A Photographic Memory

Vaughan Bell passes along a spooky story about a Parkinson’s patient whose hallucinations persisted even in photographs:

Patient 1 was first evaluated at age 66, having been diagnosed with PD [Parkinson’s Disease] at age 58… She complained of daytime and night-time visual hallucinations for the past one year. Most of the time she did not have insight about them. She described seeing three children playing in her neighbour’s yard and a brunette woman sleeping under the covers in one of the beds in her house. She also saw images of different people sitting quietly in her living room. Most of her visual hallucinations subsided in open and brightly lit spaces but were, nevertheless, troublesome. In one instance, she saw a man covered in blood, holding a child and called 911.

Her husband, in an attempt to prove to her that these were hallucinations, took pictures of the neighbour’s yard and the bed in their house. Surprisingly, when shown these photos, the patient continued to identify the same children playing in the yard and the same brunette woman sleeping under the covers. This perception was present every time the patient looked at these photos. Within 6 months of stopping ropinirole and titrating quetiapine to 75 mg every night at bedtime the hallucinations were less severe and shorter in duration, but the patient continued to see them in the photos.

New York In Living Color

In 1939:

The Dish recently posted a color film of London from 1927. Update from a reader:

The video was more captivating than I thought it would be.  I was surprised at how stylish the people seem, and how thin! Hardly any fat folks to be seen! Of course, many people were smoking, which might help stay thin. And the kids looked so healthy. They keep telling us we have an obesity problem in this country, but you don’t quite realize the extent until you look back.

Another points to an Atlanta version of 1939.

(Hat tip: Kottke)

Attack Of The Patent Trolls, Ctd

A reader writes:

I’m a patent attorney (and subscriber…) with over 20 years of experience. I’m not saying patent “trolls” are not an issue, but they are nowhere near the problem made out the graph you displayed and the president’s release yesterday. In 2011, Obama signed what was then called “patent reform,” a large piece of legislation that made many changes to the patent system. One of the changes, which was put in solely to address the alleged patent trolling problem, required that, in effect, you can only file suit against one accused infringer per case. So if you have a patent you believe covers, let’s say, a memory chip, and all the memory chip makers manufacture essentially the same chip (which, due to industry standards, is the case), you can no longer file a single case naming all the memory manufacturers. Instead, you are forced to file separate cases against each. So what used to be one case is now 5-10 cases.

Funny how that law took effect in 2011, which is when the data shows the increase in the number of cases. As my father used to say, figures are for liars, and liars figure.

I’m with Drum. The only way to fix the patent system is the fix the Patent Office. They are overworked, abused, and starved of resources. I bet most people don’t know that the Patent Office is self-funded (i.e., all the money it needs to operate comes from user fees). By statute, the Patent Office’s fees are set at a level so that it collects all the money it needs to operate – not more, not less. The PTO does this, and then Congress raids that money and takes some of it away for other uses. We cannot expect the Patent Office to do its job without the money it requires to properly operate.

The 2011 statute I mentioned was supposed to stop fee diversion, but the word I’m getting is that it has not stopped Congress from raiding the Patent Office’s coffers.

Getting Paraplegics Back On Their Feet

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Helen Thomson tells the amazing story of Antonio Melillo, whose spinal cord was severed in a 2011 car crash:

Over in the corner of the lab, Thomas Hoellinger of the Free University of Brussels (ULB) in Belgium is wearing an EEG cap, which measures electrical activity at various points across his scalp. There are several ways he can use it to control the exoskeleton through thought alone – at the moment, the most promising involves wearing a pair of glasses with flickering diodes attached to each lens. … Measurements from this part of the brain can detect whether Hoellinger is concentrating on the left diode or the right. He shows me how concentrating on the left starts the exoskeleton walking, while concentrating on the right stops it. All this happens in under a second.

Melillo isn’t wearing the cap right now, because the team has hit a snag. When the exoskeleton moves, its motors induce electrical noise in the EEG signal, making the readings unreliable. So instead of mind control, Melillo is walking by moving his upper body. As he leans left, a pressure sensor just above his buttock registers the movement and moves the opposite leg of the exoskeleton. He repeats the process on the other side to begin walking. “It’s great, such an amazing sensation,” he says. “Not just walking but even being able to stand upright.”

In the future, researchers hope to be able to control the exoskeleton based on brain activity that “corresponds with the intention of walking” and allows the user to control their pace.

The Global One Percent

Fascinating:

Despite its name, it is a less “exclusive” club than the US top 1 percent: the global top 1% consists of more than 60 million people, the US top 1% of only 3 million. Thus, among the global top percent, we find the richest 12 percent of Americans (more than 30 million people) and between 3 and 6 percent of the richest Britons, Japanese, Germans, and French. It is a “club” still overwhelmingly composed of the “old rich” world of western Europe, northern America and Japan. The richest 1% of the embattled Euro countries of Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece are all part of the global top 1 percentile. However, the richest 1% of Brazilians, Russians and South Africans belong there, too.

Joshua Keating takes note:

As usual with Milanovic’s writing, the paper is a little all over the place but all of it is fascinting. He argues that we are living in a “non-Marxian” world in which a person’s material wellbeing is determined less by class than location. “Differently put, more than fifty percent of one’s income depends on the average income of the country where a person lives or was born,” he writes. So much for workers of the world unite.

Do Mascots Need Modernizing? Ctd

Seattle Mariners v Cleveland Indians - Game One

A reader writes:

As a long-suffering Cleveland Indians fan, I thought I would weigh in on this issue. I absolutely loath the “grinning Indian” that has been the team’s mascot for decades. In the club’s defense, it seems that they have been trying to limit its use despite what appears to be support for the image by fans. Today, the team uses either a script “I” or an uppercase “C” on its uniforms and caps. Eradicating the emblem altogether would be the right thing to do.

But what is not commonly known is that the team name actually came from a fan contest in the early 20th century to rename the Cleveland club. The name honors Louis Sockalexis, one of the first and only Native Americans to play major league ball. Is the term Indians anachronistic? Yes. But the name was not selected to disparage. I think that makes a difference.

Another:

As a Cleveland transplant who also happened to go to Florida State, I can’t stand the Indians logo (or name for that matter) and see it as something that holds back the city on par with Cuyahoga River burning.  Not sure what a suitable replacement would be, but dropping Chief Wahoo (yeah, seriously) would be a big start.  Maybe the team could just be “Cleveland” and continue to be referred to as “The Tribe” informally.

Here is a hint: when your physical mascot at the field has to look like [the photo seen above] because your real mascot is too offensive, you might want to change your mascot.

Another example is the Fighting Illini of the University of Illinois.  They retired their Chief Illiniwek mascot in 2007 after the NCAA deemed it a “hostile or abusive” symbol.  Originally, the entire name “Fighting Illini” was going to have to go, but it turned out that it predated Chief Illiniwek and referenced soldiers from Illinois that fought in WWI.

Should Congress be involved?  I honestly don’t know, but it did start a discussion here on your blog, so some good has already come of it.  The best pressure the government can do is to place the copyrights for the logos for the Chiefs, Indians, Braves, Redskins in the public domain. Once any guy with a screenprinting setup can use the logo to put on merchandise their would be some clear-cut economic incentives to finally change mascots.

Another:

I have been a Redskins fan all my life and when I first hear the word “Redskins” I immediately think about the NFL team. It was until my teenage years that some people use “Redskins” as a racial slur. For a long time, I was back-and-forth on this. But then I saw this Washington Post article about the origin of the term “Redskins.” It was created by … Native Americans. They used the term as pride and endearment. Whites used the term for endearment as well. Then in the mid 1800s, authors and writers started using “Redskins” to degrade the Native Americans.

For me, the question of whether “Redskins” is racist or not is tied to the person behind the team. George Preston Marshall, the original owner of the Redskins, moved the team from Boston to Washington to attract the Southern crowd. In the late ’50s, he changed one of the lines of “Hail to the Redskins” from “Fight for old D.C.” to “Fight for Old Dixie.” A year later, it went back to the original lyrics. Also at that time, the NFL pressured Marshall to get a player in color and the Redskins were the last team to integrate.

If I were living 50 years ago, I would of demand changing the nickname because of Marshall’s actions. Now, I think the Redskins reflect its true origin: pride, endearment and character from their football team. It started with the elder, late George Allen. Then the Redskins were really “The Redskins” when Joe Gibbs came in coach the team to three Super Bowl titles. Now with the ascension of Robert Griffin III, the Redskins are back to relevance in the NFL. It’s funny that when the Redskins are good, the critics propped up about the name and when they suck, they stay quiet and laugh at their futility.

Update from a reader:

Your reader repeats a commonly believed, but false legend. The Cleveland Indians were not, in fact, named in honor of Chief Sockalexis, or any actual Native American person. Rather, after the 1914 season, Cleveland’s American League team faced the prospect of playing without their star player, Nap Lajoie, for whom the press and public commonly called the team the Naps. The selection of the name Indians in 1915 was not the result of a “fan contest,” and it had nothing to do with Chief Sockalexis. Rather, it was pure corporate marketing, an attempt to steal some glory from the then-dominant Boston Braves of the National League. The Braves now play in Atlanta, after a stint in Milwaukee. And the Braves also gave their name to Boston’s football Braves, who adopted the nickname Redskins and moved to Washington in the 1930s.

As for the Braves? The team has long maintained, with some credibility, that the name originally referred to the patriot tax protesters of the Boston Tea Party, some of whom dressed as Indians for the event. Here’s the best linkable scholarly study of the Indians naming history.

(Photo: Cleveland Indians mascot Slider entertains the crowd during the game against the Seattle Mariners at Progressive Field on August 23, 2011 in Cleveland, Ohio. By Joe Robbins/Getty Images)

The National Weather Out-Of-Service

After the damage caused during last year’s hurricane season, Brian Merchant is gob-smacked that we’re not better prepared for the upcoming one:

This summer is going to be a stormy hurricane-filled hell—climatologists are predicting more extreme activity this season than the last, and remember Frankenstorm Sandy? So you’d think we’d be gearing up to brace for impact: Hiring on extra storm forecasters, investing in better satellites and modeling computers, all around getting more hands on deck.

Instead—and stop me if you’ve heard this one before—we’re doing the opposite. Fresh off the cusp of the biggest hurricane disaster to swamp the East Coast in decades, Congress is allowing budget cuts to hamper the nation’s most important storm-monitoring services.

Climate Progress provides the details:

The National Weather Service, already cash-strapped and under scrutiny for sub-par computer modeling, will be grappling with a hiring freeze and mandatory furloughs as it heads into a potentially daunting hurricane season. The NWS office in Tallahassee, which typically has 18 meteorologists on staff, is down to 14 due to the cuts. Though officials say they can maintain adequate staffing to provide critical services, such as forecasting at the National Hurricane Center in Miami and sending aircraft known as Hurricane Hunters into storms to measure speed and pressure, the staff and crews will be forced to take turns being furloughed. …

With resources and personnel already stretched thin, the prospect of multiple major storms becomes even more daunting. “The biggest concern would be if we have a very active hurricane season and we have back-to-back storms or we have multiple storms hitting the state, they would simply not have the manpower necessary to ensure they have the appropriate coverage in all their field offices to provide us with the most accurate and timely forecast,” said Bryan Koon, director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

The Best Of The Dish Today

I can’t get me enough derpitude or David – while stocks last! – Frum. I kinda knew Catholics were less picky than Protestants about who gets into Heaven, but it was good to see how unpicky we are. A reader speculated about Chris Christie’s long 2020 game and I responded to Josh Barro on the meaning of Burke for contemporary American conservatism. And, hey, Brother, Clive James wasn’t fibbing, was he?

The most popular posts of the day were Gay-Baiting Josh Barro and When Rape Triggers An Orgasm. The three top referrers to the Dish were search engines, Twitter, then Facebook. The next two are Huffpo and Drudge.

See you tomorrow morning.