Neurologist Helen Mayberg at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, followed ten patients with major depressive disorder and seven with bipolar disorder, or manic depression, after an electrode device was implanted in the subcallosal cingulate white matter of their brains and the area continuously stimulated.Very promising, but it treatments that look great in small, initial studies often turn out to be less effective when applied on a large scale.
Deep-brain stimulation involves implanting an electrode in a patient's brain, to allow continuous electrical stimulation. All but one of twelve patients who reached the two-year point in the study had completely shed their depression or had only mild symptoms.
For psychiatrists accustomed to seeing severely depressed patients fail to respond — or fail to maintain a response — to antidepressant or cognitive therapy, these results seem near miraculous. . . .
DBS is hardly a quick fix for depression though. Not only does it involve invasive brain surgery, but recovery is usually slow. “In our study we found that many patients didn’t get well at all in the first months — but then they started to respond after a year or more of stimulation,” says Mayberg. It’s also not a cure, she notes, as patients quickly reverted to full-blown depression if stimulation of their electrodes was discontinued.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Controlling Depression with Implanted Electrodes
Nature News:
Friday, January 6, 2012
The Abandoned Islands of St. Kilda
Most modern commentators feel that the predominant theme of life on St Kilda was isolation. When Martin Martin visited the islands in 1697, the only means of making the journey was by open boat, which could take several days and nights of rowing and sailing across the ocean and was next to impossible in autumn and winter. In all seasons, waves up to 12 metres (39 ft) high lash the beach of Village Bay, and even on calmer days landing on the slippery rocks can be hazardous. Separated by distance and weather, the natives knew little of mainland and international politics. After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, it was rumoured that Prince Charles Edward Stuart and some of his senior Jacobite aides had escaped to St Kilda. An expedition was launched, and in due course British soldiers were ferried ashore to Hirta. They found a deserted village, as the St Kildans, fearing pirates, had fled to caves to the west. When the St Kildans were persuaded to come down, the soldiers discovered that the isolated natives knew nothing of the prince and had never heard of King George II either.
In the eighteenth century the island had about 100 inhabitants. In 1851, 36 emigrated to Australia, a demographic blow from which the island never recovered. In the later nineteenth century, tourist boats began to call regularly on the island, but they brought with them diseases to which the isolated islanders had no resistance, and infant mortality on the island rose to near 80 percent. By 1930, only 36 islanders remained, and they asked to be evacuated.
Even in the late 19th century, the islanders could communicate with the rest of the world only by lighting a bonfire on the summit of Conachair and hoping a passing ship might see it, or by using the "St Kilda mailboat". The mailboat was the invention of John Sands, who visited in 1877. During his stay, a shipwreck left nine Austrian sailors marooned there, and by February supplies were running low. Sands attached a message to a lifebuoy salvaged from the Peti Dubrovacki and threw it into the sea. Nine days later it was picked up in Birsay, Orkney and a rescue was arranged. The St Kildans, building on this idea, fashioned a piece of wood into the shape of a boat, attached it to a bladder made of sheepskin, and placed in it a small bottle or tin containing a message. [Above] Launched when the wind came from the north-west, two-thirds of the messages were later found on the west coast of Scotland or, less conveniently, in Norway.
Another significant feature of St Kildan life was the diet. The islanders kept sheep and a few cattle and were able to grow a limited amount of food crops such as barley and potatoes on the better-drained land in Village Bay, and in many ways the islands can be seen as large mixed farm. . . . They generally eschewed fishing because of the heavy seas and unpredictable weather. The mainstay of their food supplies was the profusion of island birds, especially gannet and fulmar. These they harvested as eggs and young birds and ate both fresh and cured. Adult puffins were also caught by the use of fowling rods. . . . An excavation of the Taigh an t-Sithiche (the "house of the faeries", above) in 1877 by Sands unearthed the remains of gannet, sheep, cattle and limpets amidst various stone tools. The building is between 1,700 and 2,500 years old, which suggests that the St Kildan diet had changed little over the millennia. Indeed the tools were recognised by the St Kildans, who could put names to them as similar devices were still in use.
The Weird Fear of Obamacare
Rick Santorum:
This is just hyperbolic nonsense, embraced by Republicans as a way to change the topic of conversation from increasing inequality to fear of big government.
I would tell you that my first priority as a president of the United States is to repeal Barack Obama's healthcare plan. I think it's the most dangerous piece of legislation, well, in many generations. It is the reason that I'm running for office. Because I believe Obamacare is a game changer. I believe Obamacare will rob America, the best way I can put it is, rob America of its soul.Um, how? Why is this a big deal? Because of subsidies for poor people to get health insurance? We've had those since the 1930s. A requirement that everyone be insured? Seems to me the requirement that all drivers buy car insurance hasn't robbed America of its soul.
This is just hyperbolic nonsense, embraced by Republicans as a way to change the topic of conversation from increasing inequality to fear of big government.
The Santorum Challenge
The Post editorial page, where they hate Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich, is today full of nice words about Rick Santorum. Does this mean he poses a real threat to Romney? I doubt it, but I guess I don't really know. The Post is a bastion of neocon warrior thinking, eager for a showdown with Iran, and Santorum at least talks the most bloody-minded line of all the Republican candidates. That explains part of their comfort with him. Another part is probably that he is the candidate most like George W. Bush, and the Post has several ex-Bushies on staff. Santorum is a "compassionate conservative," as Michael Gerson puts it today. Santorum does like to talk about the problems of the poor, but so far as I can see this is all talk. He wants poor people to get and stay married, but then so does just about everybody on both the right and the left, and Santorum has no more idea how to encourage marriage than I do. (Actually, since he flatly opposes gay marriage, I would say that he has less idea how to promote marriage than I do.) His economic plan calls for gigantic tax cuts for the rich and nothing, so far as I can see, that would actually help poor people. Since he supports a very aggressive foreign policy, he certainly can't pay for his tax cuts by reducing military spending, and that means either endlessly expanding deficits or huge cuts in programs that help the poor and elderly. How compassionate is that?
But, again, I think his campaign will founder on the rock of birth control, which Santorum opposes in all circumstances. He once said:
But, again, I think his campaign will founder on the rock of birth control, which Santorum opposes in all circumstances. He once said:
Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.Maybe the point of supporting Santorum is to use him to drive Gingrich, Perry, and Huntsman from the race, leaving Romney as the inevitable nominee.
The Online Collection of the Penn Museum
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Addiction, Habit, and Context: Heroin and the Vietnam War
In 1970, America was shocked by the news that 15 to 20 percent of our soldiers in Viet Nam were addicted to heroin. President Nixon set up a special office of drug policy to provide help to addicted soldiers and track what happened to them after they came home. NPR:
The answer has to do with the role of environmental cues in determining our behavior. Addicts shoot up when they are in the places where they are used to shooting up. Put them in a completely different environment, where they never see the sights or smell the smells they always associated with heroin, or hang out with the people they used to shoot up with, and they find it easy to beat the addiction.
Environmental cues may determine a great deal of our behavior. A famous and obvious example is war: there are men who could never kill in peacetime who become great killers on the battlefield. Another is that students do better on exams if they take them in the same room where they heard the lectures. We orient ourselves strongly to where we are and what we see, and this effects us on many and very deep levels.
And so Jerome Jaffe, whom Nixon had appointed to run the new office, contacted a well-respected psychiatric researcher named Lee Robins and asked her to help with the study. He promised her unprecedented access to enlisted men in the Army so that she could get the job done.Since about 90 percent of addicts treated in America eventually relapsed after they went home, many people refused to believe Robins' results. But they have stood the test of time, and are now widely accepted. What was going on?
Soon a comprehensive system was set up so that every enlisted man was tested for heroin addiction before he was allowed to return home. And in this population, Robins did find high rates of addiction: Around 20 percent of the soldiers self-identified as addicts. Those who were addicted were kept in Vietnam until they dried out. When these soldiers finally did return to their lives back in the U.S., Robins tracked them, collecting data at regular intervals. And this is where the story takes a curious turn: According to her research, the number of soldiers who continued their heroin addiction once they returned to the U.S. was shockingly low.
"I believe the number of people who actually relapsed to heroin use in the first year was about 5 percent," Jaffe said recently from his suburban Maryland home. In other words, 95 percent of the people who were addicted in Vietnam did not become re-addicted when they returned to the United States.
The answer has to do with the role of environmental cues in determining our behavior. Addicts shoot up when they are in the places where they are used to shooting up. Put them in a completely different environment, where they never see the sights or smell the smells they always associated with heroin, or hang out with the people they used to shoot up with, and they find it easy to beat the addiction.
Environmental cues may determine a great deal of our behavior. A famous and obvious example is war: there are men who could never kill in peacetime who become great killers on the battlefield. Another is that students do better on exams if they take them in the same room where they heard the lectures. We orient ourselves strongly to where we are and what we see, and this effects us on many and very deep levels.
Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico
Fabulous Aztec artifacts, displayed in gorgeous exhibits designed by Pedro Ramirez Vasquez.
New Species by the Dozen at Antarctic Undersea Vents
These communities are dominated by a new species of yeti crab, stalked barnacles, limpets and snails, sea anemones, and a predatory seven-armed starfish. Animals commonly found in hydrothermal vents of the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, including giant Riftia tubeworms, annelid worms, vent mussels, vent crabs, and vent shrimps, were not present at the Southern Ocean vents.
Invisible, but not for Long Enough to Steal a Painting
Physicists are coming up with new ways to manipulate light that render objects effectively invisible. This has already been done by bending light around objects, so-called "spatial cloaking." Now Moti Fridman and other physicists from Cornell have developed a new trick called "temporal cloaking," which works by splitting up a pulse of light into two packets with a gap between, doing something during the gap, and then reassembling the pulse, so that it arrives intact at its destination. The event that took place in the gap is effectively invisible. The gap, alas, was only 50 trillionths of a second long, and it is not likely to get much longer.
I think these quantum tricks are interesting as physics, and maybe they will one day have applications in the microscopic world of computer chips and nanowires. But they are not scalable; there is no conceivable way to make them work for large objects at human time scales.
A more technical explanation of the experiment:
I think these quantum tricks are interesting as physics, and maybe they will one day have applications in the microscopic world of computer chips and nanowires. But they are not scalable; there is no conceivable way to make them work for large objects at human time scales.
A more technical explanation of the experiment:
In their experiment, previewed this summer in an online archive and reported in detail in Nature on Tuesday, Fridman and his collaborators sent a laser beam of light down a fiber-optic cable. At the starting end of the cable, they pulsed the beam with a second laser that changed the light from a single wavelength to a range of wavelengths, essentially different colors.
The beam then entered a section of cable that had the property of carrying light of different wavelengths at different speeds, specifically blue light faster than red. As a consequence, the two colors separated until there was a space between them where there was no light at all. This blip of total darkness — one centimeter long and lasting 50 picoseconds — is what the researchers called a “time gap” or “time hole.” The beam was then reassembled by reversing the steps, sending it through glass with the opposite effect on blue and red light, and then through another laser that restored the light to the original single wavelength.
To show that an event occurring in the “time gap” was undetected, the researchers pulsed a ray of light through it. Normally, that would perturb the first beam in a way that was obvious when the light came out the far end of the cable. But when the ray went through the time gap and then the beam was reassembled successfully, the detector at the end of the cable perceived no change.
Wednesday, January 4, 2012
Get a Husband by Harvest or Else
Here's a little insight into what marriage sometimes meant in past cultures, in this case among the serfs of 13th-century England:
The quotation is from The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer (2008), which I will be writing about soon.
If a widow has not remarried within a few months of her husband's death, and the lord's land is in danger of being neglected as a consequence, she will be ordered to choose a capable husband before the next meeting of the manorial court -- normally within three weeks. If she does not, the bailiff or the reeve will select a suitable man for her. If the parties refuse to marry, they will be fined and, if they continued to refuse, imprisoned until they do consent.A widow with sons old enough to do the work, or other relatives willing to pitch in, could get away with not remarrying -- all the lord cared about was that the work be done. But the assumption was that this was the husband's job, and a man would be found to do it.
The quotation is from The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England by Ian Mortimer (2008), which I will be writing about soon.
FDA Limits Use of Cephalosporins for Livestock
Bacteria evolve very quickly, and the more widely we use antibiotics, the more rapidly they evolve resistance to them. The most bizarre factor driving the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has been the routine use of antibiotics in livestock feed. I don't understand why we allow this at all, but we do. So cows and pigs have been ingesting penicillin for decades. As these older antibiotics lose their effectiveness, some farmers have been moving to newer antibiotics like cephalosporins (Cefzil, Keflex, and similar drugs). The FDA, expressing concern that these crucial drugs are starting lose their effectiveness, has finally acted to limit their use in livestock feed. Not ban, which is what they ought to do, but at least limit:
Just wait until we get our first antibiotic-resistant epidemic. Then people will regret that agribusiness interests, and their own desire for cheap meat, led them to ignore this problem.
The F.D.A. announcement on Wednesday has the effect of restricting some but not all uses of cephalosporins in agriculture and is therefore a modest step that is likely to please some consumer advocates but lead others to grumble that the agency needs to do much more.
"We believe this is an imperative step in preserving the effectiveness of this class of important antimicrobials that takes into account the need to protect the health of both humans and animals," said Michael R. Taylor, deputy commissioner for foods at the agency.
The F.D.A. initially proposed its cephalosporin restrictions in 2008 but withdrew the rule before it became effective because of opposition from farmers and ranchers. The rule announced Wednesday is less strict than the one proposed in 2008; it allows for unrestricted use of cephapirin, an older member of the class of cephalosporins that is not thought to contribute significantly to antimicrobial resistance. And the new rule allows veterinarians to continue to use the drugs to treat many illnesses in feed animals as long as they follow guidelines about dosing and duration of use. The new rule also allows for use of the drugs in ducks and rabbits.
Just wait until we get our first antibiotic-resistant epidemic. Then people will regret that agribusiness interests, and their own desire for cheap meat, led them to ignore this problem.
Rick Santorum is an Old-Fashioned Conservative
Santorum, via Andrew Sullivan:
Personally, I don't see how Santorum can remain a top-tier candidate once somebody points out to voters that he thinks birth control should be illegal.
This whole idea of personal autonomy, well I don’t think most conservatives hold that point of view. Some do. They have this idea that people should be left alone, be able to do whatever they want to do, government should keep our taxes down and keep our regulations low, that we shouldn’t get involved in the bedroom, we shouldn’t get involved in cultural issues. You know, people should do whatever they want. Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world and I think most conservatives understand that individuals can’t go it alone. That there is no such society that I am aware of, where we’ve had radical individualism and that it succeeds as a culture.Santorum is right that a century ago,conservatives were horrified by individualism. In Europe, some still are. But in America they have largely reconciled themselves to "personal autonomy" and have moved on to championing unbridled capitalism, the thing they used to hate.
Personally, I don't see how Santorum can remain a top-tier candidate once somebody points out to voters that he thinks birth control should be illegal.
Money Isn't Everything, Iowa Caucuses Version
The Mystery of the Fulacht Fiadh
“Most fulacht fiadh sites are somewhat isolated, with only a few having been found as part of a permanent settlement,” says Emer Dennehy, an Irish archaeologist with the Railway Procurement Agency in Dublin who studies the fulacht fiadh. “We’re still unsure if this indicates a seasonal use with hunting expeditions or if they were used on a regular basis in conjunction with permanent settlements located elsewhere. It was convenient to locate these sites close to wet and damp areas, which would not have been suitable for habitation.”So hunting expeditions are still one of the common explanations for these things. Because they are placed in wet areas, the trough often fills with water by itself; a few are even placed over springs.
Surrounding the troughs are U-shaped mounds made of stones. These mounds can reach heights of more than six and a half feet, though on average they are roughly three feet high, and made of sandstone or limestone. Neither rock type is typically found close to fulacht fiadh sites, indicating that the Bronze Age Irish chose the stones deliberately.Of course people boil lots of different things, not just food but also dying cloth, dirty laundry, and beer -- the main rival to the boiling meat theory is that they were used for brewing.
According to Dennehy, the mounds likely cover hearths where the stones, which show evidence of heat-cracking, were fired. The cracking also provides strong evidence that after being heated, the rocks would be placed in the troughs to heat water. “The stones that were heated and shattered during this process were discarded nearby,” Dennehy explains, “gradually accumulating to form the mound surrounding the trough.”
The water in the trough could have been brought to a boil by adding fired stones, says Dennehy. Demonstrations on modern-day re-creations of fulachtaí fia have shown that intermittently adding one heated rock can keep a steady boil. “You can be absolutely sure it was used for boiling water,” says John Waddell, an emeritus professor of archaeology at the National University of Ireland, Galway. “It’s the one certain thing about the fulacht fiadh.”
The fulacht fiadh are a reminder to archaeologists that people live across the entire landscape, not just in those places where they left enough trash for us to call them "sites." Before the high middle ages, much of Ireland was wild, but it was still heavily used by humans for hunting, gathering, fishing, and communing with the spirits of the land.
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
National Greatness and Christian Morality
Rick Santorum has been getting mocked around the web for this bit of historical analysis:
For a self-proclaimed Christian, Santorum has a remarkably schoolyard bully view of what it means for a nation to be great. Greatness, he argues, means having a big empire, ruling lots of people all over the world, and (especially) having the determination and wherewithal to keep it. Yes, he throws in quick white man's burden line about bettering the world, but he doesn't even consider the possibility that the British gave up their empire because they decided this was the right thing to do. No, they lost the "values" that had won them their empire in the first place. Actually, this is true; they especially lost their belief in slaughtering Indians and Kenyans for Queen and Country.
There have been times in human history when empires could be reasonably humane systems, benefiting a majority of their inhabitants. But once the age of ideology got underway, and it became an article of faith among the world's elites that every people should rule itself, and that colonialism was a great evil, it was no longer possible for empire to be a civilizing force. After 1945, empires could only be maintained as police states. The British, to their eternal credit, realized this, and promoted the independence of their former subjects. That proved to be a boon for some of them and a disaster for others, but continued colonial rule would not have been pretty anywhere.
To see all of this history as a morality play about national will is grotesque. To seek an empire just to prove your own greatness is, I would argue, un-American, and it is certainly un-Christian.
If you look at every European country that has had world domination, a world presence, from the French to the British -- 100 years ago, the sun didn't set on the British Empire. If you look at that empire today -- why? Because they lost heart and faith in their heart in themselves and in their mission, who they were and what values they wanted to spread around the world. Not just for the betterment of the world, but safety and security and the benefit of their country. We have taken up that cause.In Obama, he said, "We have a president who doesn't believe in America."
For a self-proclaimed Christian, Santorum has a remarkably schoolyard bully view of what it means for a nation to be great. Greatness, he argues, means having a big empire, ruling lots of people all over the world, and (especially) having the determination and wherewithal to keep it. Yes, he throws in quick white man's burden line about bettering the world, but he doesn't even consider the possibility that the British gave up their empire because they decided this was the right thing to do. No, they lost the "values" that had won them their empire in the first place. Actually, this is true; they especially lost their belief in slaughtering Indians and Kenyans for Queen and Country.
There have been times in human history when empires could be reasonably humane systems, benefiting a majority of their inhabitants. But once the age of ideology got underway, and it became an article of faith among the world's elites that every people should rule itself, and that colonialism was a great evil, it was no longer possible for empire to be a civilizing force. After 1945, empires could only be maintained as police states. The British, to their eternal credit, realized this, and promoted the independence of their former subjects. That proved to be a boon for some of them and a disaster for others, but continued colonial rule would not have been pretty anywhere.
To see all of this history as a morality play about national will is grotesque. To seek an empire just to prove your own greatness is, I would argue, un-American, and it is certainly un-Christian.
Cousins
Along the Patapsco
Trees in the Desert
Obama's Signing Statement
Attached to the Defense funding bill, which seems, although people dispute what the weird wording actually means to allow the President to toss any US citizen deemed a threat into a military brig forever:
I want to clarify that my Administration will not authorize the indefinite military detention without trial of American citizens. Indeed, I believe that doing so would break with our most important traditions and values as a Nation. My Administration will interpret section 1021 in a manner that ensures that any detention it authorizes complies with the Constitution, the laws of war, and all other applicable law.
Former Libyan Rebels Shooting at Each Other
Today's not so good news from Tripoli:
Two former Libyan rebel factions clashed Tuesday in hours of gunbattles in central Tripoli that left five fighters dead, a Tripoli military council official said.This doesn't seem like a terrible problem yet, but it is a reminder that whenever you unleash hordes of young men with guns, trouble results, and it points toward the far worse things that might happen if political progress stalls.
Former rebels of Tripoli and a separate group of fighters from the city of Misrata fought with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and anti-aircraft guns. Col. Walid Shouaib, a member of Tripoli Military Council, said the clashes were triggered by arrest of a Misrata fighter on New Year's Eve by Tripoli fighters. He was suspected of robbery and the Misrata fighters were trying to free him. . . .
Disparate groups of former revolutionary fighters have clashed repeatedly since the end of the eight-month civil war that toppled Moammar Gadhafi's regime in October. Disbandment of these armed groups, which are divided by the regions where the operate, has posed a challenge to Libyan authorities.
The Looming Underground Crisis
A few items from a Post article on the problems with our water and sewer systems:
Civilization is expensive, and that is pretty much why we pay high taxes.
- On average, nationwide, 25 percent of drinking water leaks from water system pipes before reaching the faucet.
- The average D.C. water pipe is 77 years old, but a great many were laid in the 19th century.
- DC emergency crews rush from site to site to tackle an average of 450 breaks a year.
- Firefighters are equipped with computerized cue sheets to tell them which of the 9,157 hydrants in the District have enough water pressure to put out a fire.
Civilization is expensive, and that is pretty much why we pay high taxes.
Monday, January 2, 2012
You Never Know about People
Although a strong and independent woman, Drath — widowed after a long and loving first marriage — became ensnared in a two-decade cycle of loneliness, love, dependence, abuse and reconciliation, her friends and family say. . . . Those close to her said that Muth took over much of her life and that she relented because she didn’t want to be alone.Albrecht Muth was a creep of dubious sanity who at various times claimed to be a former Iraqi general and a spy for half a dozen countries. He was transparently using Drath to get closer to the world of power and influence that he craved. Drath led a full life; people told the Post that they were in awe of her, that she was the most interesting person in Washington. She had friends, children, grandchildren, a past that included a successful career in journalism (politics and fashion). But as an aging widow Drath was left with a fear of loneliness that made her a victim. "Muth, according to Drath’s account, made her feel young, alive and excited," and for this she forgave a long string of fights and beatings that makes them sound like a white trash couple from Cops. For that feeling of youth and excitement, and to escape from loneliness, she eventually died.
Ron Paul as a Mad Prophet
Ross Douthat has an interesting take on Ron Paul in this column. On Paul's passage from publisher of survivalist newsletters to prominent Presidential candidate, he writes:
There are two commonplace interpretations of Paul’s unusual trajectory. To his many sympathizers — libertarians, dissident conservatives and some left-wingers as well — the extremism in his past has nothing to do with the issues that he’s campaigning on today. The case for Paul, as The Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf put it, is that “he alone, among viable candidates, favors reforming certain atrocious policies” — scaling back America’s overseas commitments, ending a failed war on drugs, curbing a runaway public sector and reducing the powers of an imperial presidency. The newsletters may reflect badly on his past, but in the current political landscape he’s a voice of reason rather than of madness.Exactly. Sometimes ideas get so firmly entrenched in the discourse of the society that they can only be attacked by someone far outside the mainstream. Thoroughing critiques of the received wisdom usually come from people who have embraced, not just different political positions, but a different kind of logic. They find it easy to reject what "everybody knows" because they start from a different vision of reality.
To his many critics, on the other hand, Paul’s present-day positions are connected to his past derangements, because they share the same essentially conspiratorial root. Then as now, Paul blames shadowy elites for the country’s ills; then as now, he flirts with narratives that are straight out of the fever swamp. For all its superficial idealism, the critics insist, his campaign is a conduit through which fundamentally poisonous ideas are entering the mainstream body politic, and thus he needs to be not only defeated but repudiated.
But consider a third possibility. There’s often a fine line between a madman and a prophet. Perhaps Paul has emerged as a teller of some important truths precisely because in many ways he’s still as far out there as ever.
One truth I have learned from 49 years of observing humanity is that people are rarely wacky in just one way. In America, only a politician nutty enough to embrace the gold standard can call for legalizing drugs, curtailing the President's power, and an end to blowing up brown people who annoy us.
Sunday, January 1, 2012
Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis
Lithuanian painter and composer, 1875-1911. Above, Demon, 1909. These are just my kind of thing, not as good as Chagall, but in the same genre.
Sagittarius, 1907.
Angel: Prelude, 1908.
Creation of the World XII, 1906.
Sonata of Spring, Scherzo, 1907.
Virgo, 1907.
Winter, 1907.Slow Drip
Patience:In 1927, Thomas Parnell, a physics professor at the University of Queensland, in Australia, designed an experiment ot show his students how viscous a fluid could be. He poured hot pitch into a glass funnel, let it cool, and then waited. Eight years later, the first drop fell. After another nine years, the second drop fell The Pitch Drop Experiment is now the world's longest running lab experiment. There have been a total of eight drops, occurring at an average interval of ten years. The drop takes about a tenth of a second. No one has ever actually seen a drop fall.
--Nick Paumgarten in the New Yorker
Your Body Hates to Lose Weight
From a study of patients who lost about 30 pounds each at an Australian weight loss clinic:
After a year, the patients already had regained an average of 11 of the pounds they struggled so hard to lose. They also reported feeling far more hungry and preoccupied with food than before they lost the weight. . . .
A full year after significant weight loss, these men and women remained in what could be described as a biologically altered state. Their still-plump bodies were acting as if they were starving and were working overtime to regain the pounds they lost. For instance, a gastric hormone called ghrelin, often dubbed the “hunger hormone,” was about 20 percent higher than at the start of the study. Another hormone associated with suppressing hunger, peptide YY, was also abnormally low. Levels of leptin, a hormone that suppresses hunger and increases metabolism, also remained lower than expected. A cocktail of other hormones associated with hunger and metabolism all remained significantly changed compared to pre-dieting levels. It was almost as if weight loss had put their bodies into a unique metabolic state, a sort of post-dieting syndrome that set them apart from people who hadn’t tried to lose weight in the first place.
“What we see here is a coordinated defense mechanism with multiple components all directed toward making us put on weight,” [Dr. Joseph] Proietto says. “This, I think, explains the high failure rate in obesity treatment.”
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
