10.16

Essential YouTube Jazz: guitarist and instructor Jody Fisher jams on a Klein guitar (!)









*** From (pianist) Dinu Lipatti's final essay:

"How right Stravinsky was when he said 'Music is the present'. Music has to live under our fingers, under our eyes, in our heart and mind with all that we can offer them. Far from me is the thought of rendering predictable the anarchy and disdain for the primary laws which guide, along general lines, the coordination of any valid and just interpretation.
But I find that one would commit a grave mistake by searching for useless details regarding the way in which Mozart might have played a certain trill or grupetto.
On the contrary, these diverse markings, interpolated into editions which are for the most part excellent compel me to decisively take the path to simplification and synthesis.
I immutably preserve these few basic principles which I think you are aware of, and for the rest I rely on intuition (this last is as precious as intelligence) and to in-depth penetration of the work which, sooner or later, will end up by confessing the secrets of its soul.
Never approach a score with dead eyes or the spirit of the past because you might find yourselves only with Yorick's skull. Alfredo Casella said, rightfully, that we must never respect masterpieces but love them, because one only respects dead things while a masterpiece lives forever."

A Grouping of Four: Negative Synergies in Medicine, cont.


***More on children and the insane application of antipsychotic drugs:

"The use of potent antipsychotic drugs to treat children and adolescents for problems like aggression and mood swings increased more than fivefold from 1993 to 2002, researchers reported yesterday.
The findings, published yesterday in Archives of General Psychiatry, are likely to inflame a continuing debate about the risks of using psychiatric medication in children. In recent years, antidepressants have been linked to an increase in suicidal thinking or behavior in some minors, and reports have suggested that stimulant drugs like Ritalin may exacerbate underlying heart problems.

Antipsychotic drugs also carry risks: Researchers have found that many of the drugs can cause rapid weight gain and blood lipid changes that increase the risk of diabetes. None of the most commonly prescribed antipsychotics is approved for use in children, although doctors can prescribe any medication that has been approved for use..."

*** Unease on Industry's Role in Hypertension Debate


*** Attention Shoppers: Low Prices on Shots in the Clinic Off Aisle 7


*** Expert warns of microchip implants

[Google: VeriChip and hospital patient implantation] /// [past post]



(do the math)



*** Scientists Predict How To Detect A Fourth Dimension Of Space

"Scientists at Duke and Rutgers universities have developed a mathematical framework they say will enable astronomers to test a new five-dimensional theory of gravity that competes with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
Charles R. Keeton of Rutgers and Arlie O. Petters of Duke base their work on a recent theory called the type II Randall-Sundrum braneworld gravity model. The theory holds that the visible universe is a membrane (hence "braneworld") embedded within a larger universe, much like a strand of filmy seaweed floating in the ocean. The "braneworld universe" has five dimensions -- four spatial dimensions plus time --compared with the four dimensions -- three spatial, plus time -- laid out in the General Theory of Relativity."

After 30 Years, a Man's Vision for Karate Thrives as a Way of Life




Interesting Vids:

Star Trek Cribs: The Director's Cut

Kobe Bryant / Ali G: Air In Basketballs

"Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley [official version] - [first draft] - [live, slow version]

Chaka Kahn Playing the Drums in 1976

Never Kiss The Guy During A Staredown

Dance With The Ball

The Best 50 Goals


The Very Best of Ronaldinho

"Ronaldinho may get close to the secret of Brazilian soccer — the alliance of discipline and skill with superior imagination — when he explains his role with the team. "When I train," he says, "one of the things I concentrate on is creating a mental picture of how best to deliver that ball to a teammate, preferably leaving him alone in front of the rival goalkeeper. So what I do, always before a game — always, every night and every day — is try and think up things, imagine plays, which no one else will have thought of, and to do so always bearing in mind the particular strengths of each teammate to whom I am passing the ball. When I construct those plays in my mind, I take into account whether one teammate likes to receive the ball at his feet or ahead of him, if he's good with his head and how he prefers to head the ball, if he's stronger on his right or his left foot. That's my job. That is what I do. I imagine the game."

10.15

*** Essential Classical (avant-garde):
De Profundis - Arvo Part



Tracks: Seven Magnificat Antiphons

***
Colbert's deadly performance did more than reveal, with devastating clarity, how Bush's well-oiled myth machine works. It exposed the mainstream press' pathetic collusion with an administration that has treated it -- and the truth -- with contempt from the moment it took office. Intimidated, coddled, fearful of violating propriety, the press corps that for years dutifully repeated Bush talking points was stunned and horrified when someone dared to reveal that the media emperor had no clothes. Colbert refused to play his dutiful, toothless part in the White House correspondents dinner -- an incestuous, backslapping ritual that should be retired. For that, he had to be marginalized. Voilà: "He wasn't funny." '

That was both a ferocious and righteous attack by Colbert; just well-played. Perhaps a little late, but...

Colbert Video

*** “There are two classical branches of the universe connected by a quantum bridge. This connects the former collapse with the current expansion.” While Abhay Ashtekar and his colleagues, Tomasz Pawlowski and Parampreet Singh, may not have come with a completely new theory, what they have done is create a systematic way, through quantum equations, to look back in time to the birth of our current universe."



*** The CDC has revised the prevalence of autism in children from 1 in 2,000 (20 years ago), to 1 in 175. [ABC News]

As I noted in an essay on 5.3.02 ("Is Autism A Societal Threat?"), these growing numbers are terrifying.



*** New antipsychotic drugs carry risks for children



*** Q: What Scares Doctors? A: Being the Patient
(What Insiders Know About Our Health-Care System That the Rest of Us Need to Learn)

'An attending neurologist said one drug should be started immediately, that "time is of the essence." That was on a Thursday morning at 10 a.m. The first dose was given 60 hours later, on Saturday night at 10 p.m. "Nothing I could do, nothing I did, nothing I could think of made any difference," Berwick said in a speech to colleagues. "It nearly drove me mad." One medication was discontinued by a physician's order on the first day of admission and yet was brought by a nurse every single evening for 14 days straight. "No day passed--not one--without a medication error," Berwick remembers. "Most weren't serious, but they scared us."

Drugs that failed to help during one hospital admission were presented as a fresh, hopeful idea the next time. If that could happen to a doctor's wife in a top hospital, he says, "I wonder more than ever what the average must be like. The errors were not rare. They were the norm."
After he publicized his experiences, Berwick was besieged by other doctors saying, "If you think that's terrifying, wait until you hear my story." One distinguished professor of medicine whose wife was hospitalized in a great university hospital was too frightened to leave her bedside. "I felt that if I was not there, something awful would happen to her," he told Berwick. "I needed to defend her from the care." '

*** Dave Chappelle Clips: "The Niggar Family" . Hilarious.




*** Hot Peppers Have Chilling Effect on Prostate Cancer Cells

"Capsaicin induced approximately 80 percent of prostate cancer cells growing in mice to follow the molecular pathways leading to apoptosis. Prostate cancer tumors treated with capsaicin were about one-fifth the size of tumors in non-treated mice.
"Capsaicin had a profound anti-proliferative effect on human prostate cancer cells in culture," said Sören Lehmann, MD, PhD, visiting scientist at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and the UCLA School of Medicine. "It also dramatically slowed the development of prostate tumors formed by those human cell lines grown in mouse models."
The dose of pepper extract fed orally to the mice was equivalent to giving 400 milligrams of capsaicin three times a week to a 200 pound man, Lehmann estimated, roughly equivalent to between three and eight fresh habañera peppers, depending on the pepper's capsaicin content. "

Videos For A Rainy Afternoon

* A shout out to all Hispanics and their Friends participating in the (nation-wide) May 1st Immigration Rallies: ignore people like girlfriend, here, at your own peril...

"Living in Eden has its advantages. As a marginalized member of a spectator democracy, you choose your own dependencies.
Don't think of it as manufactured consent. Think of it as 'The Candy Everybody Wants'."

[Enforcer State --- Enforcer Taste]

* American Idol participants past and present: have you "PaidYour Dues"? Cause some folks are running "Outta Love".

(Joni Mitchell's two cents)



* ...some candles, some water, some chords...and a woman in the moment




* Imagine Earth singing this...to US.



* Life is a Dance. Make the most of the Space you have.



* Do harmonies get tighter than this?! Does choreography get "badder" than this?! Hold on...no.



* Now I'm "Working Up A Black Sweat" too (if you don't know why the other guy is, send email (multiple nods and nuances in THIS one!.)


* No sweat; the woman's just playin' around.


* Oh, s**t! That's my JAM!
(Grace meet Prince, Prince meet Grace...and I met Prince in NYC in '88 (Ansonia lobby))



* "...what so PROOOOUDLY we hailed, by the twilight's last gleaming..."

10.14

1) Essential Jazz Fusion:



The Best of Weather Report

Tracks: Night Passage, Mysterious Traveller, Birdland




2) Essential Avant-Garde Jazz:



The Shape of Jazz To Come
Ornette Coleman

Track: Lonely Woman (!)

commentary



3) Silent Struggle: A New Theory of Pregnancy


4) Keeping It Secret as the Family Car Becomes a Home


5) The Silent Speaker --- NASA researchers can hear what you're saying, even when you don't make a sound


6) In case you were still wondering if the pharmaceutical industry was out of control...

[A] “It’s wishful thinking that starting medication when a person already has a blood pressure reading in the 130s will allow them to later go off their medication without consequence,” he says. “Maybe if we started a person on (Atacand) treatment when their reading was still in the 120s, hypertension could be better forestalled or prevented.”
Julius agrees, and hopes he gets funding to perform such a study.
While only Atacand was tested in this trial, Julius says he suspects that other blood pressure drugs would also work.
The study, called the Trial of Preventing Hypertension or TROPHY study, was funded by AstraZeneca, which makes Atacand.
AstraZeneca is a WebMD sponsor.

[B] "A majority of the medical experts who created the "bible" for diagnosing mental illness have undisclosed financial links to drugmakers, says a study out Thursday.
And some panels overseeing disorders that require treatment with prescription drugs, such as schizophrenia and "mood disorders," were 100% filled with experts financially tied to the pharmaceutical industry, says the study published in the journal Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics."

[C] ADHD Drugs and Cardiovascular Risk

[D] Panel rejects tough ADHD drug label, bucking other FDA advisers

"Federal health advisers said...that Ritalin and other drugs for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder should not carry strong "black box" warnings about potential cardiovascular and psychiatric risks."

...etc...




7) Quantum Mechanics and God



8) A Contrarian's Christ: Making a case for Jesus as the enemy of religion.

"What parishioner of any denomination wants to hear that the Gospels are 'a deep threat to the institutional church,' since Jesus opposed 'just about every form of religion we know'?"

Bingo.



9) Complete Analysis of Songs by the Beatles



10) Now THIS Is A Rant!

10.13

1) Essential (nylon-string) Jazz: "Naked Guitar" - Earl Klugh



Tracks: Who Can I Turn To, All The Things You Are, Moon River, The Summer Knows, Serenata


2)


"Pointing to the experiences of developing countries and formerly Communist countries, where interference with an independent judiciary has allowed dictatorship to flourish, (former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day) O’Connor said we must be ever vigilant against those who would strong-arm the judiciary into adopting their preferred policies. It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship she said, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings."







3) Getting In A Twist Over Time

"For the strong gravitational field of a circulating cylinder of light, I have found new exact solutions of the Einstein field equations for the exterior and interior gravitational fields of the light cylinder. The exterior gravitational field is shown to contain closed timelike lines [R. L. Mallett, "The gravitational field of a circulating light beam," Foundations of Physics 33, 1307 (2003)]. The presence of closed timelike lines indicates the possibility of time travel into the past. This creates the foundation for a time machine based on a circulating cylinder of light. "

Mallet


4) Origami (Microsoft) handheld devices: already outdated??!

Compare: mock-up from sci-fi series "Earth: Final Conflict" [1], Readius rollable display (soon to be released) [2] and a Universal Display [3].
Gates was "behind the times" when he _conceived_ the Origami concept...or he's deliberately trying to gouge the public...


5) The Second SuperString Revolution


6) Fit To Be Captioned: It followed me home, daddy...



7) Google Search: universe giant computer


8) Take Your Pills, All Your Pills


9) "I don't think you'll be seeing (Sly Stone) on 'Oprah.'"
--- Ken Ehrlich, longtime executive producer of the Grammy telecast


10)

“Is this government so jealous of its power, so fearful of dissent, that it needs to threaten people who openly oppose its policies with charges of ‘sedition’?”

10.12

1) Essential Jazz: "Night Dreamer" - Wayne Shorter



Track: Virgo



2)

"In December 2005, the New York City Board of Health approved a novel response to the diabetes epidemic: mandatory electronic reporting of glycosylated hemoglobin values by laboratories to the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. The requirement, which took effect on January 15, 2006, was promulgated under the department's statutory authority to report and control chronic diseases and to regulate clinical laboratories.
The endeavor has aroused concern about patients' privacy and raised questions about the role of health departments..."

3)

"Researchers at UCLA found that cells in the human anterior cingulate, which normally fire when you poke the patient with a needle ("pain neurons"), will also fire when the patient watches another patient being poked. The mirror neurons, it would seem, dissolve the barrier between self and others.

early warning system may exist in the anterior cingulate cortex



4) If there is a link between toxoplasmosis and schizophrenia [1], is it possible there's a link between a parasite/virus and sociopathology??!

Brain development may be influenced by genetic parasites

Google search: anterior cingulate parasites


4a) Sociopaths Unbound

"It sounds like a treatment for a creepy psychological thriller: a world in which one in every 25 people walks through life without a drop of human compassion. On the outside, these creatures appear perfectly normal. They get married, buy homes, hold down jobs. But on the inside, they're morally bankrupt and completely unrestricted by conscience. They can do absolutely anything -- lie, steal, sabotage -- without feeling a shred of guilt or remorse.
Harvard psychologist Martha Stout, Ph.D., says this is not science fiction. In her controversial new book, "The Sociopath Next Door: The Ruthless Versus the Rest of Us," Stout claims that 4 percent of the population are sociopaths who have no capacity to love or empathize. Using composites pooled from her research to illustrate her points, Stout details the havoc sociopaths wreak on unsuspecting individuals -- marrying for money, backstabbing co-workers, or simply messing with people for the fun of it. The fact that most of us never suspect our friends and neighbors of sociopathy only makes the transgressions easier to pull off."

Why is women's sociopathy more difficult to pinpoint?

"In general, women are less physical and more verbal in the way they express things. For a sociopath who is a woman, one would expect more social manipulation. Of course, women can be violent, but it's less likely.

And that's why we don't see them as criminals? Because beating someone is a crime, but harming them emotionally is not?

Exactly. Getting someone fired or tormenting your children is usually pretty private and not always actionable."

Amazon: "The Sociopath Next Door"


ANTISOCIAL PERSONALITY, SOCIOPATHY, AND PSYCHOPATHY


CNN transcript

KING: So socio -- you can work with a sociopath. He doesn't kill anybody, he just doesn't care about when he cuts you out of a job or cheats that guy out of a pay increase or whatever?

STOUT: Exactly. Exactly. Brutally beats his children or humiliates his employees in public, steals old lady's pensions. Sure.

"Is Your Boss a Psychopath?"

THIRTEEN RULES FOR DEALING WITH SOCIOPATHS IN EVERYDAY LIFE:

1. Accept the fact that no-conscience often looks normal.
2. Do not believe role “taken on” by sociopath.
3. Use “rule of three lies” for confirming suspicion about dealing with a liar.
4. Social support will help you to question authority.
5. Suspect flattery.
6. Redefine your concept of respect: keep it separate from fear.
7. Do not join in the “game.”
8. Avoid contact, if possible.
9. Don’t pity the sociopath.
10. Don’t try to redeem the irredeemable.
11. Never agree to help sociopaths conceal their true character.
12. Remember that most human beings do possess a conscience, an ability to love.
13. “Living well is the best revenge.”

5) Hospital Infection Rates

Google

6) The "Dis-location" of U.S. Medicine — The Implications of Medical Outsourcing

"But harm may also result — particularly if, as seems likely, the main driving force proves to be saving money, rather than improving quality. First, to the extent that some care will be provided by anonymous people in cyberspace rather than by local doctors, distinguishing competent providers from hucksters will become even more difficult. In addition, having service providers operating under different laws and, potentially, value systems can create opportunities for new kinds of mischief."

7) Company requires RFID injection

8) 95 Pounds Heavier, Angry Son Faces Mother Who Starved Him

"If we knew why these kinds of things happen, we would be able to put ourselves in the shoes of defendants, in the shoes of mass murderers, in the shoes of people who do horrible things to young children," said Vincent P. Sarubbi, the Camden County prosecutor. "We'd have to become them, and that's why it's impossible in some circumstances to truly understand what may motivate people."

9) 37 million poor hidden in the land of plenty

MetaFilter


10) How to Take A Caffeine Nap

10.11

1) Essential Jazz: "Images" - Gonzalo Rubalcaba



Tracks: Autumn Leaves, Peace and Quiet Time,
Giant Steps


Rubalcaba's Web Site




2) "...I'll spell it out for you: Marlboros were the worst-selling cigarette until the invention of the Marlboro Man - the rest is history."



3) When Trust in Doctors Erodes, Other Treatments Fill the Void

"...This straying from conventional medicine is often rooted in a sense of disappointment, even betrayal, many patients and experts say. When patients see conventional medicine's inadequacies up close — a misdiagnosis, an intolerable drug, failedsurgery, even a dismissive doctor — many find the experience profoundly disillusioning, or at least eye-opening."

"Distrust in the medical industrial complex, as some patients call it, stems in part from suspicions that insurers warp medical decision making, and in part from the belief that drug companies are out to sell as many drugs as possible, regardless of patients' needs, interviews show."

'I do partly blame the drug companies and the money they make" for the breakdown in trust in the medical system..."The time when you would listen to your doctor and do whatever he said — that time is long gone, in my opinion. You have to learn to use your own head.'"

"People look around and feel that the conventional system does not measure up, and that something deeper about their well-being is not being addressed at all."

4) Debate on Climate Shifts to Issue of Irreparable Change

Is There Still Time to Avoid ‘Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference’ with Global Climate?
A Tribute to Charles David Keeling - James E. Hansen
NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and
Columbia University Earth Institute
New York, NY 10025



5)

"the tendency of modern science to present itself as an inert store of neutral, 'objective' facts obscures the reality that scientific thinking has profound moral and social implications. It makes assumptions rooted in an Enlightenment view of the world which separated humans from the world they inhabit, obscuring the connections between rational thought, imagination and feeling."
--- Mary Midgley

Wiki



6) SINGULARITY: UBIQUITY INTERVIEWS RAY KURZWEIL

"My second point is that nonbiological intelligence, once it achieves human levels, will double in power every year, whereas human intelligence -- biological intelligence -- is fixed. We have 10 to the 26th power calculations per second in the human species today, and that's not going to change, but ultimately the nonbiological side of our civilization's intelligence will become by the 2030s thousands of times more powerful than human intelligence and by the 2040s billions of times more powerful. And that will be a really profound transformation. "

"KURZWEIL: Yes, well, part of it is a belief in the power of ideas, and a confidence that I can find the ideas to solve a problem, and that these ideas exist. One technique is to just to use one's imagination. Imagine that a particular problem has been solved, and imagine what the solution would have to look like. So I'll fantasize that I'm giving a presentation four years from now, and describing the invention to my audience, and then I'll imagine what would I have to be saying, and what characteristics would the invention have to have? And then I work backwards: OK, if it's a reading machine, well it would have to somehow pick up the image of the page -- well how would it do that? And you use your imagination to break it down into smaller and smaller problems.

UBIQUITY: And this isn't a poetic conceit now? You really do work that way?

KURZWEIL: Yes, that is how I work. And I actually have a specific mental technique where I do this at night. I've been doing this for several decades. When I go to sleep I assign myself a problem.

UBIQUITY: For example?

KURZWEIL: It might be some mathematical problem or some practical issue for an invention or even a business strategy question or an interpersonal problem. But I'll assign myself some problem where there's a solution, and I try not to solve it before I go to sleep but just try to think about what do I know about this? What characteristics would a solution have? And then I go to sleep. Doing this primes my subconscious to think about it. Sigmund Freud said accurately that when we dream, some of the censors in our brain are relaxed, so that you might dream about things that are socially taboo or sexually taboo, because the various censors in our brain that say "You can't think that thought!" are relaxed. So we think about weird things that we wouldn't allow ourselves to think about during the day.
There are also professional blinders that prevent people from thinking creatively. Mental blocks such as "You can't solve a signal processing problem that way" or "Linguistics is not supposed to be done this way." Those assumptions are also relaxed in your dream state, and so you'll think about new ways of solving problems without being burdened by constraints like that.

Another thing that's not working when you're dreaming is your rational faculties to evaluate whether an idea is reasonable, and that's why fantastic things will happen in the dream, and the most amazing thing of all is that you don't think these fantastic things are amazing. So, let's say, an elephant walks through the wall, you don't say, "My God, how did an elephant walk through the wall?" You just say, "OK, an elephant walked through wall, no big deal." So your rational faculties are also not working.
The next step is in the morning, in this half-way state between dreaming and being awake, what I call lucid dreaming, I still have access to the dream thoughts. But now I'm sufficiently conscious to also have my rational faculties. And I can evaluate these ideas, these new creative ideas that came to me during the night, and actually see which ones make sense. After 15 to 20 minutes, generally, if I stay in that state, I can have keen new insights into whatever the problem was that I assigned myself. And I've come up with many inventions this way. I've come up with solutions to problems. If I have a key decision to make, I'll always go through this process. And I'll then have a real confidence in the decision, as opposed to just trying to guess at the answer. So this is the mental technique I use to try to combine creative thinking with rational thinking."

Blue Brain project




7) Windfall for drug industry raises questions


8) Rumours mount over Google's internet plan



9)

"An inquiry into the death of Princess Diana is "far more complex than any of us thought," the official leading the investigation said Friday without commenting on the conspiracy theories that persist nearly nine years after her death.
Lord Stevens, the former head of London's Metropolitan Police, acknowledged that some of the issues raised by Mohammed al Fayed — whose son, Dodi, was killed in the 1997 car crash with Diana — were "right to be raised." He did not elaborate."



10) As Oprah retreats, she gains ground
Phil Rosenthal, Tribune media columnist / January 27, 2006

"As far as Oprah is concerned, given all the alternatives for how she could have played this, she did it exactly right," Bunting said. "Even if it was cynically motivated ...Of course, there's an ancient joke that says sincerity is the most important thing in business, and if you can fake it, you've got it made.
"Well," Bunting said, "she's a very rich lady.""

Gawker's take on the _live_ Frey/Oprah 2nd interview

The Chicago Reader Speaks:

"Tribune banner headline: 'Oprah shreds Frey in a million pieces'...Page Two - John Kass on Oprah...Editorial Page: 'Don't Mess With Oprah'...Back Page of Section One: nothing but Oprah, including columns by Internet critic Steve Johnson and media columnist Phil Rosenthal, who normally don't show up in section one...Front page of Metro: Mary Schmidt on Oprah...online: Eric Zorn and Charles Madigan. That's six Tribune columnnists. Why? Because Frey had jerked Oprah around, she looked bad, and now she wasn't happy.
Back in the 60's Lyndon Johnson said he knew he'd lost the Vietnam war when he lost Walter Cronkite. There aren't many guests of the stature of James Frey for Oprah to pick on, but maybe she could lower her sights a little and invite somebody like Donald Rumsfeld."

10.10

1) Essential Graphics: PsychoNeuroImmunology Chart

2)

"The world has already passed the point of no return for climate change, and civilisation as we know it is now unlikely to survive, according to James Lovelock, the scientist and green guru who conceived the idea of Gaia - the Earth which keeps itself fit for life.
In a profoundly pessimistic new assessment, published in today's Independent, Professor Lovelock suggests that efforts to counter global warming cannot succeed, and that, in effect, it is already too late."

3) Epigenetics

"...research has demonstrated that genes and the environment are not mutually exclusive but are inextricably intertwined, one affecting the other.The idea that inheritance is not just about which genes you inherit but whether these are switched on or off is a whole new frontier in biology. It raises questions with huge implications, and means the search will be on to find what sort of environmental effects can affect these switches."

Eipigenetics - web tour



4) Return of the Puppet Masters - Toxoplasma gondii Unleashed


5) String Theory - Aspects of "Landscape"


6) Pimpin' Ain't Easy - An Historical Perspective

"The only true lesson of history, it seems, is that we never learn from history."

7) Gloria Trembicky is a bad landlord


8) Glyceollins

"Scientists with the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) in New Orleans, La., have uncovered what could be a healthier soybean, by tricking the legume into churning out a new class of impressive, health-guarding compounds.
These phytochemicals, called glyceollins, aren't new to soybeans--it's just that they're absent from the soy-based foods currently on the market."

9) Nanoparticles and Health Issues


10) Pickett on the Oprah/Frey Connection

10.9

1) Essential Jazz: Keith Jarrett - Inside Out



Track: When I Fall In Love



2) The Edge --- What Is Your Dangerous Idea?

My Favorites:

Roger Shank

"Schools are structured today in much the same way as they have been for hundreds of years. And for hundreds of years philosophers and others have pointed out that school is really a bad idea... Schools should simply cease to exist as we know them. The Government needs to get out of the education business and stop thinking it knows what children should know and then testing them constantly to see if they regurgitate whatever they have just been spoon fed.
Schools need to be replaced by safe places where children can go to learn how to do things that they are interested in learning how to do. Their interests should guide their learning..."

Rudy Rucker

"Mind is a universally distributed quality...Panpsychism. Each object has a mind. Stars, hills, chairs, rocks, scraps of paper, flakes of skin, molecules — each of them possesses the same inner glow as a human, each of them has singular inner experiences and sensations.
The minds of panpsychism can exist at various levels. As well as having its own individuality, a person's mind would also be, for instance, a hive mind based upon the minds of the body's cells and the minds of the body's elementary particles.
I still haven't said anything about why panpsychism is a dangerous idea. Panpsychism, like other forms of higher consciousness, is dangerous to business as usual. If my old car has the same kind of mind as a new one, I'm less impelled to
help the economy by buying a new vehicle. If the rocks and plants on my property have minds, I feel more respect for them in their natural state. If I feel myself among friends in the universe, I'm less likely to overwork myself to earn more cash. If my body will have a mind even after I'm dead, then death matters less to me, and it's harder for the government to cow me into submission.

("Rucker writes in his introduction to the Princeton edition of _Infinity and the Mind_ that he must have settled his questions about God, because he stopped thinking about them. Here, in a short afterword, he confirms that he still accepts the premises on which _White Light_ is based, and adds that he has also adopted a new belief: that far from being merely an impersonal metaphysical abstraction, God can and will help human beings overcome our spiritual difficulties if we just ask.")

Michael Nesmith

"Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective...Not a dangerous idea per se but like a razor sharp tool in unskilled hands it can inflect unintended damage. These three notions, Non-Time, Non-sequence, and Non-Object have been peeking like diamonds through the dust of empiricism, philosophy, and the sciences for centuries. Quantum mechanics, including Deutsch's parallel universes and the massive parallelism of quantum computing, is our brightest star — an unimaginably tall peak on our fitness landscape.
They bring us to a threshold over which empiricism has yet to travel, through which philosophy must reconstruct the very idea of ideas, and beyond which stretches the now familiar "uncharted territories" of all great adventures."

Eric R Kandel

"...These experiments led to the radical insight that by observing another person's brain activity, one can predict what someone is going to do before he is aware that he has made the decision to do it. This finding has caused philosophers of mind to
ask: If the choice is determined in the brain unconsciously before we decide to act, where is free will? They would argue that the choice is made freely, but not consciously. Libet for example proposes that the process of initiating a voluntary action occurs in an unconscious part of the brain, but that just before the action is initiated, consciousness is recruited to approve or veto the action. In the 200 milliseconds before a finger is lifted, consciousness determines whether it moves or not. Whatever the reasons for the delay between decision and awareness, Libet's findings now raise the moral question: Is one to be held responsible for decisions that are made without conscious awareness?"

Daniel Gilbert

"The idea that ideas can be dangerous...Dangerous does not mean exciting or bold. It means likely to cause great harm. The most dangerous idea is the only dangerous
idea: The idea that ideas can be dangerous.We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence."

Andy Clark

"The quick-thinking zombies inside us...So much of what we do, feel, think and choose is determined by non-conscious, automatic uptake of cues and information.
[...]
It now seems clear that many of my major life and work decisions are made very rapidly, often on the basis of ecologically sound but superficial cues, with slow deliberative reason busily engaged in justifying what the quick-thinking zombies inside me have already laid on the table. The good news is that without these mechanisms we'd be unable to engage in fluid daily life or reason at all, and that very often they are right. The dangerous truth, though, is that we are indeed designed to cut conscious, aware choice out of the picture wherever possible. This is not an issue about free will, but simply about the extent to which conscious deliberation cranks the engine of behavior. Crank it it does: but not in anything like the way, or extent, we may have thought. We'd better get to grips with this before someone else does."

Stephen M. Kosslyn

"A Science of the Divine?...Here's an idea that many academics may find unsettling and dangerous: God exists. And here's another idea that many religious people may find unsettling and dangerous: God is not supernatural, but rather part of the natural order...
1.0. First, here's the specific conception of God I want to explore: God is a "supreme being" that transcends space and time, permeates our world but also stands outside of it, and can intervene in our daily lives (partly in response to prayer).
[...]
In short, it is possible to begin to view the divine through the lens of science. But such reasoning does no more than set the stage; to be a truly dangerous idea, this sort of proposal must be buttressed by the results of empirical test. At
present, my point is not to convince, but rather to intrigue. As much as I admired Stephen Jay Gould (and I did, very much), perhaps he missed the mark on this one. Perhaps there is a grand project waiting to be launched, to integrate the two great sources of knowledge and belief in the world today — science and religion."

Bravo.



3) "An EXTRAORDINARY 'hyperspace' engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government. "

New Scientist coverage

Heim Quantum Theory for Space Propulsion

Best Papers of 2005



4) Global warming 55 million years ago shifted ocean currents



5) Google Video - Rickson Gracie fights Hugo Duarte


6) A novel method for the removal of ear cerumen

David A. Keegan* and Susan L. Bannister
*Departments of Family Medicine and Paediatrics; Department of Pediatrics, Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, University of Western Ontario, London, Ont.



7) Power Napping



8) N.Y. Cabs to Get a High-Tech Makeover

"Cabs in New York City are getting a major tech upgrade next year, in the form of video screens that will display movie listings and city maps to riders and let them *** pay for their trips with the swipe of a credit or debit card ***."

9) Getting Fit, Even if It Kills You



10) John Clesse Ringtones

10.8

1) Essential Jazz: My Funny Valentine - Miles Davis In Concert



1a) Herbie Hancock - The Piano



Tracks: My Funny Valentine



2) Quantum Trickery: Testing Einstein's Strangest Theory

"One of the most extreme points of view belongs to Dr. Zeilinger of Vienna, a bearded, avuncular physicist whose laboratory regularly hosts every sort of quantum weirdness. In an essay recently in Nature, Dr. Zeilinger sought to find meaning in the very randomness that plagued Einstein.
"The discovery that individual events are irreducibly random is probably one of the most significant findings of the 20th century," Dr. Zeilinger wrote.

*** Dr. Zeilinger suggested that reality and information are, in a deep sense, indistinguishable ***, a concept that Dr. Wheeler, the Princeton physicist, called "it from bit."

In information, the basic unit is the bit, but one bit, he says, is not enough to specify both the spin and the trajectory of a particle. So one quality remains unknown, irreducibly random. As a result of the finiteness of information, he explained, the universe is fundamentally unpredictable.
"I suggest that this randomness of the individual event is the strongest indication we have of a reality 'out there' existing independently of us," Dr. Zeilinger wrote in Nature.'

My "Matrix Revolutions" review

Zeilinger site

on quantum teleportation



3) Fate of Endocrine-Disruptor, Pharmaceutical, and Personal Care Product Chemicals during Simulated Drinking Water Treatment Processes


4) Experts Urge Less Focus on Antioxidants

"Experts aren't suggesting antioxidants aren't important or that people shouldn't eat foods that contain them. Instead, they're saying not enough is known about how they work to justify focusing one's diet on any particular antioxidant or food."
Even people trying to address specific health problems would do better to eat a broad mix of foods than to tailor their diets around certain ingredients, the experts say.
When people get prostate cancer, all of the sudden they make all the changes in their diet," Erdman says. "We don't even know if those changes make a difference then. *** But we know that if people eat that diet before getting cancer, you don't tend to get it ***."

Clearly, it's a spread of actives (anticarcinogens, antioxidants, antivirals and antibacterials) working in synergy over a long period of time that produce maximum prophylactic effect (see My BioShields files in sidebar link).


5) 1Association of Muscular Strength with Incidence of Metabolic Syndrome in Men. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. 37(11):1849-1855, November 2005.

"Purpose: To examine the association between muscular strength and incidence of metabolic syndrome.
Methods: Participants were 3233 men (20-80 yr) initially free of metabolic syndrome who had two or more clinical examinations between 1980 and 2003...
Conclusions: Muscular strength was inversely associated with metabolic syndrome incidence, independent of age and body size.
Potential benefits of greater muscular strength presumably through resistance exercise training should be considered in primary prevention of metabolic syndrome."

6) Weight Training Combats Metabolic Syndrome



7) Playing The Didgeridoo and Sleep Disorders

"Researchers in Switzerland examined 25 patients who suffered from snoring and moderate obstructive sleep apnoea syndrome, both common sleep disorders.
Half the group were given daily lessons in playing the didgeridoo, a wind instrument about 1.5 metres (yards) long which originated in northern Australia and is traditionally made from the trunk of a tree hollowed out by termites.
The study, published in the British Medical Journal's online edition on Friday, found that those who played the unusual instrument over a four-month trial period saw a significant improvement in their daytime sleepiness and apnoea.
Their partners also reported less disturbance from snoring.
The researchers said training the upper airways through the breathing techniques required to play the didgeridoo was behind the improvement."

Didgeridoo - Google



8) Verden Psychiatric Hospital - Photo Gallery



9) Polar bears drown as ice shelf melts

"Scientists have for the first time found evidence that polar bears are drowning because climate change is melting the Arctic ice shelf. The researchers were startled to find bears having to swim up to 60 miles across open sea to find food."

10) Year-End Views


25 Most Interesting Webcams of 2005

Reuters Pictures of the Year

Reuters 2005 Award Winners


World Press Photos - Winners Gallery 2005