Pleonexia

• The British Empire outlawed slavery in 1833, but it never really went away, emerging in different forms such as child labour, says Dr Richard Huzzey from the University of Liverpool’s Centre for International Slavery.  In the early 1840s, the British declared that slavery in India was over as part of the “kindness” of British rule, but what in fact happened was that definitions changed — people were called labourers or servants rather than slaves.  Not all slaves have come from Africa.  Slavery existed among some Native American groups and in some Asian countries, and Europeans were sometimes enslaved by the Ottoman Empire.  Russian serfdom can be seen as a variant of slavery.  At the time of emancipation in 1861, there were more than 22 million serfs.  Slaves were common in the ancient world — the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians all held slaves.  Today, the estimated number of people in slavery — 27 million — is more than double the total number believed to have been taken from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade.  Ship records make it possible to estimate the number of slaves transported from Africa to the Americas and the Caribbean, from the 16th Century until the trade was banned in 1807 — and the figure is about 12.5 million people.  One researcher blames today’s huge figure on rapid population growth, poverty and government corruption.
• Workers arrested at South Africa’s Marikana mine have been charged in court with the murder of those of their colleagues shot by police.  The 270 workers will be tried under the “common purpose” doctrine because they were in the crowd which confronted police on 16 August, an official said.  Police opened fire, killing 34 miners and sparking a national outcry.  The killing was the most deadly police action since South Africa became a democracy in 1994.  Six of the 270 workers remain in hospital, after being wounded in the shooting at the mine owned by Lonmin, the world’s 3rd biggest platinum producer, in South Africa’s North West province.  All 270 workers face murder charges — including those unarmed or at the back of the crowd.  The “common purpose” doctrine was once used by the former white minority regime against activists fighting for racial equality in South Africa.  During a visit to the mine after the Marikana killings, President Zuma told workers he “felt their pain” and promised that a commission of inquiry would investigate the killings.  The commission will rule on the conduct of the police. “It’s a separate case.”  The commission and an internal police review are expected to take several months to complete. Police said they started shooting after being threatened by large groups of miners armed with machetes. Ten people, including two police officers and two security guards, were killed during the protests before the police shooting.  The protests were triggered by demands for a pay rise and recognition of a new union.  Talks to resolve the dispute, which shut the mine for weeks, are continuing.
• Singapore is a unitary multiparty republic with a Westminster system of unicameral parliamentary government.  The People’s Action Party has won every election since self-government begain in 1959 by governing on the basis of a strong state that prioritises collective welfare over individual rights (such as freedom of speech).  The legal system is based on English common law but with differences — trial by jury was abolished in 1970; instead, judicial assessment is performed by judges.  Penalties include judicial corporal punishment in the form of caning for rape, rioting, vandalism, and some immigration offences.  There’s a mandatory death penalty for murder and certain drug-trafficking and firearms offences.  Amnesty International says legal provisions conflict with the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty and that Singapore has “possibly the highest execution rate in the world relative to population”.  In 2011, Singapore ranked in the top countries surveyed in “Order and Security”, “Absence of Corruption”, and “Effective Criminal Justice”.  However, it scored low for both freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.  All public gatherings of more than 5 people require police permits; protests may be legally held only at the Speakers’ Corner.  Chia Thye Poh of Singapore was the longest-serving political prisoner of the 20th century.  A teacher and socialist member of parliament, he was detained in 1966 under the Internal Security Act (for allegedly conducting pro-communist activities).  His 32-year imprisonment was 14 years longer than Nelson Mandela’s.  The Internal Security Act allows imprisoning citizens indefinitely without trial.  Elected opposition members of parliament, journalists, and trade unionists have been detained over the past 50 years.  Chia Thye Poh was locked up for 23 years before being charged or standing trial.  An amended Public Order Act outlaws any individual from conducting any kind of protest.  The Singapore myth is that economic growth can take place in an authoritarian state unhindered: after all, GDP has grown by leaps and bounds.  But silence comes via decades of defamation lawsuits, criminal prosecutions, and detentions without trial; the government extinguishes dissenting voices.  Yes, some Singaporeans are well off; in 2010, they had the greatest proportion of millionaire households in the world — but their gini coefficient (measure of income inequality) is at the level of Cambodia, Guyana, or Kenya — no unions, no minimum wage.  People commonly work until their 70s and 80s.  Each month, 1,000 Singaporeans seek residence in other countries.  And with only 1.2 births per person, it’s the least fertile country in the world, threatening the economy.

• Agence France-Presse is reporting that the Pentagon wants its drones to be more autonomous, so that they can run with little to no assistance from people.  “Before, they were blind, deaf and dumb,” said Mark Maybury, chief scientist for the US Air Force.  “Now, we’re beginning to make them see, hear and sense.”  Ronald Arkin, professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes that drones will soon be able to kill enemies on their own independently.  “It is not my belief that an unmanned system will be able to be perfectly ethical in the battlefield, but I’m convinced that they can perform more ethically than human soldiers are capable of,” he said.  Robotic weapons should be designed as “ethical” and could wage war in a more “humane” way.  People would be on the ground to control them despite them gaining more independence.  Peter W Singer, senior fellow in Foreign Policy at The Brookings Institution, believes there could be legal hurdles in regards to using robot-controlled drones.  “These responses that are driven by science, politics and battlefield necessity get you into areas where the lawyers just aren’t ready,” says Singer.  Earlier this year, Singer wrote an op-ed piece for The New York Times about the use of drones.  In the piece, entitled “Do Drones Undermine Democracy?”, he says their use “short-circuits the decision-making process, blurring civilian and military roles in war and circumventing the Constitution’s mandate for authorising it.”  The new military drones will most likely be implemented with more powerful jet engines and have a longer range.  There are currently more than 7,000 drones being used in combat.
• The appearance of new weapons in World War I initially represented innovation but not revolution.  It wasn’t until after the war that military theorists recognised the revolutionary potential of tanks and planes if they were used properly.  By World War II, tanks and planes had become the spearhead of fast-moving combined arms formations that could operate deep behind enemy lines, with infantry supporting them.  Cut to today: in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the insurgent sanctuaries of Pakistan, the US military has fielded a wide array of new technologies, with robotics by far the most important.  Today, 30% of US military aircraft flying in those conflicts are drones.  Nearly every land unit has robots of one type or another.  But, as in World War I, new technologies haven’t been used to augment existing military methods, although it’s not hard to imagine the advantages of robot-centric military formations.  A roboticised Army or Marine unit could lower the chance of US casualties and save some of the massive costs represented by recruiting, training, educating, housing, and feeding troops (as well as providing medical care and post-service benefits) and ease a potential recruiting crisis.  Large numbers of US troops antagonise local population when operations go awry.  Robots could ease these problems.  In urban combat, it’s very difficult for military units to make sure that buildings and neighbourhoods cleared of enemy troops stay that way.  Robots could help resolve this — they don’t need to sleep or eat, and don’t make mistakes from fear or fatigue.  That leaves the ethical question of the extent to which a human must be involved in any decision to use deadly force.  Robots can outperform humans at recognising someone carrying a rifle, but they can’t make complex ethical decisions.  Would a US military heavily based on robots be politically easier for a future president to deploy?  (Would that be a good thing?  Do Americans truly want a military that is easier to use?  Do they want to delegate life-and-death decisions to machines?)  Is it inevitable?

• H I G Capital is a Miami-based private equity fund that manages $8.5 billion.  Hart Intercivic is a company exclusively in the business of manufacturing and programming voting systems.  H I G Capital’s co-founder, Anthony Tamer, previously worked at Bain & Company, the global consulting giant where Romney was once CEO (8 of the company’s managing directors came from Bain as well).  Tamer and his wife are major Romney donors and have plenty of company at H I G — who has recently purchased Hart Intercivic — this is a company that provides voting machines for 370 jurisdictions around the nation, with about 17.7 million registered voters.  Bev Harris, founder of the nonprofit election watchdog, BlackBoxVoting.org, says Hart Intercivic machines are considered among the more hackable — but that’s not really the point.  “There’s no way to secure a system from its administrator,” she said.  Larry Norden, an election expert with the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, says, “It points to some of the problems with having private companies essentially running elections.”  Pam Smith, president of the election watchdog VerifiedVoting.org, says she’s not particularly concerned about Hart Intercivic, but is concerned over any equipment from any company that doesn’t leave an auditable trail.  “We need systems and rules in place that make it irrelevant who owns the voting machines,” she said.  “Some of them are recountable and some of them are not.  And that’s the situation that’s really unacceptable.”  According to Verified Voting, there are 118 jurisdictions with as many as 7.8 million registered voters whose votes are counted by Hart Intercivic machines alone (and there are other voting machine suppliers that may have similar problems) that produce no paper records whatsoever — there’s no way to ensure they’ve been counted properly.  That includes jurisdictions in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.  It looks bad.
• There are charts and analysis about US presidential and primary voting patterns available online which, if correct, are very troubling.  It would be awesome if someone could look at these and either show that the charts are incorrect or that the analysis is flawed and the charts don’t really mean what they imply.  Because if the analysis is correct, then it seems election fraud may be taking place in the US on a surprisingly large scale.  Data-driven investigations offer an intriguing potential for catching widespread fraud, whether financial or political.  But at this point, there isn’t a consensus on the validity of these statistical methods.  There needs to be.

Earlier this year, a group of internet analysts discovered a serious statistical anomaly in the Republican primaries that gave an unfair advantage to a particular candidate.  The anomaly was also present in the 2008 general election.  This statistical anomaly helped the leading candidate, Mitt Romney, win the Republican nomination in 2012 and John McCain to gain votes against Barack Obama in 2008.  The effect was subtle in 2008 and did not affect the final results; however this year’s election could be reversed because it’s a closer race.  The technique causes illicit vote gains in the 10% range.  The election thief, whom they call The Flipper, has been taking handfuls of votes from other candidates and making them be counted as votes for Mitt Romney.  This brilliant strategy is cleverly designed to elude the many security measures in the election system so that county and state election officials believe their elections have been conducted fairly.  Explanatory documents are available online from the authors ranging from a simple one page, no-math explanation of the anomaly to a thorough statistical analysis.  So who is The Flipper?  While his/her/their exact identity is not yet known, it’s apparent the Flipper knows politics inside and out, election procedures and security, and computers, and also has some cash to travel.  The Flipper is poised to aid Romney to victory in November.  (It will actually be easier than in the primaries; just flip a few votes in a handful of high electoral vote swing states and there’s the presidency on a silver platter.)  Election fraud of that magnitude detected the day after the polls close could make the Florida 2000 fiasco look like child’s play.  What happens to the US government if state election officials are unable to certify the elections and send electors to the Electoral College?  This is not a large conspiracy involving a complex network of perpetrators.  Such an alleged election fraud could be accomplished by only a single, highly-clever computer programmer with access to voting machine software updates.  Four version of the report are available: Simple (no math), Moderate (plenty of charts), Detailed (detailed statistical analysis) and Supplemental (history & further examples).  You probably owe it to yourself to check it out.  Nothing short of the integrity of the American electoral process is at stake — if this is accurate.

This Dallas, Texas bridge, designed by architect, engineer and sculptor Santiago Calatrava, officially opened March 2012.
Called the Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, it’s named after the eldest of H L Hunt’s 15 children (from his 3 concurrent wives).

• Haroldson Lafayette “Hassie” Hunt III was the oldest son of Texas oilman H L Hunt Jr.  Hassie looked like his dad and was his father’s runaway favourite, the chosen successor to head the family business.  Thanks to what H L regarded as a mystical ability to find oil, Hassie was a wildcatter millionaire in his own right by the age of 21.  But by 25 (in the 1940s), Hassie suffered an incapacitating mental breakdown — schizophrenia.  H L sent him to every major treatment centre in the country (“cures” tried included prostitutes and valium), then decided to risk what was considered the latest advance in psychiatry: two prefrontal lobotomies.  The lobotomies calmed Hassie down all right — he remained under 24-hour care for the rest of his life until his death in 2005 at the age of 87.  H L, who kept looking for a miracle cure, was forever disappointed.  (Today, schizophhrenia is chemically treated with antipsychotic meds; apparently stressful life events often precede — and possibly precipitate — symptoms.)
• H L took much of his frustration out on his next son, Bunker.  When not simply ignoring him, the older man was often finding fault, bawling him out, belittling him.  By the time Bunker had begun to work at Hunt Oil on a full-time basis, H L had let it be known that he thought his second son was unfit to succeed him.  The elder Hunt then shifted his favour to Bunker’s younger brothers, Herbert and Lamar.  Bunker, who seemed to lack the gift that H L had shared with older, smarter Hassie for locating new sources of oil, began by drilling a string of dry holes in Pakistan, losing over $11 million dollars.  He then went head to head against the major oil companies and bid on leases in Libya, obtaining tracts #2 and #65.  By then he was in such financial straits (having lost the whole $250 million in his trust fund) as a result of his dry holes that he sold a ½ interest in tract #65 to BP.  In 1961, the Sarir field, the largest oilfield in Africa to date, was discovered on tract #65.  Bunker’s ½ interest was valued at US$7 billion dollars, making him the richest private individual in the world at age 35 (wealthier, even, than his father).
• Although Bunker had a different approach than his father, he and his younger brother Herbert assumed control of the family’s businesses by the early 1970s (H L Hunt died in 1974).  Meanwhile, Hassie’s company that he started, Hunt Petroleum, continued to grow and prosper even after his incapacitation, becoming a rather large business in its own right, making huge sums of money for Hassie; at his death, Hassie was worth about US$2 billion.
• During the 1970’s Bunker owned roughly 5 million acres of real estate throughout the world.  But due to Qaddafi nationalising his Libyan oilfields and also due to a failed attempt to corner the world’s silver market, in 1988 Bunker filed for personal bankruptcy.  In 1989 he left bankruptcy with a net worth of $5-10 million dollars and a debt to the IRS of $90 million dollars to be repaid in 15 years (which it was).  Herbert Hunt followed suit and declared bankruptcy in 1990.  Their younger brother Lamar, inductee into 3 sports’ halls of fame (football, soccer, tennis), died of cancer in 2006, admired and respected by millions.  The Hunt sons covered a full spectrum.

Sourced from H L Hunt by Stanley H Brown, Bunker Hunt, Hunt, (Nelson) Bunker 1926- and Hunt, (William) Herbert 1929-, and Money — Then and Now.

• Japanese scientists have made viable mouse eggs in a laboratory dish, an advance that may offer a new route for treating infertility in people.  The experiment completes a long-sought quest in reproductive biology: to make sperm and eggs in a lab dish.  The dish-created eggs were fertilised with natural mouse sperm to create healthy, fertile mice.  It will be tough to repeat the trick in people.  But if it can ever be done, it has the potential to transform reproductive medicine by enabling both infertile men and women to conceive their own genetic offspring.  The fertilisation rates using lab-made eggs roughly matches the rate using natural mouse eggs.  However, the final outcome of the experiments are less efficient.  In a control group where natural mouse eggs were used, nearly 13% of transferred embryos led to healthy, fertile pups.  By comparison, the figure was 3.9% for lab-made eggs created from embryonic stem cells.  There’s no guarantee the technique will work on human cells.  Still, the experiments are likely to offer useful insights.
• Scientists have found that a man’s fertility can be restored by growing early stage sperm from a skin sample.  Adult cells, such as those of the skin, can be induced to return to a more primitive state and then turned into different cell types.  To see if it wais possible to produce sperm cells, a team at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in the US grew stem cells from skin samples and found they were able to generate early stage sperm cells.  It is hoped the technique can help men who had cancer during childhood become fathers, as infertility can be a side effect of some cancer treatments.  Sperm can be banked for future artificial insemination procedures, but that doesn’t help some patients, such as pre-pubertal boys.  While there are procedures to store testicular tissue prior to cancer therapy, those men who didn’t have an opportunity to save tissue are permanently sterile. The process is likely to raise concerns in some quarters from those critics wary of creating human life through artificial means.
• Some 40 years ago, researchers at the University of Missouri were searching for an alternative to the condom — a cheap, trustworthy and reversible form of male birth control.  For their first study, published in 1975, they strapped anesthetised rats face down to a platform with a cut-out cup full of water for their dangling scrota.  The scientists then exposed the animals’ testicles to a variety of things.  Heat can kill sperm (which is thought to explain why the testes hang outside the body).  So some of the animals got a 140ºF water bath for 15 minutes.  Others received a dose of infrared radiation, or short blasts of microwaves or ultrasound.  After treatment, the animals had constant access to females until they impregnated them.  Rats given the hot water bath didn’t conceive for 35 days.  Infrared radiation doubled that sterile window to 75 days.  Sometimes microwave treatment worked, sometimes it didn’t.  The best protocol, by far, was ultrasound, which researchers transmitted through the water cup.  One 5-minute exposure to these high-frequency sound waves led to 7 months of sterility, but they were back to normal by 10 months.  It works on dogs, cats, monkeys, and men.  No one knows exactly why ultrasound causes sterility — perhaps the ultrasound affects the ion exchange in the fluid in different areas of the testes, leading to conditions that prevent sperm development.

This is my very loose intrepretation of Sparknotes' summary of “The Road Not Taken” by American poet Robert Frost:
The speaker will not, in his old age, merely gather youth about him to say, “Do what I did, kiddies — I was able to do _____________ because I understood the situation.  Regardless, I took the less travelled road and that’s what’s proven to be important.”  Note that the speaker sighs.  What he says isn’t the truth.  He didn’t really think one path was better than the other, but perhaps one of the end destinations had been better than the other.  Had he picked the right one?  He pauses to reflect about what his life would have been like had he taken the other path; all his current ills would’ve been avoided, of course.  But really, that’s something he can never know.  He may have been killed by a falling tree within the first couple of minutes down the other path.  And if it eventuates that there’re infinite galaxies of infinite universes, then all those possible choices must exist somewhere.  But is it he who lives in each?  Or rather imperfect clones of himself that he’d hardly recognise?  He can never know that either.  His “possible” realities have collapsed into this one real world.  (Happens all the time.)  But what does it mean to “collapse”?  Do lives continue for other versions of him?  If alternate realities DO exist, are they able to be discovered somehow?  Could he swap places with one of his selves on an alternate world if they both agreed?  What if none of his alternates want to swap?  What if they all think the choices he made, the reality he made, was worst?  Remorse could be crippling.  The speaker (all of us) make choices if we want to change (to move and grow).  For many of those choices, there’re no real guides or definitive bases for deciding.  There isn’t so much A Right Path — as the path one is on (however one gets there).  Sighs for opportunities missed in the past aren’t always for wrong decisions made.  Sighs are for those moments of decision themselves — moments that, one atop the other, mark the unfolding of a single life, its coming into being by way of those choices made from those myriad possibilities.  This is a more primal strain of remorse: “Could I have done better?”  But there can be no answer.

A nerd is a person, typically described as overly intellectual, obsessive, or socially impaired, who spends inordinate amounts of time on unpopular, obscure, or non-mainstream activities, which are generally either highly technical or relate to topics of fiction or fantasy to the exclusion of more mainstream activities.  Additionally, many nerds are shy, quirky, unattractive, and may have difficulty participating in, or even following, sports.  “Nerd” is a derogatory, stereotypical term, but as with other pejoratives, has been recaimed and redefined by some as a term of pride and group identity.

• Intelligence and social awkwardness partially explain many patterns of Nerddom, but there’s more: dreams fool us all because, despite being incoherent, we accept them at the time as fully real.  With effort, we can form a habit of doing “reality checks” during our waking life: trying to push fingers through solid surfaces, or breathe with airways closed.  When the act of asking, “Am I dreaming?” within a routine reality test becomes habitual, these may then start happening in dreams.  The reward?  An insight denied most: knowledge of the fact of being in a dream.  Dreams demonstrate that brains create complex, immersive, fully-convincing simulations.  In fact, waking life is a (kind of) dream.  Consciousness exists and “sees” only certain aspects of reality — aspects chosen for adaptive reasons, not (usually) for mere truth.  Communal belief (social reality) and the “sacredness” produced are powerful layers of distortion that nerds usually notice and try to avoid.  One reason is because nerds are less able than normal humans to perceive social reality as sacred.  Autism (which, along with depression, is overrepresented in the nerd community) is associated with a reduced ability to model other brains in a normal social way; it is inversely linked to a belief in God.  An autistic person is more likely than a (so-called) “neurotypical” to notice that a social reality even exists.  It is no wonder: autistics get a lucid-dreaming-type reality check for “the great social dream” with every inscrutable (to him) human action he witnesses.
• Mild depression removes pleasurable feelings from everyday life; it interferes with a mechanism for sacredness-maintenance distinct from the theory-of-mind path that autism appears to block.  Meaning is deconstructed in depression; social connections weaken.  Ideas and things that for normal individuals glow with significance appear to the depressed as empty husks.  The deceptive power of social sacredness illusions is weak for the depressed person (as are certain other deceptive powers such as illusion of control).  This isn’t an unmitigated victory for the nerd — self-deception is strongly related to happiness.  The consolation of gaining insight may not always make up for loss of sacredness in terms of happiness.
• Recursion and self-reference are uniting themes for nerds, who constantly try to jump out of themselves so they can look back at themselves with a different perspective.  A predilection for abstraction feeds an addiction to insight.  Nerds desire both insight and meta-insight — a multilayered awareness that brings a complicated relationship to ambiguity: information is present on multiple levels.  Some people routinely communicate on multiple levels at once while others hold out for legible progress made only through sincerity.  Regardless, layers of self-glorifying self-deprecation illustrate nerds’ complicated relationships with themselves.  They likely begin socially awkward — failing to automatically perceive social subtleties that normal cohorts notice instinctively.  Some master social belonging by using parts of the brain not adapted for that purpose; most experience normal human aches at the lack of social belonging, friendship and bonding.  (In other words, they’re normal, just different.)  A single brain is limiting.  Via linkup, nerds may form superbrains capable of insights unavailable to mere individuals.

• Huge segments of human culture cater to stimulating the humour reward circuit; not so for the closely-related but distinct insight reward circuit.  “Insight porn,” to the extent it exists, is of marginal cultural importance compared to humour.  Puzzles, mystery stories, pattern-recognition games, perhaps even political commentary,all trigger the insight reward circuit in a degraded way.  Yet why should it be that art catering to humour is more plentiful and of higher quality than art catering to the insight reward circuit?  Perhaps because humour has implications as a mating quality indicator — insight is a more dangerous trait.  It may possibly be an indicator of uncooperativeness (contrary to the adaptive value of religion, for instance).  This may explain why there are dozens of comedy clubs in Los Angeles, but not a single club where one can go to solve lateral thinking puzzles with masters of the genre.  Humour can even inoculate against threatening ideas, such as evolution and non-religion.
• In some ways the domain of visual art has done a better job than the domain of science in promoting the nerd value of seeing through social/sacred illusions.  Severe mental illness is so common among serious visual artists that it’s practically a job qualification; it’s rare in the sciences (though less rare in abstract math and philosophy).  Science has done a better job than art (and marginally better than math and philosophy) at protecting itself from radically different ways of thinking (hence insights) about itself.  Insight porn does not have to be true to be effective; it merely has to be geared to the sophistication of its audience, producing insights of the right size.  Any given insight may be illusion; reality is best served by sceptics.  But we’ve learned to glorify insight itself, properly pitying the rest of humanity.
• The feeling of mirth (a reaction to humour) is a reward-system response to the detection of a contradiction in one’s mental space: one of the premises one had mentally committed to is found to be incorrect: it is the detection of a misfit.  Insight, on the other hand, involves the detection of a fit — the detection of a pattern that allows the compression of information previously requiring more representational space.  Humour is a much safer route than insight to correct thinking.  The feeling of humour detects a problem that is likely not to really be a problem.  On the other hand, insight is likely to provide an illusion of a problem solved: a better, more elegant model of the world.  Indeed, insight leaps often do provide a more accurate, more elegant model — but a person who’s spent a great deal of his life having the feeling of insight may or may not have a more accurate, more elegant model of the world than someone who rarely experiences insight.  Caution is needed.  Define your goals as accurately as possible.  Define the terms you use as well.

The foregoing is extracted from Trying to See Through: A Unified Theory of Nerddom.

• A significant advance in forensic investigation has been brought a step closer by scientists who believe they can produce portraits of suspects from a scrap of their DNA.  This development would mean inaccurate photofits and unreliable eyewitness testimony would be consigned to history.  Researchers in the Netherlands working with photographs of individuals and MRI scans of their heads have identified genetic factors that contribute to facial appearance.  This technique could one day give police the capacity to reconstruct faces of suspects as easily as their fingerprints.  This could then be distributed nationwide, deterring offenders and leading to a reduction in crime.  Nine facial “landmarks” were identified, including the position of the cheekbones, the distance between the eyes, and the height, width, and length of the nose.  By analysing genomes of almost 10,000 individuals, they found 5 genes that controlled the positioning of the 9 landmarks affecting facial appearance.  This marks the beginning of the genetic understanding of human facial morphology and it provides interesting applications in forensics.  This would lead to a much-needed improvement in eyewitness reports (currently not reliable).  The study was supported with funding from research organisations in Australia, Canada, and Europe including the UK.  Their aim is to find those genetic factors that determine visible human traits.

• A doctor in your pocket in the future?
  • The Skin-Cancer Scanner — A home version of a handheld cancer scope is currently under development by researchers at the University of Rochester.  Trained on any suspicious growth, it will provide essentially a 3-D virtual biopsy via a near-infrared laser that penetrates the skin, precisely controlled by an electric current, allowing it to refocus 30 times a second as it snaps thousands of pictures, allowing anyone to point it at a mole and zip off a virtual biopsy via cellphone to a distant specialist.  It could be expanded to diagnose eye diseases.
  • The Tumor Sniff-Tester — A cancer breathalyzer can detect cancer cells because they have distinctive byproducts that healthy cells don’t: small molecules that diffuse into blood and breath and can be recognised.  Cancer-sniffing dogs are 95% accurate in distinguishing the breath of a people with colon cancer.  The Meta­bolomx test has 130 different molecular sensors printed on a postage-stamp-sized piece of plastic (dogs have 900).  Breathe on it and the sensors change colour in a pattern which can be read by a computer.  It’s 85% accurate for lung cancer, but analysis for other problems should be available soon, including diabetes and some types of kidney disease.
  • The Smartphone Physician — A cellphone camera can be converted into a blood-cell imager that can potentially eliminate the need to send blood to a lab.  Software can take the chaotic-looking pattern of light and shadows that shine on the phone’s unlensed image sensor and re-create an image out of it.  A glass slide containing a blood sample is mounted in front of the camera sensor so that light shines through the blood.  It could theoretically screen for diseases like malaria and sickle-cell anæmia and could also do a straightforward blood count.  (Today’s smartphones have graphics-processing units more powerful than a room-filling supercomputer of 20 years ago.)  The images captured can be sent as text-message attachments to a lab technician.  One day the phone may do the diagnosis on its own.

• Scientists in Japan have created a microscopically-thin film that can coat individual teeth to prevent decay or to make them whiter.  This “tooth patch” is a hard-wearing and ultra-flexible material made from hydroxyapatite, the main mineral in tooth enamel, that could also mean an end to sensitive teeth.  Dentists once thought that an all-apatite sheet was unattainable, but researchers can now create a film just 0.004 millimetres (0.00016 inches) thick by firing lasers at compressed blocks of hydroxyapatite in a vacuum to make individual particles pop out.  These particles fall onto a block of salt which is heated to crystallise them before the salt is dissolved in water.  The film is scooped onto filter paper and dried, after which it is robust enough to be picked up by a pair of tweezers.  The moment it is laid on a tooth surface, it becomes invisible.  The sheet has a number of minute holes that allow liquid and air to escape from underneath to prevent bubbles forming when applied to a tooth.  A current problem is that complete adherence takes almost a day.  The film is now transparent but it is possible to make it white for use in cosmetic dentistry.  In 5 years the film could be used in practical dental treatments such as covering exposed dentin.  But cosmetic use is only 3 years away.

• The feeling of “butterflies” in the stomach is familiar to many people.  Underlying this sensation is an often-overlooked network of neurons lining our guts that is so extensive some scientists have nicknamed it the “second brain”; it does more than handle digestion and inflict the occasional nervous pang — it partly determines our mental state and plays key roles in certain diseases (no conscious thoughts, though).  Technically known as the enteric nervous system, it consists of sheaths of neurons embedded in the walls of the gut (called the alimentary canal, measuring 9 metres end-to-end from æsophagus to anus) where more than 100 million neurons control breaking down food, absorbing nutrients, and expelling waste.  Thus gut behaviour is controlled independently of the brain.  Nevertheless, this system is too complex to have evolved merely to ensure waste moves out of the colon.  About 90% of the fibres in the vagus (primary visceral) nerve carry information from gut to brain, not the other way around.  A big part of emotion may be influenced by nerves in the gut.  Everyday emotional well-being partly relies on messages from the second brain to the first.  In fact, electrical stimulation of the vagus nerve seems to be a useful treatment for depression.  Depression treatments that only target the first brain can unintentionally impact the second one.  95% of the body’s serotonin is found in bowels.  Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) increase serotonin levels — little wonder that meds meant to cause chemical changes in the mind often provoke gut issues as a side effect.  Irritable bowel syndrome, which afflicts more than two million Americans, arises in part from too much serotonin in our entrails.  Scientists are learning that the serotonin made by the enteric nervous system might also play a role in more surprising diseases: a new drug that inhibits the release of serotonin from the gut counteracts the bone-deteriorating disease osteoporosis in postmenopausal rodents.  Seeping from the second brain, it might even play some part in autism.  The same genes involved in synapse formation between neurons in the brain are involved in alimentary synapse formation.  This could explain why many children with autism have GI motor abnormalities.  And at least 70% of our immune system is aimed at the gut to expel and kill foreign invaders.
• Othello Syndrome is a type of delusional jealousy marked by suspecting a faithful partner of infidelity, attempts at monitoring and control, and sometimes violence.  The problem is named for Shakespeare’s Othello, who murdered his beautiful wife Desdemona because he believed her unfaithful.  In rare cases a treatment for Parkinson’s disease, which attempts to boost dopamine levels, brings on this stubborn delusion, which can transform a previously trusting relationship into a nightmare of suspicion, bitterness, and relentless accusations of infidelity.  It can also cause a sudden urge to gamble.  This comes about because the right frontal lobe is affected by excess dopamine; this brain region performs the function of a fact checker, monitoring the interpretations of the left hemisphere for plausibility and accuracy.  When the right hemisphere is damaged, the left hemisphere is free to issue interpretations that might make no sense.  The frontal lobes do cultural work, are immersed in that from birth, and evolved in a matrix of handling social relations and negotiations.  As we begin to see some problems as merely neuroanthropological disorders, we might develop a new understand of behaviour, thus allowing people to learn better ways to negotiate their social lives.
• Researchers have found traces of male DNA in women’s brains, which seem to come from cells from a male fœtus crossing the blood-brain barrier during pregnancy.  This is known as microchimerism.  Brain samples from 59 women aged between 32 and 101 who had borne male children were tested for the Y-chromosome-specific DYS14 gene.  It was discovered that 63% had traces of male microchimerism throughout their brains.  The 33 women who had Alzheimer’s disease had lower levels of male microchimerism, particularly in the regions most affected by the disease, but the numbers in the study were too small to draw firm conclusions.

• Resembling a mushroom cloud, a monsoon thunderstorm drops a deluge on the desert.  The base of this cloud may hang some two miles above the ground.
• In 45 minutes the storm dropping marble-sized hail moved from Wellington Airport to Eastbourne before it began to fall apart, during which time about 200 lightning strikes were recorded.
• A storm passes over the Caymans.

A 23-year-old mountain climber was hit by a lightning bolt and awoke in hospital to find herself experiencing bizarre hallucinations.  The air rescue team took her to the hospital and she was put in a drug induced coma for 3 days because she was disoriented and extremely agitated.  She began having hallucinations, partially with delusional character.  These were in the whole visual field and constantly present for approximately 20 hours.  At the time of appearance, the patient was not sure if they were real or unreal, but didn’t report them for fear she might be considered insane.  She insisted on being transferred to her hometown hospital.  Her brain scan showed damage to the occipital lobes, the areas at the back of the brain largely taken up with the visual cortex.  It deals with early stages of visual perception.  [I wonder how many people with religious “revelations” suffered a back-of-the-head trauma prior.]  Luckily, the patient survived without sustaining serious brain damage although the article mentions that because the occipital lobe has so many blood vessels “it could be particularly vulnerable to lightning damage”.   Some learning points:

• Lightning strike can cause neuropsychological problems through direct brain injury or indirectly as a result of memory and attention deficits and emotional lability.
• Cortical visual hallucinations can result from a lightning strike.
• Individuals at high altitude are vulnerable to lightning strikes even if not caught in a storm.

• Ever wondered how Moses felt as he divided the waters of the Red Sea?  Wonder no longer, as you too can now control the elements and part a deluge of torrential rain — but only in the Barbican’s Curve gallery in London.  The latest work by experimental group rAndom International, “Rain Room”, invites visitors to step into a 100-square-metre downpour without getting wet.  Set on a raised plinth at the end of a dark, curving corridor space powerfully backlit by a glaring spotlight is a perfectly rectangular chunk of rain.  As visitors step up on the stage, the driving rain is repelled, as if each body has an invisible magnetic field.  Further in, and the rain closes around you, enveloping each silhouetted figure in a cylindrical void.  The apparently simple trick is the result of a lengthy period of development, which came out of playing with large-format printing.  The group treats each project as part of an ongoing process of research into the relationship between people and the new intelligent technologies.  Rain Room is controlled by a series of cameras that 3D-map the location of bodies on the plinth, translating this to a pixelated grid of 25×25 centimetre panels, each of which controls 9 outlets – and a total of 2,500 litres of water falling at a rate of 1,000 litres per minute.  The water is constantly being filtered, treated, and recycled.
• This is a water garden outside the oceanarium in Lisbon, Portugal.  The waterfall is just at the entry of Parque das Nações, a development which originated just after Expo 98.  It features Europe’s largest Oceanarium, restaurants, bars, event halls, and permanent exhibit halls, and is located next to the Tagus River (Rio Tejo) on the east side of Lisbon.
• An art installation from the Brooklyn-based art and architecture firm Dash 7 Design: a towering steel swing set holds arrays of mechanical solenoids that create a water plane falling in the path of riders.  The swing is the first in a series that play with interaction in rides and installations.  Water recirculates through 273 independently-controlled solenoid valves at the top of the structure, thus creating a wall of water. The water starts from a collection pool on the ground and is pumped up to a large pipe that feeds the solenoids. Sensors mounted on the swingset gather information about the angle and speed of each swing. That information is sent to a computer that predicts the action of the rider. The computer then creates a hole in the wall of water, allowing the rider to swing through without getting wet.

• What Lies Beneath by artist Gabby O’Conner is an iceberg that hangs down from the rafters of the City Gallery in Wellington, a patchwork blanket of blue based on the shape of the underwater, underside of an iceberg.  It’s made of 3,000 A1 sheets of tissue paper and 28,000 staples.
• The Gerald D Hines Waterwall Park, formerly known as the Williams Waterwall, is a multi-story sculptural fountain sitting at the south end of Williams Tower in the Uptown District of Houston. Both the fountain and tower were designed by architect Philip Johnson. The semi-circular fountain is 64 feet (20 metres) tall, to symbolise the 64 stories of the tower, and sits among 118 Texas live oak trees. Water cascades in vast channelled sheets from the narrower top rim of the circle to the wider base below, both on the convex side and on the rear side. This creates a visually striking urban waterfall. The entire fountain’s water supply, consisting of 78,500 gallons, is recycled by an internal mechanism every 3 hours and 2 minutes.
• This photo was taken in Dodekanisos, Notio Aigaio, Greece.  The Dodecanese are a group of 12 larger plus 150 smaller Greek islands in the Aegean Sea, of which 26 are inhabited.  Τhis island group generally defines the eastern limit of the Sea of Crete.  Their limited natural resources, geographical fragmentation, and relative isolation have been significant obstacles for the region’s development in the past.  However these are gradually fading due to infrastructure and tourism investments.

Introverts

• Respect their need for privacy.
• Never embarrass them in public (give reprimands privately).
• Let them observe first in new situations.
• Give time to think (don’t demand instant answers).
• Don’t interrupt.
• Give advanced notice of expected changes in their lives (like 15-minute warnings to finish whatever they’re doing before calling them to dinner or moving on to another activity).
• Enable them to find one best friend with similar interests and abilities; encourage this relationship even if the friend moves.
• Don’t push them to make lots of friends.
• Don’t try to remake them into extroverts.

• Respect their need for conversation.
• Realise conversation is a two-way street.
• Sometimes be the one to initiate a connection.
• Don’t call them shallow because they can do light-touch conversation.
• Don’t assume that social embarrassment is easier for an extroverted friend to deal with than it is for you — it isn’t.  He’s dying underneath the happy face, so show some kindness.
• Remember that it’s possible (and common) to be the life of the party and yet feel utterly alone.
• If your extroverted friend is depressed or down, company and a new environment might help.
• Don’t hide behind your introversion.
• Don’t quote research at an extrovert saying that introverts are cleverer.

Trompe-l'œil is French for “deceive the eye”.  Seattle artist and science illustrator Marlin Peterson was recently commissioned by the Washington State Artist Trust to paint a mural somewhere in the city.  After searching unsuccessfully for a suitably large wall, Peterson got the idea to look for a large roof, and where would a painting on a roof be more visiable than right underneath the Seattle Space Needle?  He creates the illusion when seen from there that giant harvestmen have captured a building.

• Fishermen did not catch a single cod over the age of 13 last year according to a study of sea ports across Europe, raising fears for future stocks because fish become more fertile as they age.  But is this actually true?  This information appeared in numerous online news and information posts, but the source for most of them, the Daily Mail, soon disappeared, available only as a cached copy.  A few days later, the BBC News Magazine wrote, “The Daily Telegraph recently ran the headline: 'Just 100 cod left in the North Sea.’  It sounded fishy.  Trawlermen were furious.  'It just makes my blood boil — 100 cod in the North Sea?’ fumes Brian Buchan, who’s been fishing in the North Sea for more than 30 years.  'More like 100 million cod in the North Sea.’  It’s not a trivial issue.”  The British government’s Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science says journalists misunderstood the data.  “Cod start to mature at age 1-2 and they’re fully mature by 6,” says the UK’s chief fisheries science adviser.  An adult cod aged over 13 isn’t merely an adult cod, it’s ancient.  Contrary to the recent headlines, cod stocks are getting healthier.  (When an erroneous article is published, leaving the article up with a correction seems better to me than taking it down and pretending it never happened.
• The Pacific barreleye are deep-dwelling fish with a see-through head.  They’re named for their barrel-shaped, tubular eyes which are generally directed upwards to detect silhouettes of available prey; however, they’re capable of directing their eyes forward as well.  All species have large, telescoping eyes that dominate and protrude from the skull, but are enclosed within a large transparent dome of soft tissue; this presumably allows the eyes to collect even more incident light and likely also protects them.
• Giant fish sculptures made from discarded plastic bottles were constructed in Rio de Janeiro as part of a UN Conference on Sustainable Development.  The installation is located on Botafogo Beach in Brazil.  The sculptures are illuminated from the inside at night creating a light show.

While diving in the semi-tropical region of Amami Oshima, roughly 80 feet below sea level, underwater photographer Yoji Ookata spotted something he had never seen before.  On the seabed a geometric, circular structure measuring roughly 6.5 feet in diameter had been precisely carved from sand.  It consisted of multiple ridges symmetrically jutting out from the centre, and appeared to be the product of an underwater artist carefully working with tools.  Underwater cameras showed that the artist was a small puffer fish who, using only his flapping fin, tirelessly laboured day and night to carve the circular ridges.  The unlikely artist – best known in Japan as a delicacy, albeit a potentially poisonous one – even takes small shells, cracks them, and lines the inner grooves of his sculpture as decoration.  Attracted by the grooves and ridges, a female puffer fish will find her way along the dark seabed to the male puffer fish’s artwork, where they will mate.  She lays her eggs in the centre of the circle.  Scientists observed that the more ridges the circle contains, the more likely it is that the female will mate with the artist.  The little sea shells serve as vital nutrients to the eggs as they hatch, and to the newborns.  Further, the grooves and ridges of the sculpture help neutralise currents, protecting eggs from being tossed around and exposed unduly to predators.

• The Banker.  Is this a vulture?  (The artist didn’t say.)
• This picture shows two people who had dressed themselves in a zebra costume intending to scare away all the animals with their idiotic laughter.  In the event, they ran into two young lions who didn’t scare so easily.  (There’s a thin line between bravery and stupidity.)  Happily for them, though, it all ended well — one of the lions attacked, knocking the headdress off.  The lion grabbed it, then both of them ran away with it — the now-headless “zebra” ran the opposite direction.  (Video middle of page if you’re interested.)
• William Wegman got a dog, Man Ray, with whom he began a long and fruitful collaboration.  Man Ray, known in the art world and beyond for his endearing deadpan presence, became a central figure in Wegman’s photographs and videotapes.  In 1981, Man Ray died.  It was not until 1986 that Wegman got a new dog, Fay Ray, and another collaboration began.  With the birth of Fay’s litter, Wegman’s cast of characters grew.  Out of Wegman’s involvement with the dogs evolved a series of childrens’ books inspired by the dogs’ various acting abilities.  Wegman has also published a number of books, created video works for Saturday Night Live, Nickelodeon, Sesame Street, and a film, The Hardly Boys, which screened at the Sundance Film Festival.  Wegman lives in New York and Maine, where he continues to work.

• Chimp vacation picture (first jet ski ride).
• Conflict management is crucial for social group cohesion, and while humans are still working out details, new research shows that some chimpanzees engage in impartial, 3rd-party “policing” activity much like humans do.  Anthropologists from the University of Zurich reveal that chimpanzees mediate conflicts between other group members not for their own direct benefit, but to preserve the peace within the group.  This behaviour can be regarded as an early evolutionary form of morality.  Chimpanzees intervene impartially in a conflict to guarantee the stability of their group, exhibiting prosocial behaviour based on an interest in community concerns.  This policing activity is rare and generally limited to high-ranking individuals.  Arbiters are more willing to intervene impartially if several quarrellers are involved in a dispute, probably because such conflicts are more likely to jeopardise group peace.
• A yellow baboon (Papio cynocephalus) vividly illustrates what the photographer who captured the moment calls “yet another human-wildlife conflict issue so common in Central Africa”.  Pictured in Mozambique, this animal was caught when its group staged a foray into a crop field.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a spotted elephant.  These elephants, though all Asian, appear to have differing skin colours and differing marking colours.  Yet none of the 3 photographers seems to have remarked on that feature in any way.  None gave the elephant’s name, nor any information on the creature’s situation or personality (information I would’ve liked to know).

• An Asian elephant in India.
• Another Asian elephant — could be anywhere.
• This Asian elephant lives near Angkor Wat, Cambodia.

A note left for family members on the refrigerator.  (This is how to motivate a teen now, I guess.)  As a Parenting Strategy, sure, router-rooted discipline is just a joke … and yet, used judiciously, it could also represent the most brilliant intersection of parenting and technology since the chore wheel.