I don’t know why creationists get hung up with the Platypus or the retina. I think it’s much more interesting that humans can read, despite it only being around for a few hundred years. For example …
As part of preparation for their [epilepsy] surgery, three adults had electrodes implanted in Broca's area and anterior temporal cortex to allow doctors to pinpoint which areas of the brain would be best to remove. During the procedure, known as intracranial electrophysiology, researchers asked the patients to silently sound-out words they saw on a screen and to fill in the missing verb in the proper tense or the proper form of a missing noun. Meanwhile, the researchers were recording the local electric field potentials from the wired areas of subjects' brains to the nearest millisecond—and millimeter.
After studying the readouts, the researchers found that in these normally reading adults, word identification, grammar and pronunciation all activated parts of Broca's area—and in a very neatly defined sequence. Like clockwork, it took about 200 milliseconds to identify a word, 320 milliseconds for grammatical composition and 450 milliseconds for phonological encoding…
… Previous studies had shown that the brain takes about 600 milliseconds to form vocal speech. So the speed with which each of these processes occurred was not as big of a surprise to Sahin and his colleagues as the fact that these three distinct tasks were done separately, in a tightly timed sequence, and within millimeters of each other in the brain…
… The electrical readouts … help to dispel the theory that another part of the brain, Wernicke's area, is primarily responsible for reading and hearing language. Their data show that, in fact, Broca's area also activated during the reading and identification phases. These findings, "indicate that the role of Broca's area…should be characterized in more general terms," Hagoort and Levelt wrote…
Everyone wants to see this study repeated in persons with reading disorders, but this kind of opportunity is rare. We all owe thanks to these patients who helped out with this study while awaiting some pretty scary surgery.
See also:
Carrey joins Oprah in the class of people who combine non-rational and harmful beliefs with the power of wealth and celebrity.
Olivia Judson claims no other animal commits suicide. I wonder about cetaceans …
A Long, Melancholy Roar - Olivia Judson Blog - NYTimes.com
… Suicide rates have risen dramatically over the past 50 years. Worldwide, deaths from suicide now outnumber deaths from war and homicide together: the World Health Organization estimates that each year around one million people — predominantly men — kill themselves. The true number is probably higher, because for many countries there is no data. In some countries, suicide is now among the top ten causes of death. For the young, worldwide, it’s in the top five.
A huge effort has rightly been devoted to trying to understand the particular causes of suicide in different places — unemployment, drug addiction, relationship breakdown, intelligence, predisposing genes, what your mother ate while you were in the womb and so on.
But here’s another way to look at it. No other animal does this. Chimpanzees don’t hang themselves from trees, slit their wrists, set themselves alight, or otherwise destroy themselves. Suicide is an essentially human behavior. And it has reached unprecedented levels, especially among the young.
I’m not sure what this means. But it has made me think. We live in a way that no other animal has ever lived: our lifestyle is unprecedented in the history of the planet. Often, we like to congratulate ourselves on the cities we have built, the gadgets we can buy, the rockets we send to the moon. But perhaps we should not be so proud. Something about the way we live means that, for many of us, life comes to seem unbearable, a long, melancholy ache of despair.
Bite the apple, know despair.
I think of the human brain as a great pile of frantic evolutionary hacks, barely holding together at the best of times, a million years from getting sorted out. It’s a matter/antimatter drive bolted on to a goat cart. So it’s not surprising that it breaks in all kinds of ways.
The more surprising assertion is that rates are rising. I wonder first if that’s really true – historic data must be very hard to find. I also suspect that many suicide prone persons would die young in times of high external mortality, and that we’d expect suicide rates to rise as a population lives longer (suicide is much more common in the elderly).
One might speculate about growing awareness of the bleak realities of the material universe and suicide rates but I honestly don’t see any connection. Few people are as fond of bleak realities as I am.
Yesterday was about employees perspective on PAC donations.
Today is about how to purchase a 21st century American Senator.
Scott Adams is on a roll.
(Click to go to the readable original)
I don’t remember the 1981-82 recession. I’d finished college, and I was off on a grand adventure (thank you Thomas J Watson). I returned and started medical school.
Whatever that recession was like, this one is considerably worse …
Along With Layoffs, Recession’s Cost Can Be Seen in Pay Cuts - NYTimes.com
… The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track pay cuts, but it suggests they are reflected in the steep decline of another statistic: total weekly pay for production workers, pilots among them, representing 80 percent of the work force. That index has fallen for nine consecutive months, an unprecedented string over the 44 years the bureau has calculated weekly pay, capturing the large number of people out of work, those working fewer hours and those whose wages have been cut. The old record was a two-month decline, during the 1981-1982 recession…
Wow. I didn’t see this one coming….
Saudis Seek Compensation if Oil Exports Fall - NYTimes.com
Saudi Arabia is trying to enlist other oil-producing countries to support a provocative idea: if wealthy countries reduce their oil consumption to combat global warming, they should pay compensation to oil producers…
The tactic has a familial resemblance to calls for wealthy nations to compensate less industrialized nations for the economic impacts of shifting away from low cost fuels.
I doubt even the Saudis really expect direct compensation, it’s much more likely to be a negotiating maneuver.
I’ll take this one as an encouraging sign that CO2 negotiations are getting real.
BlackBerry Aims to Suit Every User - NYTimes.comThe BB is very profitable for carriers, because it costs very little to produce, it comes with a mandatory data services account and a 2 year contract, and it's such a crummy net device that it makes no demands on carrier capacity.... The company has also cut the manufacturing cost of BlackBerrys by using variations on its existing designs that have allowed retailers to sell the devices at prices matching much simpler phones. For example, the BlackBerry Curve, R.I.M.’s most popular phone, is offered at Wal-Mart for about $50 with a contract. About 80 percent of R.I.M.’s sales this year have been to consumers, not to employers.
Mike Lazaridis, R.I.M’s other co-chief executive, says that the low cost of BlackBerrys allows cellular carriers to make more profit from the BlackBerrys than from other touch-screen handsets.
“We help carriers be profitable,” he said. “We gave them a way to get into the data business. Now we are giving them a way to manage their costs when they are worried that all they have to sell is highly subsidized smartphones.”
A smashing view from Hubble - Cosmic Log - msnbc.com
Long ago, a galaxy far away smashed into another galaxy - creating a beautiful, terrible knot of cosmic chaos. The view of that galactic collision, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, serves as a preview of what might well happen when the Andromeda Galaxy slams into our Milky Way galaxy billions of years from now....
Why the far left and the far right both oppose swine flu vaccinations. - By Christopher Beam - Slate MagazineFortunately for this vaccine campaign, few remember the Cheney/Bush smallpox fraud. That Iraq war ploy injured and killed some volunteers.
guardian.co.ukI wouldn't bet against this deal though. The NFL is as bottom line as any other megacorp.... Some players have said they would not want to play for the Rams if Limbaugh succeeds. "I don't want anything to do with a team that he has any part of," the New York Giants footballer Mathias Kiwanuka told the New York Daily News...
Nokia’s Netbook Comes With Marathon Battery Life - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com
... At the event, Glenn Lurie, the president of AT&T’s emerging device unit, said he understood that a $60-a-month data plan puts the device out of the range of many potential consumers. He said that AT&T will introduce other data plans with lower prices before the end of the year, possibly including prepaid plans and those that charge users only for the days they are actually online...At $60/month AT&T is basically saying "don't buy this, you fool!". Their iPhone demolished network can't handle widespread netbook adoption.
More on Snow Leopard deleting user accounts after guest login | MacFixIt - CNET Reviews
... The problem seems to happen only when guest accounts were enabled for login under Leopard before updating to Snow Leopard...It's quite a bug. It's a bit like a personal version of the
Regarding the "Guest" account data loss issue, the symptoms sound very similar to those affecting Leopard users until the release of 10.5.5. Given the similarities, one might suspect the reuse of buggy code.
The 10.5 flaw actually had two facets - one is that the wrong home folder may be deleted. The other is that the same flaw permits login to non-Guest accounts without a password. See CVE-2008-3610 here:
About the security content of Mac OS X v10.5.5 and Security Update 2008-006
Description: A race condition exists in Login Window. To trigger this issue, the system must have the Guest account enabled or another account with no password. In a small proportion of attempts, an attempt to log in to such an account will not complete. The user list would then be presented again, and the person would be able to log in as any user without providing a password. If the original account were the Guest account, the contents of the new account will be deleted on logout. This update addresses the issue by properly clearing Login Window state when the login does not complete. This issue does not affect systems prior to Mac OS X v10.5.Based on reports on the web, it appears that both aspects are present in Snow Leopard, and some users claim to have established the requirements for reproducibility. I don't have Snow Leopard so unfortunately can't test things for myself, but because of the implications, will refrain from posting a link to instructions. If confirmed, the key point would be that unlike Apple's assurances that it is something that occurs only in extremely rare cases, it may well be something that is guaranteed to be triggered based on a specific sequence of events, the likelihood of which may not be so "extremely rare" depending on an individual's habits.
Regardless, since the file deletion appears to be directly tied to the resetting feature of the "Guest" account, disabling GUI login for "Guest" should prevent that aspect from being triggered, and not having any passwordless accounts enabled (including "Guest") should take care of the other
