Professor Colin Blakemore assesses the intriguing implications of advances in neuroscience that have made it possible to communicate with those in a vegetative state:
Astronomy, from Copernicus on, has transformed our view of the place of the earth in the heavens. Darwin changed forever our view of the status of humanity. Neuroscience is likely to challenge our very understanding of what it is to be a person.
I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly the other night, a film based on real events about a man that is totally paralysed and can only communicate by blinking his eye.
But this is something else, amazing:
For seven years the man lay in a hospital bed, showing no signs of consciousness since sustaining a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. His doctors were convinced he was in a vegetative state. Until now.
To the astonishment of his medical team, the patient has been able to communicate with the outside world after scientists worked out, in effect, a way to read his thoughts.
They devised a technique to enable the man, now 29, to answer yes and no to simple questions through the use of a hi-tech scanner, monitoring his brain activity.
To answer yes, he was told to think of playing tennis, a motor activity. To answer no, he was told to think of wandering from room to room in his home, visualising everything he would expect to see there, creating activity in the part of the brain governing spatial awareness.
His doctors were amazed when the patient gave the correct answers to a series of questions about his family.
There’s a campaign under way in the U.S. to “restore the First Amendment to its original purpose: to protect people, not corporations.” They need to hurry. The U.S. has long taken the road to corporatocracy. The longer this goes on the less likely they’ll ever be able to turn back.
Great piece by George Monbiot on the campaign to arrest Tony Blair:
Already the campaign has borne fruit. Outside the Chilcot inquiry a woman called Grace McCann, inspired by the website, tried to apprehend Mr Blair, before she was restrained and removed by the police. She qualifies for the first bounty: one quarter of the total pot at the time of her attempt. She has pledged to give the money to relevant charities. The fund will remain open until Blair is officially prosecuted, and we will keep paying out to those who follow Grace’s example.
You can donate here.
Iraq’s Ministry for Human Rights will file a lawsuit against Britain and the US over their use of depleted uranium bombs in Iraq, an Iraqi minister says.
According to Iraqi experts, the U.S. and Britain, being the lovers of freedom and democracy that they are:
… bombed the country with nearly 2,000 tons of depleted uranium bombs during the early years of the Iraq war. Atomic radiation has increased the number of babies born with defects in the southern provinces of Iraq.
While I’m a big fan of the iPad’s ease of use, this aspect worries me.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett writing for The Guardian:
The evidence shows that almost all the problems that occur most often in the poorest neighbourhoods—including those that make us a broken society—are systematically more common in more unequal societies. Rates are not just a little higher, but between two and eight times higher. Wider income gaps make societies socially dysfunctional across the board.
Last October Cameron rounded on Labour, saying: “Who made inequality greater? No, not the wicked Tories. You, Labour. You’re the ones that did this to our society. So don’t you dare lecture us about poverty. You have failed and it falls to us, the modern Conservative party, to fight for the poorest who you have let down.”
But the truth is that we are suffering the impact of the massive increases in income inequality under Thatcher, which Blair and Brown have since failed to reverse. In the 1980s the gulf between the top and bottom 20% widened by a full 60%—much the most dramatic widening of income differences on record.
In my circle of friends, family and workmates I’m the technological shaman who helps them acquire, use and heal their computers Macs.
I’ve always enjoyed this. Not so much the technical tinkering, but the practice of helping people to get on with what they’re using a computer for in the first place. In fact it’s always frustrated me that people like myself are needed in the first place. And even more so the dismissive attitude of so many of the technologists and computer geeks who frequent the technical forums that I myself gain much of my knowledge from. For them computers are not the problem, people are just bumbling idiots. Rather than design computers around people they think people should mold themselves to the way a computer works.
True to form many of them are apocalyptic about Apple’s new iPad. They see it as a toy, nothing more than an oversized iPod, even an affront to their computing prowess. How can one get serious computing done without a filing system, multiple windows or a mouse they cry!1 Fraser Speirs aptly refers to this as Future Shock.
Ultimately the iPad represents a couple of things to me: on the negative side it’s potentially the beginning of the end of the free and open internet as we know it. On the positive side it is almost certainly the beginning of the end of the desktop metaphor. And not a day too soon.
Someone has finally got serious about creating a powerful computer that’s easy to use.
Notes:Cancel Haiti’s Debt petition – Oxfam International
Alex von Tunzelmann, writing for The Times, explains how Haiti became so indebted in the first place:
The appalling state of the country is a direct result of having offended a quite different celestial authority — the French. France gained the western third of the island of Hispaniola — the territory that is now Haiti — in 1697. It planted sugar and coffee, supported by an unprecedented increase in the importation of African slaves. Economically, the result was a success, but life as a slave was intolerable. Living conditions were squalid, disease was rife, and beatings and abuses were universal. The slaves’ life expectancy was 21 years. After a dramatic slave uprising that shook the western world, and 12 years of war, Haiti finally defeated Napoleon’s forces in 1804 and declared independence. But France demanded reparations: 150m francs, in gold.
For Haiti, this debt did not signify the beginning of freedom, but the end of hope. Even after it was reduced to 60m francs in the 1830s, it was still far more than the war-ravaged country could afford. Haiti was the only country in which the ex-slaves themselves were expected to pay a foreign government for their liberty. By 1900, it was spending 80% of its national budget on repayments. In order to manage the original reparations, further loans were taken out — mostly from the United States, Germany and France. Instead of developing its potential, this deformed state produced a parade of nefarious leaders, most of whom gave up the insurmountable task of trying to fix the country and looted it instead. In 1947, Haiti finally paid off the original reparations, plus interest. Doing so left it destitute, corrupt, disastrously lacking in investment and politically volatile. Haiti was trapped in a downward spiral, from which it is still impossible to escape. It remains hopelessly in debt to this day.