Polar Bear Turns Purple After Medication

It seems that Saddam's sons have been killed. And in other news...a polar bear in Argentina has turned purple! From Polar Bear Turns Purple After Medication:

Paint the polar bear purple and the crowds will come.

That seems to be the lesson a zoo in Mendoza has learned, after its 23-year-old bear Pelusa was sprayed with an antiseptic spray that turned her normally white fur a dark shade of violet.

The unusual color — a temporary side effect of the treatment for dermatitis — has turned the aging bear into a minor celebrity in Argentina and prompted thousands of schoolchildren and tourists to make their way to the Jardin Zoologico de Mendoza in the western city beneath the snow-capped Andes.
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The spray applied to Pelusa is similar to one used by pediatricians to treat children's scraped knees or lab technicians to stain micro-organisms for examination under microscopes.

Pelusa, a 395-pound bear has been temporarily placed in a cage because of the treatment, and is separated from her mate, Arturo. She is also kept back a distance from the public.

The separation, Duarte said, was needed to keep Pelusa from taking her regular plunge into an icy pool of water at the polar bear compound. That would have washed away the medicine prematurely, he said.

The isolation has not seemed to bother Pelusa but it has left Arturo, a 16-year-old male almost double the weight of his mate, a bit grumpy, Duarte said.

After all, the two — who have been together for years — have been kept apart for 20 days.

I empathize with poor Arturo. Anyway, whoever produces stuffed purple polar bears — especially sold with a bigger, white polar bear — could make a mint right now.

An Interview With Victor Davis Hanson

I wouldn't normally find myself reading something called Right Wing News, but I've sought out more Victor Davis Hanson. One subject covered in a recent interview is the frequent comparisons of the US to imperial Rome:

Politically they are absurd. We do not send proconsuls to demand taxes to pay for basing troops. In fact we do the opposite — pay lavishly for bases that protect others. The imperial senate was impotent, and civil war was common after AD 200 — we have a stable Congress and little strife. For all the European venom, George Bush is not a Caracalla or even Diocletian. The classical topos of luxus, decadence brought about by affluence and leisure — read Petronius, Suetonius, or Juvenal — well, that is a real concern. Self-loathing and smug cynicism from an elite are the first symptoms and we see that clearly among those pampered and secure, who nevertheless ridicule the very system under which they operate in such a privileged fashion — most notably in the arts, on the campuses, and in the media. A Jessica Lange or Barbra Streisand is right out of a Petronian banquet or perhaps sounds like a Flavian princess spouting off at dinner before returning to Nero's Golden House. Norman Mailer is a modern day Eumolpus bellowing on spec, and a Michael Moore a court-jester brought in to stick his tongue out at his benefactors for their own sick amusement.

At some point in the near future, I reserve the right to spout: "Hah! She sounds like something straight out of a Petronian banquet!"

I also enjoyed Davis's take on US-Europe relations:

The cold war was an aberration. Note how quickly the Europeans turned on America once 400 hostile divisions were no longer on their borders. They make up a big continent with a big population that deserves pride and power commensurate with their economy and population; so it is time for both of us to recognize that, bring the troops home or redeploy them in more friendly eastern European countries, and as friends let them develop their own military identity. Keeping 200,000 troops abroad to protect a rich continent is unhealthy for all parties involved.

His take on terrorism?

The antidote is well known and works — overwhelming power, an articulated policy that explains the moral issues involved, and a strong sense of national purpose and resolve. The sicarri, the great Mahdi, the assassins, the kamikazes, they all ended up badly — though they were terrifying at the time. Al Qaeda will share their fate, and bin Laden will be a footnote to history, no better known than Isama Cho, who was the rage of 1930s in Japan, and whose ideology was felt to frightening and unstoppable. The U.S. Marines took care of him and his brood on Okinawa, and they will again with the far less dangerous Islamic fundamentalists. The United States Air Force and Special Forces are much more capable warriors than killers with head bands and hoods.

His historical allusions leave me feeling woefully undereducated.

Why the Muslims Misjudged Us

Why the Muslims Misjudged Us, by Victor Davis Hanson, makes a number of interesting points — and, in the process, goads me to read more of the classics (in translation, alas):

Afghan tribal councils, without written constitutions, are better than tyranny, surely; but they do not make consensual government. Nor do the Palestinian parliament and advisory bodies in Kuwait. None of these faux assemblies is elected by an unbound citizenry, free to criticize (much less recall, impeach, or depose) their heads of state by legal means, or even to speak openly to journalists about the failings of their own government. Plato remarked of such superficial government-by-deliberation that even thieves divvy up the loot by give-and-take, suggesting that the human tendency to parley is natural but is not the same as the formal machinery of democratic government.

I love that bit from Plato: Even thieves divvy up the loot by give-and-take.

Davis goes on to make Zakaria's point:

The fact is that democracy does not spring fully formed from the head of Zeus but rather is an epiphenomenon — the formal icing on a preexisting cake of egalitarianism, economic opportunity, religious tolerance, and constant self-criticism. The former cannot appear in the Muslim world until gallant men and women insist upon the latter — and therein demolish the antidemocratic and medieval forces of tribalism, authoritarian traditionalism, and Islamic fundamentalism.

Ouch:

Government spokesmen in the Middle East should ignore the nonsense of the cultural relativists and discredited Marxists and have the courage to say that they are poor because their populations are nearly half illiterate, that their governments are not free, that their economies are not open, and that their fundamentalists impede scientific inquiry, unpopular expression, and cultural exchange.
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But blaming the West, and Israel, for the unendurable reality is easier for millions of Muslims than admitting the truth. Billions of barrels of oil, large populations, the Suez Canal, the fertility of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates valleys, invaluable geopolitical locations, and a host of other natural advantages that helped create wealthy civilizations in the past now yield an excess of misery, rather than the riches of resource-poor Hong Kong or Switzerland. How could it be otherwise, when it takes bribes and decades to obtain a building permit in Cairo; when habeas corpus is a cruel joke in Baghdad; and when Saudi Arabia turns out more graduates in Islamic studies than in medicine or engineering?

Starting with a little dig at Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (an excellent, thought-provoking book, by the way), Davis then lays out his thesis from Carnage and Culture (which I have not yet read):

Values and traditions — not guns, germs, and steel — explain why a tiny Greece of 50,000 square miles crushed a Persia 20 times larger; why Rome, not Carthage, created world government; why Cortes was in Tenochtitl`an, and Montezuma not in Barcelona; why gunpowder in its home in China was a pastime for the elite while, when stolen and brought to Europe, it became a deadly and ever evolving weapon of the masses. Even at the nadir of Western power in the medieval ages, a Europe divided by religion and fragmented into feudal states could still send thousands of thugs into the Holy Land, while a supposedly ascendant Islam had neither the ships nor the skill nor the logistics to wage jihad in Scotland or Brittany.
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Europeans, not Ottomans, colonized central and southern Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and the Americas — and not merely because of their Atlantic ports or ocean ships but rather because of their long-standing attitudes and traditions about scientific inquiry, secular thought, free markets, and individual ingenuity and spontaneity. To be sure, military power is not a referendum on morality — Pizarro's record in Peru makes as grim reading as the Germans' in central Africa; it is, rather, a reflection of the amoral dynamism that fuels ships and soldiers.

We are militarily strong, and the Arab world abjectly weak, not because of greater courage, superior numbers, higher IQs, more ores, or better weather, but because of our culture. When it comes to war, 1 billion people and the world's oil are not nearly as valuable military assets as MIT, West Point, the U.S. House of Representatives, C-Span, Bill O'Riley, and the G.I. Bill. Between Xerxes on his peacock throne overlooking Salamis and Saddam on his balcony reviewing his troops, between the Greeks arguing and debating before they rowed out with Themistocles and the Americans haranguing one another on the eve of the Gulf War, lies a 2,500-year cultural tradition that explains why the rest of the world copies its weapons, uniforms, and military organization from us, not vice versa.

On Israel and Muslim envy:

If Israel were not so successful, free, and haughty — if it were beleaguered and tottering on the verge of ruin — perhaps it would be tolerated. But in a sea of totalitarianism and government-induced poverty, a relatively successful economy and a stable culture arising out of scrub and desert clearly irks its less successful neighbors. Envy, as the historian Thucydides reminds us, is a powerful emotion and has caused not a few wars.

As with the Cold War, immigration tells quite a story:

In matters of East-West relations, immigration has always been a one-way phenomenon. Thousands flocked to Athens and Rome; few left for Parthia or Numidia unless to colonize or exploit. People sneak into South, not North, Korea — in the same manner that few from Hong Kong once braved gunfire to reach Peking (unless to invest and profit). Few Israeli laborers are going to the West Bank to seek construction jobs. In this vein is the Muslim world's longing for the very soil of America. Even in the crucible of war, we have discovered that our worst critics love us in the concrete as much as they hate us in the abstract.

For all the frothing, it seems that millions of our purported enemies wish to visit, study, or (better yet) live in the United States — and this is true not just of Westernized professors or globe-trotting tycoons but of hijackers, terrorists, the children of the Taliban, the offspring of Iranian mullahs, and the spoiled teenage brats of our Gulf critics. The terrorists visited lap dancers, took out frequent-flier miles, spent hours on the Internet, had cell phones strapped to their hips, and hobnobbed in Las Vegas — parasitic on a culture not their own, fascinated with toys they could not make, and always ashamed that their lusts grew more than they could be satisfied. Until September 11, their ilk had been like fleas on a lazy, plump dog, gnashing their tiny proboscises to gain bloody nourishment or inflict small welts on a distracted host who found them not worth the scratch.

This dual loathing and attraction for things Western is characteristic of the highest echelon of the terrorists themselves, often Western-educated, English-speaking, and hardly poor. Emblematic is the evil genius of al-Qaida, the sinister Dr. al-Zawahiri: he grew up in Cairo affluence, his family enmeshed in all the Westernized institutions of Egypt.

Americans find this Middle Eastern cultural schizophrenia maddening, especially in its inability to fathom that all the things that Muslim visitors profess to hate — equality of the sexes, cultural freedom, religious tolerance, egalitarianism, free speech, and secular rationalism — are precisely what give us the material things that they want in the first place. CDs and sexy bare midriffs are the fruits of a society that values freedom, unchecked inquiry, and individual expression more than the dictates of state or church; wild freedom and wild materialism are part of the American character. So bewildered Americans now ask themselves: Why do so many of these anti-Americans, who profess hatred of the West and reverence for the purity of an energized Islam or a fiery Palestine, enroll in Chico State or UCLA instead of madrassas in Pakistan or military academies in Iraq?

Naval Institute Proceedings: Interview: Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson makes a fascinating point in his interview with the Naval Institute Proceedings:

If the United States has singular military power, then a lot of forces in the world vie to use that power for some particular agenda. When it's used in such a way, the United States is considered part of the global community. When it's not, they call it unilateralism. One concrete example is when nearly 200,000 Europeans were butchered in the heart of Europe, and no European power did much of anything. Some 57 days later, the U.S. Air Force removed [Yugoslavia President] Slobodan Milosevic. Before we intervened, they were calling us isolationists. After we intervened, they were calling us interventionists. But while we were intervening, they more or less approved.

The world competes for the attention, the influence, and the use of this power. And when you combine that with envy and jealousy, it's very hard to be popular. You never satisfy everybody.

Microscopic view

In Microscopic view, Steven Den Beste explains something that always seemed quite natural to me, but not at all clear to many people — that we can selfishly protect our own interests while deposing tyrants:

We are not, however, doing this out of altruism. We are not trying to give them a liberalized western democracy because we're evangelistic liberal democrats (with both "liberal" and "democrat" taking historical meanings). We are bringing reform to Iraq out of narrow self interest. We have to foster reform in the Arab/Muslim world because it's the only real way in the long run to make them stop trying to kill us.

There is thus no inconsistency with the fact that we fought a war to free Iraq's people from Saddam's cruelty while simultaneously not seeming willing to do the same for North Korea, whose people are probably suffering even more badly. At the moment, it doesn't appear to be in our narrow self interest to do that for the people of NK.

It is the leftists who claim to be motivated by compassion for the victimized peoples of the world; you'd think they'd not only be cheering for the war in Iraq, and also trying to advocate doing the same thing in North Korea. For them to oppose both wars is inconsistent with their pretensions.

Victor Davis Hanson on Iraq on National Review Online

Victor Davis Hanson on Iraq on National Review Online gives a remarkably positive summary of the war in Iraq:

Thanks to these resolute policies, after a brief three-week war and a mere four months of occupation, the Baathists are deposed, an Iraq national council is meeting, and the Middle East is in the midst of a vast reappraisal — at the cost, so far, of 200 brave soldiers. Where critics see turmoil — chaos in Iraq, saber-rattling with Iran, and banditry in Afghanistan — there are in fact the hard birth-pangs of consensual government, and the dying of an old order of both fascism and theocracy.

Pizza Cuts Cancer Risk?

Now this is good news! Pizza Cuts Cancer Risk?:

A study of 8,000 Italians found that regular pizza-eaters were 59 percent less likely to contract cancer of the esophagus, while the risk of developing cancer of the colon fell by 26 percent.

"We knew that tomato sauce was protective against certain tumors, but we certainly didn't expect that pizza as a whole would provide such strong protection," researcher Silvano Gallus told Sunday's La Repubblica newspaper.

I have to wonder though, if you're Italian, and you're not eating pizza, aren't you likely eating something with even more tomato sauce, like pasta?

Why nitrate?

I stumbled across some amusing history in Why nitrate?, an article that explains why Kodak used something as explosive as nitrocellulose for filmstock:

It was created to replace ivory, which was expensive, and becoming scare since the Elephants were being killed at a faster rate than they were reproducing. Initially, nitrocellulose was used for billiard balls, cufflinks, combs and other toiletry items, as a replacement for ivory since the cost of making it was so cheap. Even then, it was highly flammable. If you hit a pool ball hard enough it would explode. In fact, there's a gag in a Buster Keaton film when he uses pool balls like grenades while being chased. Nitrocellulose combs and cufflinks used to start on fire when people smoked near them. Despite it's danger, it was so cheap to make many people liked it and it allowed middle class people to afford the luxury items reserved for the wealthy in the ivory days.
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It was when the French and later Americans actually started projecting the nitrate film onto large screens with brighter Carbon Arc illumination that the problems started. The film shrank in the exchanges and if it jammed in the projector you had a major fire on your hands. An early screening in France at the turn of the century started a nitrate fire that killed a hundred patrons and there were nitrate fires in vaults, labs and theaters throughout its history. Di-acetate safety film was developed in the twenties by Kodak and Pathe but only used for the amateur and non-commercial markets because it shrank more rapidly than Nitrate. It wasn't until 1948 that slow shrinking, slow burning tri-acetate safety film was adopted by the industry and the nitrate phased out.

Blind Spots Plague Newer Car Models

Ah, I'm not the only one to notice this! Blind Spots Plague Newer Car Models:

Some of the coolest new cars have a problematic feature: bigger blind spots. As vehicles become more stylish and aerodynamic, the windows are shrinking and rear ends are rising, making it tougher for drivers to see what's around them. This isn't only an issue for high-riding SUVs. The small back windows and big headrests in some low-slung models can also obscure objects to the rear or cars in the next lane. Both the Toyota Celica and the Stratus, for instance, have backends that slope upward, sometimes completely blocking the driver's view of cars that are tailgating.

The last few cars I've rented have had terrible visibility. I just thought it was an American-car thing.

Why You Waste So Much Money

Modern, behavorial economics looks at how people are systematically irrational in their choices. Why You Waste So Much Money gives some examples:

A three-year study of about 8,000 gym-membership records from the Boston area found about 80% of gym members with a monthly contract were paying significantly more than if they had gone on a pay-per-use basis. That's because members went to the gym an average of less than five times per month, far less than they thought they'd go. The result: Average users paid $17 per workout -- even when a $10 'pay per use' option existed. That adds up. Members were losing about $700 over the life of the gym contract, compared with the pay-per-visit option.
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"Zero percent" teaser-rate offers on credit cards are a telling example. Consumers often choose cards with the lowest teaser rates, ignoring the fact that they may be paying 15% or more after the teaser rate expires. That's because they vow to switch their debt somewhere else when the introductory rate expires. However, most people fail to transfer their balances. Customers should pay more attention to how long the teaser rate lasts, and to the rate that kicks in after the teaser rate expires.

Of course, I was spending something like $15/month for my gym membership and going three times a week. (Now I lift at home, when I lift...)

New Insights Into Autism

New Insights Into Autism reports on a recent study:

The study in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association finds that a small head circumference at birth followed by a sudden growth spurt of the head before the end of the first year is a reliable early warning sign of autism.
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National statistics on autism spectrum disorder are hard to come by, but the incidence has been rising mysteriously. The disorder, which ranges from severe to moderate cases, affects an estimated one in 160 children in the U.S., according to UCSD researchers. It is typically diagnosed between ages 2 and 4, based on a child's behavior — delayed speech, difficulties with social interactions, poor attention, impaired exploration of the environment and inappropriate emotional responses.
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The cause of the small brain size at birth is unknown. But the abnormally sped-up brain growth, says Dr. Courchesne, likely reflects excessive numbers of brain cells, failure of the brain to prune the hundreds of synapses that connect one neuron to another, or both. Normally, experiences sculpt the developing brain; unneeded or unused synapses are pruned away. Autistic children, in contrast, seem to suffer from the neurological equivalent of electrical overload: too many impulses, thoughts and sensations in their brain.
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[T]he scientists found that the head size at birth of the autistic children was, on average, in the 25th percentile (smaller than 75% of other newborns). But most of these children quickly began a period of such rapid brain growth that, by 6 to 14 months, they landed in the 84th percentile. By 4 or 5, their brain was the size of a typical 12-year old's.

Americans Are Gaining, but 'Ideal' Weight Keeps Shrinking

While the title of the article is a bit misleading, Americans Are Gaining, but 'Ideal' Weight Keeps Shrinking presents some interesting history:

Sixty years ago, Metropolitan Life Insurance created the first widely accepted charts setting ideal weights for American men and women. 'Overweight is so common,' the company declared at the time, 'that it constitutes a national health problem of the first order.'

I didn't realize "overweight" was a noun, and I didn't realize it was already a national health problem sixty years ago.

Naturally, "ideal" weights have changed over the years.

Until the early 20th century, however, an extra 10, 20 or even 30 pounds of flesh was considered a sign of robust health — a buffer against so-called wasting diseases, such as tuberculosis. In her prime, the actress Lillian Russell, after whom the "American Beauty" rose was named, weighed 200 pounds. During his presidency, which started in 1909, William Howard Taft weighed more than 300 pounds.

A few thoughts:

• Until the early 20th century, an extra 10, 20, or even 30 pounds of flesh probably meant you were almost as big as a trim 21st-century American. And if you were a farmer or laborer, it might have been lean mass.
• Lillian Russell was not 200 pounds in her youth, and she wore a corset. That tends to shift the extra weight to where it's welcome.
• Taft did not look good at 300 pounds, and he was the butt of many jokes.

Some stats:

In 1941, for example, an average 5-foot-10-inch 35-year-old man weighed about 171 pounds. Metropolitan Life's weight chart for men, published in 1943, set the desirable weight for that man at 159.
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By 1963, the average 5-foot-10-inch 35-year-old man weighed 169 pounds. Luckily for him, Metropolitan Life had just revised its weight charts, resetting his ideal weight to 165, six pounds heavier than the 1943 charts.
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In 1983, Metropolitan Life again revised its charts to reflect new health and mortality data. Desirable weights were raised for most people, roughly two to eight pounds depending on height and frame size.

Interestingly, I'd never read the history of the body-mass index before:

While some health professionals still use Metropolitan Life's weight charts, many others have begun using another gauge of fat: body mass index, a stricter measure for many people. Developed by a Belgian statistician, Adolphe Quetelet, in the 19th century, the formula (weight in kilograms divided by the square of one's height in meters) in 1998 became the U.S. government's official standard of healthy weights. Using the new definition, an additional 25 million Americans instantly qualified as fat or obese. Today, about 97 million adults in America are considered overweight.

One of my fitness goals was to reach a BMI of 30 — technically obese — at single-digit body-fat. Technically, a six-foot, 221-pound bodybuilder has the same BMI as a six-foot, 221-pound couch potato.

The Real World

Theodore Dalrymple opens The Real World with a few simple truths that really hit home (at least for me):

Just as city-bred people find themselves surprised and alarmed by the intensity of natural darkness in the countryside, so many young people now feel uneasy, almost to the point of agitation, when confronted with silence. Without an incessant background din of music, radio, or television, they cannot (or say they cannot) concentrate. It is as if their own unaided thoughts alarmed them, and they suffered an addiction to distraction.

I am city-bred (or suburb-bred), and I can't see a damned thing at night without street lights. Also, everyone used to look at me like I was crazy when I said I didn't listen to the radio during my morning commute. (In fact, my old car had no radio. I had planned on getting something higher-end than the base factory equipment — until I found out I enjoyed the silence just fine.)

Anyway, Dalrymple's main point follows:

It is hardly surprising, then, if many people now gain their sense of reality not by contact with reality itself, but through television. What happens on the screen is more real to them than what happens all around them. Reality and virtual reality have changed their order of importance in their mental economy.

Last week, I was teaching a medical student when the police brought into our ward a man who that morning had stabbed his girlfriend to death and then had taken an overdose. He still had his girlfriend's blood on his feet.

The killer was not a habitual criminal. Indeed, he had never been in trouble with the police before in his 30 years. An immigrant who came to Britain four years previously, he had gone to live with his girlfriend at her invitation, but she had soon tired of him and began to taunt him unmercifully about his lack of sexual prowess. He became intensely jealous of her former lovers. That morning, they had had a violent quarrel, and she threatened him with a kitchen knife. He grabbed it from her, but still she taunted him. He stabbed her once, non-fatally, but still she continued her stream of insults. Then he stabbed her two or three times, and she died. He took his overdose and called the police.

His account of the events was of the greatest lucidity. Evidently, he felt compelled to speak. He appeared to have the gift of narrative. When he came to the fatal stabbing, he began to cry. "I've committed the biggest sin there is," he said. "I've taken the life of another, and now I must pay the price."

When the patient left my room, the medical student, a middle-class 22-year-old, was visibly shaken. He had never heard anything like this confession before. He struggled to put his thoughts into words.

"Phew!" he said, shaking his head. "It's just like on TV."

And you can't get more real than that.

Studies in Intelligence

Studies in Intelligence describes how FDR, despite his familiarity with then-new-fangled surveillance gear, trusted the Russians completely "and was bugged like no other American president in history":

Roosevelt was no stranger to technical surveillance. In 1939, piqued by an incident in which he believed that the press had deliberately misquoted him, he had a secret recording system installed in the White House as a means of self-protection. Since German tape-recording technology had not yet found its way to America, something had to be invented. FDR's assistants took the problem to David Sarnoff of the Radio Corporation of America. In June 1940, Sarnoff personally presented the President with a "continuous-film recording machine" that made use of motion-picture sound film. Set in a wire cage in a room beneath the Oval Office, the device was activated either by the President using a switch inside his desk drawer or by his technician down below throwing a switch on the machine itself. A single microphone poked out through a lamp on FDR's desk.

Between 23 August and 8 November, 1939, during his campaign for an unprecedented third term, the President recorded fourteen of twenty-one press conferences held in his office, plus a number of private conversations, the latter possibly by mistake. It seems that he never used the system to entrap anyone, and no one knows why he stopped it. Relatively innocent by today's standards of invasion, it nevertheless demonstrates that the President was acquainted with listening devices before his conferences with Stalin.

In the very year of the Teheran conference, he was reminded of hidden microphones when watching Mission to Moscow, a movie based on a book of that title by Joseph E. Davies, America's second Ambassador to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Produced in 1943 with the President's blessing, possibly even at his explicit request, this blatant piece of propaganda was designed to drum up public enthusiasm for a political shotgun wedding: It colored Stalin as a simple, practical man with whom one could do business; rhapsodized about Soviet construction, government, and politics; and justified the Soviet blood purges, the Moscow show trials, and Stalin's two-year pact with Hitler, which had ended when Hitler turned the tables on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941.

Attempting to forestall any criticism of the Soviet system, Davies even contrived to make a brief for bugging. In one scene, set in the American Embassy in Moscow, the Ambassador's assistants warn him of listening devices, but he rebukes them severely:

I say nothing outside the Kremlin that I wouldn't say to Stalin's face. Do you? . . . We're here in a sense as guests of the Soviet government, and I'm going to believe they trust the United States as a friend until they prove otherwise. Is that clear?

When the assistant persists that still, after all, there may be microphones, Davies, played with aplomb by FDR's favorite actor, Walter Huston, cuts him off: "Then let 'em hear! We'll be friends that much faster!"

The final irony

In The final irony, Zoe Williams (a Brit) tackles irony (using some British allusions I don't quite get):

Pretty much everything is ironic these days. Irony is used as a synonym for cool, for cynicism, for detachment, for intelligence; it's cited as the end of civilisation, as well as its salvation. Pretty much every form of culture claims to be shot through with it, even (especially) the ones that conspicuously aren't. I read last week that Bruce Forsyth hosting Have I Got News For You was an 'ironic statement', as if you could ascend into irony just by being old, as you used to with wisdom. I read, too, that it was ironic for Alan Millburn to leave his job to spend more time with his family, when the doctors and nurses under his care don't have that facility; well, it's not ironic, it's just standard-issue self-interest, with maybe a smattering of hypocrisy. I've read claims of an 'ironic' interest in Big Brother — nope. Lazy, maybe. Possibly postmodern. Not ironic.

We have a grave problem with this word (well, in fact, it's not really grave — but I'm not being ironic when I call it that, I'm being hyperbolic. Though often the two amount to the same thing. But not always).
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Most pressingly, though, there are a number of misconceptions about irony that are peculiar to recent times. The first is that September 11 spelled the end of irony. The second is that the end of irony would be the one good thing to come out of September 11. The third is that irony characterises our age to a greater degree than it has done any other. The fourth is that Americans can't do irony, and we can. The fifth is that the Germans can't do irony, either (and we still can). The sixth is that irony and cynicism are interchangeable. The seventh is that it's a mistake to attempt irony in emails and text messages, even while irony characterises our age, and so do emails. And the eighth is that "post-ironic" is an acceptable term - it is very modish to use this, as if to suggest one of three things: i) that irony has ended; ii) that postmodernism and irony are interchangeable, and can be conflated into one handy word; or iii) that we are more ironic than we used to be, and therefore need to add a prefix suggesting even greater ironic distance than irony on its own can supply. None of these things is true.

Now, after all that effort numbering and sub-numbering the points, I'm going to deal with them in the wrong order. That isn't ironic, it's just a bit sloppy.

He and she: What's the real difference?

He and she: What's the real difference? reports on a fairly simple computer program that analyzes text (looking at 50 different features) to determine whether the author is male or female:

This summer, a group of computer scientists — including Koppel, a professor at Israeli's Bar-Ilan University — are publishing two papers in which they describe the successful results of a gender-detection experiment. The scholars have developed a computer algorithm that can examine an anonymous text and determine, with accuracy rates of better than 80 percent, whether the author is male or female.

How does it work?

The odd thing is that the language differences the researchers discovered would seem, at first blush, to be rather benign. They pertain not to complex, ''important'' words, but to the seemingly quotidian parts of speech: the ifs, ands, and buts.

For example, Koppel's group found that the single biggest difference is that women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns-''I'', ''you'', ''she'', ''myself'', or ''yourself'' and the like. Men, in contrast, are more likely to use determiners — ''a,'' ''the,'' ''that,'' and ''these'' — as well as cardinal numbers and quantifiers like ''more'' or ''some.'' As one of the papers published by Koppel's group notes, men are also more likely to use ''post-head noun modification with an of phrase'' — phrases like ''garden of roses.''

Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology.

In Lights, Camera, Action. Marxism, Semiotics, Narratology., David Weddle — who has a BS in cinema from USC and who works in the film industry — describes his daughter's UC Santa Barbara film theory exam:

On the exam, I found the following, from an essay by film theorist Kristin Thompson:

"Neoformalism posits that viewers are active — that they perform operations. Contrary to psychoanalytic criticism, I assume that film viewing is composed mostly of nonconscious, preconscious, and conscious activities. Indeed, we may define the viewer as a hypothetical entity who responds actively to cues within the film on the basis of automatic perceptual processes and on the basis of experience. Since historical contexts make the protocols of these responses inter-subjective, we may analyze films without resorting to subjectivity...According to Bordwell, 'The organism constructs a perceptual judgment on the basis of nonconscious inferences.' "

Then came the question itself:

"What kind of pressure would Metz's description of 'the imaginary signifier' or Baudry's account of the subject in the apparatus put on the ontology and epistemology of film implicit in the above two statements?"

I looked up at my daughter. She smiled triumphantly. "Welcome to film theory," she chirped.

Welcome to film theory indeed.

I read from my daughter's study guide to Gary A. Randall, who has served as president of Orion Television, Spelling Television, and as the executive producer of the TV series "Any Day Now." "That's what your daughter's being taught?" he says. "That's just elitist psychobabble. It sounds like it was written by a professor of malapropism. That has absolutely no bearing on the real world. It sounds like an awfully myopic perspective of what film is really supposed to be about: touching hearts and minds and providing provocative thoughts."

From movie critic Ebert: "Film theory has nothing to do with film. Students presumably hope to find out something about film, and all they will find out is an occult and arcane language designed only for the purpose of excluding those who have not mastered it and giving academic rewards to those who have. No one with any literacy, taste or intelligence would want to teach these courses, so the bona fide definition of people teaching them are people who are incapable of teaching anything else."

The New Sex Scorecard

The New Sex Scorecard declares that "It's safe to talk about sex differences again.":

Get out the spittoon. Men produce twice as much saliva as women. Women, for their part, learn to speak earlier, know more words, recall them better, pause less and glide through tongue twisters.

Here's an interesting anatomical difference:

Gur's discovery that females have about 15 to 20 percent more gray matter than males suddenly made sense of another major sex difference: Men, overall, have larger brains than women (their heads and bodies are larger), but the sexes score equally well on tests of intelligence.

Gray matter, made up of the bodies of nerve cells and their connecting dendrites, is where the brain's heavy lifting is done. The female brain is more densely packed with neurons and dendrites, providing concentrated processing power — and more thought-linking capability.

The larger male cranium is filled with more white matter and cerebrospinal fluid. "That fluid is probably helpful," says Gur, director of the Brain Behavior Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania. "It cushions the brain, and men are more likely to get their heads banged about."

White matter, made of the long arms of neurons encased in a protective film of fat, helps distribute processing throughout the brain. It gives males superiority at spatial reasoning. White matter also carries fibers that inhibit "information spread" in the cortex. That allows a single-mindedness that spatial problems require, especially difficult ones. The harder a spatial task, Gur finds, the more circumscribed the right-sided brain activation in males, but not in females. The white matter advantage of males, he believes, suppresses activation of areas that could interfere with work.

The white matter in women's brains is concentrated in the corpus callosum, which links the brain's hemispheres, and enables the right side of the brain to pitch in on language tasks. The more difficult the verbal task, the more global the neural participation required — a response that's stronger in females.

Women have another heady advantage — faster blood flow to the brain, which offsets the cognitive effects of aging. Men lose more brain tissue with age, especially in the left frontal cortex, the part of the brain that thinks about consequences and provides self-control.

"You can see the tissue loss by age 45, and that may explain why midlife crisis is harder on men," says Gur. "Men have the same impulses but they lose the ability to consider long-term consequences."

This should come as little surprise:

Women's perceptual skills are oriented to quick — call it intuitive — people reading. Females are gifted at detecting the feelings and thoughts of others, inferring intentions, absorbing contextual clues and responding in emotionally appropriate ways. They empathize. Tuned to others, they more readily see alternate sides of an argument. Such empathy fosters communication and primes females for attachment.
[...]
Men focus first on minute detail, and operate most easily with a certain detachment. They construct rules-based analyses of the natural world, inanimate objects and events. In the coinage of Cambridge University psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen, Ph.D., they systemize.

The superiority of males at spatial cognition and females' talent for language probably subserve the more basic difference of systemizing versus empathizing. The two mental styles manifest in the toys kids prefer (humanlike dolls versus mechanical trucks); verbal impatience in males (ordering rather than negotiating); and navigation (women personalize space by finding landmarks; men see a geometric system, taking directional cues in the layout of routes).

Autism is fascinating:

In his work as director of Cambridge's Autism Research Centre, he finds that children and adults with autism, and its less severe variant Asperger syndrome, are unusual in both dimensions of perception. Its victims are "mindblind," unable to recognize people's feelings. They also have a peculiar talent for systemizing, obsessively focusing on, say, light switches or sink faucets.
[...]
Autism overwhelmingly strikes males; the ratio is ten to one for Asperger.
[...]
The more testosterone the children had been exposed to in the womb, the less able they were to make eye contact at 1 year of age. "Who would have thought that a behavior like eye contact, which is so intrinsically social, could be in part shaped by a biological factor?" he asks. What's more, the testosterone level during fetal life also influenced language skills. The higher the prenatal testosterone level, the smaller a child's vocabulary at 18 months and again at 24 months.

Lack of eye contact and poor language aptitude are early hallmarks of autism. "Being strongly attracted to systems, together with a lack of empathy, may be the core characteristics of individuals on the autistic spectrum," says Baron-Cohen. "Maybe testosterone does more than affect spatial ability and language. Maybe it also affects social ability." And perhaps autism represents an "extreme form" of the male brain.

2 Fast 4 Safety?

According to 2 Fast 4 Safety?, higher speed limits don't lead to more death — among young to middle-aged men:

[A]ccording to a recent academic study, raising speed limits to 70 miles per hour, and even higher, has no effect whatsoever on the death rates of young and middle-aged male drivers.
[...]
Like most studies that seem to grant us leave to indulge our lazy, bad habits, this one comes with an asterisk, unfortunately, that it would be cruel not to disclose (despite the fact that as a young male Westerner I'd love to bury the finding in a footnote): higher speed limits do increase the death rates of women and the elderly. The scientists can't agree on the reason for this discrepancy, and if they're wise they won't try, lest they end up confirming the prejudices of people like my old high-school buddy who cursed every time a female driver of any age had the nerve to appear in the mirrors of his Chevy Nova.
[...]
A few years ago in Montana, my home state, there was no posted speed limit on highways, just a vague rule about driving in a ''reasonable and prudent'' manner. This haziness forced motorists to think, adjusting their speeds according to the conditions while hoping that lurking state troopers agreed with them. I felt flattered by this invitation to use my judgment and drove more consciously than I ever had. I felt like a grown-up. Then they changed the law, instituting a top limit of 75 m.p.h. Suddenly, I was a rebellious child again. Whether it was day or night, raining or sunny, I treated 75 as a new minimum -- as the opening bid in a floating poker game.

Seventy-five, you say? I'll raise you four. No sirens yet? I'll raise you six.
[...]
A friend of mine, Ross, a former Navy pilot who regularly drives between Phoenix and Seattle by way of empty Nevada, argues persuasively that velocity isn't as treacherous as it's said to be; the real risk is variations in velocity. ''When you're in the Navy flying formation at 350 knots'' he says, ''everybody's fine, but if one guy's going 340, you've got a problem.'' For Ross — and I've heard of experts who agree with him — unrealistically low speed limits widen the gap between law-abiding slowpokes and the restless majority, resulting in lots of risky passing maneuvers and general chaos.

Ozeki Asashoryu a Quick Study

After reading about Asashoryu's disgraceful hair-pulling episode, I had to read up on him a bit. I found this article: Ozeki Asashoryu a Quick Study:

Formerly a sumo wrestler in Mongolia, Asashoryu reacts instinctively to each situation. Of the 10 wins in the Autumn basho at Tokyo's Ryogoku Kogukikan, Asashoryu won with eight different techniques — from uwatenage (upper-hand throw) to sotogake (a tripping of the opponent's outer foot), a trick more often seen in judo.

The Japan Times naturally mentions judo, but footsweeps are a staple of traditional Mongolian wrestling.

Standing 185 cm and weighing 137 kg, Asashoryu is somewhat smaller than the average wrestler. He said he was advised by his family, famous in his native land as an elite Mongolian wrestling clan, to practice twice as much as his peers to grab the upper edge.

'My family always told me the more I practice, the stronger I will be,' said Asashoryu, whose father reached the sekiwake rank in Mongolian sumo.

One of Asashoryu's three brothers, Dolgorsuren Sumiyabazar, wrestled in two Olympics (2000 and 1996) for Mongolia.

Interestingly, Dolgorsuren Sumiyabazar fought Tsuyoshi Kohsaka in New Japan Pro Wrestling. He lost — by doctor stoppage. (Maybe it wasn't a "worked" fight...)

He's also scheduled to compete in K-1 and Pride:

Sumiyabazar is the second oldest of five brothers. The oldest brother is a police officer. Sumiyabazar's younger brothers are "Blue Wolf", a wrestler in the New Japan Pro-Wrestling organization, and Asashoryu, an Ozeki-ranked Sumo wrestler in Japan whose real name is Dagvadorj Dolgorsuren. He began training in Mongolian Sumo and amateur wrestling at the age of 12. He then went on to become the Mongolian Sumo champion in both 1998 and 1999 out of a field of 550 competitors.

Sumiyabazar's accomplishments also include being a 7-time Mongolian amateur wrestling champion and a silver medal in the Asian Games. Furthermore, he wrestled Kurt Angle, who is currently wrestling in WWE, to a tie at the Atlanta Olympic Games. Regrettably, he lost to Kurt by 1 point in overtime. His brother, the Ozeki-ranked Asashoryu, said that Sumiyabazar is 10 times stronger than himself. Sumiyabazar's participation in both PRIDE and K-1 rings has finally been agreed upon. I'm really looking forward to seeing what Sumiyabazar, a man with a 560 lb. bench press, can do in the ring as a professional fighter.

By the way, Asashoryu's Mongolian name is Dolgorsuren Dagvadorj.

Japan Scandal: Hair-Pulling in Sumo Ring

I knew that Mongolia had a strong wrestling tradition. I didn't know Mongolians had risen through the ranks of sumo. Evidently one Mongolian sumo wrestler pulled another's hair in a bout — a terrible no-no, as Japan Scandal: Hair-Pulling in Sumo Ring explains:

For the first time ever, a wrestler ranked at the top of Japan's venerable sport of sumo wrestling was disqualified for grabbing a fistful of his opponent's topknot and yanking him down to the dirt — and Japan is duly scandalized.

"Topknot grabber, unheard of," read a headline Friday in the nation's largest newspaper, the Yomiuri.

"A first that has sullied the honor of sumo's highest rank," blared another in the Nikkan Sports tabloid, a photo of the hair-grab covering its front page.

At the center of the fracas is grand champion Asashoryu, a fiery, heavily muscled 22-year-old from Mongolia who is arguably the best wrestler in the ring today.

In the final bout Thursday, he was matched against a lower-ranking wrestler, Kyokushuzan, also from Mongolia. After a barrage of powerful thrusts that had his rival reeling, Asashoryu inexplicably grabbed Kyokushuzan's hair and yanked him down.

The judges immediately called him on the transgression and ruled Kyokushuzan the victor. It was the first time a grand champion had ever lost a bout because of a foul, let alone been cited for something as embarrassing as pulling hair.

Chilean Experts Say Beached 'Blob' a Sperm Whale

I guess the mystery's solved. From Chilean Experts Say Beached 'Blob' a Sperm Whale:

Chilean scientists said on Friday their study of a huge blob of flesh found on a Pacific beach about three weeks ago concluded it was the carcass of a sperm whale, ending speculation of a giant octopus.
[...]
Researchers at the Museum of Natural History in Santiago were the first to reach a conclusion after analyzing samples of the decaying specimen and finding glands of a sperm whale.
[...]
When a sperm whale dies at sea, it rots until it becomes a "skeleton suspended in a semi-liquid mass within a bag of skin and blubber," the scientists said. Eventually, the skin tears and the bones sinks while the skin and blubber float.

"This washes up and has the appearance of an octopus because the spermaceti organ keeps its bulky shape," they added.

The spermaceti is a large bulbous organ that forms a sort of forehead and contains a milky wax which early whalers likened to sperm fluid.

Cell-Based Detector Lights Up for Deadly Germs

From Cell-Based Detector Lights Up for Deadly Germs:

A new biodetector made with the body's own immune system cells literally lights up when it encounters anthrax, plague or other deadly germs, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
[...]
It uses B cells — the immune system cells that produce the antibodies that in turn seek out invaders, said inventor Todd Rider of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[...]
"These are a type of white blood cell designed by nature to detect bacteria and viruses. Other people had developed relatively artificial methods using PCR (polymerase chain reaction) and amino acids, which are time-consuming."
[...]
Rider's method, described in Friday's issue of the journal Science, uses mouse B cells that have been genetically engineered in two ways.

First, they contain a gene from jellyfish that lights up.

"It comes from the same jellyfish that is tortured to give us green fluorescent protein," said Rider. GFP is commonly used in scientific experiments because it is easily spliced into an animal or plant and glows under ultraviolet light.

Rider, a biologist and engineer, used a different jellyfish protein called aequorin that emits a blue light.

Second, the B cells were also engineered to recognize specific pathogens.

"Our funding comes mainly from DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and of course they are interested in military-type applications," Rider said.

"We can detect smallpox, anthrax, the Yersinia pestis bacteria that cause plagues, equine encephalitis," Rider said.

"We also developed cells to detect a few non-military pathogens such as the foot and mouth disease virus, so it will be useful for agriculture."

Scientists Cheer Return of Canadian Orca Whale

According to Scientists Cheer Return of Canadian Orca Whale, a "killer whale" scientists had nursed back to health demonstrated a worrisome habit while separated from her pod:

Scientists said Springer looked healthy and showed no interest in playing with boats, a potentially dangerous habit she developed near Seattle, apparently because she was lonely and wanted social interaction.

Geniuses, Criminals Do Best Work in Their 30s

It's good to see that I still have time to become an evil genius — at least according to Geniuses, Criminals Do Best Work in Their 30s:

Geniuses and criminals may not seem to have much in common but they both do their best work in their 30s — and mainly to impress the opposite sex.

Let's just hope, for humanity's sake, that no one explains to all those young scientists that chicks don't dig Nature papers.

When Satoshi Kanazawa, of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, studied biographies of prominent, mostly male scientists he discovered that they made their key discovery before their mid 30s, around the same age that criminal behavior peaks.

He believes the male competitive urge to attract females is a driving force for the scientific and criminal achievements, according to New Scientist magazine.
[...]
"Kanazawa also found that marriage dampens the drive in both arenas," the magazine added.

Hmm...that whole criminal mastermind thing has been looking less attractive to me lately...

Peru Doctor Performs Brain Surgery with Store Drill

Creepy. But cool. From Peru Doctor Performs Brain Surgery with Store Drill:

Lacking the proper instruments, a Peruvian doctor at a state hospital in the Andean highlands used a drill and pliers to perform brain surgery on a man who had been injured in a fight, the doctor said on Thursday.

'We have no (neurosurgical) instruments at the hospital. ... He was dying, so I had no choice but to run to a hardware store to buy a drill and use the pliers that I fix my car with, of course after sterilizing them,' Cesar Venero told Reuters in a telephone interview.

The patient, Centeno Quispe, 47, had arrived at the hospital in Andahuaylas, 240 miles southeast of Lima, after being hit in the head with a metal object in a street fight, Venero said.

'I drilled holes in his skull in a circle, leaving spaces of 5 millimeters, took out the bone with the pliers and removed the clots that were putting pressure on his brain,' he said.

Mary Had a Little Lamb -- and It Ate Nitrogen

According to Mary Had a Little Lamb -- and It Ate Nitrogen, a not-so-successful company produces animal feed from explosives:

Shaboom the sheep's favorite meal consists of animal feed made from nitrogen-based chemicals and other dismantled gun propellants -- one of the more creative uses Albuquerque company TPL Inc. is finding for unwanted military munitions.
[...]
TPL has kept the technology and the ingredients of its farm animal food made from munitions a secret, which is OK by other more conventional feed producers because Shaboom's explosive snack has proved to be a dud in the commercial market.

TPL has been in the business of finding commercial uses for spent military munitions for over a decade and does a lot of business recycling spent U.S. Army munitions.

Hong Kong Officials Seize 10,000 Turtles

I find Chinese dietary habits mildly disturbing. And, for some reason, I feel particularly bad for endangered turtles. From Hong Kong Officials Seize 10,000 Turtles:

Hong Kong customs agents have seized more than 10,000 endangered turtles and tortoises en route from Malaysia and probably destined for dining tables in China.

The Malayan box turtles and true tortoises were found Wednesday in a China-bound container said to be holding watermelons, the Customs and Excise Department said. Only four tortoises were alive.

The animals, valued at $174,000, would likely have ended up in soup pots or possibly made into 'turtle jelly,' a gooey black substance eaten by many southern Chinese who believe it has detoxifying properties and can improve complexions.

Endangered species bound for China often pass through Hong Kong. People smuggling endangered species into Hong Kong can be jailed for two years and fined up to $640,000.

Noise From Phone Can Chase Mosquitoes

Fascinating. From Noise From Phone Can Chase Mosquitoes:

South Korea's largest mobile phone operator said Thursday that it will offer cell phone users a new noise service that it says will repel mosquitoes.

SK Telecom Co. said subscribers can pay 3,000 won (US$2.50) to download a sound wave that is inaudible to human ears but annoys mosquitoes within a range of three feet. Customers can then play the sound by hitting a few buttons on their mobile phones.

Of course, it uses up the battery as much as ringing constantly would.

Singapore Lifts Ban on Chewing Gum

I find Singapore endlessly amusing. According to Singapore Lifts Ban on Chewing Gum, they've finally lifted their ban on gum. Sort of:

The government of this island nation announced Thursday it will allow chewing gum, long-banned here, to be sold — although only from pharmacies.

The decision stems from a recently signed free trade agreement between the United States and Singapore, and follows lobbying from the U.S. Congress and American gum makers.

Squeaky-clean Singapore outlawed the import, manufacture and sale of chewing gum in 1992, complaining that spent wads were fouling the city-state's famously tidy pavements, buildings, buses and subway trains.
[...]
Singapore initially agreed to allow gum to be sold only with a doctor's prescription, but that didn't satisfy U.S. negotiators.

Pharmacies may sell dentist-recommended gum that aids "dental and oral hygiene" once the trade pact takes effect, expected to be by the end of the year, a government spokeswoman said.

I didn't realize the ban only went back to 1992.

Religion, Defense Still Stand in Way As European Nations Try to Unite

Religion, Defense Still Stand in Way As European Nations Try to Unite describes the many parallels between the struggles to from the EU and the US:

Six heavily disputed subjects, which mirror questions that faced the U.S. Constitutional Convention in 1787, will provide the EU Constitution's biggest tests:

• How much power should a central government have?
• How much should individual states and citizens contribute to their common defense?
• What is the right balance of power between small and big states in the union?
• Who should represent the union abroad and how?
• What's the proper separation of church and state?
• What happens if a government refuses to ratify the constitution?

That Bully Did Hit You Harder

This may explain a lot of sparring sessions. From That Bully Did Hit You Harder:

"Given that I have two small children, I was just curious about when they get into squabbles, when both say the other child hit them harder, whether this could be explained by a predictive mechanism," said Daniel Wolpert of University College London, who led the study.

He and colleagues set up a series of "tit for tat" experiments in which they asked pairs of volunteers to take turns pressing one another's fingers with equal force.

They were asked to press back equally, but they didn't, Wolpert and colleagues report in Friday's issue of the journal Science. "The forces rapidly escalate and they escalate by around 40 percent per turn," Wolpert said in a telephone interview.

Interestingly, it's not all "psychological":

To see if physical rather than psychological mechanisms were at work, Wolpert's team did another experiment in which the volunteers were put up against a machine — and the same thing happened.

The team of neurologists and psychiatrists believe there is a reason for this — a mechanism that filters out your own perception of what your body is doing when executing basic movements.

"The key message is our findings show we are not as aware of our actions as we think," Wolpert said.

Just before making a movement, a signal is sent to the brain to tell it what to expect. If the movement is what the brain anticipated, it filters it out, leaving you not fully aware of the force you are applying.

"It is a way of filtering out uninteresting information. It just happens to lead to this consequence," Wolpert said.

"This mechanism also explains why you cannot tickle yourself — the brain already knows what sensation to expect and alters the brain activity responsible for the sensation accordingly," said Dr. Sukhwinder Shergill, who also worked on the study.

"But when someone else tickles you there is no chance to adjust your brain perception, and you feel the full effects."

Possible Gene Found for Lou Gehrig's Disease

A friend's father recently succumbed to ALS, so this naturally caught my eye: Possible Gene Found for Lou Gehrig's Disease:

European researchers said on Sunday they had identified a new gene that, when mutated, almost doubles the risk of developing a paralyzing disease.

People with the mutations had 1.8 times the risk of developing amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as motor neuron disease or Lou Gehrig's disease, they found.

Peter Carmeliet of the Flanders Interuniversity Institute for Biotechnology in Leuven, Belgium, and colleagues also found that mice bred with a similar mutation were unusually prone to paralytic disease.

The gene they looked at, VEGF, had not previously been associated with ALS, which affects between 1 and 2 in every 100,000 people around the world.

ALS usually develops after age 50, causing gradual weakness, then paralysis and death. There is no cure, although some people progress more quickly than others.

Carmeliet's team had found that mice with a defective version of VEGF, which caused their bodies to produce less VEGF protein than normal, developed a disorder similar to ALS.

They looked at samples from 1,900 people from Sweden, Belgium and Britain and found those with certain mutations of VEGF produced low levels of the protein, too — and had a 1.8 times higher risk of ALS than the general population.

Furthermore, when they gave VEGF to mice with artificially induced ALS symptoms, the mice got better, they reported in the journal Nature Genetics.

The findings suggest that VEGF plays a role in ALS, they wrote. "The findings also raise the intriguing question whether more long-term treatment with VEGF might delay the onset or slow the progression of adult-onset motoneuron degeneration as well," they wrote.

VEGF, short for vascular endothelial growth factor, is known to play an important role in blood vessel growth and development, so the finding may also shed light on the underlying causes of ALS.

Black Belt Priest to Watch Indian Shrine

One more link between Buddhism and Hinduism, from Black Belt Priest to Watch Indian Shrine:

Armed guards are forbidden inside one of India's most revered religious shrines. So authorities want to assign its security to a trusted insider: a Hindu priest with a black belt in karate.

K. Seshadri, 42, has been asked by officials at the Venkateswara temple in the southern city of Tirupati to teach younger priests to defend themselves and the temple from terrorists and other attackers, The Hindustan Times reported Tuesday.

The temple, located in Andhra Pradesh state, is visited each day by some 30,000 devotees who worship the Hindu god Venkateswara.

The state government's security adviser asked Seshadri to train the young priests, who will form an inner ring of protection around the idol, Seshadri said.

Really though, the priests should be learning kung-fu. You'd think they'd know that.

Giant Sea Creature Baffles Scientists

There's creepy stuff down there, deep under the water, and sometimes it surfaces. From Giant Sea Creature Baffles Scientists:

Chilean scientists were baffled on Tuesday by a huge, gelatinous sea creature found washed up on the southern Pacific coast and were seeking international help identifying the mystery specimen.

The dead creature was mistaken for a beached whale when first reported about a week ago, but experts who went to see it said the 40-foot-long (12-meter) mass of decomposing lumpy gray flesh apparently was an invertebrate.

"We'd never before seen such a strange specimen, We don't know if it might be a giant squid that is missing some of its parts or maybe it's a new species," said Elsa Cabrera, a marine biologist and director of the Center for Cetacean Conservation in Santiago.

Photographs showed a round leathery substance like a mammoth jelly fish, about as long as a school bus.

Cut on the Bias

Cut on the Bias describes the infuriatingly "politically correct" guidelines for textbook publishers and exam writers (here in the US):

In Michigan, the state does not allow mention of flying saucers or extraterrestrials on its test, because those subjects might imply the forbidden topic of evolution. A text illustrator wrote to say that she was not permitted to portray a birthday party because Jehovah's Witnesses do not believe in celebrating birthdays. Another illustrator told me that he was directed to airbrush the udder from his drawing of a cow because that body part was "too sexual."

A review of my book in "The Scotsman" (Edinburgh) said that a well-known local writer for children sold a story to an American textbook company, along with illustrations. The U.S. publisher, however, informed her that she could not show a little girl sitting on her grandfather's lap, as the drawing implied incest. So, the author changed the adult's face, so that the little girl was sitting on her grandmother's lap instead. A contributor to a major textbook series prepared a story comparing the great floods in 1889 in Johnstown, Pa., with those in 1993 in the Midwest, but was unable to find an acceptable photograph. The publisher insisted that everyone in the rowboats must be wearing a lifevest to demonstrate safety procedures.

She could not show a little girl sitting on her grandfather's lap, as the drawing implied incest. What is wrong with these people? And expecting everyone in a photo from 1889 to wear lifevests?

All lessons, test questions, and illustrations must reflect the following ratios: 50-50 male-female; 45% Caucasian; 25% African American; 22% Hispanic American; 5% Asian American; 5% American Indian and others; and 3% "persons with disabilities." These figures do not total 100%, nor do they represent actual U.S. Census numbers, but the principle of representation is well understood by writers and editors. American society, as represented in the textbooks, is perfectly integrated by race, ethnicity, gender, age, and disability.

These figures do not total 100%. That kind of thing is always good for a chuckle.

When it comes to illustrations in textbooks, certain images — women cooking, men acting assertive, scenes of poverty, and old people walking with the aid of a cane or a walker — are likewise considered unacceptable. The specifications for photographs, I have learned, are exquisitely detailed. Men and boys must not be larger than women and girls. Asians must not appear as shorter than non-Asians. Women must wear bras, and men must not have noticeable bulges below the waist. People must wear shoes and socks, never showing bare feet or the soles of shoes, and their shoelaces must be solid black, brown, or white. People must never gesture with their fingers, nor should anyone be depicted eating with the left hand. Things to avoid: holiday decorations and scenes in which a church or a bar appears in the background.

Men and boys must not be larger than women and girls. Asians must not appear as shorter than non-Asians. We'll just check reality at the door.