“An Iowa district court ruled Thursday that same-sex couples can marry based on the state constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment, court documents show. The court also struck down a state law declaring valid marriages are only between a man and woman.”… Link to CNN.com article!
You all know what I’m going to say already:
While one in 2,000 babies is born with an extra finger or toe, it’s much rarer to have extra digits on each appendage, said Dr. Robert Marion, director of genetics at the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore.
Among African-Americans, one in 200 is born with a sixth finger or toe, he said. The condition – known as polydactyly or hexadactyly – is usually genetic.
[ . . .]
While Jeshuah is healthy, he will have his extra fingers and toes surgically removed in mid-September, Morris said.
His father still has a tiny stump on his left pinky from where his own extra finger fell off after doctors tied a suture around it. The condition can require surgery when the additional digits are large.
Morris said she wondered whether Jeshuah’s extra fingers might give him a leg up on the ballfield. But like most parents of children with additional digits, she plans to go ahead with the surgery.
“I don’t want him to be an outcast,” she said.
Food for my misanthropy.
Your friend and humble narrator had such a fine birthday last week that she now has doubles of a handful of books she herself had recently purchased.
I’m a bookie-for-life generally: when I have a book, I don’t get rid of it. (Which, let me tell you, came in handy when the publisher shorted me a book of Socratic dialogues in 2006 and I had to teach from my 1998 copy). But I had just purchased God is Not Great, by Christopher Hitchens, and a used copy of John Brockman’s What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty 2.5 weeks before my sister sent me the very same books as a gift. It seems likely that at least one of my readers wants one or both of these books, and perhaps has a book or two to offer me in exchange.
(Just to keep this interesting, I’ve also got two other books I’ve acquired doubles of over the years: a pulp edition of Empire Star by Samuel Delany, and an old hardcover of The Computer Connection by Alfred Bester. Anyone up for a swap? I play for keeps. Comment here or via email!)
Greg Palast adds to the list of traitorous acts performed by the Bush Administration:
The charge is devastating: That, on August 29, 2005, the White House withheld from the state police the information that New Orleans was about to flood. From almost any other source, I would not have believed it. But this was not just any source. The whistle-blower is Dr. Ivor van Heerden, deputy director of the Louisiana State University Hurricane Center, the chief technician advising the state on saving lives during Katrina.
[..]
That leaves the big, big question: WHY? Why on earth would the White House not tell the city to get the remaining folks out of there?
The answer: cost. Political and financial cost. A hurricane is an act of God – but a catastrophic failure of the levees is a act of Bush. That is, under law dating back to 1935, a breech of the federal levee system makes the damage – and the deaths – a federal responsibility. That means, as van Heeden points out, that “these people must be compensated.”
Link to complete article. One more horror that the white house will not be held responsible for, and one more horror most Americans will probably never know about because of the Republican control of major media.
Krahulik has glasses, a beanpole physique, and a touch of overbite that gives him a pained expression. Holkins, who also wears glasses, is balding and so pale that he looks like he could get moonburns. This is the story of how two douches from Spokane, Washington, became the most powerful players in the videogame industry.… Link to fantastic look at Penny Arcade in Wired Magazine
Absolutely wonderful article on and by Christopher Hitchens. I had intended to just pull out one quote and toss this is the column to the right, but I couldn’t choose just one line, so it gets the highlighted treatment.
How could I choose just one among gems like this:
But when I go on to attack the Jewish prayer that thanks god for not making you a woman or a Gentile, I get quite a bit of applause. As well as featuring Katz, the panel of my critics contains a Muslim woman scholar, a Buddhist nun, and a charismatic Catholic. What if all these people were to walk into a bar at the same time? Surely the barman would ask if it was some kind of joke.
Hitchens is recounting his recent booktour / debate tour, and it’s just a marvelous read.
June 10, Washington, D.C.: It’s been weeks on the road, and after a grueling swing through Canada I am finally home. I tell the wife and daughter that’s it: no more god talk for a bit—let’s get lunch at the fashionable Café Milano, in Georgetown. Signor Franco leads us to a nice table outside and I sit down—right next to the Archbishop of Canterbury. O.K., then, this must have been meant to happen. I lean over. “My Lord Archbishop? It’s Christopher Hitchens.” “Good gracious,” he responds, gesturing at his guest—”we were just discussing your book.”
Spectacular.
Ugh. Just got word via James Randi’s newsletter that Jerry Andrus passed away yesterday. I had blogged about Jerry several times on the old incarnation of this blog. He was a fantastic man. Brilliant inventor of optical illusions, and rabid advocate of skepticism. He always had time to demonstrate his illusions and teach us a little about how perception can be tricked at the same time. I met the man several times, as he lived here in Oregon, and I had always intended to take him up on his offer to visit his farm, where he had life-sized optical illusions set up. He was well-known for his good humor and love of inquiry, as well as his brilliant inventions. I’m very sad to hear of his death. Jerry and Barry in one year… The skeptical community is infinitely better for having had them, and we are all much worse for having lost them.
A philosopher once asked, “Are we human because we gaze at the stars, or do we gaze at them because we are human?” Pointless, really…”Do the stars gaze back?” Now that’s a question. … Film adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust (now playing! Go! Watch!)
“She had asked: What is he? A friend or an enemy? The alethiometer answered: He is a murderer. When she saw the answer, she relaxed at once. He could find food, and show her how to reach Oxford, and those were powers that were useful, but he might still have been untrustworthy or cowardly. A murderer was a worthy companion. She felt as safe with him as she’d felt with Iorek Byrnison, the armored bear.” Philip Pullman… at Amazon.com
This research exploded into the sci-tech news over the last few days (it was sent to me by three people and I then stumbled onto the same story on at least five other blogs.) I’m not positive what to make of it yet. So far it looks fantastic from every perspective – they’re debunking the “out of body experience” as supernatural, they’re showing how we cognitively arrive at a sense of our own bodily perception – I should be in love with this. But instead, I keep struggling with the various ways in which these experiments are being reported on in such heavy-handed Cartesian language that I think all of the experimental results are in danger of being misused and/or misinterpreted. It isn’t that our brains “create” our sense of our own bodies, as if we ARE our brains and we OWN our bodies. We ARE our bodies, and I worry that even the scientific discussions of these experiments are drowning in the Cartesian illusion to the point that the science isn’t going to be interpreted as usefully as it ought to be.
The research reveals that “the sense of having a body, of being in a bodily self,” is actually constructed from multiple sensory streams, said Matthew Botvinick, an assistant professor of neuroscience at Princeton University who is an expert on body and mind but was not involved in the experiments.
Usually these sensory streams, which include vision, touch, balance and the sense of where one’s body is positioned in space, work together seamlessly, Botvinick said. But when the information coming from the sensory sources does not match up, the sense of being embodied as a whole comes apart.
The brain, which abhors ambiguity, then forces a decision that can, as the new experiments show, involve the sense of being in a different body.
The research provides a physical explanation for phenomena usually ascribed to other-worldly influences, said Peter Brugger, a neurologist at University Hospital in Zurich. After severe and sudden injuries, people often report the sensation of floating over their body, looking down, hearing what is said, and then, just as suddenly, find themselves back inside their body.
The new research is a first step in figuring out exactly how the brain creates this sensation, he said.
Still, really fascinating stuff and certainly worth keeping an eye on. Just keep in mind that these “multiple sensory streams” are not nice little independent pieces of information that meet in the brain – they ARE the body and they aren’t so neat and tidy (or separate) as this implies.