The Top Ten Strangest Self-Experiments Ever

The Top Ten Strangest Self-Experiments Ever: On 15 February 1921, as the American surgeon Evan O’Neill Kane lay on a table in a hospital waiting to have his appendix removed, he decided to conduct an impromptu experiment — to find out whether it would be possible to remove his own appendix. So he sat up and announced that everyone should step back because he was going to perform the operation himself. Since he was the chief surgeon at the hospital, the staff reluctantly obeyed his strange command.

Kane propped himself up with pillows in order to get a good view of his abdomen. He injected cocaine and adrenalin into his abdominal wall, and then he swiftly cut through the superficial tissue, found the swollen appendix, and excised it.

The entire procedure took thirty minutes. There was only one slight moment of panic when part of his intestines unexpectedly popped out of his stomach as he leaned too far forward, but he calmly shoved his guts back inside his body and continued working.

An address

The Chumbawamba Principle: A Commencement Address : Krulwich Wonders... : NPR: You can't always name the thing you're going to be.

For most people it doesn't work that way. You have to back into it. Designing yourself isn't like being a conqueror. It's not Genghis Khan screaming "Charge!" thundering across the steppes, seizing his prize — no. It's more like you are nearsighted. You like salty snacks, and one day, fumbling along, you knock over a pretzel dish and think, "What's this?" You take a bite and think, "Hmmm! Do I like pretzels?"

It's more like that.

The Wisconsin Recall

Quoth my fellow Williams grad Emily:

When Barrett conceded, I started crying. Not because I necessarily will be affected by Walker’s horrible excuses for policies, but because my students will be. My students depend on BadgerCare and WHEDA. Their parents are overwhelmingly either a) unemployed, b) on a fixed income, or c) working in jobs that benefit from union support (i.e. janitors, factory workers, etc.). 

This morning, my 3rd graders (3rd graders are 8-9 years old, FYI) had an intense discussion about Walker and Barrett. They decided unanimously that if they could vote, they would vote for Barrett. I had to pretty much sit out this discussion due to my AmeriCorps restrictions on discussing politics while on the clock. One student said, “Walker doesn’t care about anyone but rich white people.” Another student asked me, “Will you lose your job if he gets reelected?” Then they decided it didn’t matter, they didn’t need to worry - Walker would be recalled.

They believed in the democratic process. Believed. I doubt that they will still believe tomorrow morning. And for this reason, among many others, I cry for them.

 I don't agree with a lot of the above, but it is true that Walker's strategy wasn't about uniting anyone, but instead the cold calculus that he would win the battle against public sector unions. That sort of choice has a cost - seen in these 3rd graders.

Marina Keegan: A Yale grad made the most of her short life. - latimes.com

Marina Keegan: A Yale grad made the most of her short life. - latimes.com: News briefs can be cruel. Not because of what they say, but because of what they don't.

The Boston Globe ran an item Saturday headlined “Wayland woman dies in Dennis car crash.” It was breaking news, but not unusual. The Globe’s metro desk regularly runs tragedies in brief: struck pedestrian, fatal motorcycle accident.

This one told of Marina Keegan, 22, who died when the car she was riding in drifted off the road, hit a guardrail, veered back over the road and rolled over at least twice. The driver of the 1997 Lexus ES300 survived.

The accident backed up traffic for nearly a mile, the Globe noted. This was the news.

What the Globe didn’t mention, what wasn't news at the time, was that Keegan was a writer. A pretty good one. She had just graduated from Yale University. And one of the last things she ever wrote was about the importance of living life to its fullest.

Let's get one thing straight

"Internal deliberations of the executive branch" do not constitute due process. Particularly when it comes to ordering someone killed. Shame on Obama.

Two Thoughts

While in Chicago this weekend, I realized two new things:

1. We often talk about how stereotypes can damage or harm a person's ability or potential, but the reverse of that happened to me: I was the nerd who was "supposed" to succeed. It's a very strange kind of privilege, because that sort of praise is also isolating, but I hadn't fully realized it until this weekend.
2. I think churches need to start to explicitly welcome "friends" in addition to "members." Spirituality is a difficult topic, but churches do far too many wonderful things that go beyond embracing a creed. Some of the most loving people I know aren't explicitly religious, though I think their love of fellow man makes them more Christian than others who wear their faith on their sleeve.

Confusing Me

Why is the SEC investigating JP Morgan Chase for losing a bunch of money? That happens sometimes; part of capitalism, right?

Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart - Chad Wellmon

IASC: The Hedgehog Review - Volume 14, No. 1 (Spring 2012) - Why Google Isn’t Making Us Stupid…or Smart - Chad Wellmon: As historian Ann Blair has recently demonstrated, our contemporary worries about information overload resonate with historical complaints about “too many books.” Historical analogues afford us insight not only into the history of particular anxieties, but also into the ways humans have always been impacted by their own technologies. These complaints have their biblical antecedents: Ecclesiastes 12:12, “Of making books there is no end”; their classical ones: Seneca, “the abundance of books is a distraction”8; and their early modern ones: Leibniz, the “horrible mass of books keeps growing.”9 After the invention of the printing press around 1450 and the attendant drop in book prices, according to some estimates by as much as 80 percent, these complaints took on new meaning.

The Avengers: A Review

Robert Ebert ends his review of this movie as follows:

"The Avengers" is done well by Joss Whedon, with style and energy. It provides its fans with exactly what they desire. Whether it is exactly what they deserve is arguable.

In the immediate aftermath of watching the movie, with all of the amazement and awe at the sheer scale of it all, I wanted to throw this back into Ebert's face: "How dare you question this movie?" It's remarkable what Whedon did - he took a bunch of different characters and made them interact and fight in a way that cinematically gelled. The movie is full of moments - Hulk providing many - and will doubtlessly be remembered for many of them, from arcade games to the ship they were played on to an AMAZING tracking shot of the heroes united.

This movie could have been a massive screwup - the script might not have worked, and the was substantial opportunity to fail in a work that combined so many type-A characters and their A-list. (Joss Whedon apparently mollified Downey by following his suggestions and showing Downey that they wouldn't work.) It's not a screw-up; in fact it is an entirely solid and entertaining film, but in retrospect I miss a few things:

1. The music isn't memorable. See Iron Man got that right. What about musical motifs for each character?
2. All of the characters are basically invincible, espeically the two "normal" humans that never seem to be injured. There's no arc of "damage," possibly because all of the other films involve that.
3. I could have been more clever than a split up > ship> city structure.

One World Trade Center 2004-2012

Shepard Smith delivers again

The Maddow Blog - Romney takes credit for Obama policy he condemned

The Maddow Blog - Romney takes credit for Obama policy he condemned: Just at face value, it takes a fair amount of chutzpah to face a crisis, get it wrong, then whine about the way in which the other guy got it right. But it takes truck loads worth of chutzpah to condemn the other guy then take credit for his success.