Category: interesting

Adrian Hon:

Someone is making a lot of money out of this.

A new breed of computer games is creating compulsive behavior.

Isn’t the entire point of games that they are more engaging and fun than poor, passive TV? Yes, TV shows are driven by commercial motives and try to be just as manipulative as games with their incessant cliffhangers, but a show with cliffhanger every 30 minutes pales in comparison to games containing ‘mini-cliffhangers’ every 30 seconds.

Nota bene: “Developers aren’t doing this on purpose.”

Who woulda thunk it?
So it ::: is ::: possible to design safe itty bitty cars.

Life on a road of edges.

It has become clear that there is a population in this country living in trauma — repeated, chronic and in many cases, very complicated and overlapping forms of trauma.

— rethinking trauma, a post by Scott Johnson, Violence Reporting Fellow.

The APA’s newest descriptors of what Complex PTSD looks like:

♥ Alterations in emotional regulation, which may include symptoms such as persistent sadness, suicidal thoughts, explosive anger, or inhibited anger.

♥ Alterations in consciousness, such as forgetting traumatic events, reliving traumatic events, or having episodes in which one feels detached from one’s mental processes or body.

♥ Alterations in self-perception, which may include a sense of helplessness, shame, guilt, stigma, and a sense of being completely different than other human beings.

♥ Alterations in the perception of the perpetrator, such as attributing total power to the perpetrator or becoming preoccupied with the relationship to the perpetrator, including a preoccupation with revenge.

♥ Alterations in relations with others, including isolation, distrust, or a repeated search for a rescuer.

♥ Alterations in one’s system of meanings, which may include a loss of sustaining faith or a sense of hopelessness and despair.

“I had her heart in my hand,” Dr. Friese said.

People in Haiti are always telling me their earthquake stories.

I’m 31 years old, an American, a journalist. Even if I did have an answer, which I don’t, it would obviously be circumspect, philosophical, wrong.

Still, people beseech me with their stories, and I have to think it’s because they know I’m a journalist.

I’m a trained listener. I know when to ask questions and when to nod. I’ve taught my face to behave like a doctor’s or a judge’s. I don’t grin or interject. I know the funny bits are actually the saddest. Every story is important — a thousand little blocks built like a wall against the pain.

I told the truth. Imagine all the truth I didn’t tell.

Mental illness isn’t enough to explain assassination or mass murder. And in many cases, it appears, it isn’t part of the explanation at all. We should remind ourselves that Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the others killed or wounded in the Tucson attack were shot by a person–not by a diagnosis. – Paul Raeburn

How do we die?

A snippet from the comments:

“Who was the one very unlucky bloke killed by lightning?”

“Rod.”

I wonder about similarities to the USA…

To solve the Rubik’s Cube, just follow each step.

The Rubik’s Cube is a 3-D mechanical puzzle invented in 1974 by Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Ernő Rubik. Originally called the “Magic Cube”, the puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Ideal Toys in 1980 and won the German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle that year. As of January 2009, 350 million cubes have sold worldwide making it the world’s top-selling puzzle game. It is widely considered to be the world’s best-selling toy.

You spoke of ‘infinity’ as if it were a number. It’s not. You may as well ask, ‘What is truth divided by beauty?’ I have no clue. —John Derbyshire, 2003

I have no clue myself, but these are snippets smartly writ:

Nonmathematical people sometimes ask me, You know math, huh? Tell me something I’ve always wondered, What is infinity divided by infinity?

I can only reply, The words you just uttered do not make sense. That was not a mathematical sentence. You spoke of infinity as if it were a number. It’s not. You may as well ask, What is truth divided by beauty? I have no clue.

I only know how to divide numbers. Infinity, truth, beauty those are not numbers.

What is a modern definition of analysis, then? I think the study of limits will do for my purposes here. The concept of a limit is at the heart of analysis. All of calculus, for example, which forms the largest part of analysis, rests on the idea of a limit.

Arithmetic: The study of whole numbers and fractions. Sample theorem: If you subtract an odd number from an even number you get an odd number.

Geometry: The study of figures in space points, lines, curves, and three-dimensional objects. Sample theorem: The angles of a triangle on a flat surface add up to 180 degrees.

Algebra: The use of abstract symbols to represent mathematical objects (numbers, lines, matrices, transformations), and the study of the rules for combining those symbols. Sample theorem: For any two numbers x and y, (x + y) (x y) = x2 y2.

Analysis: The study of limits. Sample theorem: The harmonic series is divergent (that is, it increases without limit).

Modern mathematics contains much more than that, of course. It includes set theory, for example, created by Georg Cantor in 1874, and foundations, which another George, the Englishman George Boole, split off from classical logic in 1854, and in which the logical underpinnings of all mathematical ideas are studied.

The traditional categories have also been enlarged to include big new topics geometry to include topology, algebra to take in game theory, and so on.

Even before the early nineteenth century there was considerable seepage from one area into another. Trigonometry, for example, (the word was first used in 1595) contains elements of both geometry and algebra. Descartes had in fact arithmetized and algebraized a large part of geometry in the seventeenth century, though pure-geometric demonstrations in the style of Euclid were still popular and still are for their clarity, elegance, and ingenuity.

Tidying up is a relative term… for some a Prime Obsession.

It’s so neat I won’t explain.

Alexa Meade acrylic art.

What a neat and interesting satellite photo, #3 in this series of 17 satellite photos.

As well, the Guardian’s nifty description few of us know: The most easterly point in the USA is also the most westerly point in the USA. Did you know that?

Satellite eye, Earth from above.

Nobody seems to know his name. That’s likely a good thing? [link]

“Any culture that adopts an alphabet goes through a period of demonstrable madness where they denigrate women.” —Leonard Shlain

Read that twice. Read this twice:

1) Compare the feminine right-brained oral teachings of Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus with the masculine creeds that evolved when their spoken words were committed to writing.

2) Compare the feminine right-brained oral teachings of Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus with the masculine creeds that evolved when their spoken words were committed to writing.

Then ponder Leonard Shlain’s question,

“How did god go from being a woman to a man?”

The Alphabet vs The Goddess Lecture

Eureka! The feeding tube is right between your eyes !

It’s true. The good stuff hasn’t been invented yet.

But a face shield with pepper red flowery graphics?

One never forgets the first time a hummingbird suddenly arrives at the feeder right in front of your eyes. It is truly an awesome experience! Definite adrenaline rush! There you are, just sitting there, when WHOOSH a hummingbird jumps into your vision as if by magic! Absolutely a treat.

The Eye 2 Eye Wearable Hummingbird Feeder by Doyle Doss. Fill the tube with sugar water, adjust the face shield and wait for the hummingbirds to swarm to you. Doss says hummingbirds will eagerly be drawn to your mask. News story here.

…and hundreds of thousands of young counterculturists lived in one commune or another at some point.

It was a period in which huge numbers of young Americans rejected the traditional American way of greed-based and emotionally isolated living and searched for a new life path that embodied sharing, mutual caring, and openness.

Although not all communes achieved their idealistic goals, their very existence represented a yearning of the human spirit for something better than the status quo and a courageousness to act upon these convictions with direct action and sustained efforts.

Global warming…recession…peak oil…data smog…by necessity and by choice, thousands of people are once again being drawn toward collective living, this time empowered by the successes and failures of the past.

• people are living longer
• not because they are less likely to get sick,
• but because they survive longer with disease…

As a result, a 20-year-old man today can expect to live about a year longer than a 20-year-old in 1998, but will spend 1.2 years more with a disease, and 2 more years unable to function normally.

NYTimes,
via Mind Blog

As many as 25% of police using steroids?

“Essentially, this has become commonplace.”

Testing in law enforcement — much the way it is in professional sports — is a touchy subject. Like pro ballplayers, officers are usually protected by unions, and drug testing is often used as a bargaining chip. A majority of departments have random testing for street drugs like cocaine and heroin, but few also test regularly for steroids. —A. J. Perez

Simultaneously nuts and serious, don’t you think?

Dec 17th Gallup poll:

Four in 10 Americans believe God created humans in their present form about 10,000 years ago.

But hey, creationists were 47% in 1993 and 1999.

The creationist viewpoint is held by 60% of weekly churchgoers and about a fourth who seldom or never attend church, each with a significantly higher percentage of Republicans.

Language changes. For example, child care is more fashionable than nursery school.

Although there are only about 500,000 books published in English before the 19th century, Google has launched a database of 500 billion words contained in 5.2 million books published between 1500 and 2008 — a sequence of letters that is one thousand times longer than the human genome.

The corpus cannot be read by a human.

If you tried to read only the entries from the year 2000 alone, at the reasonable pace of 200 words per minute, without interruptions for food or sleep, it would take eighty years.

Play with Google’s new “Books Ngram Viewer” yourself.

Yes, language changes. Google’s discovered usage of Carlin’s seven dirty words from 1650 to 2000.

Caracas housing. Stunning ingenuity is ingepoority?

Someday soon warmth will return.
I wonder if the iPhone could power head heaters?

About half calling 911 for a heart attack are hospitalized, yet only 20 percent actually have heart attacks.

Robert DeBusk, MD

“Patients don’t know when to go to the ER. They agonize, they wait. Once the patient does go to the ER, there’s a high rate of unnecessary hospitalization.”

Why not ask a few questions? Ask callers to identify symptoms of chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness, weakness and visual changes. It can be administered over the telephone. For example, a patient reporting ischemic chest pain that occurs at rest, lasts 20 or more minutes and is still present at the time of the patient’s report, would be categorized as ‘high risk’.

Our trend setting Army shall haul no petroleum.

Robert Whitaker, the Polk Award-winning journalist and author of the recent “Anatomy of an Epidemic”:

The story told to the public by the NIMH and by academic psychiatry is that psychiatric medications have greatly improved the lives of those diagnosed with psychiatric illnesses.

Yet, even as our society has embraced the use of psychiatric medications during the past two decades, the number of people receiving government disability due to mental illness has more than tripled, from 1.25 million people to more than 4 million people.

So you can see, in that data, that something may be wrong with that story of progress.

And then, if you look at how psychiatric medications affect the long-term course of psychiatric disorders, you find — in the scientific literature — consistent evidence that they increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill.

I know this is startling, particularly since we do know that some people do well on the medications long term, but that evidence, in terms of how the medications affect long-term outcomes in the aggregate, shows up time and again in the scientific literature.