Dreamer Easy

Reading about bullying is at once reassuring and liberating, and bloody horrible, as all the old nausea and dread comes rushing out. I've parked so much information about the subject here there's probably not a whole lot of value in my adding much more, but I may take some notes and add further info and/or insights at some point. In the meantime, have a squiz at The Web Means the End of Forgetting, There's Only One Way to Stop a Bully, and this particularly ugly example of how malicious gossip online - in this case, a deliberate distortion swallowed and spread by the credulous - can affect someone IRL.

ETA: Six Causes of Online Disinhibition, for good or ill; and from the same psychology blog, 10 Rules That Govern Groups, Group Polarization, and Fighting Groupthink.

Putting that topic aside for now, here's some Australian stuff:

The Brisbane Times reports on sexual assault during Schoolies' Week. Beneath the titillating headline there's a surprising amount of acknowledgement that the problem is the rapists and not their targets - in particular, the need to educate young men.

Still on The Kids, a survey of young Australians brings out concerns about how police interact with them, including racist assumptions and general disrespect. (Have I told you this story before? My first conscious awareness of Privilege™ came when inspectors insisted a pair of teenagers Of Middle Eastern Appearance produce their train tickets, but let off the middle-class Anglo thirtysomething - me! - when I couldn't find mine promptly.)

Gay marriage: what would it really take? A detailed look at the state of play in Australia. (ETA: the same politics explains why schools get chaplains instead of counsellors.)

Heck, while I'm here, have this, too:

We Are All Talk Radio Hosts: "Our hypothesis is that the function of reasoning is argumentative. It is to devise and evaluate arguments intended to persuade... Skilled arguers, however, are not after the truth but after arguments supporting their views." Oh, shit.

ETA: And this: The forgotten Muslim victims of 11 September 2001, from the UK's Independent, 11 October 2001.

Australian judge: it's OK to rape an unconscious woman. SMH columnist defends him against mean old feminists. Peachy.

Let's have some cheering crap:

Advice on finding a lost cat

Via fritters, here's a baby deer washing a very happy cat.

The exact link between obesity and diabetes may have been found - a protein secreted by fat cells.

More helpful science on teenagers' brains. "You constantly hear parents saying to their teens, 'What were you thinking?' but the truth is, they're not thinking at all. They are controlled by the emotional part of their brain. The frontal lobe, which is responsible for rational thought, is under construction. The limbic system, which is responsible for emotional thought, is running the show. That's why teens are moody and why they take risks and engage in excessive behaviour. They simply can't put the brakes on." We mock and sneer but the truth is we couldn't really help it.

The Catholic Church in Australia is auditing its carbon footprint with a view to reducing it. (I typed that as "crabon footprint", which is probably what New New York has to audit.)

Happy or not, Russians rarely smile in public

Why girls are killing themselves. "[Teenage girls] lack the privacy needed to work through the emotional struggles of adolescence because of cell phones, instant messaging, and social networking sites. 'Let's say things aren't going well in middle or high school and you email someone about it,' Hinshaw says. 'Soon it's all over everyone else's email, text messages, MySpace, Facebook. Everyone knows what's going on in your life and they're all talking about it. You can't escape it.'" (Online fandom's version of this is the "dogpile", in which a small scale dispute explodes into a drama with a cast of thousands.)

How muggers and rapists pick "easy targets"

http://xkcd.com/23/
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16211-delaying-puberty-could-help-genderconfused-teens-.html
http://www.theage.com.au/national/students-face-racism-exploitation-20081207-6t8x.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/14/AR2007121401328.html
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/violence-accused-get-gun-licences/2008/12/05/1228257317704.html
http://news.smh.com.au/national/one-in-10-teens-hallucinate-study-20081206-6slt.html
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004641.html


(I'll clean these up as I go - I just need to get my bookmarks cleaned up or I'll go spare.)

Tetris has become a way for me to check the level of my cognitive deficit. After last night's rough sleep, not only can I not react quickly enough, I just get more and more bewildered - it all becomes a sort of blur.

Steven Hall. The Raw Shark Texts.
Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata. Death Note 11 and 12.

( Books bought and borrowed )

Lots of stuff about cross-wiring between adjacent bits of brain. Ramachandran touches the cheek of an amputee, who says, "Oh my God, you're touching my left thumb". The brain has a map of the body, but there are some quirks - for example, the map of the hand is right next door to the map of the face. In the absence of input, the hand part has started to make connections with its neighbour. Synaesthesia is a similar example of cross-wiring, but one that you're born with. The part of the brain that processes numbers is right next door to the part that processes colours.

Also, a very cool thing where amputees gain control over phantom hands by using the reflection of the other hand to fool the brain - "seeing" the missing hand move causes the brain to "feel" the movement, and allows the patient to relieve the sensation of a painful cramp by telling the absent hand to relax.

The most extraordinary thing, I think, is realising how dependent we are on this lump of porridge in our skulls for the simplest, most obvious, most intuitive things. Ramachandran tried a similar experiment to the amputee one, showing a patient with "hemispheric neglect" the reflection of a pen on her left in a mirror on her right.

"Of course, any normal person would turn to their left for the pen, but my patient began clawing the surface of the mirror, even reaching behind it... because left doesn't exist in her universe the only possible explanation, however improbable, is that the object is inside the mirror. Remarkably, all her abstract knowledge about the laws of optics and mirrors is distorted accomodate this strange new senory world in which the patient finds herself trapped."

The brain is capable of all sorts of rationalisations like this, denying basic facts like paralysis, blindness, not being dead, etc. Ramachandran suggests an explanation for the creepy observation that your brain starts moving your finger before you decide to move it... it's simply that, to keep everything coordinated, your brain delays your conscious knowledge of the decision. Wrap your head around that one!

(More later. I'll put the stuff about colour vision in door_of_time.)

"The reason for including a chapter on disorders of semantic knowledge in a book on visual agnosia is not simply for the sake of distinguishing the two classes of problems. Vision and semantics are intimately related, and the whole purpose of visual object recognition is to access semantic knowledge about seen objects. We didn't evolve visual systems just to see the shape, color, texture, and movement of the tiger in the bushes; we needed to see those properties so that we could access further nonvisual knowledge, such as 'One of those ate Harry last week.'"
- Martha J. Farah, Visual Agnosia (2nd ed.)

*sigh* Paralysed again. Although weirdly, I just made a pie.

Wiki gives the psychological definition of delusion. To be a delusion, a belief has to be held with complete conviction, can't be challenged by evidence to the contrary, and has to be "implausible, bizarre or patently untrue". I'm relieved to see that my religious / spiritual beliefs don't fulfil these criteria.

Interestingly, the DSM definition specifically excludes religious beliefs, along with anything else generally accepted by the person's "culture or subculture". This may irk some of my more dedicated atheist readers, who may be interested by this.

Here is a cute puppy.

Reading the fascinating A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness by V.S. Ramachandran, with its accounts of strange neurological conditions, and finding various SFnal connections.

( SPOILERS for Torchwood 2.4 Adam )

In Ringworld, one of Larry Niven's cowardly aliens, the Puppeteers, explains why his species have no sense of humour: "Humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism... no sapient being ever interrupts a defense mechanism." Until now, I had no idea what this meant, but Ramachandran argues for exactly this theory when describing a patient who responded to pain with uncontrollable laughter. It can't just be the a-ha effect, he points out, or every great scientific discovery "would be greeted with hilarity". Instead, "laughter is nature's way of signalling 'that it's a false alarm'": someone slipping on a banana peel is funny if they're not actually hurt. (This would explain my outbursts of hysterical relieved laughter during Countrycide and also the Voyager episode The Thaw). Ramachandran suggests his patient's brain also had a cut connection: "one part of the brain signals a potential danger but the very next instant another part... does not receive a confirmatory signal, thereby leading to the conclusion 'it's a false alarm'". For Puppeteers, I guess, there are no false alarms.

(Lots of stuff on synaesthesia, which I'll scribble about in door_of_time.)