MIT biochemists identified the molecular mechanism that creates fear and successfully cured it in mice. Give it a few years and you can kiss that nagging fear of public speaking goodbye! [via lifehacker.com]
Since I rarely update this blog, I am guessing that this level of addiction is based on how many blogs I read and how much time I devote to reading them.
On that subject, I have to give a big thumbs up to Google Reader.
There are plenty of other news readers and RSS aggregators out there, but Google Reader makes sense for me. I already use Gmail, Google Docs, and Google Notebook.
Nearly two-thirds of young Indian men expect the woman they marry to be a virgin, but nearly half have had sex with prostitutes, according to a poll. But that’s not the kicker…. check out the last sentence of this article. WTF?!
Something about a handbasket & going somewhere in it. GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS, UNBELIEVABLE NEWS
by Bill Winter (Liberator Online)
High school students against free speech
Here’s the good news: Fully 69% of American high school students think musicians should be allowed to sing songs with “offensive” lyrics without fear of prosecution. (So Snoop Dogg and Buckcherry can breathe a sigh of relief.)
Here’s the bad news: Only 54% of students say newspapers should be allowed to publish controversial stories without government approval.
(Sorry, New York Times.)
That’s according to a new survey of 14,498 high school students and 800 teachers funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
According to the survey, students support the First Amendment most when it directly affects them. For example, 64 percent said student newspapers should be able to publish without school officials’ approval.
But a significant number of students have major reservations about free speech in general. Fully 45 percent said the First Amendment “goes too far,” while 32 percent said the press has “too much freedom.” (More frighteningly, 29 percent of teachers also thought the press has too much freedom.)
This widespread opposition to free-speech rights comes four years after Congress passed a bill requiring federally funded schools to teach students about the Constitution.
Ironically, of course, the Constitution doesn’t give the federal government the power to mandate what schools should teach. This led libertarian columnist Walter Williams to write: “I cannot think of a piece of legislation that makes greater mockery of the Constitution.”
So, an unconstitutional bill, ordering teachers (a significant ercentage of whom are dubious about the First Amendment) in government-funded schools to instruct students about the constitution (which was written to limit the power of government) doesn’t seem to be instilling in students a proper appreciation of freedom of speech.
Why aren’t we surprised?
Source: Knight Foundation
USA Today (September 17, 2006)
Walter Williams Column (September 13, 2006)
Heard this on the radio during the morning commute. Great commentary.
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Commentary: Naturalists
By Lee Cullum, KERA 90.1 Commentator
DALLAS, TX (2006-08-24)We are so divorced from nature most of the time that it’s startling to meet what once was called a naturalist. John James Audubon was a great naturalist. So were Teddy Roosevelt and Charles Darwin. And so is San Antonio lawyer Luke Kellogg who is more than an expert at hunting and fishing. He is a student of wildlife, weather and crops. He is an astute respecter of nature as well as the laws that govern the natural world. He does not play around with lightning. Nor does he allow anyone to wave a gun to the right or to the left. Straight ahead, he says, is the only way to shoot. Kellogg has the poise and confidence of somebody deeply rooted in the earth. Not for him the anxiety of those who flit about the land, never alighting in a place that truly feels like home.
This makes Luke Kellogg reliable in the air. He knows when it’s foolish to fly in a six-seat plane. People of science, he said, sometimes make bad pilots. That’s because they believe they can overcome nature. Isn’t that what medicine teaches? How to use the science of nature to counteract or neutralize natural effects? It causes some, he explained, to understand the science, but not the art, of flying.
They are not the only ones who think they can have their way with the natural world. John McPhee wrote a book about some of the others called “The Control of Nature.” In it he described how the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers mounted a Herculean campaign to keep the Mississippi from changing its course by a hundred miles, as it was wont to do. As this work explained, if the river moved its mouth by going down a tributary, the Atchafalaya, that would cut off New Orleans and Baton Rouge from river commerce. The Corps succeeded for the moment in saving the bayou city, but not forever, since Nature, as we now know, had other devastation in store.
I realized as I talked to Luke Kellogg that naturalists are different from environmentalists. Environmentalists are essential to our survival, but they may be entirely urban people who never see a sunset outside a city. They may deplore contaminated air and water, the extinction of species, the destruction of rain forests and global warming, but these can be intellectual or political interests, uninvolved with the passions of the heart.
Environmentalists seek to preserve things as they are, said Kellogg, and that’s impossible. Naturalists, he explained, know they cannot “stop all encroachment and go back to the Garden of Eden,” so they practice a “practical acceptance of change.” They do not embrace the solution sometimes advanced by environmentalists to “get people off the land.” Kellogg stresses that he and his compatriots want to conserve natural spaces, but “they can only manage them around the edges.”
We need more naturalists in the world, more students of nature, including human nature, who understand the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, that there is a time for every purpose under heaven. The thing is to match experience to the moment, and not mistake one’s own force for a force of nature itself. It could be called knowing when to fish and when to cut bait.
© Copyright 2006, KERA