BS: Random Traces From All Over

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 Feb 08 - 11:55 AM

"Mr. Stern's criticisms can be irksome to members of the city's Education Department, but they are heard.

"Sol is a pundit, and pundits have lots of ideas," said David Cantor, a spokesman for the department. "Some of his have been helpful."

Despite his obvious appetite for stirring controversy, Mr. Stern can sound as though he is on the edge of despair.

"We've been arguing about the same things for the last 10 years," he said. "Sometimes I tell my friends that I have fallen into the trap of writing about the two most intractable problems in the world: American education and the Middle East."

" (NYT)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 13 Feb 08 - 03:05 PM

John
Look up myalgia or the after effects of lyme disease and other chronic fatigue symptomology and treatment.

There are successful treatments that include antibiotics all the way to synthetic narcotic.

There is a lot of progress despite some of the medical establishment looking the other way.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 Feb 08 - 06:07 PM

Photos of gorillas having intercourse face-to-face have been taken for the first time, according to this article in LiveScience.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: JohnInKansas
Date: 13 Feb 08 - 06:31 PM

Amos -

Nice picture of the gorillas; but they're doing it sitting and not standing - and in the grass not in a canoe. They can't be too advanced as lovers ...

Actually the comment about the "smart" female observed "using a tool" is about as "significant" for gorilla watchers as the bit about how they have sex. It's probably well known to serious followers, but is the first note I've seen/noticed on that for gorillas. (I never doubted that the gorillas would "use tools," since I've noted even some house cats doing that. I hadn't seen that the researchers had recognized and reported it as such.)

John

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 13 Feb 08 - 07:59 PM

Well, John, I did not look that closely--they seemed face-to-face to me.

In other news, Anti-Hydrogen:

"ANTI-HYDROGEN ATOMS DETECTED IN A PENNING-IOFFE TRAP.   The
Antiproton Trap Collaboration (ATRAP) working at CERN has succeeded
in detecting, for the first time, the presence of anti-hydrogen
atoms (each made of a positron and an anti-proton) in the heart of a
combined Penning-Ioffe trap. Both types of trap combine electric
and magnetic fields to hold charged particles and neutral particles
with magnetic moments. Both traps play an important role: the
Penning trap is needed to hold and control the positrons and
antiprotons enough so that they can join into the antimatter
counterpart of hydrogen atoms, while the Ioffe trap is needed to
trap those atoms once they*re made, in order to carry out
high-precision spectroscopic studies.

Producing and then cooling anti-protons (created in powerful
collisions at energies of billion of electron volts and then slowed
in stages to energies of milli- or micro-eV) is hard to do in the
first place, much less combining them with positrons from a
radioactive source. Some scientists feared that it might be
impossible to hold the positrons and antiprotons long enough to
produce anti-atoms when a Ioffe for neutral atoms was in place, but
this new development dispels that worry.

Gerald Gabrielse, head of
the ATRAP team () says that they
do not yet have evidence of trapped anti-atoms, only that anti-atoms
are being produced; indeed the number of anti-atoms actually goes up
when the Ioffe trap is turned on. (Gabrielse et al., Physical
Review Letters, upcoming article)"

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 Feb 08 - 04:56 PM

Shades of "The Crucible":


"Human Rights Watch has appealed to Saudi Arabia to halt the execution of a woman convicted of witchcraft.


In a letter to King Abdullah, the rights group described the trial and conviction of Fawza Falih as a miscarriage of justice.

The illiterate woman was detained by religious police in 2005 and allegedly beaten and forced to fingerprint a confession that she could not read.

Among her accusers was a man who alleged she made him impotent.

Human Rights Watch said that Ms Falih had exhausted all her chances of appealing against her death sentence and she could only now be saved if King Abdullah intervened.

'Undefined' crime

The US-based group is asking the Saudi ruler to void Ms Falih's conviction and to bring charges against the religious police who detained her and are alleged to have mistreated her.

Its letter to King Abdullah says the woman was tried for the undefined crime of witchcraft and that her conviction was on the basis of the written statements of witnesses who said that she had bewitched them.

Human Rights Watch says the trial failed to meet the safeguards in the Saudi justice system.

The confession which the defendant was forced to fingerprint was not even read out to her, the group says.

Also Ms Falih and her representatives were not allowed to attend most of the hearings.

When an appeal court decided she should not be executed, the law courts imposed the death sentence again, arguing that it would be in the public interest. "


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 Feb 08 - 05:13 PM

A row has erupted in Australia after Sydney's zoo announced a nine-year-old Asian elephant was pregnant.

Animal rights groups say the elephant, Thong Dee, is too young to fall pregnant, and that the zoo is "irresponsible" in letting it happen.

This was "the equivalent of allowing your 12-year-old daughter to become pregnant", said Erica Martin of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

But keepers at Taronga Zoo say they took expert advice and acted on this.

"We took our advice from the experts in elephant reproduction," says Lucy Melo, senior keeper at the zoo.

"And based on their findings, when they came here and did elephant reproductive assessments... they suggested that all of the elephants were reproductively viable, and that they actually recommended Thong Dee for immediate breeding."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 Feb 08 - 07:52 PM

Forgetfulness is key to a healthy mind
16 February 2008
Jessica Marshall
New Scientist Magazine issue 2643

SOME things in life are best forgotten. Unfortunately for AJ, forgetting is a luxury she can only dream of. A 42-year-old woman from California, AJ remembers every day of her life since her teens in extraordinary detail. Mention any date since 1980 and she is immediately transported back in time, picturing where she was, what she was doing, and what made the news that day. It's an ability that has baffled and amazed her family and friends for several decades, but it comes at a price. AJ is locked in a cycle of remembering that she describes as a "running movie that never stops". Even when she wants to, AJ cannot forget.
She is one of a handful of people with similar abilities now working with neuroscientists to find out how and why they remember so much. ...

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 Feb 08 - 08:03 PM

This blog documents the tortuous steps of trying to teach a computer to understand what it means to be in love.

Looks a bit like a Mudcat thead! :D


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 10:13 AM

The map shows the impact of human life on the oceans of the world, at least on the surface. (Land masses are light gray; water regions are colored by scale).


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 15 Feb 08 - 10:33 AM

Tiger parts are still being widely sold in Sumatra, Indonesia, warns a new report. However, with tiger numbers dwindling, the illegal trade is looking like an increasingly unsustainable, as well as unsavoury, business.

Traffic, a wildlife monitoring network which works with WWF and the World Conservation Union, says the number of Sumatran tigers that are being illegally poached and sold is dropping. But that is not good news.

The group surveyed 326 shops across the Indonesian island of Sumatra in 2006 and found that 33 were selling body parts amounting to at least 23 tigers.

"This is down from an estimate of 52 killed per year in 1999-2000," says Julia Ng, lead author on new report. "Sadly, the decline appears to be due to the dwindling number of tigers left in the wild."

Conservation groups say the Indonesian government is not doing enough to protect the tiger subspecies despite ample evidence of their decline.

Tiger body parts, including canine teeth, claws, skin and whiskers, are believed to bring good luck to those who wear them and to give protection from black magic. The bones of the right front paw are sometimes "infused" in a glass of warm water, which is then drunk to treat headaches.

(New Scientist)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 10:22 AM

Scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles have synthesized a class of spongelike crystals that can soak up carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas in industrial emissions.

The crystals - zeolitic imidazolate frameworks, or ZIFs - are grids of metal atoms and organic molecules that loosely trap carbon dioxide as it drifts into microscopic pores. The researchers believe that atomic charges hold the gas in place.


One variety, ZIF-69, is so absorbent that a single liter of it can hold 83 liters of carbon dioxide, according to a study published yesterday in the journal Science.

The crystals could be tailored to capture carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, factories and other industrial sources, said Omar M. Yaghi, the chemist from UCLA who led the study.

The idea is to line the insides of smokestacks with a layer of ZIF. Carbon dioxide that enters the pores could be sucked out periodically and sequestered underground.

Yaghi said the material also could be used to line vehicle exhaust systems. (LAT)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 16 Feb 08 - 03:02 PM

In certain regions of Nepal, very young girls are chosen to act as "Goddesses" for a number of years.

"There are currently 12 sitting Kumaris, a word that means "virgin" in Nepali. But it is the Kumari of Basantapur who is the most important of all the worshiped virgins. She is worshiped by the king of Nepal and is believed to bestow strength on his monarchy.

A committee of Buddhist priests selects each Kumari through a process that begins once a young candidate has lost her first baby tooth. The Kumari's time in the spotlight is short: She must abdicate immediately after her first menstruation. At that point, the Kumari is expected to transition back to a normal childhood. .

The debate and its implications have hardly impressed Rashmila Shakya, who was a principal Kumari from 1984 to 1992. Being worshiped as a living goddess, Ms. Shakya says, was a privilege.

"It was fun. No one was mad at me. I didn't have to work either. I spent my days playing with dolls," Shakya says in her freshly cemented four-story house in central Kathmandu.

But when asked about the court case, her answer is just as simple: "That's politics. I don't want to get into that." Soft-spoken and shy, Shakya says she feels fortunate to have experienced both the lives of a goddess and a mortal. Her only regret is that she was not able to receive a formal education. "I used to get books used in the school curriculum. But there was no one pushing me to study, and I didn't sit for exams either," she says.

During her Kumari years, Shakya was allowed to meet with her biological family several times a year. She liked living with her caretaker family despite having to always wear makeup and the stiff, formal gown of the goddess.

After returning home in 1992 at the age of 12, she found the transition difficult. But a meeting with another former Kumari - a decade after returning to society - deepened her resolve to lead a normal, educated life. "I saw her sitting in her room, quietly, all made-up the way we used to be at the Kumari House. She still believed she was a goddess," she says. "I told myself this is not the way I am going to spend the rest of my life.""

(Shakya recently completeld a B. S. degree).


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 18 Feb 08 - 09:55 AM

The Dumbing Of America
Call Me a Snob, but Really, We're a Nation of Dunces



By Susan Jacoby
Sunday, February 17, 2008; Page B01

"The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an "elitist," one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just "folks," a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: "We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.") Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country's democratic impulses in religion and education. But today's brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism. ...

Full article in the Washington Post...

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Feb 08 - 12:02 PM

"Nancy Nipples started the Pike Place Market Creamery in Seattle 30 years ago, selling milk, butter, cream and the like to help local independent dairies. It didn't help enough, and little by little they disappeared. "Last year a whole new group of local independent dairies started up a new cycle," Ms. Nipples said. "Hallelujah! The cream has 40 to 45 percent butter fat so you don't have to chant over it to whip it." (Nancy Nipples is the name she uses to sign checks; her full name, taken after a divorce, is Nancy Nipples the Milkmaid.)"

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Feb 08 - 12:07 PM

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 19 (UPI) -- A video by Will.i.am and George Pajon, Jr., in support of U.S. presidential hopeful Barack Obama has been viewed an estimated 6 million times.


Directed by Jesse Dylan, the "Yes We Can" video was released last week and can be viewed on

http://www.dipdive.com/;
http://www.yeswecansong.com/ and
http://www.youtube.com/

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Feb 08 - 12:13 PM

VATICAN CITY, Feb. 18 (UPI) -- The Vatican Monday issued a new set of rules tightening criteria for declaring someone a saint in a move seen as a return to more traditional practices.

Related Headlines
Vatican to tighten canonization process (February 12, 2008) -- A Vatican document calls for bishops to use greater sobriety and rigor when considering potential saints, the cardinal in charge of the process .

The 100-page document released instructs Catholic bishops to be tougher when deciding which candidates for sainthood can begin the official procedures leading to canonization, Italy's ANSA news agency reports.

Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, head of the Vatican's saints department, writes the new rules ask bishops to show "greater sobriety and rigor" when accepting requests to begin the first phase of the proceedings.

...

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Feb 08 - 02:07 PM

"The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future. Now ... I do recognize that non-human animals often act as though they have the capacity to think about the future. ... For example ... the squirrels in my yard act as though they know they will be unable to eat later unless they bury some food now ... [but instead] they have regular squirrel brains that run food-burying programs when the amount of sunlight that enters their regular squirrel eyes decreases by a critical amount. Shortened days trigger burying behavior with no intervening contemplation of tomorrow ... Until a chimp weeps at the thought of growing old alone, or turns down a Fudgesicle because it already looks to fat in shorts, I will stand by my [statement]. We think about the future in a way that no other animal can, does, or ever has, and this simple, ubiquitous, ordinary act is a defining feature of our humanity. ...

"The greatest achievements of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real, and it is this ability that allows us to think about the future. As one philosopher noted, the human brain is an 'anticipation machine,' and 'making future' is the most important thing it does."

Daniel Gilbert, Stumbling on Happiness, Knopf, 2006,

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Feb 08 - 02:26 PM

NEW YORK (AP) -- A man was charged with withdrawing $2 million from an account after a bank confused him with a man who has the same name.

Benjamin Lovell was arraigned Tuesday on grand larceny charges. The 48-year-old salesman said he tried to tell officials at Commerce Bank in December that he did not have a $5 million account. He says he was told it was his and he could withdraw the money.

Prosecutors said the bank -- which advertises itself as America's Most Convenient Bank -- confused Lovell with a Benjamin Lovell who works for a property management company.

The lesser-funded Lovell gave away some of the withdrawn money and blew some of it on gifts, but lost much of it on bad investments, prosecutors said.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 20 Feb 08 - 04:41 PM

Florida's Education Evolution


Yesterday, the Florida Board of Education voted 4-3 to adopt new science standards that, for the first time, would require public schools to teach evolution.ÊPreviously, Florida's science standards referred to evolution as "biological changes over time," but those rules "were slammed by scientists as vague and shallow." The new standards are intended to "make science learning more in depth" and "improve the understanding of science by Florida students, who do poorly in the subject area when tested." In fact, a 2005 national review gave Florida's science standards a failing grade because of their "superficiality of the treatment of evolutionary biology" and for "fudging or obfuscating the entire basis on which biology rests." The new science proposal -- which won the approval of the National Academy of Sciences -- defined evolution as "the fundamental concept underlying all of biology" and one "supported by multiple forms of scientific evidence." But instead of accepting thisÊscientific standard,Êthe Florida Board approved "a last-minute alternative"Êfollowing numerous public complaints and objections made by religious conservatives. The new Florida school science standard on evolutionÊwill come with a caveat:Ê"The subject will be taught as 'the scientific theory of evolution.'"

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 21 Feb 08 - 05:32 PM

Hitting a major milestone in nanotechnology, IBM researchers have figured out how to measure the amount of force needed to move an atom.


"IBM has been involved in atomic manipulation for 20 years," said Andreas Heinrich, a researcher and project leader at IBM. "What we have now is a way to quantify why we can move certain things, because now we know the forces involved. It's going from a trial-and-error stage to a more systematic way of doing things. It will be easier to build stuff once you have this knowledge."

Heinrich noted that in 1989 IBM Fellow Don Eigler showed off the ability to manipulate individual atoms with atomic-scale precision. Now about 20 years later, Heinrich and Markus Ternes, a post doctoral scientist at IBM, worked with scientists at the University of Regensburg to devise a way to calculate the force needed to manipulate those individual atoms.

Understanding the force required to move an atom is key to nanotechnology, according to Ternes. He explained that it's like engineers figuring out how to build a bridge over a large river. They both need to understand the strength of the different materials. How much force would it take to make a piece of metal bend? How much force would it take to move a cobalt atom over a copper surface? They're similar questions that all need to be answered in order to build a bridge or a nanoscale storage device.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 24 Feb 08 - 10:18 AM

A new report in The Journal of Adolescence this month suggests that when it comes to sex, girls and dating, boys are more complex than we typically give them credit for. While hormonal urges are no doubt an important part of a teenage boyÕs life, they arenÕt necessarily the defining trait influencing a boyÕs relationships with girls.

Psychology researchers from the State University of New York at Oswego recently examined data collected from 105 10th-grade boys, average age 16, who answered questions about a number of health behaviors. In questions put to them about girls (most of the boys self-identified as heterosexual), the teenagers were asked to note their reasons for pursuing a relationship. The top answer, marked by 80 percent of the boys? ÒI really liked the person.Ó

(NYT)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 25 Feb 08 - 11:39 PM

Most cells in our bodies sport hair-like organelles called cilia that help out with a variety of functions, from digestion to hearing. In the nose, cilia help to drain mucus from the nasal cavity down to the throat. Cold weather slows down the draining process, causing a mucus backup that can leave you with snotty sleeves. Swollen nasal membranes or condensation can also cause a stuffed schnozzle.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Feb 08 - 11:09 AM

The propensity to make music is the most mysterious, wonderful, and neglected feature of humankind: this is where Steven Mithen began, drawing together strands from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience--and, of course, musicology--to explain why we are so compelled to make and hear music. But music could not be explained without addressing language, and could not be accounted for without understanding the evolution of the human body and mind. Thus Mithen arrived at the wildly ambitious project that unfolds in this book: an exploration of music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the evolutionary history of our species.

Music is the language of emotion, common wisdom tells us. In The Singing Neanderthals, Mithen introduces us to the science that might support such popular notions. With equal parts scientific rigor and charm, he marshals current evidence about social organization, tool and weapon technologies, hunting and scavenging strategies, habits and brain capacity of all our hominid ancestors, from australopithecines to Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis and Neanderthals to Homo sapiens--and comes up with a scenario for a shared musical and linguistic heritage. Along the way he weaves a tapestry of cognitive and expressive worlds--alive with vocalized sound, communal mimicry, sexual display, and rhythmic movement--of various species.

The result is a fascinating work--and a succinct riposte to those, like Steven Pinker, who have dismissed music as a functionless evolutionary byproduct.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 26 Feb 08 - 10:26 PM

LIMA (Reuters) - A ceremonial plaza built 5,500 years ago has been discovered in Peru, and archeologists involved in the dig said on Monday carbon dating shows it is one of the oldest structures ever found in the Americas.


A team of Peruvian and German archeologists uncovered the circular plaza, which was hidden beneath another piece of architecture at the ruins known as Sechin Bajo, in Casma, 229 miles north of Lima, the capital. Friezes depicting a warrior with a knife and trophies were found near the plaza.

"It's an impressive find; the scientific and archeology communities are very happy," said Cesar Perez, the scientist at Peru's National Institute of Culture who supervised the project. "This could redesign the history of the country."

Prior to the discovery at Sechin Bajo, archeologists considered the ancient Peruvian citadel of Caral to be one of the oldest in the Western Hemisphere, at about 5,000 years.

Scientists say Caral, located a few hours drive from Sechin Bajo, was one of six places in the world -- along with Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, India and Mesoamerica -- where humans started living in cities about 5,000 years ago.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Feb 08 - 09:43 AM

There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president." - Kurt Vonnegut

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Feb 08 - 10:45 AM

WASHINGTON — The House on Wednesday approved a bill to extend more than $17 billion in tax credits and other incentives to encourage the production of energy from solar, wind and other renewable sources, and to promote energy conservation. The bill would be financed by ending tax incentives for oil and natural gas producers.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Senator Pete V. Domenici has opposed any effort to end incentives for oil and gas.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi pointed to record profits and a need to repeal "subsidies to big oil."

Democratic leaders in the House hailed the legislation as a step toward energy independence and a moral victory for protecting the environment, by encouraging production of clean alternative fuels. But the White House threatened to veto the bill, saying it would be a mistake to increase the tax burden on American oil companies.

Similar legislation has failed to pass the Senate on three occasions over the last year, including an effort in December when the package of tax credits for renewable energy fell just one vote short of the 60 needed to advance it.

Senate Democrats say they still hope to get it approved. But Senator Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico, the senior Republican on the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, has opposed any effort to end the tax incentives for domestic production of oil and gas.

"Why would you tax oil when we are having troubles, when we aren't producing enough; we are importing it all?" Mr. Domenici said this month. "A tax on oil production in the United States? It seems kind of dumb to me."

In a statement after the House vote, Mr. Domenici denounced the bill and said Democrats were hurting the chances of extending the tax credits for alternative energy by tying them to ending the tax incentives for oil and gas.

"These tax credits for wind, solar, biomass and other technologies are set to expire at the end of this year," he said. "It is clear to me that America must pursue all its available resources if we are to meet our energy challenges."

During debate on the House floor, however, Democrats sought to frame the issue around the steep increase in gasoline prices and record profits for oil companies, a theme that they intend to focus on through this election year, along with their criticism of the Iraq war.

"Gasoline at the pump has gone up 75 cents, 75 cents since we first took up this legislation," Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in a speech supporting the bill. "Imagine what that means to a household income."

"The price at the pump increased 17 cents just in the past two weeks," Ms. Pelosi, of California, continued. "Just yesterday oil prices reached another new record at $101 per barrel. This is at a time when oil companies are making record profits. Last year, ExxonMobil earned $40.6 billion in profits, the largest corporate profit in American history, and yet the administration refused to repeal billions of dollars in subsidies to big oil."
...

---

It might be smarter to impose the burden on imports, But however it is done, steering the nation toward energy independence is critical, mandatory, essential and a primary goal. It is worth a lot. It would completely rewrite the political dynamics that have ruined so many lives in the Middle East, and would hopefully do so for the better.

A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Feb 08 - 04:09 PM

SAO PAULO (Reuters) - Exterminators looking for termites in a monastery in Brazil's biggest city of Sao Paulo found a mummy and a skeleton believed to be at least 200 years old, the head of the monastery said on Tuesday.

"There were some mounds of termite dust and the exterminators broke into the walls to see what was in there," Father Armenio Rodrigues Nogueira, who is in charge of the monastery, one of the city's oldest, told Reuters.

"It was a huge surprise."

The bodies, believed to be two nuns, were found weeks ago, but officials at the Mosteiro da Luz (Monastery of Light) decided to keep them secret while the Institute for National Artistic and Historical Heritage did further research.

The Catholic monastery was founded in 1774 by Brazil's first saint, Antonio Galvao, about 50 years before the nation's independence from colonial power Portugal.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Donuel
Date: 28 Feb 08 - 05:19 PM

George Bush has given Turkey permission to bonb the hell out of the Kurds.

It wasn't too long ago when were told how Saddam gassed Kurds with weapons of mass destruction (he bought the gas from US...shhhh) and how we needed to get in there to save them.

The Kurds have now been quadruple crossed by the USA.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 28 Feb 08 - 11:10 PM

FRACTALS THROUGH TIME.

A new theoretical study looks at what
fractal things look like not just when you magnify them in space
(they are scale invariant: they look the same even at finer and
finer size scales) but also when you magnify them in time---that is,
when you look at them over finer and finer time intervals. Fractals
are those geometrical shapes so tortuously indented as to take on
extra dimensionality. For example, a nominally one-dimensional
curve can, with enough switchbacks, begin to be characterized by a
dimension somewhere between 1 and 2. In other words the curve
starts to take on the properties of a surface.

Similarly a two dimensional surface can be so dimpled as to acquire some *volume.*
This fractal geometry is especially interesting to consider for
minerals and for certain living things (such as tumors) where highly
non-Euclidean interfaces are important. In a new paper, Carlos
Escudero of the Institute for Mathematics and Fundamental Physics in
Madrid performs calculations of the dynamic scaling (how a surface
changes in space and over time at several different scales) of
growing structures, such as the kind of semiconductor films used in
the microchip industry where, even under the most carefully
controlled of conditions, rough (non-Euclidean) geometries can
exist.

He found that the moment-by-moment behavior of the surfaces
are strongly effected by the fractal geometry. Escudero (34-
915616800, [e-mail]) will soon be testing his
theories with colleagues in several practical areas of research,
including the growth of tumor-like tissues in plants and the growth
of semiconductor films. (Physical Review Letters, upcoming article;
at http://www.aip.org/png/2008/297.htm we*ve posted a picture of a
plant tumor provided by the Complex Systems Laboratory at the
Technical University of Madrid. )

---

Food for thought. TIme fractals? Hmmmm.


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 01 Mar 08 - 04:00 PM

In the 1840s, Samuel Augustus Maverick was a Texas cattleman who refused to brand his cattle because he said it was cruel to the animals. Rather than hail him as a humane hero, his neighbors denounced him as a damned hypocrite because his kindness enabled him to lay claim to all the unbranded cattle that wandered onto his range. Lawsuits and shoot-Õem-ups are said to have followed, but the result was a triumph of eponymy: the cattlemanÕs name, Maverick, became the word for an animal that bore nobodyÕs brand.

MaverickÕs grandson and great-grandson became Texas politicians. In 1944, the former Representative Maury Maverick coined a word for bureaucratic obfuscation: gobbledegook. He said the language in official Washington sounded to him like the gobbling of a strutting turkey cock, Òand at the end of the gobble there was a sort of gook.Ó

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 03 Mar 08 - 07:32 AM

Police cite S.F. zoo patron accused of taunting rhino
A man accused of throwing acorns at a rhinoceros at the San Francisco Zoo has been cited for misdemeanor animal taunting

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 03 Mar 08 - 09:59 AM

Researching the prospects for life beyond our solar system is moving to the next level. Exoplanet hunters are getting instruments that promise to spot Earth-like planets around alien stars. In some cases, they may even yield crude estimates of how life-friendly such a planet may be.

Meanwhile, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) is gaining new capacity to scan the heavens for alien signals. It could produce more analyzed data over the next two years than its researchers have collected over the past half century.

Seth Shostak, who forecast that data bonanza at a meeting at the University of Arizona in Tempe earlier this month, readily admits that researchers have monitored only a tiny bit of the cosmos. A senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif., Dr. Shostak explains that "we might have to search millions of star systems" to detect an alien signal. Yet, he says, "The actual number of star systems that radio SETI experiments have carefully examined is fewer than a thousand."

... New systems planned or under construction, such as the SETI Institute's 42-antenna Allen Telescope array, will begin the needed millions-of-stars search. Many of these radio telescopes will be ...sensitive enough to detect leakage from radio transmissions an alien civilization may be sending domestically.

Avi Loeb and Matias Zaldarriaga at Harvard University have proposed piggy-backing monitoring software on these telescopes to detect alien radio leakage. It will be technically difficult to avoid being fooled by Earth's own leakage. But the Harvard astronomers think it is doable. Shostak forecasts: "SETI experiments will have examined millions of star systems within a generation."

Meanwhile, exoplanet hunters do have something to show for their past efforts. The confirmed planet count is closing in on 300. It's hard to keep an accurate count since new planets are reported frequently. Two more were announced last week. One is Jupiter-size the other is Saturn-size in a star system 5,000 light-years away.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 03 Mar 08 - 02:35 PM

February 2008

Briefly Noted: Ballard Automotive Sale is Official
It's official: Ballard Power Systems' shareholders have overwhelmingly approved the sale of the company's automotive fuel cell business to Daimler AG and Ford Motor Co.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 03 Mar 08 - 02:41 PM

Two battling Boston moms face the next round in court after police say they turned on each other at a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant.

The fight allegedly broke out at the Natick pizza-and-play eatery during a child's birthday party, police said.

Natick police said the mom of the 9-year-old birthday boy apparently became enraged because the other woman's son was "hogging" an arcade game Saturday night.

Sgt. Paul Thompson said 38-year-old Catherine Aliaga and 33-year-old Tarsha Williams, both of Boston, would be summoned into court to answer charges of simple assault and battery stemming from the scuffle.

One of the accused moms tells the Herald today she's hiring a lawyer. "I cannot believe it," said Aliaga of the mess, quickly adding "I must call my attorney."

A company spokesman tells the Herald the two moms "exchanged words" Saturday night at 6:45 while two children were playing an arcade game and then "punches were thrown."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 03 Mar 08 - 08:12 PM

It is hard to picture a wee monkeylike adult creature weighing no more than an ounce. But fossils of the 55.8 million-year-old animal, the earliest known primate to inhabit North America, have emerged from coastal sediments in Mississippi.


It is even harder to imagine that tiny primates of this primitive kind were able to migrate to this continent all the way from their Asian homeland.

The world then was much warmer, however, basking in tropical or subtropical conditions nearly everywhere as continents drifted apart. Over countless generations the tree-dwelling primates slowly crossed to America from Siberia, presumably by the Bering land bridge when it was probably heavily forested.

Some primates apparently continued through Greenland and Scotland, connecting links to Europe at a time of lower sea levels.

This new reconstruction of the early dispersal of primates, the order of mammals that now includes humans and apes, stems from an analysis of a fossil primate discovered in 2001 near Meridian, Miss. The identification and significance of the new species are reported in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.... (NYT)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 04 Mar 08 - 12:22 AM

raffic that grinds to a halt and then restarts for no apparent reason is one of the biggest causes of frustration for drivers. Now a team of Japanese researchers has recreated the phenomenon on a test-track for the first time.
The mathematical theory behind these so-called "shockwave" jams was developed more than 15 years ago using models that show jams appear from nowhere on roads carrying their maximum capacity of free-flowing traffic Ð typically triggered by a single driver slowing down.
After that first vehicle brakes, the driver behind must also slow, and a shockwave jam of bunching cars appears, travelling backwards through the traffic.
The theory has frequently been modelled in computer simulations, and seems to fit with observations of real traffic, but has never been recreated experimentally until now.

(New Scientist)

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 04 Mar 08 - 11:44 AM

Many subjects have debates about definition. For example, novelists and poet routinely argue about the ideal direction of novels and poems. But the debate in philosophy is unbalanced because of the way power is distributed in the field. In literature, a range of novelists – almost all of them freelance individuals – compete to argue their case. In philosophy, academic philosophers are the only people with power: they have multi-million pound departments, they can hire and fire, they have a stranglehold on journals. And they are hugely powerful next to the few individuals who write philosophy books on a freelance basis. The popular interest in philosophy is still very weak. The idea of having a philosophy career outside of academia is a precarious proposition. Hence the outrage when an academic outsider writes a book about philosophy which attracts an undue amount of public interest – and dares to challenge some of their underlying assumptions about philosophy's role. Academic philosophers, ever mindful of people moving in on their patch, get out the big guns and try to ensure that the interloper will never dare to stray on their path again. If a modest "populariser" is content to write a basic introduction, the sort of thing that might bring more eighteen year olds into departments, then that is just about OK. But beware anyone who approaches the subject with more literary and ambitious intentions. Beware anyone who refuses to see themselves as a vulgariser and makes a claim to be a philosophical writer.

Life being short, one has to pick the important battles and I don't consider this to be one (it falls under Mario Vargas Llosa's famous category of "two bald men arguing over a comb"). However, I hope there will be a time when there will be more room in the academic philosophical imagination for the discursive, thoughtful quasi-philosophical essay which has always guided me in my own writing. I am inspired by what Montaigne, Schopenhauer and Emerson used to write. What Virginia Woolf wrote. What Adam Phillips writes today in psychoanalysis. What Joseph Brodsky or Roland Barthes have produced in literary criticism. There should of course be a place for Bernard Williams's vision of philosophy. But why not also allow Montaigne to be an inspiration?

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 04 Mar 08 - 10:49 PM

In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black
boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM
microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the
processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It
contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on,
the only thing you can hear is the continuous sigh of the massive air
conditioner. This is Blue Brain.

The name of the supercomputer is literal: Each of its microchips has
been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain. The
behavior of the computer replicates, with shocking precision, the cellular events
unfolding inside a mind. "This is the first model of the brain that
has been built from the bottom-up," says Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at Ecole
Polytechnique FŽdŽrale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the director of the Blue
Brain project. "There are lots of models out there, but this is the only one
that is totally biologically accurate. We began with the most basic facts
about the brain and just worked from there."

Before the Blue Brain project launched, Markram had likened it to the
Human Genome Project, a comparison that some found ridiculous and others
dismissed as mere self-promotion. When he launched the project in the summer of
2005, as a joint venture with IBM, there was still no shortage of skepticism.

Scientists criticized the project as an expensive pipedream, a blatant
waste of money and talent. Neuroscience didn't need a supercomputer, they
argued it needed more molecular biologists. Terry Sejnowski, an eminent
computational neuroscientist at the Salk Institute, declared that Blue
Brain was "bound to fail," for the mind remained too mysterious to model. But
Markram's attitude was very different. "I wanted to model the brain
because we didn't understand it," he says. "The best way to figure out how
something works is to try to build it from scratch."

The Blue Brain project is now at a crucial juncture. The first phase
of the projectÑ"the feasibility phase"Ñis coming to a close. The skeptics,
for the most part, have been proven wrong. It took less than two years for the
Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which
is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with
about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built
and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up." Blue Brain
scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be
able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it
will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that includes
selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? "When I say
everything, I mean everything," he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his
face.

Henry Markram is tall and slim. He wears jeans and tailored shirts. He

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 05 Mar 08 - 10:12 AM

ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2008) — A 10-cent pill doesn't kill pain as well as a $2.50 pill, even when they are identical placebos, according to a provocative study by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University.

"Physicians want to think it's the medicine and not their enthusiasm about a particular drug that makes a drug more therapeutically effective, but now we really have to worry about the nuances of interaction between patients and physicians," said Ariely, whose findings appear as a letter in the March 5 edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Ariely and a team of collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a standard protocol for administering light electric shock to participants' wrists to measure their subjective rating of pain. The 82 study subjects were tested before getting the placebo and after. Half the participants were given a brochure describing the pill as a newly-approved pain-killer which cost $2.50 per dose and half were given a brochure describing it as marked down to 10 cents, without saying why.

In the full-price group, 85 percent of subjects experienced a reduction in pain after taking the placebo. In the low-price group, 61 percent said the pain was less.

The finding, from a relatively small and simplified experiment, points to a host of larger questions, Ariely said.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 06 Mar 08 - 02:53 PM

According to EE Times, a California-based company called QuantumSphere has developed nanoparticles that could make hydrogen cheaper than gasoline. The company says its reactive catalytic nanoparticle coatings can boost the efficiency of electrolysis (the technique that generates hydrogen from water) to 85% today, exceeding the Department of Energy's goal for 2010 by 10%. The company says its process could be improved to reach an efficiency of 96% in a few years. The most interesting part of the story is that the existing gas stations would not need to be modified to distribute hydrogen. With these nanoparticle coatings, car owners could to make their own hydrogen, either in their garage or even when driving. "

""The nanoparticles are perfect spheres, consisting of a couple hundred atoms measuring from 16 to 25 nanometers in diameter. They are formed by means of a vacuum-deposition process that uses vapor condensation to produce highly reactive catalytic nanoparticles, for which the engineering team has formulated several end-use applications. 'Our biggest engineering challenge was finding a way to get the nanoparticles to stick to metal electrodes,' McGrath said. The company has solved that problem, she said, 'enabling existing electrolysis equipment to realize a 30 percent increase in hydrogen output just by retrofitting our coated electrodes.'"
"

See details at http://blogs.zdnet.com/emergingtech/?p=847

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 06 Mar 08 - 03:06 PM

The Democratic Process as they do it in Gambia offers some instructive insights. A pity our politicians can't muster that kind of juju


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Mar 08 - 09:29 AM

Grand Canyon Still Grand but Older
(NYT)

By dating mineral deposits inside caves along the canyon's walls, geologists now claim the canyon's formation began 11 million years earlier than previous estimates.

---

Ah, hell...what's a few million years between friends, after all?


A

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 07 Mar 08 - 02:56 PM

SAN BRUNO — Seconds after Marc Perkel's mind had shifted into a higher state of thinking, he had a revelation: The Church of Reality.
Perkel was relaxing alone at home nine years ago when the light bulb went on.

"I was smoking a little weed, and I was thinking about religion," said the now 52-year-old realist. "The name kind of popped in my head. But I had a hard time grasping the idea that no one (had) thought about it. Quite frankly, that aspect (has) never gone away."

The next morning, The Church of Reality was born.

"If it's real, we believe in it," said Perkel, who is self-employed and works in Web hosting and spam filtering. "Anything true will stand up to scrutiny. We're not a faith-based religion. We're doubt-based. The Church of Reality is a new kind of religion."

The American Religious Identification Survey, performed in 2001 by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, found that the non-believer population at that time comprised roughly 14 percent of the American community.

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation in Madison, Wis., said atheists, humanists, and free-thinkers are flourishing all over the country.

"Thomas Paine said, 'My own mind is my church,'" said Gaylor, referring to the author of "The Age of Reason" and a critic of 18th-century Christian doctrines.

"It's important that there be vocal groups and individuals. That's the only way to counter the religion din. Anything to have a free-thought point of view is a good thing."

The Freedom From Religion Foundation was formed in 1978. It is a national association of atheists, agnostics and other skeptics.

Gaylor suggested America may be moving in a more secular direction due to the controversy surrounding Terry Schiavo and the fight by the government and pro-life groups in 2005 to keep her feeding tube inserted.

"People are waking up to the danger of religion taking control of our government," Gaylor said.

The Church of Reality has its roots in atheism, humanism and science. Perkel has 24 principles, or truths, that revolve around the need for exploration and curiosity, environmentalism, compassion, inclusiveness and other virtues.

The church once was intended merely to poke fun at religion. But Perkel — who was "barely raised Jewish" — now emphasizes that the human race must evolve and move forward rather than look to the past as religious groups most often do.

"We inject reality DNA into the religious mind-set; we fill a void," Perkel said. "I get e-mails all the time saying, 'You have defined what I believe in. I just didn't have a name for it.'"

Outside the Church of Reality, Perkel is part of a secular humanist community in Palo Alto. Humanists

affirm the dignity and worth of all people.

Currently, Perkel's realists don't have a brick-and-mortar meeting place for services. However, people can participate in a forum on Perkel's site, http://www.churchofreality.org. He gets anywhere from 3,000 to 5,000 hits a day. Recently, the church registered as a nonprofit organization. There is no official membership count, but 1,200 people are on Perkel's e-mail list.

In the future, he would like to have a place where he and other realists can congregate.

"We're still in our infancy," Perkel said. "It's OK if we're moving slowly."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 08 Mar 08 - 12:34 PM

Seems like toking is sneaking into all kinds of unexpected corridors:

" ..It's midnight on a far-flung planet and some alien astronomers happen to have their radio telescopes pointed right at Earth, when they get a tiny spike in RF power - it's a message! Quick, decode it. What's it say?

It's . . . it's . . . an advertisement for Doritos. Beamed across the cosmos. On purpose.

No joke. Doritos' latest effort will see the UK public trying to come up with the winning 30-second spot that evidently will represent humanity's first interstellar ad campaign. With that universal fame, the winner will collect the tidy sum of 20,000 GBP.

In June, the ad will be broadcast using the high frequency radar telescope at the EISCAT Space Centre in Svalbard, Norway. It'll be aimed toward the "habitable zone" around one of the stars in the Ursa Major constellation, one of our best candidates for an untapped populace of snack food consumers."

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 12 Mar 08 - 10:36 PM

Nanotechnology Researchers Surprised to Find Unusual Strength Properties of Nanomaterials and May Expolit Them in Future Nanomachines


In yet another twist on the strangeness of the nanoworld, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Maryland-College Park have discovered that materials such as silica that are quite brittle in bulk form behave as ductile as gold at the nanoscale. Their results may affect the design of future nanomachines.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 Mar 08 - 01:57 AM

cientific literature has been littered with studies over the past 40 years documenting the superior language skills of girls, but the biological reason why has remained a mystery until now.

Researchers report in the journal Neuropsychologia that the answer lies in the way words are processed: Girls completing a linguistic abilities task showed greater activity in brain areas implicated specifically in language encoding, which decipher information abstractly. Boys, on the other hand, showed a lot of activity in regions tied to visual and auditory functions, depending on the way the words were presented during the exercise.

The finding suggests that although linguistic information goes directly to the seat of language processing in the female brain, males use sensory machinery to do a great deal of the work in untangling the data. In a classroom setting, it implies that boys need to be taught language both visually (with a textbook) and orally (through a lecture) to get a full grasp of the subject, whereas a girl may be able to pick up the concepts by either method.

The team was able to pinpoint the differences between the sexes by monitoring brain activity in a group of children (31 boys and 31 girls, ranging in age from nine to 15) using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the kids tackled language tasks. In the exercises, two words were either flashed in front of, or spoken to them; they had to determine whether the pair was spelled similarly (omitting the first consonant, as in "pine" and "line") and whether the words rhymed, such as "gate" and "hate" or "pint" and "mint." In some cases, the words fit neither criterion: "jazz" and "list" being an example.

Study co-author Doug Burman, a research associate in Northwestern University's communication sciences and disorders department, says the team saw greater activity in the so-called language areas of the girls' brains than in those of the boys. The areas included the superior temporal gyrus (implicated in decoding heard words), inferior frontal gyrus (speech processing), and the fusiform gyrus, which helps spell and determine the meaning of words. Activation of the latter two structures, in particular, seemed to correlate with the girls' greater language accuracy.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 14 Mar 08 - 11:44 AM

PHOTONIC QUBIT NETWORK. Finally, Charles Santori (Hewlett Packard,
[e-mail]) reported the creation of qubits in diamond
at room temperature without the need for any external magnetic field
(for polarizing electrons) or microwaves (for flipping the
polarization). All these tasks, he said, could be accomplished with
a visible-light laser modulated at two frequencies. The
all-optical approach to manipulating spins, using optical waveguides
and cavities, was a necessary step toward streamlining and scaling
up the process of creating and linking many qubits in a workable
quantum computer.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 16 Mar 08 - 01:46 AM

Denmark has now taken over as the country with the highest tax burden, according to website E24 and Danish newspaper Dagbladet Bšrsen.

Based on figures taken from the tax authorities in both countries, Danes now have a tax burden of 48.4 percent, compared to 47.8 percent for Swedes.

Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt is happy that Sweden no longer has the worldÕs highest tax burden.

ÒMoreover, the Danish media isnÕt even using the most recent information. This year weÕre going to land down below 47 percent,Ó he told news agency TT.

The government doesnÕt have a specific target for how much SwedenÕs tax burden ought to change during its current term in office.

Subject: RE: BS: Random Traces From All Over
From: Amos
Date: 16 Mar 08 - 10:44 AM

"Smail focuses more attention on the Òpursuit of psychotropyÓ than on its consequences. Still, an intelligent disquiet runs through these pages. As we Ògrow numb to the mechanisms that stimulate our moods and feelings on a daily basis,Ó we ceaselessly shift from one device to another. The prospects for human foresight and self-knowledge would seem dim. In the 1860s, Walter Pater wrote that Òart comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those momentsÕ sake.Ó Has art become superfluous? Smail suggests we are all the choreographers of our own chemical dance, enjoying the ÒspikesÓ and ÒdipsÓ as they follow one another, and simply for their own sake."

From a review of ÒOn Deep History and the Brain,Ó Daniel Lord Smail