Month: September 2011

Death row inmates can waive their appeals and volunteer to accept their sentences. Utne reprints John Blume's account from Legal Affairs in the winter of 2005. Blume believes "death row volunteers are almost always suicidal":

Life on death row in America is a breeding ground for volunteerism. A sense of hopelessness, the loss of relationships, and social isolation are the most common factors leading to suicide among nonincarcerated people; these factors define life on death row. The profiles of a volunteer and of a person outside prison who commits suicide are strikingly similar. The overwhelming majority of volunteers and suicides are white males with a mental disorder (generally depression). Many also have a substance abuse disorder and a history of suicide attempts.

The glow-in-the-dark cat above could be key to stopping feline and human AIDS:

The substance that makes the cat glow is a version of the green fluorescent protein that lights up the crystal jelly, a type of jellyfish that lives off the West Coast of the United States. Years ago scientists realized that the gene for GFP is a perfect marker when they insert another new gene into an organism. … [T]he Mayo Clinic scientists inserted a version of the GFP gene along with a gene from the rhesus macaque that blocks the feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV)—the virus that causes feline AIDS—into the unfertilized eggs of a cat. After those eggs were fertilized, they produced kitties that glowed green, showing that they also had the anti-FIV gene.

In Utah, Huntsman has cozied up to and gone to bat for various multilevel marketing (MLM) companies like Nu Skin and Usana. MLM companies sell products through networks of individual distributors instead of by retail and are widely considered pyramid schemes. Stephanie Mencimer reports:

At the behest of the Direct Selling Association, the trade lobby for multilevel marketing companies, the state Legislature passed a bill that essentially gutted Utah's anti-pyramid-scheme law. The bill Huntsman then signed into law may have sanctioned the practices of at least 20 companies in the state thought to be illegally operating a pyramid scheme under the old statute, according to Jon Taylor, the head of the Utah-based Consumer Awareness Institute. … Taylor says he thinks Huntsman is a good man, but that the MLM industry is awash in money and has outsized political influence. Utah has the dubious distinction, he notes, of serving as home to more MLM companies per capita than anywhere else in the country.

Trevor Macomber offers one:

It’s like when [warning: rich white boy anecdote ahead] you’ve been skiing for awhile with your goggles on and after a few runs have forgotten that the world doesn’t actually have a vaguely orange tint to it, such that when you finally pull the things off again before trudging into the lodge for an overpriced, over limp hamburger, you’re astonished to remember just how white the snow truly is. And just as it doesn’t take your eyes long to normalize a previously alien discoloration, or your nose long to accustomize itself to your rank-ass dorm room — which smells perfectly fine to you but which drives out all comely coeds within seconds of their arrival — so, too, would a single homogeneous news source eventually taint all of your perceptions about the world around you in ways you wouldn’t even realize. Call it a modern application of the old boiling frog chestnut, if you’d like.

The web hosts a surprisingly animated debate.

Thant Myint-U reports on Burma's efforts at reform:

[I]f Burma indeed takes a turn for the better and we see an end to decades of armed conflict, a lifting of Western sanctions, democratic government, and broad-based economic growth, the impact could be dramatic. China's hinterland will suddenly border a vibrant and young democracy, and India's northeast will be transformed from a dead end into its bridge to the Far East. What happens next in Burma could be a game-changer for all Asia.

"The Quantum World," the eleventh installment in the Symphony of Science series:

Brian Brown tracks the rise of localism in politics and the private sector:

Rather than the top-down hierarchical strategy of directed control, companies like [Starbucks] are developing organizational cultures manifested through smaller networks in which local knowledge matters…The organizations that have made these adjustments — or were founded based upon them, such as Apple, Amazon, and Google — are reporting higher job satisfaction, faster innovation, and greater profits than organizations still laboring under the old methods.

Laura Miller reconsiders pleasure-seekers, in a review of Stephen Greenblatt's Swerve: How the World Became Modern:

If you think Epicureanism means extravagant self-indulgence, think again. [First-century Roman philosopher] Lucretius was a follower of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, who did indeed argue that pleasure is a sign of the good. But Epicurus also wrote, "we do not mean the pleasures of the prodigal or the pleasures of sensuality."

… Above all, Epicurus and his followers conceived of an ethos that required no supernatural enforcer threatening to condemn the wicked to eternal torment. The Epicurean good life is a good life in both respects — enjoyable because it is moral, prudent and honorable. It is also a life devoted to celebrating this world, not the next.

Scientists measured the speed of various languages. The takeaway:

For [most languages], the researchers discovered, the more data-dense the average syllable was, the fewer of those syllables had to be spoken per second — and thus the slower the speech.

English, with a high information density of .91, was spoken at an average rate of 6.19 syllables per second. Mandarin, which topped the density list at .94, was the spoken slowpoke at 5.18 syllables per second. Spanish, with a low-density .63, ripped along at a syllable-per-second velocity of 7.82. The true speed demon of the group, however, was Japanese, which edged past Spanish at 7.84, thanks to its low density of .49. Despite those differences, at the end of, say, a minute of speech, all of the languages would have conveyed more or less identical amounts of information.