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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "nancylebov" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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11:54 am
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Poets on Prozac
Poets on Prozac is a collection of essays by poets with major psychological problems about how treatment has affected them and their poetry.
The consensus is that meds help. A lot. Once the meds are tweaked adequately, almost all the poets find that being able to write more of the time (or in some cases, at all) is better than having an unmedicated illness. The two exceptions are one who had such bad side effects from her meds that she found ways to live with her depression, which is gradually becoming less intense, and another who found that the meds made metaphors less spontaneous but were still worth taking.
However, most of them are still writing, at least as pleased with their poems (or no less distressed at them), and getting published. A number of them find that they have different subject matter, but this isn't a problem. Generally speaking, they think their poems have improved, but I'm not sure how much of this is directly a result of meds and how much is just that they've spent more time writing poems.
None of this proves that meds leave everyone's creativity intact, just that there are quite a few people who've found that meds don't conflict with creative work.
There were at least a few people who found that writing poetry is an essential part of maintaining sanity, and one who became a poet as part of his therapy.
I didn't make a list, but relatively few of the poets were actually on Prozac.
The mental problems included depression, bipolar, bipolar 2 (bipolar that has a very small up phase-- it's apt to be misdiagnosed as depression), bulimia, anorexia, and post-partum psychosis.
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01:03 pm
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That white firefighters case.....
Does anyone have details about the test which the white firefighters scored so much better on?
I can't imagine what would be on a test which legitimately produced such results, so I'm wondering if there was dishonest scoring.
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12:54 pm
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The short tail
Retailers cut back on variety.
Link thanks toUnqualified Offerings.
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10:34 am
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Too much naughtiness
A gingerbread revolution.
If you're in the mood for something silly.
Link thanks to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) yhlee.
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10:34 am
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The Happy Science Fiction Ahead
Why all the reasons given for not writing optimistic sf are just excuses, from a site for an anthology of optimistic sf-- they are accepting submissions till July 1.
ahmedakhan is putting out an anthology to be called Cheer Up, Universe" " Humor is good, but that is not the only thing I am seeking for this anthology. I primarily want stories that leave you feeling warm and fuzzy after reading them - stories with likeable characters and/or exhilarating events".
This reminds me-- any recs for sf where the bad guys are defeated but they don't have a single point of failure? There's a certain kind of kick that you can probably only get from the destruction of the One Ring or the Death Star, but there's room for not-perfectly tidy aftermaths. ("The Scouring of the Shire" would be a minor example, except that even the aftermath has a single point of failure.)
For that matter, any stories where the good guys are dealing with the consequences of their own single point of failure?
First link thanks to james_nicoll.
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10:16 am
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We're doomed
CIA recruits downsized Wall Streeters
Link thanks to Alas, a blog.
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10:10 am
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Looking for room share at Shore Leave
If anyone's got space, I'm interested. Floor is ok. I've found crash space.
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10:08 am
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You can use lj archive for search
It's obvious to a lot of people, but not me, and not everybody.
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10:20 am
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Debunking the Obesity Epidemic
From Paul Campos:
In fact there has been no weight gain at all over the past 30 years in the thinnest quartile of the population -- whatever (poorly understood) factors have caused Americans to weigh more on average now than they did in the 1970s have had very different impacts across the weight spectrum: thin people have gained no weight, people in the middle weigh 10-15 pounds than they did 30 years ago, while the fattest people have gained a lot of weight, which is exactly what one would expect. Furthermore, as even this story manages to note, there's quite a bit of evidence that the trend toward weight gain in the populace in the 1980s and 1990s seems to have plateaued.
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The best epidemiological data on the U.S. population is the CDC's National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). This is universally recognized as the gold standard for such surveys, in particular because it's a nationally representative sample that directly measures its participants. NHANES has been ongoing since the 1960s; the most recent data that allows for significant followup is from NHANES III, which was assembled in 1988-1994.
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Most recent excess deaths estimates from NHANES III:
Underweight: 38,456
Normal weight: 0
Overweight: -99,980
Obesity Grade I: -13,865
Obesity Grade II and III: 57,515
Underweight less than 18.5 BMI, normal weight 18.5-24.9, overweight 25-29.9, Obesity Grade I 30-34.9, Obesity Grade II and III 35+ What these numbers mean: In the US population at present, we are seeing about 100,000 fewer deaths per year among "overweight" people than we would if "overweight" people had the same mortality risk as "normal weight" people. Note that the majority of people in the US who according to the government's current classifications weigh too much are in this group. The "overweight" category is to the obesity panic what marijuana use is to the drug war: stories about an "epidemic" of fatness depend crucially on classifying the 35% of the population that's "overweight" as being at some sort of increased health risk. This is simply false, and is known to be false by the researchers who are quoted in stories like the one linked above.
But the situation is much more egregious than even this suggests. Note that the NHANES III data reveals that most people who are classified as obese have a lower mortality risk than so-called normal weight people. About two-thirds of "obese" Americans have a BMI of between 30-34.9, and currently we're seeing about 14,000 fewer deaths per year in this group than would be expected if the group's mortality risk was the same as that of "normal weight" individuals.
Only when one gets to roughly the fattest 10% of the population does the NHANES III data begin to find a relative mortality risk higher than that found among the supposedly "normal weight." And even here, the relative mortality risk results in about three times fewer deaths per capita than observed among the "underweight" (there are approximately four times as many people with BMIs 35+ than there are people with BMIs below 18.5).
The comments cover some of the more common questions-- it's not that a few very sick thin people are making the low weight category look dangerous. There probably aren't enough muscular athletes to completely disconnect BMI from fat percentage.
I can't help wondering if the stats for moderately fat people would be even better (and somewhat better for very fat people) if fat people weren't stigmatized. Not only is there the aggravation of (in many cases) being harassed and insulted, it's harder to make money, and there's a risk of having doctors that blame all one's physical problems on fat so that quite serious medical problems may be neglected.
It's very weird to think that you could be living in a society where the culture could be so comprehensively wrong-headed. The way I got past that threshold was to remember that I'd spent 8 (mostly boring) years in Hebrew school, and it wouldn't have been totally wasted [1] if I realized that anti-Semitism proved that the majority can be wrong for centuries at a time.
[1]To be fair, a lot of the folk songs and some of the prayers have good tunes.
Link thanks to andrewducker.
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09:56 am
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Vague conclusions from Jacobs survey
I just asked people about whether they knew about Jane Jacobs and what their political orientation was. I'm forced to conclude that *maybe* Jacobs is a little better known among libertarians than non-libertarians, but that's swamped out by other factors, like whether you're interested in how cities work. It wouldn't surprised me if there's an age-based difference, too.
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09:48 pm
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Advice on cell phone plans?
I'm planning at being an occasional user at this stage (Verizon?) and eventually getting rid of the land line.
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08:23 pm
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Jane Jacobs?
I mentioned that I think Jane Jacobs is better known among libertarians than elsewhere in the comments here, and then it occurred to me that I don't really know. Unfortunately, lj doesn't offer a good way of getting correlations among different answers, and this isn't a random sample either, but I hope to get a better-informed vague impression.
Poll #1418345
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: AllHave you heard of Jane Jacobs? What's your political orientation?
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11:55 am
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Adaptive chemotherapy
From orac:
Cancers are made of heterogeneous cells, and under the challenge of chemotherapy, there's selection for resistant cancer cells. However, resistance is biologically costly (cool details at the link), so it might be worthwhile to try to manage the cancer rather than destroy it.
This is all very experimental (just mouse models and one promising study on actual mice), but it seems plausible that fine-tuning the chemo to the state of the cancer instead of following a pre-set schedule could work well.
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09:45 am
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Taking descriptivism to a higher level
smallship1 is a proud proscriptivist.
I prefer to get outside the system--here's my comment:
Alternate theory: Language keeps changing, but needs to be kept stable enough to be useful.
It's both good and natural to have people pulling in both directions, according to what usages feel plausible to them.
I'm not sure how much language change comes from great writers, how much from slang, and how much from mainstream drift.
Second thought: I'm not sure how much the important resistance to change comes from people who invoke rules and stability and how much is from people who just don't use the changes they don't like.
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07:57 am
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Something else I'd like to see in a romance
For whatever reason, I don't like conventional romance novels, even though there are some love stories (McKinley's Sunshine, Bujold's Komarr) that romance readers like that I like very much.
For the most part, though, romance novels seem to be about falling in love with someone you have good reasons to mistrust, and having it all work out anyway.
Some of this crystalized for me when I read Durgin's A Feral Darkness, an otherwise pretty good science fiction and horror mix. The heroine even has a small business, which is always a plus for me. However, she's in love with Scary Infuriating Guy. This is more annoying because Scary Infuriating Guy has a younger brother who doesn't withhold important information from her. (All this is from memory.)
I want stories where the heroine figures out that a romance hero is more trouble than he's worth, and chooses someone who is better news. One time when I was ranting about A Feral Darkness, a woman told me she'd lived my preferred version.
I realize that what I want is probably not crackfic for the general public, but I've never seen a example of it at all.
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01:30 pm
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Misunderstandings in romances
From sartorias:The Big Mis, or misunderstanding. I get really impatient when ten seconds of conversation would clear up the problem, which instead is protracted for the length of a book. Yet some of the funniest comedy is based on misunderstanding. I finally figured out when it works for me: it's when everyone thinks they know what's going on, but they perceive something different from what they are expected to know. So cross purpose talk, with several meanings, is going on. I see that as different from the misunderstanding in which there is no real reason why A won't ask B for clarification, and I am right out of the book when A does ask B, who says, "We don't have time now"--but then goes on to yap for pages about something completely different.
Are there any stories where it occurs to the characters that if they're afraid to ask each other important questions, that's a problem with their relationship?
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11:51 am
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The passivist Supreme Court
Splitting 5-4, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that an individual whose criminal conviction has become final does not have a constitutional right to gain access to evidence so that it can be subjected to DNA testing to try to prove innocence.
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A little more detail
Is there any place that lists all the dissenting opinions?
Answered by arashinomoui. Stevens' dissenting opinion starts on page 39. Shockingly, he thinks that what happens to actual human beings matters. I don't know how a justice with that much empathy managed to get onto the Supreme Court.
What are those five justices trying to optimize?
First link thanks to The Agitator.
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12:14 pm
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Excellent silly fantasy
From Catherynne Valente:
Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her father's house, where she washed the same pink and yellow teacups and matching gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were very large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her, and flew to her window one evening just after her eleventh birthday. He was dressed in a green smoking jacket, and a green carriage-driver's cloak, and green jodhpurs, and green snowshoes. It is very cold above the clouds, in the shanty-towns where the Six Winds live.
"You seem an ill-tempered and irascible enough child," said the Green Wind. "How would you like to come away with me and ride upon the Leopard of Little Breezes, and be delivered to the great sea which borders Fairyland? I am afraid I cannot go in, as Harsh Airs are not allowed, but I should be happy to deposit you upon the Perverse and Perilous Sea."
And a bit especially for dcseain:
September smoothed the lap of her now-wrinkled and rumpled orange dress. She liked anything orange: leaves, some moons, marigolds, chrysanthemums, cheese, pumpkin, both in pie and out, orange juice, marmalade. Orange was bright and demanding. You couldn't ignore orange things. She once saw an orange parrot in the pet store and had never wanted anything so much in her life. She would have named it Halloween and fed it butterscotch. Her mother said butterscotch would make a bird sick and besides the dog would certainly eat it up. September never spoke to the dog again, on principle.
Ok, that's why you might well like the story, if that's at all the sort of thing you like.
Here's why you should donate if possible-- the author literally needs food money. This gets into some detail about how writers have seriously irregular incomes, and why fast money is sometimes an urgent matter. It also includes the non-obvious information that, if you happen to have some money, you can probably commission a little writing from just about anybody.
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11:55 am
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What do terrorists study?
There I was, thinking it's "Weak Points of Western Civilization", but no. It's engineering! It's well-known to habitue's of rasfw that electrical engineers are prone to crank theories, but unfortunately, New Scientist fails to break it down by specialty.
But first, the efficacy of profiling when you're just using plausible guesses:
The extraordinary lengths the German authorities went to after 9/11 to track down potential terrorists are a stark example of how useless profiling can be. They collected and analysed data on over 8 million individuals living in Germany. These people were categorised by demographic characteristics: male, aged 18 to 40; current or former student; Muslim; legally resident in Germany; and originating from one of 26 Islamic countries. Then they were sorted into three further categories: potential to carry out a terrorist attack (such as a pilot's licence); familiarity with locations that could be targets (such as working in airports, nuclear power plants, chemical plants, the rail service, labs and other research institutes); and studying the German language at the Goethe Institute.
With the help of these categories authorities whittled the 8 million down to just 1689 individuals, who were then investigated, one by one. Giovanni Capoccia, an Oxford-based political scientist who analysed this case, reported that not one of them turned out to be a threat. All the real Islamic terrorists arrested in Germany through other investigations were not on the official "shortlist" and did not fit the profile.
However, after partial clue acquisition, we discover....
The next move was to find out what they had studied - and we tracked down 178 of our 196 cases. The largest single group were engineers, with 78 out of 178, followed by 34 taking Islamic studies, 14 studying medicine, 12 economics and business studies, and 7 natural sciences. The over-representation of engineers applies to all 13 militant groups in the sample and to all 17 nationalities, with the exception of Saudi Arabia.
I'm tired of typing "blockquote", so I'll just tell you it's possible that Saudi Arabia is an exception because it's easy for engineers to find jobs there.
We also collected data on non-Muslim extremists. We found that engineers are almost completely absent from violent left-wing groups, while they are present among violent right-wing groups in different countries. Out of seven right-wing leaders in the US whose degrees we were able to establish, four were engineers: for example, Richard Butler, the founder of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations, was an aeronautical engineer, and Wilhelm Schmitt, leader of the right-wing, extreme anti-government, pro-localism group known as the Sheriff's Posse Comitatus, was an engineer with Lockheed Martin. Among the total membership of the Islamic groups, however, the over-representation is still much higher.
This may explain why right-wing terrorists are better at killing people than left-wing terrorists, but it doesn't explain the political divide.
Strange....
According to polling data, engineering professors in the US are seven times as likely to be right-wing and religious as other academics, and similar biases apply to students. In 16 other countries we investigated, engineers seem to be no more right-wing or religious than the rest of the population, but the number of engineers combining both traits is unusually high. A lot of piecemeal evidence suggests that characteristics such as greater intolerance of ambiguity, a belief that society can be made to work like clockwork, and dislike of democratic politics which involves compromise, are more common among engineers.
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06:35 am
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Money isn't quite as useful in elections as you might think
The rise of millionaire candidates is an interesting test of the thesis that money is the be-all and end-all of winning elections. The Center for Responsive Politics compiles lists of candidates who put large amounts of their personal money into elections for the House and Senate. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the results show that the overwhelming majority of them lose and often lose badly.
In 2002, 32 candidates put at least $500,000 of their own money into their campaigns. Only three won their elections. At the top of the list of losers was James F. Humphreys, Democrat of West Virginia, who spent almost $8 million of his own money to lose an election to the House of Representatives. Not far behind were Douglas Forrester, Republican of New Jersey, who invested $7.5 million to lose the Senate, and Erskine Bowles, Democrat of North Carolina, who spent almost $7 million to lose a Senate race in his state.
It's amusing to think of tempting rich people to spend their money on political campaigns as something like a progressive tax, but it may actually increase variation in wealth if the few who win come out wealthier as a result. Anyone know if they do?
Link thanks to Marginal Revolution.
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