And Ridley Scott has said that he is a replicant. And since he is the main creative force behind this particular telling of the story, and thus this particular work of art, I tend to side with him. In any case, in the original movie it was left ambiguous with the assumption of Deckard's humanity, and in the director's cut it was left less ambiguous sliding towards replicant. Ridley Scott's expressed intention was to have him be a replicant, or at least his intention at the time he made the Director's Cut, and I think it's the better intention.
I think the symbolic interpretation you give is a bit of a stretch. Actually, a rather large stretch, and it ignores the context of the film. There is no real evidence that the unicorn is any more a symbol for Rachel than an indication that Deckard himself is a replicant. While its significance does owe to being a mythical symbol, its mythic quality only lends itself to the idea that the memory content *itself* is artificial. That concept was painstakingly laid out in the beginning of the film, when it is made clear that Rachel's memories are artificial, and she discovers this because Deckard shows her that he knows about them. The gesture of Gaff's origami directly parallels Deckard's informing of Rachel, and within the context already laid out the only thing that makes sense is that Gaff's origami unicorn shows that Deckard's own memories are artificial, too. Filmmakers tend not to use symbols and signifiers only if they are situated in a coherent thematic context which is central to the film. In this case, the context is the already emphasized opposition between natural memory and artifical memory. The prevailing dynamic in the movie is not who is in love with whom, but the opposition between artifice and nature - who created whom.
Moreover, for most good filmmakers and story-tellers, effective symbolism needs to be plausible within the rules of the narrative - otherwise the symbols become arbitrary, and can be interpreted arbitrarily. It is not plausible for Gaff to know about the specific content of the unicorn dream if it is a natural memory. It is however plausible for him to know about the unicorn dream if it is an artificial memory. Given the context and the established themes of "What makes a real memory?" and artifice vs. nature, this is the only intelligible explanation for the origami. I don't think you need to go as far as you did in interpreting its meaning., as it communicates something rather more profound already under the simpler explanation that I have given.
It's pretty obvious, if you take the Director's Cut as being the version most telling about Scott's intentions and ultimately the real meaning of the story he was trying to tell(hence the name, Director's Cut) that 1) Ridley did not want to dub - that was not his intention and it is not an integral part of the story. The voice-over may add to the story as Ridley tells it, but by adding to it it might also *alter* it or diminish it from its intended form. 2) It is certain that Deckard is a replicant at the end of that cut.
On the first issue - Scott is a filmmaker, a very good one, and he no doubt has a paramount respect for the narrative power of images, as all good filmmakers do. Movies, after all, started off in a silent era where all the filmmaker had as his story-telling tool were images - no sound, no color. In this tradition, filmmakers learned to maximize the power of the visual medium of film. Ridley Scott no doubt learned to love and create films by watching movies from the silent era and other movies where the emphasis was on visual story-telling. It is no surprise, then, that he believed that the images and dialogue of Blade-runner alone could communicate what needed to be communicated, and that the dub was a needless accomodation for the producers who thought that the public would not be able to follow a story with exposition just from the images and dialogue. They added dub to clarify the narrative, not to give insight into Deckard's internal monologue, which, if you watch the director's cut, was communicated more powerfully and precisely by just watching him.
Second - The dream of the unicorn and the origami at the end of the movie pretty much settles the question of whether Deckard is a replicant. And no, he does not have to be human in order to explore the question of "What is it to be human?" more deeply. THe fact that the revelation that he is a replicant is left to the very end of the movie ensures this. It is more or less a surprise which re-forms the question, "What is it to be human?", and the audience is left to re-evaluate the entire movie in order to answer it. The default position with regard to Deckard's humanity through most of the movie is that he is *human* - and when Scott completely destroys this assumption, it creates a very neat moment in which the entire movie becomes mysterious again, just as it was at the beginning.
Besides, who says Tyrell doesn't know Deckard is a replicant? He was pretty withholding about Rachel's status when Deckard came to vsiit - if he was reluctant to tell him that Rachel was a replicant, he can't be trusted to tell Deckard that he is a replicant too, which would be truly earth-shattering. Furthermore, some models are given different traits and strengths than others - that's why Rutger Hauer's character is the leader, because he is the most clever and strong of all of them. Harrison Ford may have been an earlier model, and in any case the emphasis was placed on his detective capabilities and his abilities to detect other replicants verus the ability to beat them in a brawl.
Please. Rush amassed over 2,000 pills of Oxycontin to feed his habit. This is equivalent under the law to trafficking in opiates(like Heroin), and usually such an offense requires a sentence of something like 20 - 25 years. However, his charges were reduced to "doctor shopping" for only 40 pills. Now, you tell me that's not getting off easy, considering he could easily be in jail for the rest of his natural life. Ans since he regularly rails on drug-addicts and other ne'er -do-wells on his show, the whole thing stinks of hypocrisy and favoritism.
The law should be the same no matter where you are in society or who you are in the public eye. This applies to Congressmen and radio pundits alike.
"In psychological treatment, two disorders are known to have very low placebo effects: schizophrenia, and obsessive compulsive disorder." Since I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, of which schizophrenia is part, it is very unlikely that this disease would have been "Cured" by an antibiotic placebo.
"It cannot be explained by a placebo" is not a false statement. I was using it to describe that Lyme disease 1) can and 2) in my case *did* cause major neurological/psychological and cognitive problems. Let's do a little before/after analysis:
1) Before, my cognitive abilities were 30 - 45 percent below my previously measured native abilities as measured by a battery of psychological testing, including memory tests, executive functioning tests, and tests of other cognitive domains.
2) After, my cognitive abilities were about 10 percent above the level they were measured at before this major episode in illness.
3) SPECT imaging revealed very poor oxygenation of brain tissue (hypoperfusion) due to inflammation of the vascular system in my brain.
4) Very high concentrations of Lyme antibodies were found in my cerebral-spinal fluid after lumbar punction.
Cognitive abilities do not improve by that margin due to a "placebo" effect, and brain scans do not show hypoperfusion if there is no pathological process in the brain. Moreover, the fact that my cognition improved to above my "normal" levels indicates that I was experiencing symptoms of these disease a long time before the most recent, most severe phase. I was also highly skeptical during my entire treatment about whether or not the Lyme hypothesis was correct - in fact, I thought I was dying from a much more severe, lethal disease. In any case, I can assure you that the phenomenal experience of what I went through - literally, a fragmentation of my thought processes and consciousness - was about as real and intrusive as possible. I could not think - thoughts would end abruptly, or hit a mental "ceiling" which I could not break through. I had to take leave from school. My life stopped. It was like my mind was trapped inside some sort of abstract box. For you to suggest it was anything other than this is 1) stupid, since you have no idea what you are talking about, you weren't there 2) ill-informed, since you have no idea what tests I receieved, and 3) insulting.
They put me in the mental ward for a week, during which I gave them every symptom I had(including neurologic symptoms like numbness, tingling in my arms, tremor) and they still gave me anti-psychotic medications and told me I was delusional. I basically handed them the answer - I told them that I had had Lyme disease when I was 6 years old - and it fell on deaf ears. So, no, they can't read minds, but they should be able to call a spade a spade.
Other clinicians have likewise prescribed antibiotics. Dr. Raphael Stricker, a Lyme disease specialist in San Francisco, sees a handful of Morgellons patients--all of whom have tested positive for chronic Lyme disease. He thinks that Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria behind Lyme disease, has set his patients up for another, as-yet-unidentified, infection. And Dr. George Schwartz, a Santa Fe, N.M., trauma specialist, treats his patients with antibiotics targeted to Stenotrophomonas maltophilia--a usually harmless waterborne bacterium--and says he's seen them improve in only 48 hours.
From the CBS article:
The disease does seem to cause a brain fog or lack of clarity. However, Morgellons sufferer Jane Waldoch wanted to prove to doctors that it wasn't all in her mind so she saved the fibers that were growing out of her body.
Brain fog is a symptom of neurologic Lyme disease - the most common cognitive symptom actually. I'm not just grasping at straws here - there is real evidence that this is if not actually Lyme disease related to the psychiatric problems caused by Lyme disease.
Morgellonsusa.com:
Finally, in 2001 diagnosed by Dr. Theresa Yang (brilliant woman) with Lyme Disease, Bartonella Henselae, and Babesia Microti. (Tests Positive for all three!)
The patient who wrote Morgellon's USA site is still experiencing symptoms unfortunately. While apparently the other patients respond to antibiotic treatment, Lyme can resist antibiotic treatment, especially if the brain inflammation it causes is more like an after-effect caused by immune over-response. IN this case, IV Immunoglobulin can help.
If you feel that there are parasites under your skin, antibiotics are not going to make that feeling go away unless the bacterium that is causing your delusion is dying. In my case the symptoms of a SEVERE mental illness went away when I was treated with powerful antibiotics. Not only that, but my cognitive abilities improved, since I had had these deficits for so long without even knowing it. This was a real effect, it is measurable, it cannot be explained by placebo - it was not a placebo.
This isn't surprising at all. As someone who has been misdiagnosed with schizophrenia with affective symptoms(schizoaffective disorder) because I brought myself into the emergency room with tachycardia, panic, and what appeared to me to be some kind of neurodegenerative illness(I literally could not think), I doubt that the patients in this story are making up what they feel. They certainly must feel the sensation of itching, scratching - it is just as real to them as the breakfast they eat. In my case, it was neurological Lyme disease, which the doctors in question failed to test for and failed to diagnose, prescribing an antipsychotic medication - claiming I was delusional - which made my symptoms much, much worse. However, after seeking out the help of a psychiatrist and neurologist, I was offered correct treatment for the Lyme disease that I was originally diagnosed for in 1989 - when I was six years old - and for which I had been treated inadequately. After intravenous treatment with antibiotics and immune-modulating drugs, my brain became sharp again - indeed, sharper than it has been since I was a small child, before my brain had fully developed. Schizophrenia doesn't go away with antibiotics, and usually neither does severe cognitive decline - Lyme disease does.
In this case, there's a suspicious connection reported on multiple web sites about people with this disease being co-diagnosed with Lyme disease. While this "Morgellons" parasite-disease may be a delusion, it probably has a neurologic, organic cause, due to suddenness of onset and other factors. I wouldn't be surprised if the cause turned out to be Lyme disease, which can have a wide range of neuropsychiatric effects including delusions, hallucinations, memory problems, suicidal and homicidal ideation, thought disorder, and severe cognitive deficits . One quote from TFA is quite telling:
Ginger Savely, a nurse practitioner in Austin, Texas, says she has treated 35 patients with symptoms. "Everyone tells the exact same story," she says. "It's just so consistent." Savely prescribes her patients a course of broad-spectrum antibiotics. "If I knew what I was dealing with," she says, "it would be easier to treat." Yet, she says, her patients--including Lawrence--improve within weeks.
. The fact that it may respond to antibiotics may indicate some relation to a bacterial illness, in particular Lyme. It's truly an insidious disease that can go undetected and undiagnosed for many years while patients' lives deteriorate - and no doctors are literate enough in the treatment of this disease to treat it adequately.
In any case, the medical establishment is often too quick to diagnose a patient with a complaint it does not understand as a primary-onset psychiatric disorder. By doing this, they cause a great deal of harm by delaying treatment in the case that the disease is *not* a psychiatric disorder. In order for medicine to be able to heal people, it needs to stop this trend and start taking earnest, persistent reports of people's pain seriously - even if it is delusional. If all of the possible organic causes have been researched and exhausted, only then is it time to take out the prescription pad for anti-psychotic or other psychiatric medication.
But imagine this scenario: You're walking home at night in New York City because you don't have a car and it's only a short distance anyway. There's someone walking five or ten yards behind you, chattering to themselves. It's dark. There's very few other people around. Do you feel safe?
If you don't feel outright freaked out, you are going to feel at least mildly uncomfortable.
Now, as someone who has been mugged in a city twice, I am well aware that there's a distinct possibility that someone following me in the dark could want to hurt me. If someone is talking to themselves, there is no reliable way to tell if they are a crazy person or not without looking back and engaging them in some respect.
It's not a neurosis if it's grounded in *reality.* Sometimes people talking to themselves in public makes me feel uncomfortable, because suddenly any predictive ability I have over their actions seems to go out the window - we've lost the common ground of "reality," and that's scary. If that's a neurosis, then 9 out of 10 people in our culture is thereby classified as neurotic and isn't mental illness - neurosis - defined by your abnormal behavior?
All I'm asking is for people to be considerate of the people around them. You don't want to be labeled a criminal, I don't want to label you one, but if you're following me closely talking to yourself, I'm bound to do so and that's perfectly reasonable unless I know for a fact that you're talking on a cell phone.
Moreover, what does it say about us that we need to have access to a phone at all times? Why do we need to have to contact another person - any person - at any minute? This wasn't the case ten years ago. You certainly don't have to subject yourself to discomfort to accomodate my "neurosis" - but the bigger issue is, you don't have to be talking on a cell phone either. I know we're in a new technological era where cell phones are becoming commonplace - they're a device we never knew we needed. Cell phone adoption is going to keep becoming more and more widespread as time goes on, and I can't do anything about that. Does that mean I have to like it? No.
Could they do something about the "crazy person" headset wearing phenomenon? I can't count how many times I've walked down a city street thinking I was being followed by a schizophrenic talking to himself when it was actually a business executive wearing a headset talking to payroll, for instance. I know this isn't a fair portrait of schizophrenics, who are usually non-violent, but it's still creepy to have someone follow you who appears to have an imaginary friend.
I understand the hands-free necessity in cars - but is it necessary to wear a headset all the time? Are we getting too lazy to hold a phone up to our ears while walking? It may be uncomfortable and inconvenient, but it certainly clearly labels anyone talking on a phone as talking on a phone.
Wake me up when a game world isn't a static 3D environment. Wake me up when I can walk up to any tree, pick off a branch, chop the tree down, squish some ants living on the tree, and can rip a moist leaf on the tree like a sheet of paper.
I mean, we already have that. It's called reality. It's great!
"Sick of receiving spam emails requesting submissions to the 2005 World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics - which charges $390 for each attendee - students Jeremy Stribling, Daniel Aguayo and Maxwell Krohn of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology wrote a program to generate a nonsense paper."
Does this qualify as spam? Was it unsolicited and generated to bypass spam filtering technology? Could I run this spam email through the inauthentic paper detector and have it come out as authentic? Sounds like it might have been a solicited email from a campus mailing list, as it is something that would only be pitched to say, engineering students at a university, who have interest in these subjects. I'd rather receive this than all the penis enlargement solutions and horribly filthy pr0n spam that I get.
It is alarming that the MIT fake paper made it through the selection process: Academic pretense is dangerously high if the only requirement for a paper to make it into a conference is that it is full of multi-syllabic scientific jargon, and no one actually reads it closely enough to understand it.
Hmmm...yes, I can see how they might agree with that, just as 30% of Americans still agree with Bush even though he's reframed the Iraq argument four times: from "Saddam has WMD" to "Saddam has links with terrorists" to "Saddam has committed crimes against humanity" to "We want to redraw the map of the middle east and spread democracy." Ironically it is the last one that has been the most true for the most time, and the fact that the administration couldn't tell us the true reason in the first place indicates that the administration knows the majority of the American public that didn't vote for him in 2000 couldn't tolerate such insane messianic posturing.
The problem with the idea that we are stabilizing the Middle East post-9/11 is that, well, we are not stabilizing the MIddle East, we are de-stabilizing Iraq, and with that the rest of the Middle East. Thinking that invading a country can somehow stabilize that country or its surroundings is foolhardy. "Regime change" annihilates order - you have to pick up the pieces quickly and re-assert order in a competent and logical fashion after you perform regime change, or you risk a long period of chaos, as we are seeing with Iraq.
Moreover, who said the MIddle East was somehow de-stabilized by 9/11? Our efforts should be directed at Iran. So, the idea that there is literally *any* connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda has always been patently, 100% false, and that most of our troops appear to believe that one exists is very curious(while I don't know about the integrity of the poll in the parent post).
Scientists have known that cells in different parts of the brain react to attributes such as colour, taste or quantity. Dr Camillo Padaoa-Schioppa and John Assad, an associate professor of neurobiology, found neurons involved in assigning values that help people to make choices. [...] The scientists, who reported the findings in the journal Nature, located the neurons in an area of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) while studying macaque monkeys which had to choose between different flavours and quantities of juices.
I think the article implies here that while the neurons that the scientists located are in a specific area of the brain (orbitofrontal cortex), that they can be found in a number of other regions.
In addition, from what I've read and heard, there a number of complex processes that go into all of our actions involving many areas of our brain. "Decision" is such an enormous concept that I doubt it is isolated either to memory functioning or executive functioning or any other cognitive domain - decision-making is essential to our intentionality, our ability to have beliefs and desires and to act on them. Intentionality is a defining characteristic of human consciousness. All that these scientists have found are the neurons responsible to assigning value or priority to certain options - the way the neurons do this is (ostensibly) by somehow syntactically sorting out the pleasure-responses(or other criteria) of other mental representations.
Ok, now you're simply making things up. From this article regarding Apple's most recent quarterly earnings reports:
"Apple said it shipped 1,112,000 Mac computers and more than 8.5 million iPods music players during the quarter. The iPod shipments represented a 61 percent increase over the same period last year."
Therefore what you have just said is patently incorrect. QED.
Ok, now you're simply making things up. From this article regarding Apple's most recent quarterly earnings reports:
"Apple said it shipped 1,112,000 Mac computers and more than 8.5 million iPods music players during the quarter. The iPod shipments represented a 61 percent increase over the same period last year."
Therefore what you have just said is patently incorrect. QED.
Uh - who said that Apple made the announcement? The summary says that BusinessWeek's article is about Apple's decision to drop PortalPlayer, not the announcement of its decision to drop PortalPlayer.
The Wired article says that the first three parts of the puzzle contain clues to solve the fourth and final part. So, while they decrypted the message correctly, the mistake that was made has prevented them from figuring out how to decrpt the entire message correctly. So, yeah, it was the artist's mistake, but it was an incorrect decryption because it doesn't provide any meaningful clues about the fourth part of the puzzle.
You are correct. I was referring to a uniformly random system, but I think that's what many people mean when they say random. In any case I still think it's misleading to call a quantum system random because it implies that quantum theory can't make any meaningful predictions at all about what happens in that system besides the fact that it is random. But quantum techniques can provide meaningful predictions which are definitely not uniformly random - and, I would argue, not random in the slighest.
Capitalism isn't limited to the one-dimensional "You provide me a service or good, I give you money in return" configuration. The people at LiveJournal have resources that they pay for and then give it out to users who want to express themselves via the service of online journal space. They do not demand any direct compensation from the journal author; however, the journal author signs onto an agreement in which they are allowed to author a journal which can in turn provide compensation for LiveJournal. If the user who writes a journal actively seeks to block ads from its site, the user is not fulfilling his side of the bargain. The user is actively seeking to prevent LiveJournal from being compensated for the service it provides them.
Whether or not you as simply a reader(not user) of LiveJournal want to receive ads is still up to you. However, the minute you sign on to be a user of LiveJournal's service, you forfeit the right to block their ads, because you are using their service and must in some way assist their compensation for that service.
This model works with content-providers on television to. Would a network accept a contract from a show producer who wants to inform its viewers how to completely stop the ads that allow the network to be compensated for its role in the contract? No. The network needs to understand that the producer wants to benefit the network as well as itself. In capitalism, the rule is, for every transaction, both parties benefit. It's that simple.
This whole argument revolves on the distinction between ethics and morality. Morality is subjective - ethics are a universal, logical system based on things which can be discovered through pure thought alone. I'm inclined to believe that while we do not know what the ethical or even meta-ethical system that governs the universe is, we can still discover pieces of it through reasoning, as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Kant, and present-day philosophers do. The problem is that when we contaminate our logical process with our own personal desire to win - well, that destroys the purity of our thought process. I would call Karl Rove "clever" - he has a high "general intelligence" score, if you will. While he may be very capable at reasoning through the game of political strategy , it takes a different level or type of intelligence(and sanity) to be able to soundly reason through the ethics of any decision. You may be perfectly right that this isn't a matter of intelligence - he just lacks the sensitivity or goodness that would compel a person to want to act ethically. I would argue that he does have the desire to act ethically and simply cannot.
Slashdot Mirror
And Ridley Scott has said that he is a replicant. And since he is the main creative force behind this particular telling of the story, and thus this particular work of art, I tend to side with him. In any case, in the original movie it was left ambiguous with the assumption of Deckard's humanity, and in the director's cut it was left less ambiguous sliding towards replicant. Ridley Scott's expressed intention was to have him be a replicant, or at least his intention at the time he made the Director's Cut, and I think it's the better intention.
I think the symbolic interpretation you give is a bit of a stretch. Actually, a rather large stretch, and it ignores the context of the film. There is no real evidence that the unicorn is any more a symbol for Rachel than an indication that Deckard himself is a replicant. While its significance does owe to being a mythical symbol, its mythic quality only lends itself to the idea that the memory content *itself* is artificial. That concept was painstakingly laid out in the beginning of the film, when it is made clear that Rachel's memories are artificial, and she discovers this because Deckard shows her that he knows about them. The gesture of Gaff's origami directly parallels Deckard's informing of Rachel, and within the context already laid out the only thing that makes sense is that Gaff's origami unicorn shows that Deckard's own memories are artificial, too. Filmmakers tend not to use symbols and signifiers only if they are situated in a coherent thematic context which is central to the film. In this case, the context is the already emphasized opposition between natural memory and artifical memory. The prevailing dynamic in the movie is not who is in love with whom, but the opposition between artifice and nature - who created whom.
Moreover, for most good filmmakers and story-tellers, effective symbolism needs to be plausible within the rules of the narrative - otherwise the symbols become arbitrary, and can be interpreted arbitrarily. It is not plausible for Gaff to know about the specific content of the unicorn dream if it is a natural memory. It is however plausible for him to know about the unicorn dream if it is an artificial memory. Given the context and the established themes of "What makes a real memory?" and artifice vs. nature, this is the only intelligible explanation for the origami. I don't think you need to go as far as you did in interpreting its meaning., as it communicates something rather more profound already under the simpler explanation that I have given.
It's pretty obvious, if you take the Director's Cut as being the version most telling about Scott's intentions and ultimately the real meaning of the story he was trying to tell(hence the name, Director's Cut) that 1) Ridley did not want to dub - that was not his intention and it is not an integral part of the story. The voice-over may add to the story as Ridley tells it, but by adding to it it might also *alter* it or diminish it from its intended form. 2) It is certain that Deckard is a replicant at the end of that cut.
On the first issue - Scott is a filmmaker, a very good one, and he no doubt has a paramount respect for the narrative power of images, as all good filmmakers do. Movies, after all, started off in a silent era where all the filmmaker had as his story-telling tool were images - no sound, no color. In this tradition, filmmakers learned to maximize the power of the visual medium of film. Ridley Scott no doubt learned to love and create films by watching movies from the silent era and other movies where the emphasis was on visual story-telling. It is no surprise, then, that he believed that the images and dialogue of Blade-runner alone could communicate what needed to be communicated, and that the dub was a needless accomodation for the producers who thought that the public would not be able to follow a story with exposition just from the images and dialogue. They added dub to clarify the narrative, not to give insight into Deckard's internal monologue, which, if you watch the director's cut, was communicated more powerfully and precisely by just watching him.
Second - The dream of the unicorn and the origami at the end of the movie pretty much settles the question of whether Deckard is a replicant. And no, he does not have to be human in order to explore the question of "What is it to be human?" more deeply. THe fact that the revelation that he is a replicant is left to the very end of the movie ensures this. It is more or less a surprise which re-forms the question, "What is it to be human?", and the audience is left to re-evaluate the entire movie in order to answer it. The default position with regard to Deckard's humanity through most of the movie is that he is *human* - and when Scott completely destroys this assumption, it creates a very neat moment in which the entire movie becomes mysterious again, just as it was at the beginning.
Besides, who says Tyrell doesn't know Deckard is a replicant? He was pretty withholding about Rachel's status when Deckard came to vsiit - if he was reluctant to tell him that Rachel was a replicant, he can't be trusted to tell Deckard that he is a replicant too, which would be truly earth-shattering. Furthermore, some models are given different traits and strengths than others - that's why Rutger Hauer's character is the leader, because he is the most clever and strong of all of them. Harrison Ford may have been an earlier model, and in any case the emphasis was placed on his detective capabilities and his abilities to detect other replicants verus the ability to beat them in a brawl.
Please. Rush amassed over 2,000 pills of Oxycontin to feed his habit. This is equivalent under the law to trafficking in opiates(like Heroin), and usually such an offense requires a sentence of something like 20 - 25 years. However, his charges were reduced to "doctor shopping" for only 40 pills. Now, you tell me that's not getting off easy, considering he could easily be in jail for the rest of his natural life. Ans since he regularly rails on drug-addicts and other ne'er -do-wells on his show, the whole thing stinks of hypocrisy and favoritism.
The law should be the same no matter where you are in society or who you are in the public eye. This applies to Congressmen and radio pundits alike.
"In psychological treatment, two disorders are known to have very low placebo effects: schizophrenia, and obsessive compulsive disorder." Since I was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, of which schizophrenia is part, it is very unlikely that this disease would have been "Cured" by an antibiotic placebo. "It cannot be explained by a placebo" is not a false statement. I was using it to describe that Lyme disease 1) can and 2) in my case *did* cause major neurological/psychological and cognitive problems. Let's do a little before/after analysis: 1) Before, my cognitive abilities were 30 - 45 percent below my previously measured native abilities as measured by a battery of psychological testing, including memory tests, executive functioning tests, and tests of other cognitive domains. 2) After, my cognitive abilities were about 10 percent above the level they were measured at before this major episode in illness. 3) SPECT imaging revealed very poor oxygenation of brain tissue (hypoperfusion) due to inflammation of the vascular system in my brain. 4) Very high concentrations of Lyme antibodies were found in my cerebral-spinal fluid after lumbar punction. Cognitive abilities do not improve by that margin due to a "placebo" effect, and brain scans do not show hypoperfusion if there is no pathological process in the brain. Moreover, the fact that my cognition improved to above my "normal" levels indicates that I was experiencing symptoms of these disease a long time before the most recent, most severe phase. I was also highly skeptical during my entire treatment about whether or not the Lyme hypothesis was correct - in fact, I thought I was dying from a much more severe, lethal disease. In any case, I can assure you that the phenomenal experience of what I went through - literally, a fragmentation of my thought processes and consciousness - was about as real and intrusive as possible. I could not think - thoughts would end abruptly, or hit a mental "ceiling" which I could not break through. I had to take leave from school. My life stopped. It was like my mind was trapped inside some sort of abstract box. For you to suggest it was anything other than this is 1) stupid, since you have no idea what you are talking about, you weren't there 2) ill-informed, since you have no idea what tests I receieved, and 3) insulting.
They put me in the mental ward for a week, during which I gave them every symptom I had(including neurologic symptoms like numbness, tingling in my arms, tremor) and they still gave me anti-psychotic medications and told me I was delusional. I basically handed them the answer - I told them that I had had Lyme disease when I was 6 years old - and it fell on deaf ears. So, no, they can't read minds, but they should be able to call a spade a spade.
From popular mechanics:
From the CBS article:
Brain fog is a symptom of neurologic Lyme disease - the most common cognitive symptom actually. I'm not just grasping at straws here - there is real evidence that this is if not actually Lyme disease related to the psychiatric problems caused by Lyme disease.
Morgellonsusa.com:
The patient who wrote Morgellon's USA site is still experiencing symptoms unfortunately. While apparently the other patients respond to antibiotic treatment, Lyme can resist antibiotic treatment, especially if the brain inflammation it causes is more like an after-effect caused by immune over-response. IN this case, IV Immunoglobulin can help.
If you feel that there are parasites under your skin, antibiotics are not going to make that feeling go away unless the bacterium that is causing your delusion is dying. In my case the symptoms of a SEVERE mental illness went away when I was treated with powerful antibiotics. Not only that, but my cognitive abilities improved, since I had had these deficits for so long without even knowing it. This was a real effect, it is measurable, it cannot be explained by placebo - it was not a placebo.
In this case, there's a suspicious connection reported on multiple web sites about people with this disease being co-diagnosed with Lyme disease. While this "Morgellons" parasite-disease may be a delusion, it probably has a neurologic, organic cause, due to suddenness of onset and other factors. I wouldn't be surprised if the cause turned out to be Lyme disease, which can have a wide range of neuropsychiatric effects including delusions, hallucinations, memory problems, suicidal and homicidal ideation, thought disorder, and severe cognitive deficits . One quote from TFA is quite telling:
. The fact that it may respond to antibiotics may indicate some relation to a bacterial illness, in particular Lyme. It's truly an insidious disease that can go undetected and undiagnosed for many years while patients' lives deteriorate - and no doctors are literate enough in the treatment of this disease to treat it adequately.
In any case, the medical establishment is often too quick to diagnose a patient with a complaint it does not understand as a primary-onset psychiatric disorder. By doing this, they cause a great deal of harm by delaying treatment in the case that the disease is *not* a psychiatric disorder. In order for medicine to be able to heal people, it needs to stop this trend and start taking earnest, persistent reports of people's pain seriously - even if it is delusional. If all of the possible organic causes have been researched and exhausted, only then is it time to take out the prescription pad for anti-psychotic or other psychiatric medication.
By "criminal" I meant "potential criminal."
Look, I can't *make* you do anything.
But imagine this scenario: You're walking home at night in New York City because you don't have a car and it's only a short distance anyway. There's someone walking five or ten yards behind you, chattering to themselves. It's dark. There's very few other people around. Do you feel safe?
If you don't feel outright freaked out, you are going to feel at least mildly uncomfortable.
Now, as someone who has been mugged in a city twice, I am well aware that there's a distinct possibility that someone following me in the dark could want to hurt me. If someone is talking to themselves, there is no reliable way to tell if they are a crazy person or not without looking back and engaging them in some respect.
It's not a neurosis if it's grounded in *reality.* Sometimes people talking to themselves in public makes me feel uncomfortable, because suddenly any predictive ability I have over their actions seems to go out the window - we've lost the common ground of "reality," and that's scary. If that's a neurosis, then 9 out of 10 people in our culture is thereby classified as neurotic and isn't mental illness - neurosis - defined by your abnormal behavior?
All I'm asking is for people to be considerate of the people around them. You don't want to be labeled a criminal, I don't want to label you one, but if you're following me closely talking to yourself, I'm bound to do so and that's perfectly reasonable unless I know for a fact that you're talking on a cell phone.
Moreover, what does it say about us that we need to have access to a phone at all times? Why do we need to have to contact another person - any person - at any minute? This wasn't the case ten years ago. You certainly don't have to subject yourself to discomfort to accomodate my "neurosis" - but the bigger issue is, you don't have to be talking on a cell phone either. I know we're in a new technological era where cell phones are becoming commonplace - they're a device we never knew we needed. Cell phone adoption is going to keep becoming more and more widespread as time goes on, and I can't do anything about that. Does that mean I have to like it? No.
you forgot:
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6.
7. Profit!
Could they do something about the "crazy person" headset wearing phenomenon? I can't count how many times I've walked down a city street thinking I was being followed by a schizophrenic talking to himself when it was actually a business executive wearing a headset talking to payroll, for instance. I know this isn't a fair portrait of schizophrenics, who are usually non-violent, but it's still creepy to have someone follow you who appears to have an imaginary friend.
I understand the hands-free necessity in cars - but is it necessary to wear a headset all the time? Are we getting too lazy to hold a phone up to our ears while walking? It may be uncomfortable and inconvenient, but it certainly clearly labels anyone talking on a phone as talking on a phone.
Now how much could we save by switching the Iraq war to Linux?
Does this qualify as spam? Was it unsolicited and generated to bypass spam filtering technology? Could I run this spam email through the inauthentic paper detector and have it come out as authentic?
Sounds like it might have been a solicited email from a campus mailing list, as it is something that would only be pitched to say, engineering students at a university, who have interest in these subjects. I'd rather receive this than all the penis enlargement solutions and horribly filthy pr0n spam that I get.
It is alarming that the MIT fake paper made it through the selection process: Academic pretense is dangerously high if the only requirement for a paper to make it into a conference is that it is full of multi-syllabic scientific jargon, and no one actually reads it closely enough to understand it.
Correction: I meant that our efforts should be directed against Afghanistan and finding Osama bin Laden.
Hmmm...yes, I can see how they might agree with that, just as 30% of Americans still agree with Bush even though he's reframed the Iraq argument four times: from "Saddam has WMD" to "Saddam has links with terrorists" to "Saddam has committed crimes against humanity" to "We want to redraw the map of the middle east and spread democracy." Ironically it is the last one that has been the most true for the most time, and the fact that the administration couldn't tell us the true reason in the first place indicates that the administration knows the majority of the American public that didn't vote for him in 2000 couldn't tolerate such insane messianic posturing. The problem with the idea that we are stabilizing the Middle East post-9/11 is that, well, we are not stabilizing the MIddle East, we are de-stabilizing Iraq, and with that the rest of the Middle East. Thinking that invading a country can somehow stabilize that country or its surroundings is foolhardy. "Regime change" annihilates order - you have to pick up the pieces quickly and re-assert order in a competent and logical fashion after you perform regime change, or you risk a long period of chaos, as we are seeing with Iraq. Moreover, who said the MIddle East was somehow de-stabilized by 9/11? Our efforts should be directed at Iran. So, the idea that there is literally *any* connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda has always been patently, 100% false, and that most of our troops appear to believe that one exists is very curious(while I don't know about the integrity of the poll in the parent post).
And now there are talks of military action against Iran and weapons tests involving plans for tactical nuclear weapons to use in such a military action - a three-war president? That is unprecedented, and for good reason.
You can't spread democracy at the barrel of a gun. Freedom is not freedom if it is imposed on people by force.
I think the article implies here that while the neurons that the scientists located are in a specific area of the brain (orbitofrontal cortex), that they can be found in a number of other regions.
In addition, from what I've read and heard, there a number of complex processes that go into all of our actions involving many areas of our brain. "Decision" is such an enormous concept that I doubt it is isolated either to memory functioning or executive functioning or any other cognitive domain - decision-making is essential to our intentionality, our ability to have beliefs and desires and to act on them. Intentionality is a defining characteristic of human consciousness. All that these scientists have found are the neurons responsible to assigning value or priority to certain options - the way the neurons do this is (ostensibly) by somehow syntactically sorting out the pleasure-responses(or other criteria) of other mental representations.
Uhm, this poster just blatantly PLAGIARIZED my previous comment from an earlier article about this same issue.
Proof? My Comment
Karma whore.
Sorry, didn't post the link
Ok, now you're simply making things up. From this article regarding Apple's most recent quarterly earnings reports:
"Apple said it shipped 1,112,000 Mac computers and more than 8.5 million iPods music players during the quarter. The iPod shipments represented a 61 percent increase over the same period last year."
Therefore what you have just said is patently incorrect. QED.
Uh - who said that Apple made the announcement? The summary says that BusinessWeek's article is about Apple's decision to drop PortalPlayer, not the announcement of its decision to drop PortalPlayer.
The Wired article says that the first three parts of the puzzle contain clues to solve the fourth and final part. So, while they decrypted the message correctly, the mistake that was made has prevented them from figuring out how to decrpt the entire message correctly. So, yeah, it was the artist's mistake, but it was an incorrect decryption because it doesn't provide any meaningful clues about the fourth part of the puzzle.
You are correct. I was referring to a uniformly random system, but I think that's what many people mean when they say random. In any case I still think it's misleading to call a quantum system random because it implies that quantum theory can't make any meaningful predictions at all about what happens in that system besides the fact that it is random. But quantum techniques can provide meaningful predictions which are definitely not uniformly random - and, I would argue, not random in the slighest.
Capitalism isn't limited to the one-dimensional "You provide me a service or good, I give you money in return" configuration. The people at LiveJournal have resources that they pay for and then give it out to users who want to express themselves via the service of online journal space. They do not demand any direct compensation from the journal author; however, the journal author signs onto an agreement in which they are allowed to author a journal which can in turn provide compensation for LiveJournal. If the user who writes a journal actively seeks to block ads from its site, the user is not fulfilling his side of the bargain. The user is actively seeking to prevent LiveJournal from being compensated for the service it provides them.
Whether or not you as simply a reader(not user) of LiveJournal want to receive ads is still up to you. However, the minute you sign on to be a user of LiveJournal's service, you forfeit the right to block their ads, because you are using their service and must in some way assist their compensation for that service.
This model works with content-providers on television to. Would a network accept a contract from a show producer who wants to inform its viewers how to completely stop the ads that allow the network to be compensated for its role in the contract? No. The network needs to understand that the producer wants to benefit the network as well as itself. In capitalism, the rule is, for every transaction, both parties benefit. It's that simple.
This whole argument revolves on the distinction between ethics and morality. Morality is subjective - ethics are a universal, logical system based on things which can be discovered through pure thought alone. I'm inclined to believe that while we do not know what the ethical or even meta-ethical system that governs the universe is, we can still discover pieces of it through reasoning, as Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Kant, and present-day philosophers do. The problem is that when we contaminate our logical process with our own personal desire to win - well, that destroys the purity of our thought process. I would call Karl Rove "clever" - he has a high "general intelligence" score, if you will. While he may be very capable at reasoning through the game of political strategy , it takes a different level or type of intelligence(and sanity) to be able to soundly reason through the ethics of any decision. You may be perfectly right that this isn't a matter of intelligence - he just lacks the sensitivity or goodness that would compel a person to want to act ethically. I would argue that he does have the desire to act ethically and simply cannot.