Archive for September, 2010
The Biology of Soul Murder
Shannon Brownlee writes in a U.S. News and World Report article, dated Nov. 3, 1996:
Once viewed as genetically programmed, the brain is now known to be plastic, an organ molded by both genes and experience throughout life. A single traumatic experience can alter an adult’s brain: A horrifying battle, for instance, may induce the flashbacks, depression and hair-trigger response of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). And researchers are finding that abuse and neglect early in life can have even more devastating consequences, tangling both the chemistry and the architecture of children’s brains and leaving them at risk for drug abuse, teen pregnancy and psychiatric problems later in life.
Yet the brain’s plasticity also holds out the chance that positive experiences — psychotherapy, mentoring, loving relationships — might ameliorate some of the damage. Much remains unknown. But if scientists can understand exactly how trauma harms the brain, they may also learn much about healing…
UN Identifies the World’s Most Expensive Broadband Access
In the Central African Republic, broadband internet service costs 3891% of the average monthly income. Put another way, a month’s broadband service costs more than three years’ average wages in the country,” notes this technology blog, “compared with less than two hours’ earnings in Macau.” (The world’s cheapest broadband access…)
A United Nations’ technology group released the figures in a new report in advance of a September 19 summit on the digital divide in developing countries. (”We are trying to avoid a broadband divide,” said Dr. Hamadoun Toure, the secretary general of the UN’s International Telecommunications Union says in the report.) Their agency noted that the rate for broadband penetration is below 1% in many poor countries, with monthly costs higher than the average monthly income, whereas in the world’s most developed economies, 30% of people have access to broadband at less than 1% of their income.
And the report also estimates…
The Single Biggest Threat to U.S. National Security … Is Its Debt
Via Washington’s Blog:
In February 2009, the head of U.S. intelligence — Dennis Blair — said that the global financial crisis was the largest threat to America’s national security. All of America’s intelligence agencies apparently agreed.
The same month, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — Admiral Mullen — also agreed.
Now, Mullen is focusing on a specific economic threat. Specifically, Mullen is focusing on the debt:
The national debt is the single biggest threat to national security, according to Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Tax payers will be paying around $600 billion in interest on the national debt by 2012, the chairman told students and local leaders in Detroit.
“That’s one year’s worth of defense budget,” he said, adding that the Pentagon needs to cut back on spending.
But at least war is good for the economy, right? At least spending on defense will help the economy recover and…
Turtles Could Hold the Secret to Human Immortality
Interesting article from Alasdair Wilkins on io9.com:
All animals eventually grow old and die. It’s an inevitable fact of life — except when it isn’t. Some animals, like tortoises and lobsters, never grow old, and learning their secrets could let humans live as long as they want.
For most animals, there are three basic ways they can die: disease, injury, or old age, which is also called senescence. But a select few species are seemingly immune from aging itself, a phenomenon known as negligible senescence. The gradual accumulation of cellular damage and degradation that will eventually kill other animals (including us) slows to a virtual standstill, prolonging the life — and, in fact, the youth — of any animal lucky enough to be negligibly senescent.
Tortoises are the most famous negligibly senescent animals. An Aldabra giant tortoise named Adwaita was thought to be 255 years old when he died in 2006, and carbon…
What’s Wrong With How We Punish Criminals
Mark Kleiman, professor of Public Affairs at the UCLA, talks to ReasonTV about the overriding flaw in the U.S. criminal justice system: it’s “randomized draconianism” — that is, punishments are both too severe, and are applied irregularly, unfairly, randomly, etc., in different cases. For example, get caught violating your drug probation, and most likely nothing will happen, but there’s a small chance you will be hit with a twenty-five-year prison sentence. The solution? Modeling penalties on parenting techniques, in which punishment should be swift and certain, but not cruel or too drastic.
What If Homosexuality Becomes a Choice … For Parents?
Evidence that homosexuality is biological — and not a lifestyle choice like some on the religious Right believe — is building; gay men are more likely than straight men to have counterclockwise hair wholrs, have longer index than ring fingers, and be left handed or ambidextrous. David France wrote in a 2007 New York magazine article:
Because many of these newly identified “gay” traits and characteristics are known to be influenced in utero, researchers think they may be narrowing in on when gayness is set — and identifying its possible triggers. They believe that homosexuality may be the result of some interaction between a pregnant mother and her fetus. Several hypothetical mechanisms have been identified, most pointing to an alteration in the flow of male hormones in the formation of boys and female hormones in the gestation of girls. What causes this? Nobody has any direct evidence one way or another,…
Meet Stark County, Ohio’s Phil Davison: A Politician Who REALLY Speaks His Mind (Video)
Gabe writes on Videogum:
If you ask me, I think that both of the parties are corrupt and more interested in playing politics with each other than they are in making this country a better place for regular Americans like you and me. Now, what I’d like to see is someone who really speaks his mind. Someone with a fragile, broken, possibly diseased mind, really speaking it. Hopefully his face would get all red, and he would be screaming, and people wouldn’t know why he was screaming, because it wouldn’t seem like screaming was necessary, but that’s just it: he has to scream, because his brain is broken! That’s the kind of guy I’d like to send to Washington. Or, not Washington exactly, but the Stark County, Ohio, Treasurer’s office.
Quran Burning Story: This Is How The Media Embarrass Themselves
Jason Linkins writes on Huffington Post:
[Thursday] afternoon, the leader of a microscopic cult of idiots who announced plans to stage an “international” day of Quran burning in Gainesville, Florida held a press conference, for a rapt media which decided that his moronic plans were the single most important thing going on in America. At that press conference, in front of “9/11 Truther” signs, this cult leader lied to everyone who was watching, telling them that he was going to call off his 9/11 book burning festival because he had successfully reached a deal with the people behind the Park51 community center in Lower Manhattan, in which they would move their facility away from the site of the World Trade Center.
Not a word of this was true, but it was amazing, all the same — at one fell swoop, we had finally knit up the strands of a season of irrationality…
Body Parts of 9/11 Victims Map Used To Oppose ‘Ground Zero Mosque’
Photo from NY Post
Fox News often takes things a step too far, but to use a map of the distance where human remains were found as an argument against a mosque, is just uncalled for. Via RawStory:
Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has set what may be a new standard of shamelessness by marking the anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks with the publication of a map of human remains originally developed by the New York Fire Department in 2002.
“Here’s the chilling proof that Ground Zero stretches well beyond the boundaries of the World Trade Center site,” Murdoch’s New York Post boasted. “The map was obtained by The Post from sources after the Fire Department did not respond to requests to review it. It shows that remains were found just 348 feet to the south of the mosque site at 45 Park Place.”
An even more ominous version of the same map, with…
The Ultra-Rich Are Meaner Than Rest of Us
What a shocker. Matthew Lynn writes in Bloomberg:
There is something surprising about a private banker warning his colleagues about the rich. It would be like a director of Volkswagen AG casting doubt on motorists, or the boss of McDonald’s Corp. distancing himself from people who eat fast food. Rather like valets, the main aim of the private banker is to court the wealthy.
At a conference in Zurich last week, the head of Barclays Wealth Management’s private-banking unit, Gerard Aquilina, appeared to issue a red alert about the richest of clients.
“Beware of the complexities of dealing with ultra high net worths,” Aquilina told his audience. “Demanding and often unreasonable” requests from them may create “impossible demands on the organization.”
Such as? Help with getting children into the right school, securing credit to buy property, or obtaining last-minute concert tickets, for example. Even worse, the richest of the rich turn out to be…
Is This How the ‘Planet of the Apes’ Begins? Wild Chimps Outwit Human Hunters
Great, now all we need is some virus to kill all the cats and dogs on the planet, so we start taking primates as household pets and they become smarter. Thanks scientists for helping to create our eventual Ape Overlords. Slippery slope, real slippery slope. Matt Walker writes on BBC Earth News:
Across Africa, people often lay snare traps to catch bushmeat, killing or injuring chimps and other wildlife. But a few chimps living in the rainforests of Guinea have learnt to recognise these snare traps laid by human hunters, researchers have found.
More astonishing, the chimps actively seek out and intentionally deactivate the traps, setting them off without being harmed.
The discovery was serendipitously made by primatologists Mr Gaku Ohashi and Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa who were following chimps living in Bossou, Guinea to study the apes’ social behaviour.
Snare injuries to chimps are reported at many sites across east and west Africa where…
Ahmadinejad Tweets On Koran-Burning
Iran’s president weighs in on the Florida Koran-burning controversy via his Twitter account. Its not being “real” doesn’t change the fact this is the best celebrity Twitter to follow.
Woman Defies Naysaying Doctors And Grows Back Finger
Never say never — especially when it comes your your health! Elizabeth Cohen reports for CNN:
…”The doctor who was on call at the emergency room told me there was no way he could reattach my pinky,” she says. “I didn’t like that, so I asked to see a specialist.”
An orthopedic surgeon concurred with the ER doctor, and made an additional recommendation: He’d have to amputate even more of the finger so it would heal properly.
“I was like, no way, with so much technology out there, there must be some other way to do this,” she said. “But he said he wouldn’t even attempt to reattach it. He said was there was a 100 percent chance of failure,” she remembers…
A Happy Meal 137 Days Later
Artist Sally Davies runs the classic, terrifying “McDonald’s burger time-lapse” experiment. The goal of course is to see how long it takes food from McDonald’s to alter in appearance even the slightest bit. At 137 days and counting, this meal looks identical to how it did at the time of purchase. Via Refinery 29:
Just Say No To Freedom Of Religion
Mitt Romney. Photo: Jessica Rinaldi (CC)
The inimitable Christopher Hitchens says the taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civilization, at Slate:
A recent blizzard of liberal columns has framed the debate over American Islam as if it were no more than the most recent stage in the glorious history of our religious tolerance. This phrasing of the question has the (presumably intentional) effect of marginalizing doubts and of lumping any doubters with the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, the anti-Semites, and other bigots and shellbacks. So I pause to take part in a thought experiment, and to ask myself: Am I in favor of the untrammeled “free exercise of religion”?
No, I am not. Take an example close at hand, the absurdly named Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. More usually known as the Mormon church, it can boast Glenn Beck as one of its recruits. He has…
Hackers Plan To Hit Terrorist Web Sites On 9/11
If they can do it on 9/11, why not all the time? Adam Rawnsley reports for Wired:
Jihadi websites are in for a bruising, if the past is any precedent.
For the past two years, Islamic extremists’ online forums have been subjected to a series of attacks around the 9/11 anniversary — just as the jihadists worked to score a propaganda win. Major sites have been shut down, some permanently. Previous reporting has indicated that the United States and its allies have been responsible for some of the attacks.
As Sept. 11 approaches, the United States may or may not go for the hat trick and launch another round of online sabotage. But should it? What do western governments gain from occasionally disrupting jihadi websites?
In September 2008, a number of major jihadi forums were attacked and shut down shortly before the 9/11 anniversary, delaying the release of a feature length al-Qaida 9/11 anniversary video, The…
Can PTSD Be Genetically Inherited?
Two related stories from Science Daily, the first from May of this year:
A study by researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health suggests that traumatic experiences “biologically embed” themselves in select genes, altering their functions and leading to the development of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“Our findings suggest a new biological model of PTSD in which alteration of genes, induced by a traumatic event, changes a person’s stress response and leads to the disorder,” said Sandro Galea, MD, professor and chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the Mailman School of Public Health, and principal investigator.
“Identification of the biologic underpinnings of PTSD will be crucial for developing appropriate psychological and/or pharmacological interventions, particularly in the wake of an increasing number of military veterans returning home following recent wars worldwide.”
The findings are published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
Keiser Report: Markets! Finance! Extradition!
Once again, great political and economic analysis from Stacy Herbert and Max Keiser:
We look at the scandals of no fiscal or monetary bullets left in the bankrupt warfare states of America. In the second half of the show, Max talks to Huffington Post blogger Mike Jensen about his call for Americans to unite against the emergency in their nation.
Kim Jong Il Names Son As Successor, But Who Is He?
This will be the third member of the family to take over the position, but Kim Jong Il’s youngest son is a mysterious one. There isn’t must information about him, other than he is in his twenties and went to school in Switzerland. With the lack of information being provided (not that it’s anything new for N. Korea) it allows room to question if this is his son at all or someone standing in as his son as a way to keep the leadership in the family. PBS News Hour reports:
A major conference of North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party in Pyongyang has raised the expectation of a handover of power from Kim Jong Il to his youngest son.
The transition appears to have been underway for months. In June, Kim (pictured at right) promoted his brother in law to a top leadership post and made other Cabinet changes in what many considered preparation for…
