In a recent book review discussing a book on lonliness and its negative impact on health, there was this curious passage.
If subjects are told for the purposes of experiment that they will face a lonely future, they score lower on intelligence tests and abandon tasks sooner. If cookies are set before subjects who have been told that no one else in the experiment wants to work with them, they eat twice as many as those who have been told that everyone else in the experiment wants to work with them.
I’ve always argued against the idiocy of half the ethics guidelines but this seems a good case for a query. Its not hard to imagine a long lasting, let’s say a haunting continuing echo, of a directive that you are lonely and will die alone in your apartment, your body not being discovered for days, and possibly being partially eaten by cats.
And in other health related news…
This courtesy of InventorSpot …the shopping cart wash…capitalizing on all the germophobes out there.
You gotta end with something good…great animal portrait from the best nature photography of the year at NationalGeographic
Via Archiblog: the projected Walter Towers to be built in Prague. Like I needed another reason to go back there.
Food
Another sort of tower discovered through OddityCentral but you can straight to the Heart Attack Grill for more of the same. This is the quadruple bypass burger (two pounds of meat).
The election is about a week away. This video ended up in my box via The Canadian Harm Reduction Network. There are many different reasons why to or not to vote for someone but this little bit highlights a few things that matter to me. I prefer a government with compassion, that sees drug use as a health and also a human rights issue rather than a crime issue. I do not like governments who not only manipulate statistics but outright deny reality to push their own agenda, in this case an agenda of fear.
Canada has had decreasing levels of crime for some time but Stephen Harper wants to charge more people, put more people behind bars, and for longer times, and basically create an atmosphere that makes us fear walking down the streets when we really should fear the government that is currently in power.
Once in a blue moon something comes along that challenges your limited sense of what is possible, and this, for me, Don’tClickIt certainly qualifies. Visit this site to see how simple navigation without a mouse, without clicking, is possible.
And then some new and unusual ways of telling timevia GrowaBrain:
In an entirely different realm but of potentially life saving consequence is the invention of the Peepoo bag, a portable toilet (via the David Report Blog), a bag that soon after it is used, sanitizes the feces and thus prevents further contamination of the environment. Any natural disaster disturbs existing infrastructures, and even barring such events, many urban slums are ill equipped to deal with human waste; this is a major contribution toward reducing disease under those conditions.
And the craziest and most disturbing invention in some time:
From LoveHoney, the Touche Womanizer Shaver and Silicon Massager. “The magnificent Womaniser is not only smooth to the touch - it’ll leave you smooth and strokable, too! This intimate shaver is hidden inside a single speed silicone massaging vibrator - the perfect combination for a night of orgasmic personal pleasure.” I’d love to read the warning label.
Water snails crawl along under the water surface on ripples of slime.
2.From DerSpiegel, this image shows that manually pulling boats upriver is probably a superior way to tighten up those glutes than the stairmaster. Now this would make an infomercial!
In Der Spiegel today (story is here), it was reported that one 72 year old German granny was busted for growing and selling marijuana; she is now awaiting word from law enforcement on a trial date. She is at home and she should thank her lucky stars she is not in the States where she would probably be locked up already as the menace to society that she surely is.
This lady ended up growing the weed partly as a way to alleviate the pain of her daily labours to make ends meet. She knew about this particular remedy as her father had grown it as well, his own medicine for the pain of a stomach tumour. So here she is, taken down by the law.
So many who read this, who generally support going after these villains, are thinking that perhaps an exception should be made in this case. Obviously a kindly soul driven by need. But replace her with a 20 year old girl who also has some sort of condition that it might help, and also is somewhat destitute. There would be little sympathy in that case. Take it a little further and make it a 20 year old boy who is simply growing the plant for fun and sells a little to friends. An otherwise law abiding citizen who likes to smoke a joint now and then. Now make him black or hispanic. Now you can break out the automatic weapons.
This is the war on drugs. It is a war on youth, a war on minorities, and a war on the poor.
These busted dealing grannies embarrass everyone because they reveal how perverse the situation and the response is. Wars are generally fought by those who are not smart enough to consider other options. Unfortunately even though the war on drugs is a strategy devised by puritanical, elitist and small brained fools, for all its idiocy it is building up a monstrous body count.
Above, is a Joan Miro sculpture that stands outside the Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona. In later posts I will be writing about all that but my energy level is still a little under par, (great trip but bad sleeps), and I have my roughly 800 photos to organize, over 1000 postings for the last couple of weeks on my GoogleReader (not going to read all those), and a slightly neurotic post kennel Siberian to attend to. But today was an interesting day.
Yesterday, at Heathrow, I picked up a copy of Ben Elton‘s latest novel, Blind Faith. Below is the jacket copy, and it describes this book nicely. It is a smarter version of Idiocracy (which I thought, ironically, was made for a dumbed down audience). It has a good go at reality TV, FaceBook, blogging, The Secret and many more elements of current culture. Its a novelistic rant against modern mass culture, and both bitter and funny.
As Trafford Sewell struggles to work through the usual crowds of commuters, he is confronted by the intimidating figure of his Parish Confessor. Why has Trafford not been streaming his every moment of sexual intimacy onto the community website like everybody else? Does he think he’s different or special in some way? Better than his fellow man and woman? Does he have something to hide?Imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everybody. Where what a person ‘feels’ and ‘truly believes’ is protected under the law, while what is rational, even provable is condemned as heresy. A world where to question ignorance and intolerance is to commit a Crime against Faith. Ben Elton’s dark, savagely comic novel imagines a post-apocalyptic society where religious intolerance combines with a confessional sex obsessed, self-centric culture to create a world where nakedness is modesty, ignorance is wisdom and privacy is a dangerous perversion. It offers a chilling vision of what’s to come? Or something rather closer to what we call reality?
I mention the novel because it gets one thinking about how much nonsense is out there. And after attuning to Spain, and while thinking overall that it is a much saner culture than my own, the television viewing indicated that there were some curious parts of that culture that weren’t quite obvious from wandering around. Exhibit Number One:
This odd duck is an astrologer and one of the many various psychics encountered at any given time on Spanish television (in our room, out of the 20 or so stations, 3 had psychics, 2 had fulltime lottery shows, 1 switched to porn after supper and about 3 switched to porn after midnight, as well as more Walker Texas Ranger than anyone could wish for). Exhibit Number Two:
I do have more pictures but on to the point at hand. This and some very odd informercials led me to think that I was returning to normalcy on the reentry to Canada but today, trundling down to Zellers to pick up some dog bones and an extension cord, I was behind a woman in line who was buying a new type of toilet paper. There was some issue about a two for one deal and how to ring it through the register, so while waiting for a manager to call back, the till operator and the customer talked about the toilet paper. The operator said the paper looked good and the customer said that she had first used it in Hawaii and really loved it. And then the operator replied “and wasn’t it great that it had added vitamin E?” At first I thought they must be talking about a second item of some kind, a food product perhaps, but no, the packaging on the asswipe boldly proclaimed added aloe vera and vitamin E. To my mind, you would probably have to stuff the whole roll up the old sphinctre and leave it there for a fortnight to get any benefit accruing.
Reeling from this insanity, I staggered out to my car, and as I pulled out, on the radio, long time respected CBC host Shelagh Rogers was seriously discussing listeners’ letters and call-ins telling how dead loved ones had caused trees and flowers to bloom after their passage from this world.
(When I was on the way to the store, the same show was discussing a government health commission looking into reported (reported but not proven) high cancer rates in Fort Chipewyen. It was worried about the effects, should the commission not find evidence for the link with the oil sands that the local population were certain of. That in itself is not odd but it was stated quite bluntly that the locals had determined the cause, and if the science didn’t show it, or came up with another reason, the science was insufficient. They had decided what was real and the evidence was not going to get in the way of that. (A lot of this sort of thing in the Ben Elton novel as well). The thing about cancer is that it is both a very difficult causation to pin down and it is remarkably amenable to woowoo thinking (that is, making connections either without basis or without having the background to accurately determine the cause but not letting that stand in your way). Now, I am not saying that the oil sands aren’t a factor but there is every possibility of an alternative explanation or two, and some objective inquiry is necessary to determine the likely cause of the higher rate, and in fact, if there is a higher rate.) Added note: this was radio…the later report in the newspaper was much saner in all respects.
Its always been a little fuzzy out there but it may be getting worse. Kind of natural really. Most people are not that good at processing information, and now that there is so much more of it, the odds of doing a good job of that are decreasing, and the sheer mass of infocrap hurled at us every day along with the proven lower efficiency associated with multitasking, renders even good processors more vulnerable to lapses of judgment.
Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even? by Jared Diamond.
Daniel explained to me that Handas are taught from early childhood to hate their enemies and to prepare themselves for a life of fighting. “If you die in a fight, you will be considered a hero, and people will remember you for a long time,” he said. “But if you die of a disease you will be remembered for only a day or a few weeks, and then you will be forgotten.” Daniel was proud both of the aggressiveness displayed by all the warring clans of his Nipa tribe and of their faultless recall of debts and grievances. He likened Nipa people to “light elephants”: “They remember what happened thirty years ago, and their words continue to float in the air. The way that we come to understand things in life is by telling stories, like the stories I am telling you now, and like all the stories that grandfathers tell their grandchildren about their relatives who must be avenged. We also come to understand things in life by fighting on the battlefield along with our fellow-clansmen and allies.”
I like this article for a number of reasons. It gives me even more ammunition against the idea of tradition for its own sake being a good thing. Tradition means only that someone has done it before. Women were banished to the special hut whilst having their period; men could only rise to the level that their fathers had risen to; and the “reasonable” occurrences of murder and torture were all too many. This article is more than just that though, it also explores the natural tendency toward revenge, the problems when justice does not seem to have taken place and the role of the state in all this.
See the video below of Stephen Pinker’sTED talk on how post violent we really are. Its not only an eye opener but a challenge to the fear based media propaganda that is so easy to buy into.
I would also recommend Dan Gardner’s book Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.
Gardner not only makes quite clear that we are living in a golden age in our freedom from pain and violence but how much of our skewed and baseless perceptions of everyday dangers are fed by the media. Its both entertaining and enlightening reading. As a member of the media, he has seen first hand how reports of decreasing crime do not make the front page but a single odd and unrepresentative tragedy can blossom into misguided public panic and unneeded legislation at the expense of true dangers.
KINSHASA (Reuters) - Police in Congo have arrested 13 suspected sorcerers accused of using black magic to steal or shrink men’s penises after a wave of panic and attempted lynchings triggered by the alleged witchcraft.
Police arrested the accused sorcerers and their victims in an effort to avoid the sort of bloodshed seen in Ghana a decade ago, when 12 suspected penis snatchers were beaten to death by angry mobs. The 27 men have since been released.
“I’m tempted to say it’s one huge joke,” Oleko said.
“But when you try to tell the victims that their penises are still there, they tell you that it’s become tiny or that they’ve become impotent. To that I tell them, ‘How do you know if you haven’t gone home and tried it’,” he said.
Some Kinshasa residents accuse a separatist sect from nearby Bas-Congo province of being behind the witchcraft in revenge for a recent government crackdown on its members.
“It’s real. Just yesterday here, there was a man who was a victim. We saw. What was left was tiny,” said 29-year-old Alain Kalala, who sells phone credits near a Kinshasa police station.
These remarkable con artists, the penis thieves, though I would prefer the more substantial sounding cock snatchers or dick filchers, seem to be able to make the victim believe that something that is still there no longer is…kind of a reverse of the fairy tale…the emperors new member.
This curious news is one manifestation of what has been called penis panics where numbers of men will believe that their genitals have disappeared or are shrinking….in Asia this is know as koro. I like that word, reminiscent of sashimi, more than the medicalized Genital Retraction Syndrome.
Whilst penis theft would seem a fairly simple charge to refute, victims in an 1990 Nigerian outbreak (reported on by psychiatrist Sunny Ilechukwu) often believed that their penises were returned at the point of public accusation. Some even went as far as undress to prove their accusation to onlookers, subsequently claiming that their ‘returned’ penis had been replaced but was shrunk, leading them to think it must be a ghost penis or perhaps the wrong one.
Doctors have previously succeeded in reuniting men with their sexual organs after traumatic accidents or attacks, but the Guangzhou operation is the first in which a donor penis has successfully been attached to another man, The Guardian reported.
Although the operation was a surgical success, surgeons said they had to remove the penis after just two weeks.
“Because of a severe psychological problem of the recipient and his wife, the transplanted penis regretfully had to be cut off,” Dr Hu said.
An examination of the organ showed no signs of it being rejected by the body.
