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."