"Why
Owning Property Sucks". It isn't the money tied up, or even
the maintenance work--it's the way the author sees herself, and
many other people, cut off from the rest of the world, feeling secure
at home--and only there.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
"Why
Owning Property Sucks". It isn't the money tied up, or even
the maintenance work--it's the way the author sees herself, and
many other people, cut off from the rest of the world, feeling secure
at home--and only there.
The domestic narrative, informed as it is by the idea of creating a refuge from external reality, sees the world outside the home as threatening and unpredictable. Having selected our sanctum we will only invite the outside in under certain, highly controlled conditions. We stop interacting with it and start to see the collective body - the street or the city - as an enemy from whose clutches we must escape if we are to claim our identity.
This leads to Thatcherism, the sale of council houses, and why New York and Amsterdam are livelier than London.
The genome of Streptococcus pyogenes, a.k.a. strep A,
the cause of strep throat, rheumatic fever, and necrotizing
fascitis--this is the notorious "flesh-eating bacteria"--has been
sequenced.
The circular
map of the genome is quite pretty, as they all are: a matter of
form more than content, attractive colors and symmetry.
Stem cells can be derived from
human
fat, which in turn can be easily obtained by liposuction. If
this pans out, the painful argument about the use of fetal stem cells
is over and we can go on to figure out what can and can't be done
with them.
We don't yet know the limits for stem cells found in fat. So far, we have seen promising results with all of the tissue types we have examined.
The 30 March 2001 issue of Science has a
thought-provoking article on how little we actually know
about dietary fat. Unfortunately, all that's available free
online is a one-paragraph
summary,
and even that requires free registration.
Quoting for commentary and discussion:
Mainstream nutritional science has demonized dietary fat, yet 50 years and hundreds of millions of dollars of research have failed to prove that eating a low-fat diet will help you live longer. Indeed, the history of thenational conviction that dietary fat is deadly, and its evolution from hypothesis to dogma, is one in which politicians, bureaucrats, the media, and the public have played as large a role as the scientists and the science. It's a story of what can happen when the demands of public health policy--and the demands of the public for simple advice--run up against the confusing ambiguity of real science.
The key point to note here is that even the studies that find that a low-fat diet is good for everyone say that it will extend life by, on average, a few weeks. That's the best case, assuming that the change in what you eat has no harmful effects. All that stuff about more deaths from heart disease?--that's a combination of changes in what could appear on a death certificate (exactly zero deaths were attributed to "coronary heart disease" in 1940, not because people's hearts were healthier but because the category didn't exist) and of more people surviving long enough for heart trouble to turn up.
The fallback argument for a low-fat diet has been "well, it won't do any harm." But it might. Some fats are good for you, and the trans-fatty acids in margarine, a common fat substitute, appear to be harmful. It's also possible that low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets (people have to eat something) promote weight gain. That's a convenient circular effect for the sellers of expensive low-fat "diet" foods, but not for the rest of us.
After all this research, about all we really know is that it's a good idea to eat your vegetables. If you have dangerously high cholesterol, ask your doctor whether drugs will work better than changing your diet. If your cholesterol is okay, and someone tries to sell you on a low-fat diet, ask to see the medical research supporting it. The USDA food pyramid doesn't count as research: that's a recommendation based on very little real information.
So the "French paradox" may be a figment: it takes as an axiom something that barely deserves to be called a hypothesis. The French aren't harmed by all that cream because there's nothing wrong with cream.
Unfortunately, Taubes's article is an overview, with few specific references. In my copious free time, I think I'm going to be doing Medline searches on things like the Nurses' Health Study.
Jon Carroll has fun explaining
dark
matter:
Leave a scientist in a room alone for five minutes, and he will start inferring. The next thing you know, he will start implying. Entire conferences will be held about the implications of his inferences.Act now, and we'll include ray guns and ghostly neutrinos.
Thursday, 12 April, is the 40th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's
trip to space, the first by any human. Sounds like a good
excuse for a party.
I'll be at the one in Minneapolis.
Ask a
silly
question, get a boring answer.
MIT plans to put course materials--lecture notes, reading lists,
assignments, and whatever else professors consider relevant or
useful-- on
the Web, free, for anyone who wants to use them. The
official claim is that OpenCourseWare
"is not a distance learning initiative" and
"is not meant to replace degree granting higher
education,"
but this will make it a lot harder to sell second-rate online courses.
Interaction with professors and other students is the key to
education--if that isn't provided, why pay for a canned
chemistry course
from the University of Wherever when you can get MIT's free?
The materials are explicitly offered to professors at other universities who want to use them as a basis for their own courses, as well as to MIT students and individual learners.
The ultimate
show
and tell item weighs 4100 pounds and loves bananas.
[via the
Obscure Store]
I'm less sure than Carl Kenney that this is
free
speech in action, but it's delightful poetic justice:
That's what happened in Missouri. After the Supreme Court ruled against the State of Missouri, the Department of Transportation renamed the highway the Klan wanted to adopt. The Klan has paid to clean the Rosa Parks Freeway. That's free speech.
Careful measurements of the light from a distant
supernova
support Einstein's conjecture that there is a cosmological constant
pushing everything apart. Specifically, the supernova is
brighter than it would be if other dim objects were dim because of
intervening dust, or if old supernovas were dimmer than recent ones.
The best current model for this is a repulsive force that has
increased over time.
Democracy, Giuliani style: his proposal for a private company
to take over five city public schools loses a vote by the parents.
The mayor's response is that they should
turn over
twenty schools, and give vouchers to
parents who voted for the takeover. No secret ballots, elections thrown
out because the results aren't what the government wanted,
and financial rewards for voting the right way. Words fail me.
A possible
solution
to the widespread problem of arsenic-contaminated
drinking water calls for little more than a bucket and some rocks.
Once again, the poor
pay
more for the same thing--in this case, medical care.
An artist decided to see what would happen if he
put up posters asking for the return of a lost
dollar
bill, identified by serial number. No reward was specified.
The real
causes
of the War of the Southern Rebellion, as proclaimed
by the rebels before they lost and decided that "states'
rights" sounded better than the
Mississippi convention's 1861 message that "Our position
is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery" and
the pro-secessionist who
warned that remaining in the Union would mean that "we will have
black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything."
The Nation is taking a poll to
name
the current resident of the White House.
[via More
Like This]
Coral reefs off the coast of Jamaica are
regenerating.
They were damaged by hurricanes, or overfishing, or by the
mysterious death of millions of sea urchins--nobody's sure. But
the sea urchins have returned and are eating the seaweed, and
the coral is growing again. That's the good news, and perhaps all
the good news:
"The coral reefs of Jamaica have been at the forefront of reports of ecosystem collapse, and predictions of the future for most reefs remain gloomy," [Peter Edmunds and Robert Carpenter]write."Although our results should not be construed to mean that reef recovery is inevitable throughout the western Atlantic, this study does provide good news about the recovery of highly degraded Caribbean coral reefs."
Purring
builds
strong bones and promotes healing.
[via Rebecca's Pocket]
Thus, Consignia.
How much do they pay for these names that disguise what they
actually do? And do the incomprehensible mission statements
cost extra?
Never mind blaming the victim, the state of New Jersey
has sent the victims a
bill
for the abuser's psychiatric treatment. There's an old law that
families have to help pay for court-ordered commitment, and a new one
that enables the state to imprison sex offenders in hospitals
indefinitely.
The law that requires family members to help pay for a relative's court-ordered care doesn't make exceptions for abuse victims."We've never had a case like this, where two kids who are abused are being asked to pay for their abuser's care," said Pam Ronan, spokeswoman for the state Department of Human Services.
They're being decent, but bureaucratic: they'll waive the charges if they get a letter of appeal, but they may insist on a new letter every year, keeping the pain fresh:
After four years of therapy, a new home with an aunt and uncle and a slow reconciliation between brother and sister, the state's order has given new life to old pain and rage.
The larger question is, if doctors can't cure sex offenders--the rationale behind long-term commitment--are they receiving "treatment" that any relative, victim or not, should be expected to pay for?
Another bonus from the Galileo mission:
the Jupiter probe that gave us our only images of the
Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact has inadvertently detected a
variable
star. Galileo was using Delta Velorum as a reference point
for navigation, and couldn't find it for eight hours: when
the hardware checked out, the engineers passed the data
to the American Association of Variable Star Observers, who found
that the brightest part of Delta Velorum is an eclipsing binary.
Copyright 2001 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.