Words Worth Repeating
Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.
- Do not think dishonestly.
- The Way is in training.
- Become acquainted with every art.
- Know the ways of all professions.
- Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.
- Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything.
- See those things which cannot be seen.
- Pay attention even to trifles.
- Do nothing which is of no use.
Do not think dishonestly.” You must make an honest appraisal of yourself, your attacks and your defenses, your strengths and your defects, of the environment, its wide avenues and narrow defiles, and of your opponent, his attacks, his strengths, and his vulnerability.”The Way is in training.” Constant training is the way to perfection. The Chinese character for “the way” means a discipline, a road, or a point of view”Become acquainted with every art.” This rule and the next one are meant to encourage what athletes often call “cross-training” here meaning a very broad form of eclectic training. The “art” referred to here is not just painting or sculpture.
- “Know the ways of all professions.” This would include law, medicine, retail sales, sword sharpening, and so on.
- “Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.” This I take to mean that one should not accumulate worldly goods, but the text is ambiguous.
- “Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything.” This is, I think, what it says.
- “See those things which cannot be seen.” This does not mean to see things which are invisible but to see things which are difficult to see.
- “Pay attention even to trifles.” This means just what it says.
- “Do nothing which is of no use.” This one is a little harder to figure out but appears to mean to avoid wasted motions and ineffective activities.
Do Not Think Dishonestly
- The way is in training.
- Become acquainted with every art.
- Know the ways of all professions.
- Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.
- Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything.
- See those things which cannot be seen.
- Pay attention even to trifles.
- Do nothing which is of no use.
A study published on Wednesday in The Lancet, following one million middle-aged women in Britain for 10 years, finds that the widely held view that happiness enhances health and longevity is unfounded.
“Happiness and related measures of well-being do not appear to have any direct effect on mortality,” the researchers concluded.
“Good news for the grumpy” is one way to interpret the findings, said Sir Richard Peto, an author of the study and a professor of medical statistics and epidemiology at the University of Oxford.
He and his fellow researchers decided to look into the subject because, he said, there is a widespread belief that stress and unhappiness cause disease.
Such beliefs can fuel a tendency to blame the sick for bringing ailments on themselves by being negative, and to warn the well to cheer up or else.
via Happiness Doesn’t Bring Good Health, Study Finds – The New York Times.
I was paradoxically cheered by this piece of bad news, confirming my long held suspicions that people who are happy are just fooling themselves.
Leonard Bernstein 1965… I was in a creative writing class with his daughter in 1970-71. Pretty sure I didn’t take this picture as I didn’t know him then; but I found it somewhere on the web and as I can’t find it again, I’m going to hope that this constitutes fair use.
Conrad Theodore Seitz MD 1982-3, when I was about Leonard’s age; taken from a tripod in my living room one winter’s evening. With a set top antenna, only one snowy channel came through from Rapid Ciry. There was a twenty five foot tall wooden post behind the house that held an antenna, which picked up all three channels plus PBS, but I didn’t bother with it.
Conrad Theodore Seitz, aged fourteen, taken by my mother in the summer of 1969 outside her house in Larkspur CA (Marin Country)
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Anonymous couple, circa civil war; pretty sure this one’s copyright has lapsed. Note the medal the man is wearing on his coat.
My gravatar website: www.gravatar.com/Conradseitz#photo-0
Additional remarks on the Retraction Watch website:
…is being done for legal reasons based on the advice of counsel” may mean “We forgot to read the small print in the contract with our funding source saying they could veto what we published and they didn’t like what we found”
And that looks like a clever way to publish something despite the sponsor of the research not wanting it published, it the retraction gets you out of the legal trap, that is.
My original comment post follows (augmented afterwards by repeated proofreading):
I agree with both these reasons and they are good reasons, which means that I think people should implement them, as long as they can get back door approval of the publish//retract strategy from their funding sources… and even if they can’t, because devious funders may send you mixed mss then stab you in the back when you try to follow through. And if that happens, you didn’t want any more funding from them anyway. Which will get you published in retraction watch at least.
The only difference is you may lose your career a la the Whittemore affair, but if the lab closes down maybe it’s worth it.
This will have advantages for the individual student and researcher as well. In fact, I think that this would be ideal for an individual or retired researcher who just wants to file such items as case reports and actual studies.
For example, I had my own hearing tested recently and this is what I came up with: my hearing is nearly perfect for my age. A person hears in different ways. When one is not expecting to hear anything, the ear will be sensitive to random sounds, the deflection of the width of a hydrogen atom being enough to create a signal. A t these times, one hears what I will call “secondary” sounds… dampened things down so that one hears the secondary late echoes bouncing off of objects in the room or transmitted through hollow objects. Under these conditions, sounds come through only as single clicks regardless of their actual frequency. The timing of the echo will produce the effect of a sound frequency, and then the actual frequency will be inferred at higher level of processing in the brain. The result is truly random sounds, which are extremely relaxing if interpreted correctly. If misinterpreted they can lead to the sensation that one is hearing noises or even voices in one’s own head.
I had the misfortune to examine a man once who was considered a paranoid schizophrenic. He was having a driver’s physical, but I had plenty of time to talk to him and I wondered why he was being given an extremely low dose of an antipsychotic drug. It turned out that he heard voices in his head, but he was otherwise normal. He could be described as a little paranoid, but then most undereducated men are and he was functioning normally. I just renewed his driver’s certificate.
By the way, I did my first research study, “Finding circadian rhythms in Pterophyllum eimeki (the common angelfish)” in my parent’s kitchen, with my father’s fish and equipment he brought home from his psychology laboratory at MacMurray College in Jacksonville Illinois, when I was eleven years old in 1964. and I got to go to the State Science Fair in Champaign-Urbana, where my stepmother was studying for her PhD in statistics. The study used fish in a tank, two tanks, one with one fish and the other with three, both with light cells and light sources (like those that used to open bank doors for the customer), hooked up to an “event recorder” which produced a line on a 4″ wide inked tape. The study was supposed to last twenty days but it ended after eighteen because algae grew over the aquarium walls and obscured the light source. I was still able to get a significant circadian activity signal by cutting the data into two periods of ten days each with two days overlap. I found that the three fish tank woke up a half an hour before it was to get light in the morning, which woke up the one fish in the tank next to it. Angelfish turned out to be perfect for the experiment because they produced one short signal when crossing the beam sideways, and one long signal when passing through the beam long ways (they are a very flat, pancake-shaped fish.)
I now realize that the fish were responding to those infrasounds created when my parents got up and used the bathroom first thing in the morning–two rooms away in a solid steel reinforced concrete building three stories tall. Fish are anchored to the building by the water in their tanks resting on the counter. Thus they can feel the vibrations that start early in the morning and appear to anticipate everyone else’s waking up. What they are really doing is resetting their circadian clocks each morning, while in isolation the clock would run a little slow.
I spent long hours on the living room floor manually counting up the signals on the paper tape, and then had my stepmother help me to analyze the data statistically. My father suggested the experiment, I looked it up and found that no-one had yet studied circadian rhythms in angelfish. My father supplied all the reseach materials and the fish. The fish consented to be studied by eagerly gathering at the surface to be fed, and especially by not dying during the experiment. They remained in perfect health for some time after that, back in the big group fish tank.
This is the first time this study has ever been published anywhere, and I am grateful to Retraction Watch for allowing me the space to contribute this advancement of scientific knowledge. I acknowledge no conflict of interest except that I liked fish and my father was pushing me into an experimental career.
I am now retired, but I still have the orignal paper tapes (the data) in my garage. No autopsies were done on the fish, who died of natural causes (they were eaten by my cat.) (Correction: I made up the part about the cat.)
This study will be cross published in Retraction Watch so even if it disappears from here it will be available there.
Correction: the original paper tapes have long since been lost, and the fish have died due to asphyxiation after their big fifty gallon tank mysteriously burst late one evening.
Depression is not a side effect of cancer; it is a side effect of dying.
- 1Department of Psychiatry, New York University Langone Medical Center, New York, NY, USA.
- 2Department of Psychiatry, New York University Langone Medical Center, New York, NY, USA. Donald.Goff@nyumc.org.
Abstract
A convergence of evidence shows that use of Cannabis sativa is associated with increased risk of developing psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia, and earlier age at which psychotic symptoms first manifest. Cannabis exposure during adolescence is most strongly associated with the onset of psychosis amongst those who are particularly vulnerable, such as those who have been exposed to child abuse and those with family histories of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia that develops after cannabis use may have a unique clinical phenotype, and several genetic polymorphisms may modulate the relationship between cannabis use and psychosis. The endocannabinoid system has been implicated in psychosis both related and unrelated to cannabis exposure, and studying this system holds potential to increase understanding of the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Anandamide signaling in the central nervous system may be particularly important. Δ(9)-Tetrahydrocannabinol in cannabis can cause symptoms of schizophrenia when acutely administered, and cannabidiol (CBD), another compound in cannabis, can counter many of these effects. CBD may have therapeutic potential for the treatment of psychosis following cannabis use, as well as schizophrenia, possibly with better tolerability than current antipsychotic treatments. CBD may also have anti-inflammatory and neuroprotective properties. Establishing the role of CBD and other CBD-based compounds in treating psychotic disorders will require further human research.
This abstract is a review of studies demonstrating that the effects of cannabis can simulate schizophrenic psychosis and that a component of cannabis called cannabidiol can relieve the symptoms. It lends strength to the prohibition of cannabis use, as well as alcohol use, by minors. Alcohol use is a major causative risk factor for car crashes, whereas cannabis use can produce paranoia and reduces likelihood of driving at all.
Daily Marijuana Use Is Not Associated with Brain Morphometric Measures in Adolescents or Adults
- Barbara J. Weiland1,
- Rachel E. Thayer1,
- Brendan E. Depue2,
- Amithrupa Sabbineni1,
- Angela D. Bryan1, and
- Kent E. Hutchison1
1Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, Colorado 80309, and
2Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky 40292
The Journal of Neuroscience, 28 January 2015, 35(4): 1505-1512; doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2946-14.2015
Recent research has suggested that marijuana use is associated with volumetric and shape differences in subcortical structures, including the nucleus accumbens and amygdala, in a dose-dependent fashion. Replication of such results in well controlled studies is essential to clarify the effects of marijuana. To that end, this retrospective study examined brain morphology in a sample of adult daily marijuana users (n = 29) versus nonusers (n = 29) and a sample of adolescent daily users (n = 50) versus nonusers (n = 50). Groups were matched on a critical confounding variable, alcohol use, to a far greater degree than in previously published studies. We acquired high-resolution MRI scans, and investigated group differences in gray matter using voxel-based morphometry, surface-based morphometry, and shape analysis in structures suggested to be associated with marijuana use, as follows: the nucleus accumbens, amygdala, hippocampus, and cerebellum. No statistically significant differences were found between daily users and nonusers on volume or shape in the regions of interest. Effect sizes suggest that the failure to find differences was not due to a lack of statistical power, but rather was due to the lack of even a modest effect. In sum, the results indicate that, when carefully controlling for alcohol use, gender, age, and other variables, there is no association between marijuana use and standard volumetric or shape measurements of subcortical structures.
This study contradicts the highly publicized study that was so widely noticed in the popular press but has been attacked as misrepresenting its data set. Of course, this study received no notice in the press, which is what is expected in studies that contradict popular studies, like the “impending global cooling” study of 1970… see also next post.
The Power Plant at Moro Rock, With Seagull
this is about the best I could do with this image. My photography instructor would have told me to move the camera to get a different image, but then the seagull would probably have flown off
Guns and “gun control” part 3
Wayne La Pierre, head of the National Rifle Association, promises to bring more lawsuits to challenge gun restrictions, and urges gun enthusiasts to donate so it can buy more political ads. In asking more gun enthusiasts to join the group, LaPierre admits it doesn’t represent anywhere close to a majority of gun owners. “We must reach out to the tens of millions of gun owners who are not yet NRA members—to the gun owners who care about their own rights but who have been duped by Obama and the national media into believing that the Obama and Bloomberg gun controls will only affect other people,” he says. “We will not surrender. We will not appease. We will buy more guns than ever.”
“We will buy more guns than ever.”
The more guns bought, the more profit for the gun manufacturers. The coincidental presence of this sentence, “We will buy more guns than ever”, could be interpreted, clearly, as an urge to act by purchasing more firearms. This activity will stimulate the “gun market.” Increased demand will raise prices and increase supply.
(these post on guns were drafted some time ago but not published)
The current discussion about gun control laws unfortunately neglects the most prevalent form of gun violence: shootings with illegal handguns. Most murders committed with firearms are done with handguns, and most of these guns are illegally obtained on the black market. The highest incidence of these shootings is in the so-called “inner city”, such places as Chicago and Oakland. Virtually all (97%) of the murders are committed with handguns.
Therefore, the discussion of banning so-called “assault weapons” misses the vast majority of murders committed today. It turns out that assault rifles with large (100 round) magazines are almost universally owned by people who use them legally on the firing range, and most of them store their weapons safely. It is obvious that even a “safely stored” weapon can be turned against you, as it was in Newtown. Unfortunately, even a ban on such weapons would not eliminate them, as most older weapons will be grandfathered in. There are many issues that can reduce risk without actually removing the weapons from the hands of citizens. Safe storage, background checks, and reduction in potential for violent impulses are all alternative methods for reducing risk.
The techniques that will reduce gun deaths the most in the current atmosphere of widespread access to firearms include aggressive mental health outreach, retrieval and interdiction of firearms by law enforcement personnel as their primary mission (with a de-emphasis of drugs, for example), and federal registration statutes for all firearms. There is a huge black market in guns, and it is estimated that 40% of guns are bought illegally (mostly handguns.)
The current loopholes for gun purchases in the private market and at gun shows allow almost half of purchases to avoid background checks. This is besides the street market, which is almost entirely in small handguns.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 