Month: January 2007

Enough LSD to intoxicate several hundred million people… had come and gone.

Systematic testing July 1960.
It took almost three years, and an estimated 100,000 hours of professional effort by physicians, nurses, technicians and volunteers…

Excerpts From ‘Chemical Warfare: Secrets Almost Forgotten’

Hallucinogenic Weapons: The Other Chemical Warfare
At the Army Chemical Center at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, psychiatrist James S. Ketchum was testing LSD, BZ and other psychedelic and deliriant compounds on fully informed volunteers for the U.S. military.

As well as hurting your wallet, your brain expects an expensive product to cause you pain too. Researchers have found that in terms of brain activity, whether or not we choose to make a purchase is reflected in a trade-off between regions of the brain involved in anticipating pain and pleasure.

When looking at a product, activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward centre, was associated with subsequent self-reported product preference and also predicted a purchase. Meanwhile, during presentation of the price, activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area involved in weighing up relative gains and losses, also predicted a subsequent purchase, and was related to how much smaller the actual price was than the price a participant reported being prepared to pay. Finally, also during the price presentation, increased activity in the insula, a region involved in anticipating physical pain, predicted a decision not to purchase the product.

Link

Mickey Fine Pharmacy of Beverly Hills sues Michael Jackson claiming the singer owes more than $100,000 for prescription drugs over the past two years.

Geesh, how many pills per day is this?

The Stanford Prison Experiment web site features an extensive slide show and information about this classic psychology experiment, including parallels with the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph?

How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you.

Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress.

Additional commentary at neurophilosophy:

When the Abu Ghraib scandal was exposed, the Bush administration insisted that the perpetrators were just “bad apples”. However, it soon emerged that, far from being an isolated case, the systematic abuse that occurred in Abu Ghraib was common-place, and had been sanctioned from above.

war is a firedrill
preparing harmony
until
light remains
past

Mr Bush says stem cell research would destroy human life in the name of science.

Dress to impress, goes the maxim.

“Dress to conceive” might be more accurate.

Women take greater care over their appearance when they are at peak levels of fertility. [study at New Scientist]

Seth Godin posts in Turning your idea into a picture

A Periodic Table of Visualization Methods.

I love the spectacular use of technology on this web page.

I hate the twisted use of the periodic table (because the relationships between the types isn’t natural or elegant the way chemicals are) but it’s worth it, because it will certainly inspire you to figure out how to get out of your text rut.

A new search engine geared towards Baby Boomers and other people who are old as hell has launched: it’s called Cranky.com. It was created by the people of Eon, a media group that caters to old people. The search algorithm supposedly ranks results according to their age-relevance.

Matt at netbusinessblog says,

The search algorithm supposedly ranks results according to their age-relevance. I wasn’t really sure what that meant until I did some searching on the site.

When searching the term “diapers” a normal search engine would yield results catering to parents of infants; however, at Cranky.com we get uplifting stories of how the elderly struggle with adapting to using diapers.

Here’s a blogger’s value:

Hello,
I am the marketing manager for Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster publishers. I am writing to offer you a free review copy of You Call the Shots, by 21-year-old Cameron Johnson. This charismatic young author started his first business when he was nine and made his first million before he graduated high school. By doing so, he managed to pay his way through college – almost unheard of in today’s economy. In this new book he shares the amazing story of his career so far, as well as the lessons he’s learned about success in both business and life. I think it might be of interest to you and to the readers of One Stop Thought. If you are a parent, it also might be an interesting and motivational read for your son or daughter.

If you would like to receive a complimentary copy, just send me the appropriate mailing address. Cameron is excited at the prospect of the online media, especially bloggers, and he would be more than willing to do an online Q&A. If you are interested, I would be happy to set it up.

Thank you,
Shannon
Shannon Gallagher
Marketing Manager, Free Press
Simon & Schuster

Here’s my simple answer:

Dear Shannon,
When I was young, I taught sky and brightening things… .

I appreciate your niche and the work you carry. I appreciate your community and the faith you carry. But sorry, I am not a tool. I will not use my blog in your brigade.

What goes up comes down, what goes around comes around, for each action there is a reaction, and so on. Life is intrinsically self-correcting at almost all its levels, including evolutionary, physiological, historical and genetic. This permits a limited optimism.

Wickedness and stupidity are ultimately self-destructive and self-limiting, so we need not trouble ourselves that any particular trend in that direction will go on indefinitely. Sooner or later — and usually sooner — they will be reversed.

On the other hand, the principle of self-correction also applies to love, friendship and high intellectual powers. No movement in these directions can proceed long without setting up counter-pressures against their further spread. cooperative strategies suggest long-term trends (under a broad range of conditions) toward greater cooperation, contingent on ever more sophisticated discrimination.

http://www.edge.org/q2007/q07_16.html#trivers

I must tell you about Lucky Lord Barkeley of Berkeley. Here on legs is Life. He’s not had one day without love; rubbing his longgg neck, running his firmm feet, nor more than four hours alone in his four years. He’s not had a day without running faster than his tail, leaping higher than his nose nor pretzling delight along his spine. He is a creature to help you find the first happy bicycle, the first pleasant neighbor, the decent side of the street, the thick of your heart. His sire is an Alaska champion and bitch an England champion. There are few dogs in this world better bred or better loved.

Projection describes the habit of removing our own disturbing thoughts by attributing them to someone else, whereas identification is changing ourselves to become more like someone we admire.

As we mature from late childhood into adulthood, we rely less on ‘denial’ (ignoring upsetting thoughts) and instead use progressively more ‘projection’ and ‘identification’.

BPS Research Digest

If you think in pounds and miles instead of kilograms and kilometers, you’re in the minority.

Only the United States, Liberia, and Burma still primarily use English units — the rest of the world is metric.

And now the Moon will be metric too.

Health insurers in California can refuse to cover individuals because of their jobs or because they take certain medicines…

“This isn’t cherry picking; this is ignoring whole orchards of people.”

Total groups of workers — roofers, pro athletes, migrant farmers and firefighters among them — are denied insurance, even if they’re in good health and can afford it, The Los Angles Times said Monday. According to actuary tables, certain workers are too big a risk to underwrite.

Dozens of widely prescribed medications for heart burn and asthma, for example, may lead to rejection, according to underwriting guidelines, the Times said. [story at physorg]

What are the obstacles facing Education?

When kids

sit at desks to answer questions on paper using a pen while worrying whether they’ve ranked in their assigned peer group?

When kids

go home to log onto MySpace to update their profiles, run half a dozen simultaneous Instant Messaging conversations, use Skype to make free phone calls, rip music from CDs they’ve borrowed from friends, twiddle their thumbs to send incomprehensible text messages, view silly videos on YouTube and use BitTorrent to download episodes of ‘Lost’?

Caught from the Unreasonable Observer

Gill Rapley, the deputy director of the Unicef UK Baby Friendly Initiative has introduced “Baby-led Weaning”, to re-start the way we used to feed our babies before the multi-million-pound baby-food industry made us believe we needed purées.

Babies should be in charge of what went into their mouths and when. What would happen if we never took the control away from them in the first place and let them feed themselves?

The idea behind “Baby-led Weaning” is that you should allow your baby access to a variety of healthy finger foods and, provided he is sitting up straight, and you are with him, leave him to feed himself with his hands. As long as there are no known allergies in the family, you can give your child pretty much anything, except for whole nuts if your child is under five. This approach takes a leap of faith for many parents, but the benefits are great.

First, a baby will take as much or as little as it needs; this approach, Rapley has observed (she conducted a study in 2000/1), stops them becoming constipated. Constipation is something that seems to trouble many babies not long after solids are introduced; it’s not certain why, but it could be because if they are spoon-fed, they are fed more than their young systems can handle.

Babies allowed to feed themselves tend to become less picky, develop better hand control more quickly, and seem to avoid foods that they were later found to be intolerant to. Another advantage is that babies can eat what you’re eating, so no “special cooking”. And definitely no puréeing.

“Imagine eating tomato soup – you suck it in. Now imagine eating minestrone, a mixture of liquid and solids. The way you eat it is different, you can’t suck it in, you chew it.” It’s because of this that purée-fed babies often refuse second-stage baby foods, which involve lumps and purée. They don’t know whether to suck or chew so, as a natural defence mechanism, they do neither.

[story]

Satellite navigation systems can stunt your brain, preventing it from developing, according to scientists. They have discovered that taxi drivers have actually grown more brain cells because of all the knowledge they keep in their heads.

The mid-posterior hippocampus is where black-cab drivers store a mental map of London, including up to 25,000 street names and the location of all the major tourist attractions.

The research is the first to show that the brains of adults can grow in response to specialist use. It has been known that areas of children’s brains can grow when they learn music or a language. The scientists warn that increasingly widespread use of satellite navigation could change all that. “GPS [Global Positioning System] may have a big effect,” says Dr Eleanor Maguire, who led the research at University College London. [story]

After a high-profile campaign, which turned the plight of the homeless into an election issue, French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin vowed recently to introduce a new law that would make housing an enforceable right, like education and health care. Those who want to be off the street would be able to sue the government to have that right met. The French law is modelled after Scotland’s legally enforceable right to housing.

In the U.S., more than 200 American cities and counties have pledged to abolish homelessness by arranging apartments for people instead of just finding them homeless shelters and food. [story]

Three parents? A woman in Canada is legally the second mother.

“I couldn’t see, there were so many tears,” she recalled.

The ruling revolved around a lesbian couple who have been together since 1990. In 1999, the couple — a lawyer and university professor — asked a man who was a close friend to help them start a family.

The university professor became pregnant in 2000 and gave birth early the following year.

While the two women have raised the boy since birth, the father continues to be involved in his son’s life, visiting twice a week.

Legally being declared a parent — all three will have their names on the boy’s birth certificate.

The five year old boy said, “Actually, I’m glad you won because I didn’t want to lose one of my mommies….”

Globe and Mail

The most dangerous part of me is an idea.

Foreign Policy magazine has an article by Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Renshon on the role of cognitive biases in the decision to go to war based on the book Why Leaders Choose War: The Psychology of Prevention (ISBN 0275990850).

Social and cognitive psychologists have identified a number of predictable errors (psychologists call them biases) in the ways that humans judge situations and evaluate risks. Biases have been documented both in the laboratory and in the real world, mostly in situations that have no connection to international politics. For example, people are prone to exaggerating their strengths: About 80 percent of us believe that our driving skills are better than average. In situations of potential conflict, the same optimistic bias makes politicians and generals receptive to advisors who offer highly favorable estimates of the outcomes of war. Such a predisposition, often shared by leaders on both sides of a conflict, is likely to produce a disaster. And this is not an isolated example.

As if porn were love, armies bring no peace.

Global instant noodle industry sells 85.7 billion packages every year. ( ! )
Inventor & founder of Nissin Foods passes away. BBC

The BBC has a short slideshow of one of the largest ice sculpture shows in the world held annually in Harbin, China.

Similar to every wartime, perhaps we will exit Iraq in bed.
Propaganda, media and business are preparing the sales theme of 2007.

The UK’s Dr Petra Boynton points to upcoming trends in Sex Predictions for 2007:

This year you can expect to see a lot of media coverage in the UK, US and Canada on ‘great’ or ‘super’ sex. This will be in the form of books, television programmes and magazine features and include topics such as ‘how to have the best sex ever’, ‘how to have the best sex in the world/universe’, ‘how to have more/better orgasms’, ‘how to get more sex’, and ‘how to be really fantastic in bed’.

Related to these programmes/features will be classes run from either sex stores or by individuals teaching ‘great sex’ techniques. Most of this coverage won’t be based on evidence but will be based on a one-size-fits-all approach to sex. Contrary to good sex advice, rather than encouraging exploration and adventure we’ll be told what good sex is and how to achieve it.

The programmes/articles will be built around product placement and feature ‘sexperts’ who may not be the best qualified to offer advice on exploring sex. The emphasis of media coverage will be around positions, body parts, hormones, techniques and activities with little information on communication, culture, choice and pleasure.

It’s anticipated this media coverage will be hugely popular, but will also create more questions and anxieties in audiences who probably won’t find the information easy to act upon and will blame themselves when they don’t get the best sex ever or become the best lover in the world.

Not to be overlooked is the link between propaganda, indoctrination [wickipedia]

Joseph Trento declares, “This Administration makes choices for PR not security.”

We may be less safe flying today than we were before 9/11, and we have spent billions of dollars in tax money going backward. Unsafe at Any Altitude goes behind the scenes at our nation’s airports and inside the government and paints a remarkably inept picture of a Transportation Security Administration.

Homeland Security is now a $6 billion industry, but airline security is less effective today than it has ever been…

Inspired by the belief that true vigilance is impossible without an honestly informed citizenry, Unsafe at Any Altitude shines the bright light of truth on past and present practices that have remained in the dark for far too long.

CSpan has a presentation online.

China chokes on a coal-fired boom
The Chinese plan to build no fewer than 500 new coal-fired power stations, adding to some 2,000, most of them unmodernised…

via Peak Energy