Month: November 2012

Not bigger but way more complex than most:

"In each lobe," including the frontal, parietal and occipital lobes, "there are regions that are exceptionally complicated in their convolutions," Falk says. As for the enlarged regions linked to the face and tongue, Falk thinks that this might relate to Einstein’s famous quote that his thinking was often "muscular" rather than done in words.

Although this comment is usually interpreted as a metaphor for his subjective experiences as he thought about the universe, "it may be that he used his motor cortex in extraordinary ways" connected to abstract conceptualization, Falk says … "Einstein programmed his own brain," Falk says, adding that when the field of physics was ripe for new insights, "he had the right brain in the right place at the right time."

This is not some kind of ace in the nature versus nurture argument. Both were involved (Einstein's parents were devoted and his musical capacity was highly developed). But what you begin to realize, or appreciate more deeply in this study, is the most powerful thing to have impacted planet earth since the last asteroid: the physical incarnation of human intelligence. And we are only beginning to understand its potential. My favorite comment from ScienceNOW:

Obliviously Einstein was exercising the triceps of his mind.

And all I want at this stage in my life is to obliviously exercize the triceps on my arm.

(Illustration from the Washington Post)

SCOTUS could announce which marriage equality cases it will or won't hear on Friday. Chris Geidner lists likely outcomes. The first one:

The court takes multiple DOMA cases and the Proposition 8 case. This outcome would be the “all in” option, and it would make clear that at least four justices want the court to resolve the legal questions surrounding these issues, from what level of scrutiny that laws classifying people based on sexual orientation should be given (see more about this here) to whether gay couples have a constitutional right to marry.

Another possibility:

The court takes a DOMA case (or multiple DOMA cases), but denies certiorari in the Proposition 8 case. This option, once considered by advocates to be the most likely possibility, would lead to same-sex couples being able to marry in California within days. The Ninth Circuit’s ruling in the case did not broadly resolve the marriage question, instead holding that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional because it took back rights formerly held by Californians. As there are other cases in the legal pipeline about same-sex couples marriage rights that could make their way to the Supreme Court, the court could decide to let the narrow Ninth Circuit decision stand.

It's a slow news week and I guess a Washington Post columnist's resentment of James Bond's amazing body is not exactly an important issue. But Richard Cohen regrets what he sees as the loss of real manhood:

Maybe the best example of the unmuscled hero is Humphrey Bogart in “Casablanca.” Bogart was 15 years older than Ingrid Bergman and it did not matter at all. He had the experience, the confidence, the internal strength that can only come with age. As he did with Mary Astor in “The Maltese Falcon” — “I don’t care who loves who, I won’t play the sap for you” — he gives up the love of his life because age and wisdom have given him character. These older men seduce; they are not seduced. They make love. They do not score.

I'm not sure I agree – and not only because of that cringe-inducing boomer use of the term "make love". I know my knowledge of heterosexuality is, er, limited, but it always struck me as a function of sexism, not elegance, that older, physically over-the-hill guys routinely date much younger and far more attractive women in movies. It's only a milder version of men in straight porn: in general, apart from the size of their member, they look much more like a regular Joe than the fantasy, plastic porn-bots they penetrate. I don't see that as different in kind than Woody Allen casting himself as a love object for women a third of his age, only different in degree. And it's bullshit by and large – but bullshit that flatters most male viewers, including, it would appear, Richard Cohen.

But Cohen misses something important as well: surely many superman-like movie stars are on steroid cycles, as are many of the young guys and Jersey bros detailed in this recent NYT piece. The male body changed on screen because of steroids. Arnold started it all, essentially requiring men to be as physically ravishing in movies as women generally are. Advertizing took the baton, with Marky Mark leading the charge, followed by Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber filling the airwaves and magazine ad pages (remember them?) with physically enthralling super-men. Over three decades, the increasingly sophisticated results are everywhere. Not so long ago, you'd be able to point out the guys in the gym who were obviously on roids. Now, you're lucky to spot a body that hasn't been transformed by steroids. So when Cohen says

Every rippling muscle is a book not read, a movie not seen or a conversation not held.

He's not wrong. But he is over-estimating the amount of work and time needed in a gym to get a great bod if you eat right, rest well and use the right, responsible mix of steroids. I think this quiet revolution in the use of steroids explains a lot in our culture.

I think it has a huge amount to do with NFL concussion rates: go look at football teams from thirty years ago. None of them come close to the steroidal cattle NFL teams herd together today. Surely that sheer weight and heft makes collisions more damaging, even as technology prevents the skull actually breaking like an egg.

Hollywood is getting subtler, of course. Arnold is no longer the model. But all those dudes from their twenties to their fifties with ripped, lean bods? You think that's all diet and exercize and creatine? I worked out for years with mild but decent results and then got on HIV-related testosterone therapy and everything became so much easier, and I got a hell of a lot more buff with the same amount of effort. For me, it was a medical gain. For others, it need not require much medical cost, except smaller balls, and the danger of losing your own endocrine system through abuse.

But how are you going to stop vain and competitive and sexually driven young men from trying that out? Their movie stars are now all ripped muscle comic book characters. Why would they not want to preen more around their peers, get more attention from women, more street respect from men and far more sex? The phenomenon is global, huge in places like Afghanistan and Turkey, and buttressed by Hollywood's ancient desire to sell sex on screen.

The new male is here to stay. And that is largely because it's hotter. Get used to it.

(Photo: Getty)

Over the weekend, Scott Shane reported that, in preparation for a possible Romney win, the Obama administration "accelerated work in the weeks before the election to develop explicit rules for the targeted killing of terrorists by unmanned drones, so that a new president would inherit clear standards and procedures." Greenwald sighs:

Now that Obama rather than Romney won, such rules will be developed "at a more leisurely pace". Despite Obama's suggestion that it might be good if even he had some legal framework in which to operate, he's been in no rush to subject himself to any such rules in four full years of killing thousands of people. This makes it safe to assume that by "a more leisurely pace", this anonymous Obama official means: "never".

Amy Davidson adds:

Did the idea that some Presidents are better than others at deciding whom to kill cause anyone to feel smug rather than abashed? When it comes to “kill lists,” Obama’s weakness has been to act as though the clarity of his judgment is the same thing as a clear standard; perhaps the thought of losing gave him a sense that this wasn’t the case. But what was most vivid for those in the present Administration, in their vision of President Romney haphazardly dispatching drones? Their distrust of Obama’s successor, or embarrassment about what they might be leaving, unattended to, on the Oval Office desk?

There are conditions attached, but the shift toward UN recognition of Palestinian statehood by the UK and France could bring the entire EU bloc with them. As time goes by, Israel is losing all its Western allies except the US.

A reader speculates:

I don't know if it's occurred to you that the president is raising two teenaged daughters. As the mother of a teenaged daughter myself, it's very, very difficult to discuss pot use with them. Weed is the new cigarettes for this age group. It's really hard to say, "Yes, it's harmless, mostly, and I did it a lot in the '70s, but YOU CAN'T." I think President Obama may be more silent on this issue because of what he's teaching at home. It would be very hard to tell his girls, "Absolutely not!" when publicly you're all for it.

But in Colorado and Washington, the point is that the voters are all for it except for kids. A parent can now say to her kids: you have to wait till you're older to do that, because doing it now will harm your development. And if you buy or possess it as a minor, you are still a criminal, as with alcohol. So Obama has a perfect out: "I was a hardcore stoner … but it's illegal until you're 18 or 21. If you promise me you won't try and get some illegally, we can all buy some legally when you're adults and I can help you navigate marijuana just as parents help kids navigate alcohol." Another reader:

That old footage you showed of Obama speaking in favor of decriminalization in 2004 reminded me of one of the wierdest Obama videos I've ever seen. It's from the summer of 2007 when he was running for president and in it someone on a rope line in New Hampshire asked what his stance was regarding medical marijuana.

You can tell right away from Obama's body language that he really doesn't want to answer this question, presumably because he thinks it's a political landmine. Then the oddest thing happens, and I had to watch it a few times to make sure that I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. You can see Reggie Love in the background apparently listening to an earpiece, which I'm assuming must be radioed directly to somebody like Gibbs or Axelrod or some other adviser. Reggie hears something in the earpiece and suddenly has to get Obama's attention in the middle of this guy's question and not-so-smoothly transfers the ear piece to Obama, who then pauses, and after a few beats apparently parrots back the stock answer coming to him in his ear.

Obama's response was that the Feds cracking down on state medical marijuana operations wouldn't be a worthwhile use of federal resources. But never mind the answer, which didn't seem like his own. To me, it was one of those rare times where you see the politically calculated side rather than the casual authenticity that usually comes across in him, and the sense I got was that whatever Obama's actual position on marijuana is, he's not about to let that be the issue that he wastes political capital on. That's not going to be the issue that prevents him from becoming president and fixing everything else that he cares more about. 

As a big Obama supporter back in the summer of '07, I wouldn't have dared point out this video before Obama won the Democratic primaries, the election in 2008, or the recent reelection, but now that we're on the other side of all three, I couldn't help but pass along the footage.

Above is some footage closer to the real Obama.

In the wake of the Petraeus scandal, Melik Kaylan sounds the alarm over the loss of privacy in the Internet age:

It’s no good arguing that the famous or powerful have signed on to such risks, that they are crucially different from us. With the advent of the Internet, anybody can shame anybody, and the stain can endure through generations across continents. Nor is there real comfort in the notion that digital media promotes the exposure of genuinely egregious offenders such as the Jerry Sanduskys and Jimmy Saviles. A precisely appropriate forum exists for such cases: the criminal justice system. And there are reasons why it has checks and balances—to protect the innocent while calibrating punishment for degrees of guilt.

Today’s scandals do no such thing. Instead, they unleash ancient mythological furies with the power of modern technology. Suddenly, we are back in the archaic time of fear, where anyone who rises too high can get arbitrarily destroyed by the Gods, where there’s no distinction between guilty and innocent, merely between the lucky and unlucky…

I have lived this – being humiliated and falsely accused of hypocrisy by the gay far left because I once tried (and failed) to find other HIV-positive guys to have sex with online when I was single. Since that searing experience – I was a pioneer target in Internet shaming and exposure – I've seen countless others go through the same thing, sometimes for reason, more often for no reason at all.

This is a huge loss that accompanies the huge gain of the Internet. Non-saints all need some zone of privacy if they are to remain sane. And yet no one can really avoid the tools of email and texting and tweeting and Tumblring and Instagramming if they want to be part of society – and any single image or text or email can be instantly communicated to everyone on the planet by almost anyone. Anthony Weiner will therefore always live with the image of his fruit-of-the-loom chubby as if it were stamped to his forehead like a Scarlet Letter of old. Yes, there are great advantages to transparency – we would never have grasped the full extent of the torture under Bush and Cheney if some hadn't taken digital photos of the Cheney-authorized techniques in use at Abu Ghraib. But there is also great human cost.

The only way past this, alas, is through it. The more poor souls this humiliation happens to, the more used we become to the humiliation, the less potent it becomes. In the end, it will likely happen to everyone in public life at some point in their lives, ranging from minor embarrassment – a photo of your love-handles on a beach – to a major scandal whose graphic texts every page-view-grabbing website will broadcast with relish.

Maybe some of our hypocrisies will wither away in this paralyzing sunlight. Maybe we will live less embarrassing lives. Or, more likely, we will build up personal and social scar tissue to live as actual flawed creatures in a terrifyingly transparent world.

From his bio:

Alex Massie is a Scottish journalist. A former Washington correspondent for The Scotsman, he has also written for The Daily Telegraph, Scotland on Sunday, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, The Los Angeles Times, Foreign Policy, National Review Online, The Sunday Telegraph, The New York Times, The American Conservative, Bloomberg Businessweek, The Observer, Slate, The Irish Independent, Newsweek and The Sunday Business Post. Since January 2009 he has written a blog that is published by The Spectator. In 2012 he was short-listed in the blog section for the Orwell Prize for political writing.

Follow that blog here. Watch his previous video here.

The ACA is working:

Private insurers and government, as part of health reform's cost-cutting, are changing the way they pay for care. Rather than reimburse for every service a doctor performs, they have begun to pay lump sums per patient, forcing doctors to more efficiently manage the health of patients, especially those with chronic illnesses.

To adapt, doctors have been forced to change the way they practice. They have to stay open longer, use electronic records, keep better tabs on patients with chronic illnesses and make other changes aimed at keeping patients healthy and out of expensive hospitals and emergency rooms.

Or the doctors have decided to quit their own businesses and go work for hospitals, which can use their bigger multiple-physician leverage to negotiate costs down further.