Accidental Blogger

A general interest blog

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  • A picture that only a mother could love…

    That's a bit of a purposely sef-deprecatory sounding title. I too like the picture. But it is true that of all my paintings this was my mother's favorite. When I posted an Obamaicon of myself here, I had thought that was as close as I was likely to come to publishing a true likeness on the blog. I still do not plan to post a "real" photo here any time soon. But I guess my inhibition in www realm is diminishing with time. Recently, I used this painting, a self-portrait, on my Facebook profile page. There too I have not until now used a true-life photograph, new or or old.  

    I painted the self-portrait in 1996, a composite of two photographs that my husband took in a hillside restaurant in the Black Sea town of Varna, Bulgaria. One was a close up of me sitting at a table and the other a wide angle shot of the outdoor terrace of the restaurant. It was the summer of 1982 and this is a pretty good likeness of me from those days. Old friends and family recognize the subject readily. The youthful incarnation bears little resemblance to my older current self and I feel comfortable enough to post it here, still artfully managing to hide behind a cyber-burqa!

    RP self 2 (click to enlarge)

  • Elite Athletes Are Different (Joe)

    From the NYT, a Well Blog post about Olympic athletes, many of whom will undoubtedly be taking Epo (the new blood doping), which is dangerous, maybe very dangerous:

    There’s a well-known survey in sports, known as the Goldman Dilemma. For it, a researcher, Bob Goldman, began asking elite athletes in the 1980s whether they would take a drug that guaranteed them a gold medal but would also kill them within five years. More than half of the athletes said yes. When he repeated the survey biannually for the next decade, the results were always the same. About half of the athletes were quite ready to take the bargain.

    Only recently did researchers get around to asking nonathletes the same question. In results published online in February, 2009 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, exactly 2 of the 250 people surveyed in Sydney, Australia, said that they would take a drug that would ensure both success and an early death. “We were surprised,” James Connor, Ph.D., a lecturer at the University of New South Wales and one of the study’s authors, said in an e-mail message. “I expected 10-20 percent yes.” His conclusion, unassailable if inexplicable, is that “elite athletes are different from the general population, especially on desire to win.”

    So not all elite athletes are qualitatively different than normal people, but about 50% of elite (or super-elite; I don't know the methodology, or what the label means) are different than 99.2% of people who are not elite athletes.  They will literally die to for "sports glory," i.e, to win, and win big.

    Kind of explains why we have so many stories of world-class athletes doing stupid, illegal, bad things.  Why Kobe Bryant allegedly raped that woman in Eagle, Colorado; why Michael Vick ran a dog-fighting ring; why Tiger Woods was carrying on about a dozen sleazy affairs.  If you need to win, if winning at all costs is the primary thing driving you in life, is the only thing you care about, serious transgressions from social norms are understandable.1

    [1] Unlike the other transgressions, Vick's dog-fighting might be explainable by different social norms — in his subculture, dog-fighting was arguably socially acceptable, much like cock-fighting in Mexico or bull-fighting in Spain.  I'm not sure about it, but I've seen it claimed.  Either way, I think the basic generalization still makes sense.

  • A Slippery Slope (Sujatha)

    Or maybe we are already at the bottom of the hill, with no further place to go.

    I refer, to the Jan 21 decision of the US Supreme Court with regard to election spending by corporate entities. From the Washington Post:

    "Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and his conservative colleagues
    delivered a seismic jolt Thursday. They overturned two of the court's
    past decisions — including one made as recently as six years ago — to
    upend federal legislation that says corporations may not use their
    profits to support or oppose candidates and to declare unconstitutional
    a large portion of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act passed in 2002"

    In his 90-page dissent, Justice Stevens avers

    "… the majority's "glittering generality" that corporate speech,
    like individual speech, is protected under the First Amendment was a
    "conceit" that is "not only inaccurate but also inadequate to justify
    the court's disposition of this case."

    He wrote of his conservative colleagues' "agenda" and said they had
    transformed a simple case about whether a conservative group's movie
    about Hillary Rodham Clinton violated McCain-Feingold into a constitutional quandary. "Essentially,
    five justices were unhappy with the limited nature of the case before
    us, so they changed the case to give themselves an opportunity to
    change the law."

    All  that I  take away from the whole case is that(1)Corporations are currently treated as persons with limited rights regarding free speech (2) The rulling by Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas now removes restrictions on corporations as to how much they may spend to directly influence electoral politics, by extending the earlier limited version of 'free speech'.

    Support of sorts for this Free Speech argument comes from some surprising quarters, such as Glenn Greenwald's article 1 and 2 on Salon.com.

    His contention is that unlike many who dislike the concept of full personhood with its attendant rights of free speech being extended without restriction to corporations, this ruling also in a different way protects the free speech rights of organizations like the ACLU or Planned Parenthood, which while it may cause havoc in electoral politics by muddying waters (which are hardly crystal-clear to begin with), is the correct stance to take on the issue of free speech and the First Amendment.

    There are many skilful dissents to the above opinion, coming from quarters who are severely concerned with the widespreading tentacles of the corporations to influence political discourse now digging in further. Here for example.

    The insidious influence of corporations via PACs, 527s and the like have already made inroads into the body politic. So this protest may be much ado about nothing. Maybe this ruling will make it unnecessary for the corporations to hide behind the PAC masks and give openly to candidates of their choice, so then we could see speeches by Senator A,  Aetna-Highmark, or Congresswoman B,  Exxon-Mobil, instead of the silly R or D designation which does nothing to indicate which way their legislative record will lean.

  • Journalistic Ethics vs Common Decency – A False Choice

    With earthquake devastated Haiti as the backdrop, I was surprised to come across this strange question posed by a journalist: Are reporters with backgrounds in medicine being show-offs when they simultaneously report on a disaster and administer care?

    The particular reporter whose actions provoked this journalistic soul searching is Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the chief medical correspondent for CNN. Gupta administered medical care to the sick and the injured in Haiti while also reporting the news of their conditions.

    Interchangeably dressed in a grey T-shirt or a black button-down, CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta has spent the past seven days and seven nights amid Haiti's ruins, at times abandoning the microphone and bright lights for gauze and a scalpel. …

    Since he arrived in Haiti last Wednesday, Dr. Gupta has treated a 15-day-old Haitian girl whose mother perished in the earthquake, single-handedly staffed a field hospital after a Belgian medical team left the site over security concerns and, most recently, performed brain surgery on a 12-year-old Haitian girl aboard the USS Carl Vinson, which is anchored off the coast of Port-au-Prince….

    Between surgeries, impromptu consults, administering antibiotics and changing IV drips, Dr. Gupta — who was unavailable for an interview — has been filing regular field reports and interviewed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton over the weekend.

    In an article in the Washington Post, correspondent Ian Shapira picks up on the question originally asked by another WaPo journalist, Paul Farhi and elaborates on his own feelings about Gupta's dual role as a reporter and medic.

    Today, The Washington Post's Paul Farhi poses a provocative question on journalism ethics: Are reporters with backgrounds in medicine being show-offs when they simultaneously report on a disaster and administer care?

    This debate has emerged in the aftermath of Haiti's quake; journalism's longstanding traditions dictate that we are supposed to be primarily observers, and that we should intervene in events only when necessary. Admittedly, reporters tend to take themselves a little too seriously — with a dose of self-righteousness — believing that we should not interfere in a story because we would interrupt the narrative's natural rhythms. But in the case of Haiti, or in any other crisis, reporters often discard those mandates.

    I confess that when I saw the CNN reporter Sanjay Gupta caring for a baby in Haiti, dealing with the child's head wound, I cringed. I thought he had an ulterior motive, that he was trying to boost CNN's flagging ratings by sending a message to audiences back home: CNN tells great stories, but CNN also saves lives! One can't help but feel that major media organizations possess a kind of lust for these disasters, with their built-in storylines, and that the onslaught of reporters is taking up so much precious space and resources, as The New Republic's Noam Scheiber recently argued..

    But, the more I thought about the extreme circumstances of Haiti's situation — the seeming lack of government and scant supply of medical workers — the more my cynicism receded and the more I thought Gupta and others like him have been doing the right thing. Haiti needs help. Reporters can tell stories and show the images to help boost sympathy and donor dollars; and, in the cases of those who are qualified, administer medical aid.

    Are Farhi and Shapira being stupidly purist?  Shouldn't one do what one can in matters of life and death and isn't a doctor, even in the role of a reporter, well suited to act in a crisis? Human interactions can not be compartmentalized by the rigid protocols of the Fourth Estate. Sanjay Gupta did what he should have done as a doctor, reporter and a human being.  Shapira admits in the end that Gupta did the right thing. What I found confounding is that he and his colleague bothered to bring up the issue of journalistic ethics here in the first place.

  • Walking in our neighbor’s shoes

    A sobering historical perspective on Haiti by Morgan Meis of The Smart Set and 3 Quarks Daily.

    Louverture

  • The Depraved Never Rest

    In the wake of the devastating earthquake in Haiti, two right wing media commentators have been heard spouting their usual reactionary drivel.  Televangelist Pat Robertson blamed the people of Haiti for bringing about their own misfortune by making a pact with the devil and Rush Limbaugh used the occasion to cast aspersions on President Obama, who he said would exploit the disaster to curry favor with African Americans!

    Meanwhile, decent human beings are doing their best to assist the people of Haiti. Please find out how you can help. (My contribution went to Doctors Without Borders)

    Donate over the Internet:

  • Ministry of Silly Walks

    Glad to be back home after an enjoyable but hectic two weeks in New Delhi. The occasion for the winter travel was a family wedding. Most of the time was spent in attending to that - dressing up, eating and meeting with relatives some of whom I hadn't seen in years. On the return journey, I discovered to my relief that the security checks at airports, despite the Christmas Day scare created by the undie bomber, weren't especially draconian. Or perhaps because we were traveling as a family (my daughter, son and I), we did not come under special scrutiny.  Whatever. On the other hand, former New York City mayor Ed Koch warns us that we ought to be really worried and not let our guard down because hundreds of millions of Muslims are terrorist killers.  

    Despite the hustle and bustle of the wedding activities in New Delhi, I was able to make a short side trip to the lovely old city of Amritsar, the home of the fabled Golden Temple, the most revered site of worship of the Sikhs. Amritsar lies on the western edge of the Indian state of Punjab, close to Lahore, an ancient city on the Pakistani side of divided Punjab. Between the two historic places lies the village of Attari through which runs the India-Pakistan border. Of the sixteen or so check points that dot the long border, the one located here, known as the Wagah-Attari Check Post, also contains the only official trade and traffic route on land between the two countries. In 1993 when the road opened for the first time since the partition of British India in 1947, the governments of India and Pakistan created a tourist spot at the border crossing with stadium style seating on both sides and the daily flag lowering ceremony at the gates turned into a spectator drama. This was my second trip to Amritsar. The first was in 1972 when the Wagah border was not a significant place to visit. This year however, we made it a point to go and witness the highly choreographed ritual. The Indian side of the border was chock-full of visitors whose voices drowned out the relatively sparse crowd on the Pakistani side which may have been the result of this threat just a few days prior to our visit. The ceremony was great fun – much rooster like strutting by the border security guards on each side, accompanied by singing, dancing and loud and friendly jingoism. Although my son took numerous photos which I have permission to post, I am including instead a You Tube video here because still pictures do not do justice to the circus like atmosphere prevailing at the event.

  • Drugs! (Joe)

    First, maybe Tom Cruise does know the history of psychology.  Link.  Or at least was right that exercise can be as effective as antidepressants for people with mild depression (but not moderate-to-severe depression).

    Second, locking drug users up in China.  Link.  Minimum two-year stay, no treatment, ghastly conditions.  I'm not sure I buy the popular addiction-as-disease paradigm, and I don't really think Western treatment facilities are effective, but China sure makes us look pretty good.  What's going on over there is just beastly.

  • Prions and Primordial Soups (Sujatha)

    While recently discussing the precise mechanism of evolution,after viewing "What Darwin Never Knew" on Nova on PBS, there was much argument over whether the 'random' nature of mutation is truly random or conforms loosely to a framework of rules.

    Evolution in organisms, as we commonly understand, is where random mutations occur, of which the traits most conducive to the survival of the species are preserved by 'natural selection'. But the term 'random mutations' doesn't imply that every possible combination will occur and have at least one or more organisms which could survive and show up in the fossil record. These mutations are governed by certain rules, some transformations being more probable than the other. One such mechanism is termed 'biased gene conversion', a far cry from the initial assumption that the word 'random' implies. For instance, certain types of amino acid pairs in DNA are favored over others, leading to certain mutations being much more probable using those pairs.

    Clearly,the Theory of Evolution is itself evolving with the times and as more discoveries are made, much like we progressed from simple models of the atom to the weirdnesses of quantum mechanics and particle physics. 

    But what does this have to do with prions and primordial soups? What does the origin of life have to do with the origin of species? 

    It might be a leap of logic from one to the other, but maybe someone could talk me out of this idea.

     
    Prionsquiggle Prions, malfunctioning proteins (less complex than DNA and RNA, considered the basic building blocks of life), have been found to evolve, despite their falling under the category of 'non-living' per the DNA/RNA definition.

    "On the face of it, you have exactly the same process of mutation and
    adaptive change in prions as you     see in viruses," said Charles
    Weissmann, M.D., Ph.D., the head of Scripps Florida's Department of
    Infectology, who led the study. "This means that this pattern of
    Darwinian evolution appears to be universally active. In viruses,
    mutation is linked to changes in nucleic acid sequence that leads to
    resistance. Now, this adaptability has moved one level down — to
    prions and protein folding — and it's clear that you do not need
    nucleic acid for the process of evolution."

    A path to an answer to the major question of how life could have possibly started on a 'lifeless' planet covered with 'a primordial soup' now presents itself. Could it be a 'prion' like molecule, or an even simpler version that started to replicate itself, 'evolving' as the millenia passed?

    In the study of early life on Earth, one name towers above the rest: LUCA. LUCA is not the name of a famous scientist in the field; it is shorthand for Last Universal Common Ancestor,
    a single cell that lived perhaps 3 or 4 billion years ago, and from
    which all life has since evolved. Amazingly, every living thing we see
    around us (and many more that we can only see with the aid of a
    microscope) is related. As far as we can tell, life on Earth arose only
    once.

    Is it possible that LUCA may not been the 'true ancestor' of all cells, just as the atom was not the final frontier in the deconstruction of matter? The prion evolution discovery portends exciting possibilities into understanding the true mechanisms behind how a 'lifeless mix of chemicals' could indeed generate life as we now know it.