The Brain Observatory

edit–they are at it again!

As I write (so if you hurry, you can see it), the Brain Observatory is sectioning a brain. Last time I watched them, it was when they were sectioning HM’s Brain. This time, it’s a dolphin brain.

Aaaand, it looks like they are closing up for the evening, or getting ready to. Their schedule:

The dolphin brain is pretty cool–far more gyri and sulci than I would have imagined!

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Below is the verse I wrote for HM, on the occasion of his brain sectioning. It has the distinction of being the only one of however many hundreds of poems or verses I have written, to be unrhymed. I’ve said before, it’s not what I usually do.

For H. M.

My day goes by in bits and pieces,
The crossword puzzle, conversations,
Doctors asking, running tests;
They seem to know me; I don’t know how.
And who is that old man in the mirror?

My day goes by as days do, I suppose,
I watch TV, play bingo, read…
Today the crossword is very easy!
I don’t remember when I moved here—
And who is that old man in the mirror?

My day – I don’t recall yesterday—
A pleasant day, with pleasant friends,
I know my way through this house,
But I do not remember moving here,
And who is that old man in the mirror?

My day goes by in one-act plays
Old plots forgotten with the new,
I never know the actors’ names—
Each one is nice enough, it seems;
But who is that old man in the mirror?

Today, I’m feeling very tired;
I don’t know why—I’m much too young
To stiffly walk, to ache to move—
I must have worked hard yesterday.
I feel like that old man in the mirror.

Henry Molaison, known to biology and psychology students everywhere as “H. M.”, is perhaps the single most famous patient in history. Perhaps. He was studied for over half a century, from when he underwent psychosurgery in 1953 to alleviate epileptic convulsions, until his death last year. Henry had an extreme case of anterograde amnesia–the inability to form new episodic memories. He could learn new tasks, but would not know that he had learned them (his performance surprised himself!). He taught us, or allowed us to learn, more about how remembering works than we had ever suspected before. Abilities we thought as single were exposed as many parallel abilities, and not always the neat splits our introspective accounts may have predicted. (that may not be expressed well. It is late.)

Headline Muse, 8/16

Though for others, it seems a bit odd,
Winning games isn’t big for this squad
If you don’t score a goal
They can still win your soul
Cos they play to bring glory to god

Headline: Christian pro soccer team: ‘Scoring souls, not goals’

Ok, not so much a headline as a CNN blog post, but close enough. I only wanted to write about this team because they are seen as so anomalous, and their anomaly is attributed to their faith. I’m here to tell you, it ain’t necessarily so.

Back in college, I was a member of an intramural team (I’ll give you their name in a bit); depending on the season, we played softball, basketball, volleyball, or ultimate frisbee. We were sort of the B version of a separate team that was far more typical of the intramural league. Our team, not so typical. Other teams loved to play us, for two reasons. First, they got a win. Second, they got a fun game.

Now, you might think we were not very good. You’d be wrong. We played hard, and usually scored more points than the opposing team. But our team operated by a different set of rules. For one, before each and every game… (expected phrase: “we would pray”), we would officially forfeit that game. That’s right, we lost the game before we even played it. For two, our hard and fast rule was “never argue a call”. If the first base umpire missed a call by a mile, so what?

With winning and arguing tossed out, the only thing remaining was to compete, play a great game, and have fun. Given that it is more fun to play well, you’d still see us diving after a spiked volleyball or laying out at full run after a frisbee. I personally ended more games than not, bleeding and injured. But smiling.

The object of any game, unofficially, was to have the most fun we could. But that was unofficial. Officially, the object of every game was “not to spill your beer”. (Easy for me–I did not drink at the time.)

The name of the team? “The Heathens.”

Spare The Rod

We tell you, in the name of God
That when you choose to spare the rod
You spoil the child.
The holy word, from God above,
Is “use a stick to show your love”
So just go wild.
A God who drowned the Earth in flood
Won’t mind if you should draw some blood
It’s fair and just.
So beat your child! Start today!
The bible doesn’t say you may
It says you must!
So if they fight (as children will)
Just beat them with a cane until
They get along
And if a kid should end up dead,
You followed what the bible said
And can’t be wrong.

From CNN, Anderson Cooper reports on parents who follow the book “To train up a child”, which advocates regular and severe punishment–beatings with a rod–for young children (video at link).

In His Own Image

They say that God created Man
As part of an enormous plan,
And did so in His image, cos he loves us, every one.
When men of God discriminate
And treat their fellow men with hate
They do so with the knowledge it’s what Jesus would have done.
When righteous men, in righteous ways
Hate atheists, or Jews, or gays,
Or Muslims, pagans, redheads, southpaws, foreigners, or Voodoo
I know at first it may seem odd,
But clearly, you’ve created God
In your own image, when you find he hates the same folks you do.

“You can safely assume you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates the same people you do.” –Annie Lamott

Headline Muse, 8/15

Casting blame has already begun
Not a group will be spared ere we’re done
So we don’t have to think
Of the grim headline ink:
“Man decapitates disabled son”

Headline:Police: La. man decapitated disabled son, 7

The comments after the New York Daily News version of the article are an exercise in cognitive dissonance. The death has been blamed on Obama, on Republicans, on “trailer trash”, on whites, on liberals, on conservatives, and on “black DNA”. No one, yet, is owning up to the notion that the father is a member of their own group.

In the complete absence of any info about his beliefs, we get:

Commenter “New Yorker” writes: Hmm, I’m guessing the man was an atheist. No ‘Fear of God’ . . . . . yet.

Commenter “Theoham” writes: Louisiana is in the bible belt. Total rat dropping!

*****
Even (perhaps especially) when confronted with a horrible story of human behavior, we make a distinction between the actions of that person and anything remotely associated with ourselves.

Raise Your Hand!

Republicans across the land
Will stand with those who raise their hands
Thus caving to the right’s demands
For “No New Taxes!”
They’ll hear no ifs, nor ands, nor buts,
No compromise! More cuts! More cuts!
And showing they’re completely nuts
They raise their axes.

It’s just exactly what was feared—
The moderates have disappeared—
They’ve all marched right; it’s rather weird
But quite expected
Some seem quite real; some must be fakes
But all of them will lie like snakes
They’ve figured out, that’s what it takes
To get elected.

But raising hands one August night
And claiming they will fight the fight
Might put them in a different light
Come next November
They’ll do their best to sugar-coat
Because they need the centrist vote;
We saw the hands, and we made note,
And we’ll remember.

Via Ed, a bit on the surreal moment from the GOP debate. Given that Perry was not among the debaters, he needs to have his answer put on record–preferably before a similarly minded crowd.

Lady Franklin’s Lament, 2011

“Lady Franklin’s Lament” (AKA “Lord Franklin) is a haunting ballad, telling of Lord Franklin’s British Arctic Expedition (1845), an attempt at finding the fabled Northwest Passage. For centuries, that passage has been a dream; climate change is making that dream a reality. First, my favorite version of the song, then my update:

They sought a passage through the frozen seas
Where brave men searched and died for centuries
The dream of merchant-men and sailors too
Amid the icy white, a waterway of blue

To sail from Newfoundland to Beaufort Sea
A Northwest Passage when from ice it’s free
Now rising temperatures and cloudless skies
Have opened channels, and cleared the Passage prize

A land of Eskimo and polar bear
The metal ship is an intruder there
Once thought impossible, a sight so strange
What has happened, to bring about this change?

The lure of money means we’re bound to see
Canada challenged over sovereignty
This Northern treasure, never seen before
The perfect reason, for economic war

The north is changing at a growing pace
Because of challenges we all must face
The fate of Franklin no tongue can tell
Now I worry… about our fate as well.

Via NPR this morning, a story on the Northwest Passage. Clearly, one could write entire books on the subject, so any brief story will be necessarily incomplete, but it touches on a number of interesting bits. For me the most frightening is that the US sees the Northwest Passage as international waters, and Canada sees it as an internal waterway. Oh, and we can add to this the notion that perhaps a fifth of the world’s oil might lie under Arctic ice.

Think about that.

Alien Invasion

Watching “Curiosity: Alien Invasion”; it occurs to me that we really don’t know how aliens will react toward us–different “experts” will justify their own hunches–but we have a pretty decent guess as to how we would act toward aliens. This was from the old blog, a couple of years back:
*****

Daringly, erringly,
Children in Panama
Saw a strange being, and
All held their breath:

Certain the creature was
Extraterrestrial,
Showed they were human, and
Beat it to death.

In some of the pictures, the “creature” looks like E.T., or “a fetus”, or some unidentifiable alien being. In the video, it is fairly clearly (to my eye, anyway) a three-toed tree sloth. But “teens beat sloth to death” is not nearly so cool a headline as “unidentifiable creature found in Panama” (the title of the linked video). Note the use of “unidentifiable” rather than “unidentified”; a small but crucial difference.

There are a great many stories already, and there will be more. Even CNN is going with the “unknown/unknowable” angle. As of this writing, Google news lists a mere 120 news articles. Any bets?

My favorite coverage thus far is this nicely skeptical article:

The story begins at a waterfall near the town of Cerro Azul, Panama. A group of teens, four in all, were playing in the area when the mystery creature, a large hairless monster, shuffled out from a cave hidden by the waterfall. According to most accounts, the creature approached the boys. Growing alarmed, they began to throw rocks at the monster. They continued to do so until it — Gollum, E.T., monster, whatever — stopped moving. Satisfied that they had killed the hairless mystery creature, the Panamanian emissaries of Earth tossed E.T. into the water.

But in all the pictures being circulated on the web, E.T./Gollum looks more like a hairless sloth (and has been identified as such by many who have seen a full body picture of the Panamanian mystery creature), which means that the animal moves at an extremely slow pace (it is difficult to move across the ground on its hooked-claw feet). Which means that the teens might have been alarmed when they first saw the creature but could have easily outran it, so remaining frightened at something that presents no real danger probably did not occur. And they certainly did not have to pelt the mystery creature with stones until it died. That the teens decided to make a sport out of hitting the mystery creature with rocks sounds like a typical teen reaction. But it is doubtful they did it out of fear.

So they lied. They’re teenagers. It’s what they do best, besides eat and sleep and whine about being bored.

There are other news outlets showing evidence that it is a sloth:

…

Nevertheless the local media has played up the story, reporting that zoologists are unable to identify the “alien-like” creature. But DNA testing should soon confirm what most are saying: the animal is a sloth.

As a consequence of a slow news cycle towards the end of summer, August and September tend to be peak months for sightings of “strange” and “unidentified” creatures including unusual marine life, malformed animals and the mythological beasts like the Chupacabra, the Mongolian Death Worm, Big Foot, and the Loch Ness Monster.

I wonder how long it will take CNN to correct themselves?

It’s a sloth. They are teenagers. Ignorance->fear->kill it. No wonder the aliens all choose to show themselves to isolated individuals with lousy cameras. They are scared!