AmbivaBlog

You Could Call It "The Red Zone."

Speaking of Rip van Winkle -- what a story:

WARSAW, Poland (Reuters) -- A 65-year-old railwayman who fell into a coma following an accident in communist Poland regained consciousness 19 years later to find democracy and a market economy, Polish media reported on Saturday.

Wheelchair-bound Jan Grzebski, whom doctors had given only two or three years to live following his 1988 accident, credited his caring wife Gertruda with his revival.

"It was Gertruda that saved me, and I'll never forget it," Grzebski told news channel TVN24.

"For 19 years Mrs Grzebska did the job of an experienced intensive care team, changing her comatose husband's position every hour to prevent bed-sore infections," Super Express reported Dr Boguslaw Poniatowski as saying.

"When I went into a coma there was only tea and vinegar in the shops, meat was rationed and huge petrol lines were everywhere," Grzebski told TVN24, describing his recollections of the communist system's economic collapse.

"Now I see people on the streets with cell phones and there are so many goods in the shops it makes my head spin."

Grzebski awoke to find his four children had all married and produced 11 grandchildren during his years in hospital.

He said he vaguely recalled the family gatherings he was taken to while in a coma and his wife and children trying to communicate with him.

Plot to Blow Up JFK Airport Foiled

The FBI says "there was no indication of any connection with al Qaeda."  But the plotters "tapped into an international network of Muslim extremists from the United States, Guyana and Trinidad."  Doesn't that count as a connection, at least in spirit, with al Qaeda?  Or is that like saying Saddam was in on 9/11?

First the good news:

The plot was foiled well before it came to fruition [it's been under investigation since 1/2006] and the FBI said there was no threat to the public from the plot. [...]  "We believe this threat has been fully contained".

The bad news is that things like this keep bubbling up.  And this was a bad one:

Four people, including a former member of Guyana's parliament, have been arrested in connection with a plot to blow up New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport, U.S. officials said on Saturday.  

Another one of the suspects was a former cargo handler at the airport. The four were charged with conspiring to attack the airport by planting explosives to blow up the airport's major jet fuel tanks and pipeline, the U.S. Justice Department said and other law enforcement officials said in a statement.

The attacks would result in destruction of "the whole of Kennedy," one suspect said in a recorded conversation, according to the statement. He predicted very few survivors.

This was "one of the most chilling plots imaginable," Roslynn Mauskopf, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, told a news conference. "The devastation that would be caused ... is just [un]thinkable."

The 40-mile fuel pipeline to the airport extends from New Jersey and through the New York boroughs of Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens. [...]

"Any time you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow ... they love John F. Kennedy like he's the man ... if you hit that, this whole country will be mourning. You can kill the man twice," [one of the suspects, Russell Defreitas] said in another conversation [...]

"Even the twin towers can't touch it," referring to the September 11 attacks in another comment that the law enforcement authorities said was recorded last month. "This can destroy the economy of America for some time."

The law enforcement authorities said the investigation was helped by an informant, who recorded the conversations with the suspects.

How many thousands of lives do you think have been saved by the patriot-snitch -- so often himself a Muslim -- the unlikely, unsung hero of our time?  This one had a drug and racketeering rap sheet from 1996.  Whatever the motives -- love of country, money, a "get out of jail free" card, nothing to lose, a shot at redemption -- it's a huge, extended, nerve-racking risk to take, and it's the one kind of operative without whom these plots could never be uncovered and broken.

A Math Freak's Paradise.

What's special about this number?

And for more about your special number . . .

Letters ain't half bad, either.  (DON'T MISS this one.  It's awesome.)

Erich Friedman invented the Friedman number, and he has well earned his anagram:

Rare Chief Mind

Hat tip (as always in such mathmatters):  Phil Straus
 

"Listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as eating chocolate, having sex or taking opiates." [UPDATED]

Beatles commemorations abound, but why?

It has been 45 years since Mitch Miller, head of A&R (artists and repertory) at Columbia Records, dismissed the Beatles as "the hula hoops of music." Will Beatles songs still be loved when baby boomers are 64? Will they inspire future generations? Or will their music die with those who became intoxicated by their wit and charisma during the mind-expanding '60s?

Nowadays, everything from God to Google has to be explained in terms of neuroscience.  The human brain has fallen in love with its own image.  The appeal of art or music is no longer only, or even primarily, a mystery to be fathomed in terms of technique, archetypal resonance, or formal structure.  It is a jigsaw puzzle to be assembled of molecules, the super-Sudoku that currently obsesses Homo conundrumicus. 

Well, let's play this new game:

A hundred years from now, musicologists say, Beatles songs will be so well known that every child will learn them as nursery rhymes, and most people won't know who wrote them. They will have become sufficiently entrenched in popular culture that it will seem as if they've always existed, like "Oh! Susanna," "This Land Is Your Land" and "Frère Jacques."

Great songs seem as though they've always existed, that they weren't written by anyone. Figuring out why some songs and not others stick in our heads, and why we can enjoy certain songs across a lifetime, is the work not just of composers but also of psychologists and neuroscientists. Every culture has its own music, every music its own set of rules. Great songs activate deep-rooted neural networks in our brains that encode the rules and syntax of our culture's music. Through a lifetime of listening, we learn what is essentially a complex calculation of statistical probabilities (instantiated as neural firings) of what chord is likely to follow what chord and how melodies are formed.

Skillful composers play with these expectations, alternately meeting and violating them in interesting ways. In my laboratory, we've found that listening to a familiar song that you like activates the same parts of the brain as eating chocolate, having sex or taking opiates. There really is a sex, drugs and rock-and-roll part of the brain: a network of neural structures including the nucleus accumbens and the amygdala. But no one song does this for everyone, and musical taste is both variable and subjective. [...]

To a neuroscientist, the longevity of the Beatles can be explained by the fact that their music created subtle and rewarding schematic violations of popular musical forms, causing a symphony of neural firings from the cerebellum to the prefrontal cortex, joined by a chorus of the limbic system and an ostinato from the brainstem. To a musician, each hearing showcases nuances not heard before, details of arrangement and intricacy that reveal themselves across hundreds or thousands of performances and listenings.

Fortunately, Daniel Levitin is both -- "a former record producer" and rock musician who has become "a professor of psychology and music at McGill University in Montreal," the author of This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession.  (That's the hardcover link -- the paperback will be out at the end of August.)  That's why he knows that what makes music mysteriously great, whether you understand it in terms of the heart or the brain, is the simultaneous satisfying and violation of expectations.  If the greatest, most freeing and empowering pleasure the human brain (soul) knows is the forging of a new connection between deep-rooted but overfamiliar ideas, which both taps into their old life and recharges them with new life, then . . .

Which Beatles songs did it for you?   

There are so many.   Having bathed in the Beatles like everyone else, but not been a superfan (what a thing to take for granted, like aural wallpaper!), I have to go through a catalog to remind myself.  "I'm Lookin' Through You" and  "Blackbird" come right to mind, and the catchiness of "Ticket to Ride" and "Day Tripper" (two versions of the same song, don't you think?), and the sly lyrics to "Come Together" ("hold you in his armchair you can feel his disease," right) and "Rocky Raccoon."  But there are surprise memories that detonate in the catalog:  "She Said, She Said" ("I know what it's like to be dead" -- probably one of my top five), "Mother Nature's Son," "Girl," "Fixing a Hole," "Good Day Sunshine," that clangorous guitar hook in "Got To Get You Into My Life," and on and on. And maybe most surprising, they're all right there, almost note for note, chord for chord . . . in my brain.

(Blog-related trivia bit:  Lennon and McCartney actually wrote a song called "Thinking Of Linking." Can't place that one, though.)

UPDATE:  I've been singing bits of Beatles songs all day -- as well as bits of other the songs that have come up in my mental commentary (the underground river from which blog posts are dipped) about what was  more important to me than the Beatles ("Surrealistic Pillow," believe it or not) and what sappy taste in music I had  (important to me my first year in New York:  Simon & Garfunkel, José Feliciano, the Doors . . . and the Play of Daniel).

And I've been thinking that I really don't like the Beatles' druggy songs, with the exception of "A Day in the Life" which has some merits qua song, melodically and lyrically, and also historically -- it connects the lure of druggy escape or epiphany to the sense of how awful the world was.  It belongs in a time capsule (I've been thinking a  lot about time capsules).  But "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" is musically moronic.  Once the Beatles got on drugs, a lot of their songs became in-jokes; you had to be stoned or tripping just to enjoy and decode them.  I never liked the manipulation and distortion, all those paper-thin layers of sound  laminated on in the studio, and the woozy, blitzed, fatuous tone of voice.   Those are the songs of theirs that will not endure, in my opinion.   You hadda be there.

It's strange, because the only drugs I was at all sympathetic to were the "imagination drugs" -- grass and hallucinogens -- but I didn't like the music composed under their influence (that wasn't why I loved "Surrealistic Pillow," and those weren't the cuts I loved).  Whereas I avoided all forms of speed like the plague and had no interest in cocaine, yet one of my all-time favorite songs is a rarely heard sex-and-blow ballad by the Stones -- "Moonlight Mile."

"A serious work by an intelligent man with an incurable habit . . . [UPDATED]

. . . of calling more attention to himself than to the ideas he wishes to communicate."

Alan Ehrenhalt, in the WaPo via Powell's, calls Al Gore's The Assault on Reason (#3 on Amazon tonight) "worth reading, but ... maddening."

It is ... the apparent product of a man desperate to display his erudition at every possible
moment, appropriate or not. Virtually every major figure in the history of political theory turns in a cameo appearance, often making the same point someone else just made. Within the space of a few pages, we are treated to the wisdom of Louis Brandeis, Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, John Donne, the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas and the Roman rhetorician Lactantius. One begins to wish that Bartlett's Quotations had gone out of print.

Then there are the strained attempts to explain relatively simple political events through detours into the chemistry of the brain. The Bush administration, Gore says, has not only lied to the voters about its intentions, it has damaged the nation's capacity for judgment by stimulating the "affect heuristic" and generating fear responses in the portion of the brain called the amygdala. In a book by a Nobel laureate neurophysicist, some of these ideas might strike the reader as odd but provocative speculation. In this book, they simply come off as pedantry.

Sounds like the Al we know, doesn't it?  And then there's . . .

[B]rimming with futurist and other ideas—some logical, some loopy, many interesting ... he has spent his exile lecturing, appearing on [cable news], writing and co-writing books at a ruthless pace ... and advertising his thoughts on how to transform government and how to save his party. ... He has a fondness for ideas that he deems large and not much talent for small talk. Charm is a chore ...

Nope, not Al.  Newt.  As viewed by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker.  Imagine a campaign between these two!  Not likely, but it could happen.  What a lecturing we would get!  Would our eyes glaze over and roll up in our heads?  Newt, of course, has recently gone green:  his new book, coming this November, is called A Contract With the Earth.  And Newt, like Al, knows he needs to lose weight if he wants to run.  Like out-of-shape fighters back in training, watch their waistlines as indicators of their presidential appetites.

UPDATE:  Gallup Poll Weekly Briefing (by subscription):  "Only about one in three Americans believes that reluctant candidate Al Gore would have a good chance of being the Democratic nominee should he enter the race."

This is Mesmerizing.

It's the Eternal Feminine -- and she's flirting.

(Why can't we post YouTube videos on TypePad?  O Blogger, where art thou?)

H/T:  Althouse.

Thanks for Filling Us In. [UPDATED]

I love it when news stories do this:

[Former Senator Fred] Thompson, who plays district attorney Arthur Branch in the television show "Law and Order," would not be the first Hollywood actor to gain national prominence in politics if he decides to seek the White House.

In 1980, California Gov. and former B-movie star Ronald Reagan was elected president.  More recently, Austrian-born body builder and "Terminator" star Arnold Schwarzenegger became governor of California. 

I call it "writing for Rip van Winkle."  Actually it's just careless journalism (from Reuters, by Richard Cowan).  There are more artful ways to mention the precedents for Fred Thompson's ever-more-likely Presidential run without addressing us as if we'd been asleep for the last 30 years.

Thompson is tempted enough to begin the only test of his presidential prospects that counts:  The Money Test.  If donations gush into his coffers, it'll be a go.  Both he and Newt are eager to try on Ronnie's glass slipper, since it hasn't quite fit any of the other aspiring princesses yet.

UPDATE:  It actually sounds a little more certain than that.  From The Politico:

Fred Dalton Thompson is planning to enter the presidential race over the Fourth of July holiday, announcing this week that he has already raised several million dollars and is being backed by insiders from the past three Republican administrations, Thompson advisers told The Politico.

Thompson, the "Law & Order" star and former U.S. senator from Tennessee, has been publicly coy, even as people close to him have been furiously preparing for a late entry into the wide-open contest.  But the advisers said Thompson dropped all pretenses on Tuesday afternoon during a conference call with more than 100 potential donors, each of whom was urged to raise about $50,000. [...]

Campaign officials said they have every indication Thompson will declare his candidacy, but cautioned that he could still decide not to run or to postpone the announcement. Mark Corallo, the campaign spokesman, said: "He is seriously considering getting in and doing everything he has to do to come to a final decision."

A member of Thompson's inner circle, who insisted on anonymity, said the former senator will offer himself as a consistent conservative who can unite all elements of the Republican Party.

Yeah, that's top secret.

Another interesting factoid about the Republican field:  Thompson, if he enters the race, will be the third candidate (as far as I know), along with Giuliani and McCain, to have been diagnosed with cancer.   It is an "indolent" form of lymphoma, in remission, that Thompson says should not affect his lifespan.  Now I could pull a Rip van Winkle and inform you that John McCain has had two malignant melanomas removed, while Giuliani has been treated for prostate cancer.  In keeping with the new conventional wisdom that cancer can be a disease you live with, not one you die of (and if anyone was in doubt about that, they had only to watch Arlen Specter), the public has evidently concluded that a successful bout with cancer need not count out a candidate.

In polls, Thompson is currently tied with Romney -- regarding whom, The Politico has my favorite headline of the day:

Romney schleps to N.Y. for Jewish support

Where's King Solomon, Part II:A Story For Our Time

An international, interracial marriage.  Subtly different varieties of Christian faith.  Fertility trouble and the grueling technological ordeal that creates . . . what?  Persons?  Property?  Then, on the brink of possible parental redemption, a chilling change of heart.

On the night before the scheduled embryo transfer, the couple went out for Chinese food. Upon returning home, Augusta changed into her nightgown and settled in to watch the news. That is when Randy told her they needed to talk, and presented her with a handwritten bill of complaints. Foremost was his claim that he perceived her as being "hostile to God."

There had been minor disputes over religion in the past. Augusta had complained about the tithes Randy gave to a family that he considered his spiritual advisors. And Randy — a Pentecostalist but not a regular churchgoer — had bristled at Augusta's occasional criticism of televangelists. The previous year, Randy had confided his concerns about Augusta's faith to her sister, but he had never mustered the courage to confront his wife.

Randy said it was difficult for him to explain exactly how and when his perception of his wife and their marriage had changed. But he said the creation of the embryos, and the permanence they might bring to their relationship, finally moved him to act.

"The reality of my thoughts and feelings hadn't really come together until that moment," he said. "I woke up from a dead sleep, staring at the ceiling, saying, 'Oh, gosh, something's not right.' I really was like a deer in the headlights. I thought, 'This is a reality like no other reality.' "

Augusta was bewildered, furious and hysterical. She thought Randy sounded crazy, and chafed at his assertions that the Bible required her to submit to his will. She could not believe that he had allowed her to undergo surgery and watched as she injected herself twice daily with hormones without saying a word.

"Why put somebody in that situation?" she asked. She said she stayed up all night crying. The next morning, they showed up at the Center of Reproductive Medicine and instructed Dr. Vicki L. Schnell to freeze the embryos.

Counseling failed, and the couple -- she a Nigerian-born nurse and former bodybuilder, now 47; he an aerospace technician -- mediated their divorce.  Three remaining frozen embryos represent her last, very slim chance at biological motherhood (estimated at 10%).  He doesn't want her to have them.  She's willing to sign away his parental obligations.  He says he'd feel them anyway.

In the absence of King Solomon, this one's going all the way to the Supreme Court.

AUGUSTA'S lawyers have now filed a brief with the (Texas) Supreme Court arguing that "women undergoing IVF should have the same right to control the disposition of their embryos as afforded to naturally conceiving mothers."

"These are my kids," Augusta said. "It's almost like I was pregnant and somebody says I have to give them up because he doesn't want to be a father, so get an abortion because he's changed his mind."

Randy counters that Augusta's position would reduce the legal standing of men in in vitro fertilization cases to that of mere sperm donors. "If I am the biological father of a child, I could not bear the emotional consequences of being forced out of my child's life by a court order," he testified.'

It makes me think of realpc's comment a while back to the effect that our unhappiness is due to our technological success.  It seems clear to me that our unhappiness is more than Biblically ancient -- we were unhappy as soon as we were human, if not before -- but technology has certainly made for some strange new twists on the age-old themes.

And their names!  Randy and Augusta.  Like something from a bad feminist novel.  The details of the story -- the Chinese food, the religious husband marking his life-altering epiphany with "oh, gosh" -- make it a found short story of excruciating pertinence, ready-made for a time capsule.  (Credit, of course, goes to the writer, L..A. Times staffer, Kevin Sack, for selecting those details.)

Desires are endless; even our unacknowledged god, technology, cannot fulfill them all, and the hope it so seductively dangles may in fact inflame them.  My Google search for another solution -- which I remembered as "desires are endless, I vow to extinguish them all" (the correct word is "passions" or "delusions") -- turned up this enigmatically related and heartbreaking story.

Good Housekeeping for Writers

If you are a woman who writes and also takes care of others and a dwelling place, you must not miss Louise Erdrich's advice . . . to herself.  It begins:

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster. ...

And that's just the beginning.  It goes on, to

Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

And beyond.  You will treasure this.  You will print it out and post it on your refrigerator door, where the ink will gradually run in a rainbow of orange juice and freezer condensate and bubble-gum-flavored amoxicillin.

It's today's poem of the day at The Writer's Almanac, which I was just introduced to.   You can also hear the poem read in Garrison Keillor's slightly sneery drawl, which is all wrong.  It had to be a woman.

"Everything is more meaningful to these mice."

Adult mice with the Cdk5 gene switched off.

The gene controls production of a brain enzyme that has been linked to diseases like Alzheimer's, in which neurons die.  Yet when mice are bred to lack the gene completely, the pups die at birth.

Mice engineered so the gene can be turned off in adulthood, however . . .

. . . were far more adept at sensing changes in their environment than their mouse brethren. [...]

”The increase in sensitivity to their surroundings seems to have made them smarter.”

[Dr. James Bibb, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, who led the study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience,] said the mice were better at tasks based on associated learning [...]

“It’s the most important kind of learning in the animal kingdom. It’s how we know where our car is and that is our wife or our husband and that’s our kids. It’s how we connect things,” he added.

The smart mice were better at learning to navigate a water maze and remembering that they got a shock when they were in a certain cage.

“It was very clear right off the bat that the loss of Cdk5 made them have a much stronger associative memory,” Bibb said.

“What was really interesting is they not only remembered better, but the next day, if you put them back in those same circumstances, they noticed they were not getting shocked.”

Wait, these aren't by any chance also the mice with human brains, are they?