The Dish

DiA passes along a paper:

In this paper we consider possible links between the advent and diffusion of a number of new psychiatric pharmaceutical therapies and crime rates. We describe recent trends in crime and review the evidence showing mental illness as a clear risk factor both for criminal behavior and victimization … We find that increases in prescriptions for psychiatric drugs in general are associated with decreases in violent crime, with the largest impacts associated with new generation antidepressants and stimulants used to treat ADHD. Our estimates imply that about 12 percent of the recent crime drop was due to expanded mental health treatment. Our estimates imply that about 12 percent of the recent crime drop was due to expanded mental health treatment.

I wonder how much productivity has been added to the economy from more effective anti-depression drugs in the last decade or so. The pharma-demonizers rarely point out how widespread the benefits of pharmaceutical research are.

Moby Dick translated into the emoticons used in Japanese texting. The author's reasoning:

I’m interested in the phenomenon of how our language, communications, and culture are influenced by digital technology. Emoji are either a low point or a high point in that story, so I felt I could confront a lot of our shared anxieties about the future of human expression (see: Twitter or text messages) by forcing a great work of literature through such a strange new filter.

Sharing a recipe with the ADD generation:

Paul Graham has one:

In fact consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren't really selling it either. If the content was what they were selling, why has the price of books or music or movies always depended mostly on the format? Why didn't better content cost more?

A copy of Time costs $5 for 58 pages, or 8.6 cents a page. The Economist costs $7 for 86 pages, or 8.1 cents a page. Better journalism is actually slightly cheaper. Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant. Book publishers, for example, set prices based on the cost of producing and distributing books. They treat the words printed in the book the same way a textile manufacturer treats the patterns printed on its fabrics.

One of Jeff Jarvis' commenters counters:

It’s good to take an extreme position to try and evince some insight, however, the idea that publishers sell paper is a bit of a reductio ad absurdum. […W]hat about books by authors that don’t sell[?] A best selling author and a poor selling one are both printed on the same paper. If the publisher were selling paper, wouldn’t there be equal demand for both?

The existential answer.

A fascinating blog featuring pieces of personal correspondence throughout history. Here is a fan letter written by Elvis Presley to president Nixon, which prompted their historic meeting. Here is a letter from Jackie Robinson to president Eisenhower, pressing him on his dithering over civil rights. And here is a letter from an Australian soldier to his son in 1945 after spending 3.5 years in a POW camp in Malaya:

"If Mummy is good"? Maybe that's a reference to Nancy. The rest here.

A reader writes:

I've been following your posts on theodicy and it dovetails with something that's happening in my own life right now.

A cousin just died last Friday of ALS – Lou Gehrig's disease. I don't know how familiar you are with the disease, but it's among the most cruel, evil of diseases – robbing the person of his ability to move, to communicate, to go to the bathroom by himself – yet leaving his or her mind untouched.

My cousin was a man with a very strong faith in God, but after about five years of fighting the disease it just got too hard. He was getting worse, it was costing so much money, it caused so much anguish for him but moreso, for his family – his wife and his four girls, ages 12-19. They watched their daddy, their rock, shrivel up and die. And I know how much they loved him – it had to have been the most devastating thing imaginable.

They remain devout; and I've no doubt their faith has helped them get through this. But I look at it and think: Where is the justice in this? If faith cannot protect the most devout, the best among us, who can it protect? And what's it for, then? I cannot consider his death, and the pain it inflicted upon his children, and think that there was some greater purpose in it. I cannot think of it as anything but UNjust; and as such, if God does exist, I cannot consider him anything but unjust, or at best arbitrary.

When faith serves no practical purpose, when even those with the most faith are at risk of being slapped down like this, I see no reason for faith. A greater purpose? Bullshit. For this man, there was no greater purpose than his children; now they are fatherless. The God to whom they devoted such a large portion of their lives could do nothing to prevent it; their personal relationship with Jesus Christ afforded them no protections. Perhaps they are wiser. But all I can think about is: There is no justice in the world. And how, then, can I believe in a just God?

An incredible video from the helmet of a back-country skier in Alaska. Full description here. A snippet:

He was only buried for 4 and a half minutes which is incredibly short. In that time, though, you can hear his breathing already accelerate. The ruffling noise back and forth is his chest rising and falling and the noise that his jacket makes. The intermittent whimpering noise you hear is him trying to swallow and get some air. Still sends chills up the back of my neck. Oh and they located him so fast because his right glove came off just before he came completley to rest and there was an excellent visual of course.

The digging out is utterly amazing. I don't think that you could've paid a Hollywood crew to stage something better. The fact that he could've been facing any 360 direction and yet he's looking right up into the sun-filled blue sky with that first full scoop away of the shovel is borderline spiritual.