Isegoria

Very interesting. High Doses of Vitamins Ward Off Alzheimer’s:

The 4,740 participants in the five-year study were aged 65 or older when the study began in 1995.

In the first phase of the study, 200 cases of Alzheimer’s were diagnosed, and those who had been taking vitamin supplements were at a 78 percent lower risk of the disease than those who had not. At the end of the study, another 104 participants had developed the disease, and the risk factor was 64 percent lower among supplement users.

Taking a lower-dose multivitamin or one of the two vitamin supplements taken alone did not have the protective effect.

Taking a lower-dose multivitamin or one of the two vitamin supplements taken alone did not have the protective effect. Very interesting. What I find almost shocking — having read quite a few news stories about nutritional-supplement studies — is that they were willing to say the following:

High-dose vitamin supplements are rarely toxic and could have wide-ranging health benefits, the report said.

In UCLA Team Claims It Can Predict Earthquakes, Randall Parker cites a UC NewsWire article that claims that earthquakes can now be predicted months in advance:

‘Earthquake prediction is called the Holy Grail of earthquake science, and has been considered impossible by many scientists,’ said Keilis-Borok, a professor in residence in UCLA’s Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics and department of earth and space sciences. ‘It is not impossible.’

‘We have made a major breakthrough, discovering the possibility of making predictions months ahead of time, instead of years, as in previously known methods,’ Keilis-Borok said. ‘This discovery was not generated by an instant inspiration, but culminates 20 years of multinational, interdisciplinary collaboration by a team of scientists from Russia, the United States, Western Europe, Japan and Canada.’

The team includes experts in pattern recognition, geodynamics, seismology, chaos theory, statistical physics and public safety. They have developed algorithms to detect precursory earthquake patterns.

The real news story is that Keilis-Borok, the lead scientist, is 82 years old:

Kellis-Borok apparently took on earthquake prediction to give him something worthwhile to do in his old age. Incredible.

In Ritalin Exposure May Increase Risk Of Depression, Alter Reward Sensitivity, Randall Parker reports on the long-term effects of the popular ADD drug — on rats. More interesting is his secondary point:

What is amazing about this is the scale on which doctors and parents have embarked upon a massive experiment that may cause a variety of lasting changes on cognitive function. As of 1995 2.8 percent of American children were on methylphenidate (Ritalin) and that represented a sharp increase from 1.2% in 1990. Methylphenidate use is also up in Canada and some other Western countries in about the same time period.

If anyone doubts whether, when it becomes possible to do so, humans will be willing to reengineer their minds or the minds of their offspring consider the use of nervous system-altering drugs on children today. Look at how willing parents and authority figures are to embrace treatments that are not sufficiently well understood and which probably have a number of lasting effects on cognitive function thoroughout the rest of the lives of the children who are given methylphenidate and other nervous system drugs.

Michael Holland reviews The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, by Peter Lamont, a book that demonstrates “how people will believe a thing is true, despite all rational evidence to the contrary, indeed despite outright denials of its existence, if it is repeated that it is true often enough”:

It goes like this: “The fakir drew from under his knee a ball of grey twine. Taking the loose end between his teeth, he, with a quick upward motion, tossed the ball into the air. Instead of coming back to him, it kept on going up and up until out of sight and there remained only the long swaying end… [A] boy about six-years-old… walked over to the twine and began climbing up it… the boy disappeared when he had reached a point 30 or 40ft from the ground… a moment later, the twine disappeared.”

This purported to be an eye-witness account of the trick given by a couple of American travellers returning from the mysterious Orient. Within a few months, however, the editor of the Tribune was forced to come clean and admit that not only was the account bogus but that the travellers did not even exist.

Too late. By then, the account had been reprinted in newspapers and journals around the world and the denial scarcely caused a ripple. Over the next half century, the story of the rope trick gathered momentum and, more to the point, wonderful embellishments. By the mid-1930s, other “eye-witnesses” reported seeing the “fakir” pick up a knife and scramble up the “rope” after the boy. After a while, bloody limbs, a torso and, finally, a head would drop to the ground, followed by the fakir who would reassemble the pieces and the original boy would spring smiling back to life.

With each new account receiving graphic treatment in the popular (and more arcane) prints, millions believed in the trick, while thousands more tried to explain it. But they were all completely and absolutely wrong. The trick was not even an illusion; it simply did not and had never existed.