In The News

Some things in the news I've been thinking about

Tibetan Brain Science

I heard a radio interview with a science reporter from the Wall Street Journal, talking about recent experiments in neuroscience. Various bits reeked of bogosity to me, but I thought I'd post to see if somebody could actually confirm or deny this suspician.

Apparently there have been a lot of studies of brain plasticity. That is (according to the radio interview), the question of whether physical actions can affect the size, growth, activity of the brain. In one example, the reporter claimed that violinists who practice for hours actually cause a certain sector of their brain to get larger. My apologies for not getting the details. See Zen and the Art of Neuroscience.

The "Zen" part of the story is that the reporter claims that a certain form of Tibetan Meditation (first august alarm: Zen is very, very different from Tibetan Buddhism), in which the monks contemplate compassion, can lead a different part of the brain to expand, and this chunk is supposedly associated with a sense of happiness and well-being (second august alarm: the key to wisdom is found in the Orient!). How they control for meditation as opposed to vegetarian diet, various monkly activities, or living as refugees away from the threat of genocide is but one of many possible questions.

But I know zilch about neuroscience. So feel free to enlighten me.

Italian Soccer

Italian soccer clubs have long had a symbiotic relationship with the more frightening segment of their fan base, the "ultra" -- fanatic groups who sell merchandise and riot outside (or sometimes inside) football stadiums. Recently, one of these groups surrounded and threw a bomb a policeman's car, killing the cop inside.

As of right now, the consequence has been cancellation of Serie A (the equivalent of Premier or Major League) for the weekend.

In fact, the entire season should be cancelled. It will take that long to refurbish Italian stadiums for better safety and security, to ensure that football clubs have severed their relations with ultra groups, and for the nation as a whole to discover life without football. This comes in the wake of a match fixing scandal last season. It's a mess, and anything less than loss of the season will mean that the powers that be are not interested in fixing the problem.

Friendly Fire

I hate the war. The latest in a series of scandals is a tape of an incident in which two U.S. pilots bombed a British tank in 2003. The tape was played on the BBC this morning. If anything, it confirms that the incident was a horrible mistake -- the U.S. pilots radioed to make sure that there were no allied forces in the area, and when they later found out that had killed a British soldier, they show immediate and deep remorse.

The problem is that the U.S. refused to release the tape to the British soldier's widow, and in fact both the U.S. and Great Britain denied that such a tape existed, a denial now hard to swallow in view of the fact that a transcript appeared in the tabloid Sun and played on the Beeb.

Our government seems determined to exascerbate the situation for our troops, to spit on our allies, to lie about the measures necessary to prosecute the war, and to mislead the American public about what constitutes national security and what constitutes ass-covering. The administration has so many asses, that may be all they are doing anymore.