to a renewed gratitude and admiration for all that Mailer accomplished and the forward-ho ferocity of his life-force that fed and fueled everything he did. He had a great life, a multi-storied career, a molecular-altering impact on postwar culture, and he never tamped down his iconoclasm and risk appetite for a cozy fade into the sunset as a senior statesman of letters. "The fact that Mailer continued writing up until the very end says more about him as a creative being than anything that any critic could offer," observes reviewer and blogger Laura Axelrod. Infirm as he was, "Mailer was clearly as curious and alive as he was in the 60s." As a writer and man, he went down fighting to the end, courting turbulence, willing to look foolish and willing to wage big, his body ravaged but his mind still keen and serrated. Mailer believed in karma, and may his transmigration be the voyage he was seeking. James Wolcott's blog
Federer, Shmederer
The hard and stiff will be broken. The soft and supple will prevail. –Tao Te Chin
BZZZZZ Clinton T. Rubin knows full well that his recent results are surprising — that no one has been more taken aback than he. And he cautions that it is far too soon to leap to conclusions about humans. But still, he says, what if ... ? And no wonder, other scientists say. Dr. Rubin, director of the Center for Biotechnology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is reporting that in mice, a simple treatment that does not involve drugs appears to be directing cells to turn into bone instead of fat. All he does is put mice on a platform that buzzes at such a low frequency that some people cannot even feel it. The mice stand there for 15 minutes a day, five days a week. Afterward, they have 27 percent less fat than mice that did not stand on the platform — and correspondingly more bone. “I was the biggest skeptic in the world,” Dr. Rubin said. “And I sit here and say, ‘This can’t possibly be happening.’ I feel like the credibility of my scientific career is sitting on a razor’s edge between ‘Wow, this is really cool,’ and ‘These people are nuts.’” The responses to his work bear out that feeling. While some scientists are enthusiastic, others are skeptical. The mice may be less fat after standing on the platform, these researchers say, but they are not convinced of the explanation — that fat precursor cells are turning into bone. More in the NY Times
Alive when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet A clam dredged up off the coast of Iceland is thought to have been the longest-lived creature discovered. Scientists said the mollusc, an ocean quahog clam, was aged between 405 and 410 years and could offer insights into the secrets of longevity. Researchers from Bangor University in Wales said they calculated the clam's age by counting rings on its shell. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the longest-lived animal was an Arctica clam found in 1982 aged 220. Unofficially, another clam - found in an Icelandic museum - was discovered to be 374-years-old, Bangor University said, making their clam at least 31 years older. The clam, nicknamed Ming after the Chinese dynasty in power when it was born, was in its infancy when Queen Elizabeth I came to the throne. Shakespeare was writing plays such as Othello and Hamlet. More from the BBC
Altruistic Little Buggers King Solomon is said to have told sluggards to look to the hard-working ant and be wise. Aesop, too, extolled the virtues of the humble ant in his fable explaining why the insect's constant toiling through the summer months would make for an easier winter compared with the fortunes of the lazy, singing grasshopper. Now there is another reason to admire the tiny, colonial denizens of the insect world. Ants not only work hard and are prepared to lay down their lives for their fellow ants, they also take bigger risks for the good of the colony as they get older – and they can even assess how much time they have left in life. Dawid Moron and his colleagues at Jagiellonian University in Poland have carried out a set of laboratory experiments showing that ants have the ability to gauge the end of their lifespan and to use their assessment of imminent mortality to take bigger risks with their ageing lives. It is well established that worker ants tend to take greater risks as they get older. Scientists have shown that this behavioural trait benefits the colony because certain risky activities, such as foraging far from the nest, are best done by ants coming to the end of their useful lives – it doesn't pay to put young workers in high-risk jobs. More from The Independent (U.K.)
House of Cards America’s mortgage crisis is likely to get considerably worse because the level of fraudulent lending to unsuitable borrowers was much higher than previously estimated, Standard & Poor’s said yesterday. David Wyss, the ratings agency’s chief economist, said that defaults on high-risk “sub-prime” mortgages would continue to soar as unqualified mortgage-holders struggled to meet their repayments, tightening the credit markets and dragging down the American economy. The US economy, which grew at 2.9 per cent in 2006, consequently would grow at just 2 per cent this year and next, Mr Wyss said. This compared with estimated growth of 3.6 per cent this year and 3.5 per cent in 2008 in the global economy. Mr Wyss told a conference in Bombay: “The panic has subsided, but the housing market has not hit bottom yet. Housing prices won’t hit bottom until next summer and the losses won’t peak for another two years, until 2009. We are not halfway through this crisis yet. “We underestimated the extent to which fraud was occurring in the industry. It looks [as if], based on some surveys that had been done, the extent of frauds increased sharply in 2006.” The level of fraud increased as lenders sought new customers through increasingly dubious means after a surge in sub-prime home loans in recent years that had left most eligible borrowers with mortgages. Many brokers and mortgage lenders did not require proof of income and others helped borrowers to forge documents that inflated their salaries, enabling them to take out bigger loans than they could repay. More from The Times (U.K.)
Brilliant and ConScienTious
If you haven't heard or read anything by John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group and author of (among other titles) THE BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF CAPITALISM, you really should. You can get a good feel for Bogle's acuity and moral sensibilities from a recent interview with Bill Moyers. Here's a long, illustrative excerpt from the transcript: BILL MOYERS: These private equity firms that own these nursing homes wouldn't even talk to THE NEW YORK TIMES. They won't talk to reporters. I mean, there's no accountability to the public. JOHN BOGLE: There's no accountability. And it's wrong. It's fundamentally a blight on our society. BILL MOYERS:What does it say that big private money can operate so secretly, with so little accountability, that the people who are hurt by it, the residents in the nursing home have no recourse? JOHN BOGLE:It says something very bad about American society. And you wonder — the first question anybody would have after reading the article — how in God's name do they get away with that? Well, we have all these attorneys that are capable of devising complex instruments, and money managers who are capable of devising highly complex financial schemes. And there's kind of no one to answer to the call of duty at the end of it. BILL MOYERS: And we're talking about some of the most powerful names in the business. I mean, these are formidable forces, right? JOHN BOGLE: They're formidable forces. But, I'm afraid-- BILL MOYERS: Respectable citizens, right? JOHN BOGLE: Well, I mean, I don't know about that. But, it's certainly -- it's easy to say that greed is taking — playing a part — greed has a role in a capitalistic society. But, not the dominant role and-- BILL MOYERS: What should be the dominant? What is the job of capitalism? JOHN BOGLE:Well, ultimately, the job of capitalism is to serve the consumer. Serve the citizenry. You're allowed to make a profit for that. But, you've got to provide good products and services at fair prices. And that's the long term, that's what businesses do in the long term. The businesses that have endured in America have done that and done that successfully. But, in the short term, there's all these financial machinations in which people can get very rich in a very short period of time by creating highly complex financial instruments, providing services that can be cut back easily as in the hospital article, not measuring up to basically their duty. We all know that in professions, the idea has been service to the client before service to self. That's what a profession is. That's what medicine was. That's what accountancy was. That's what attorneys used to be. That's what trusteeship used to be inside the mutual fund industry. But, we've moved from that to a big capital accumulation — self interest — creating wealth for the providers of these services when the providers of these services are in fact subtracting value from society. So, it doesn't work. BILL MOYERS:So, the private equity nursing homes have added to their wealth. But, they've subtracted from society the care for people who need it. JOHN BOGLE: That is exactly correct. Not good. BILL MOYERS:THE WALL STREET JOURNAL editorial page celebrates what it called the animal spirits of business. And as if that's the heart of capitalism. What do you think about that? JOHN BOGLE:Well, I like the animal spirits of business. I mean Lord Keynes told us about animal spirits. And it comes out of a part of his work that says, "You know, all the precise numbers and the perspectives mean nothing. What determines the future of a business is its animal spirits." You know, the desire for progress, the desire to create something new. That's all good. But, it's gotten misshapen. Badly-- BILL MOYERS: How so? JOHN BOGLE: --misshapen. BILL MOYERS: How so? JOHN BOGLE: Well, it's gotten misshapen because the financial side of the economy is dominating the productive side of the economy BILL MOYERS: What do you mean? JOHN BOGLE: Well, let me say it very simply. The rewards of the growth in our economy comes from corporate, largely - from corporations who are a very important measure, from corporations that are providing goods and services at a fair price innovating and bringing in new technology — providing a higher quality of life for our society and they make money doing it. I mean, and the returns in business in the long run are 100 percent the dividends a corporation pays and the rate at which its earnings grow. That still exists. But, it's been overwhelmed by a financial economy. The financial economy, which is the way you package all these ways of financing corporations, more and more complex, more and more expensive. The financial sector of our economy is the largest profit-making sector in America. Our financial services companies make more money than our energy companies — no mean profitable business in this day and age. Plus, our healthcare companies. They make almost twice as much as our technology companies, twice as much as our manufacturing companies. We've become a financial economy which has overwhelmed the productive economy to the detriment of investors and the detriment ultimately of our society. Read the full transcript at PBS.org
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