Brain scan spin -

"Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the politically partisan brain when it tries to digest damning facts about favored candidates or criticisms of them. The process is almost entirely emotional and unconscious, the researchers report, and there are flares of activity in the brain's pleasure centers when unwelcome information is being rejected."

1. the study is "to be presented" at the society for personality and social psych. conference this week

2. point 1 says it all. but really, exactly how did they ask parcipants if they were evaluating things 'unconsciously'? let alone 'entirely' emotionally . . .

why SPSP and not a brain imaging/neuroscience conference? why the press before peer review and publication? this makes a media splash, and perhaps the authors don't think it will get published anywhere. but often the biggest frenzies surround such speculative conference reports (which only feeds the critics of mr). remember the coke/pepsi fMRI study that was hyped at a conference eons ago? it was only published recently as a weak finding - pissed off reviewers didn't like that a press release was taken for accepted results.

no, i won't be eating these words some day. i don't think . . .

we give them

pnem et circnss, and they wish it to be awarded more than blood and cheers? come now.

"Once again, the media elites are proving that their pet projects are more important than profit," Janice Grouse, of Irrelevant Women for America, said. "None of the three movies - Capote, Transamerica or Brokeback Mountain - is a box office hit. Brokeback Mountain has barely topped $25 million in ticket sales. If America isn't watching these films, why are they winning the awards?"

of course, these folks have probably been lobbying art and history departments for decades to abandon the so-called "classics" in favor of the stories and study of gladiators, chariot races, and wine-infused roman soap operas - these are the things that people through history actually watched after all. Hamlet? nah. football. cock fighting! oh, wait.

unless, of course, these outbursts are just symptoms of small-minded bigotry . .

a pomo novel being published through junkmail

what follows is an unedited series of emails that have reached my stanford inbox,
presumably written by an R. Adeline.  this will form, we believe, a powerful post-
modern novella - it appears that 'Miss Murdstone' will be featured prominently.
some investigation, or a passing knowledge of british literature, reveals that this
may be the long-awaited mashup of david copperfield.  the first salvo appears off,
but it may just be a poetic frontispiece.  waiting, in trepidation and curmudgeon,
for the crazy-boxed next installment.



-----------------------------------------
Subject:  Re: study
Date:     Sun, January 15, 2006 10:53 pm

upland sustaining lemons, and two of those extraordinary boxes, all  Miss Murdstone
gave me her chilly finger-nails, and sat severely
raj the affirmative so readily, that I further asked her if she would  Could I
defend my conduct if I did not, sir? I returned, with all

Subject:  Re: I look on makings seashore
Date:     Sun, January 15, 2006 4:41 pm

starting; and arrived at Highgate without encountering any last, today I find them
put out for sale.  I have only noticed them
round green fan of former days, which was screwed on the back of a You have been a
long time, she said, without coming here.  Is



Subject:  Re: abrupt
Date:     Sun, January 15, 2006

peruvian influence with my daughter.  Do you decline to take those letters,  been
anxious to make, concerning the accounts, the housekeeping,
visibility The otherwise immovable Miss Murdstone laughed contemptuously in  And you
can hardly think, said Mr. Spenlow, having experience of



Subject:  notification
Date:     Sun, Jan 15, 2006 10:56 am

Hi, brownbag.

I lettuce of wolfs a erudition the rooks is continuity
She jumbled was sales of wrongly it gases children
Me legless pacing is handbag of mistakes a servants
A northwards the connecting predictions it planted she decently
You courteously of obliged the stool and somebodys or resurrect
Not yawn you annually and whispering me like? ascertained
No periods is sickly this octopus of strings the flax
If joking we book? of sixteenth a artistic is narrators
An awaited me encyclopedia you neck? she rustic savings?
Have progresses heed of nonsense? it whistling was flues
Was rotting not eloquently headed a knelt or wretched
And shuffled sanatorium is smooth of within an unclear

Best Regards,
Rivera Adeline

the year in blogs

- the most-blogged about stories in 2005
there's also google's end-of-year zeitgeist.
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2005.html

note on zeitgeist - aaron and i dropped in for a drink during his drive-by fooding last week, and i had shot of the mystical chartreuse. the first few sips resulted in involuntary head-shakes, but i could get used to the green stuff. next: raki. but where to get it?

because this ID

decision should just be posted in more places. not martin luther-style, but close. oh - and don't forget the juicy part where jones criticized the "breathtaking inanity" of the policy.

after writing a triumphant anti-religion column in my high school paper, i was called into the principal's office, where i was treated to a discussion on alternative viewpoints - and I was also offered a book by Behe, star pro-ID defense witness. i declined the offer. and then went home to compose a strong rebuke letter, focusing on what i thought was fantastically inappropriate behavior on the part of an administrator in a public school. wish i had that letter today - would probably be a good read.

================

We find that ID fails on three different levels, any one of which is sufficient to preclude a determination that ID is science. They are:

1) ID violates the centuries-old ground rules of science by invoking and permitting supernatural causation;

2) The argument of irreducible complexity, central to ID, employs the same flawed and illogical contrived dualism that doomed creation science in the 1980s, and;

3) ID's negative attacks on evolution have been refuted by the scientific community. ... It has not generated peer-reviewed publications, nor has it been the subject of testing and research. ...

ID takes a natural phenomenon and, instead of accepting or seeking a natural explanation, argues that the explanation is supernatural.... It is notable that defense experts' own mission is to change the ground rules of science to allow supernatural causation of the natural world, which the Supreme Court in Edwards and the [district] court in McLean correctly recognized as an inherently religious concept. ...Not a single expert witness over the course of the 6-week trial identified one major scientific association, society, or organization that endorsed ID as science. What is more, defense experts concede that ID is not a theory as that term is defined by the National Academy of Sciences. ...

ID is at bottom premised upon a false dichotomy, namely, that to the extent evolutionary theory is discredited, ID is confirmed. This argument is not brought to this Court anew, and in fact the same argument, termed 'contrived dualism' in McLean, was employed by creationists in the 1980s to support 'creation science'. ... However, we believe that arguments against evolution are not arguments for design. Expert testimony revealed that just because scientists cannot explain today how biological systems evolved does not mean that they cannot, and will not, be able to explain them tomorrow. ...

We find that ID is not science and cannot be adjudged a valid, accepted scientific theory. ... [It] is grounded in theology, not science. ...It has no place in a science curriculum. ID's backers have sought to avoid the scientific scrutiny which we have now determined that it cannot withstand by advocating that the controversy, but not ID itself, should be taught in science class. This tactic is at best disingenuous and, at worst, a canard. The goal of the ID movement is not to encourage critical thought, but to foment a revolution that would supplant evolutionary theory with ID.
*http://www.pamd.uscourts.gov/kitzmiller/kitzmiller_342.pdf

well, yeah,

there are DRM issues with apple. but if your auditory cortex is happy with 128 kps sound, then enjoy the third circle of entertainment media hell. 'our stock shall rise!'

Google is jumping into the online pay-per-video business, so perhaps a little competition will improve things.


p.s. - this mcsweeney's post on ithings is really funny.