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 A-11 principles. Bryan isn't surprised to see college coaches embracing the A-11. The offense is based on the same principles of the spread and the run-and-shoot, finding running lanes and open space. Of the college programs seeking information on Piedmont's offense, Bryan said about 70 percent of them run some version of the spread. Talk of the offense began with word of mouth on the West Coast, then picked up when college recruiters received highlights of Piedmont games. Media reports during the spring brought more attention to the offense, presenting Piedmont's coaches with a dilemma - should they share their creation or guard the company secrets. They decided to share everything. Bryan and Humphries have fielded phone calls, hosted coaching clinics, sent film all over the country and established a Web site (a11offense.com) with access to diagrams and video. Humphries recently completed a comprehensive installation manual for the offense, as well. "It was bound to happen," Bryan said. "It's amazing how sincere, how interested and how energetic they've been about something fresh." - David Fox What developed from that brainstorming session was the "A-11 offense" - as in all 11 players potentially are eligible. The base offense is one in which a center and two tight ends surround the football, three receivers are split right, three more split left and two quarterbacks stand behind in a shotgun, one of whom has to be at least 7 yards behind the line of scrimmage. A description on the offense's Web site - www.a11offense.com - describes it as "an innovative offense blending aspects of the spread option, West Coast and run and shoot." Yes, per the rules of the game, only five players are eligible to catch a pass during a particular play and seven players have to set up on the line of scrimmage. But in the minds of Bryan and Humphries, you can develop an infinite number of plays with an infinite number of formations. Talk about confusing a defense. "It presents a different set of challenges for defenses because they have to account for which guys go out or might go out," Bryan said. "Those guys who are ineligible to go down the field and catch a pass, they can take a reverse pitch or a negative screen or a hitch behind the line of scrimmage. "We've opened up the game to the extreme with the rules already in place." First, though, Piedmont coaches had to make sure this offense was actually legal. Bryan and Humphries scoured the rulebook, met with league officials and submitted the concept of the offense to the National Federation of High Schools and the California Interscholastic Federation. "We had a 99.9 percent feeling that it was legal," Bryan said. "After it was approved, there was a sense of, 'OK, now what do we do?' " First, they had to install the offense during spring practice and during the summer. Bryan said it wasn't pretty. Even into the first two games of the 2007 season, contests in which the Highlanders lost while scoring a combined nine points, the coaching staff continued making adjustments. Then, something clicked and they went on a seven-game winning streak, using the A-11 offense about 60 percent of the time and a more traditional formation the other 40 percent. This season, Bryan said he wants to use the A-11 offense 85-90 percent of the time. "There was a lot of learning, and we put in a lot of the preparation," Humphries said. "We adapted every week. We learned from what the competitors were doing against us. We made changes and adjusted techniques. We saw nine different defenses in 11 games. It was a wealth of information on what things different defenses can do against this. The different techniques are invaluable." Now, after a year, Bryan says the interest level from coaches across the country is high, and Bryan has produced five instructional videos. Though Bryan admits there probably is some resistance to this radically different offense, one of his opponents said he sees nothing wrong with it. "It's pretty trailblazing," said Hayward (Calif.) Moreau Catholic coach Andrew Cotter, whose squad was pummeled by Piedmont 47-7 last season. "The fact they came up with the idea - it takes a lot of work. I don't think they're trying to take an easy way out. "I'm a new coach coming from an old-school philosophy. Football is meant to line up, get your hand in the dirt and figure it out. But playing within the rules and trying to create an advantage is not something I'm against. There is a philosophy that says you need to line up and see who's the man. However, if you're not the man, you need to come up with some significant strategies to counter that." Now, Bryan looks to the future and ponders what this offense can mean. http://louis-j-sheehan.com "It is limitless," Bryan said. "Here's what's going to happen. If we were sitting down with football coaches and players in 50 years or 100 years, the A-11 would be no big deal because that's what the game will be. "People can laugh at it, but that's reality." </p> 4495266 2008-07-25 00:51:42 2008-07-25 00:51:42 open open football-4495266 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis j sheehan.com left http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/07/23/left-4487723/ Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:58:04 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Anyone who has watched their fair share of baseball games has heard TV analysts, and probably other fans, wax ad naseum about strategic match-ups between righties and lefties. No truly complete lineup, they say, lacks at least one left-handed power hitter. No bullpen is complete without at least one left-handed relief pitcher to oppose those left-handed hitters. http://louis-j-sheehan.com But why are there so many lefties in baseball in the first place? Twenty-five percent of baseball players are left-handed, as opposed to only 10 percent of the general public. Are lefties naturally more athletic? http://louis-j-sheehan.com No, says David Peters from Washington University in St. Louis. Rather, he argues, the science of the game, right down to the dimensions of the diamond, favors left-handed people. Consider the following: 1. When a right-handed batter swings, his momentum takes him toward third base. He has to stop, and then re-start toward first base. But a lefty’s swing takes him toward first base, and Peters says that an average lefty reaches first base one-sixth of a second faster than an average righty, which could make the difference between a hit and an out. 2. It’s not just the infield, either. Because of the preponderance of right-handed people, who can’t hit the ball as far to right field, the outfield fences in historic ballparks like Yankee Stadium and Fenway Park were built notoriously close to the plate. 3. Left-handed hitters fair better against righty pitchers, who are the majority, because they pick up the ball easier. If you’re a right-handed hitter, the pitch looks like it starts out behind your shoulder. But a lefty sees it in front of him the whole way. 4. Lefty pitchers stay in demand because they can reverse that visual effect—left-handed hitters see the ball start out behind them. But lefty-against-lefty is additionally troubling for the hitter—because there are fewer total left-handed people in the world, lefty hitters have less experience against lefty pitchers, and end up taking some goofy-looking swings. 5. Left-handed pitchers face first base, making it easier to hold runners close to the bag or pick them off. Overall, the odds of any one person making it to the Major Leagues are remote. But if you’re born left-handed, consider it a leg up. That is, unless you want to play catcher. Then forget it.</p> 4487723 2008-07-23 10:58:04 2008-07-23 10:58:04 open open left-4487723 publish 0 0 post 0 http://louis j sheehan.com cytosol http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/07/18/cytosol-4465611/ Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:59:20 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Cells come in different shapes and sizes. But how is cell shape determined? And does shape have a role in the regulation of signalling? http://louis-j-sheehan.com Julie Theriot and colleagues used motile epithelial keratocytes derived from fish skin to address the first question. Keratocyte shapes were described by four primary shape modes: cell area, 'D' versus 'canoe' shape, cell-body position and left–right asymmetry. Measurements of cell motility, surface area and other morphological features in a large number of cells, and examination of the distribution of actin filaments along the leading edge to relate the cell-shape measures with cellular actin dynamics, revealed that cell shape is dynamically determined. Cell morphology perturbation studies indicated that cell shape and motility depend on a cellular history-independent, self-organizing mechanism that is characterized by a small number of cellular parameters that stay constant over time (such as the available quantities of membrane or cytoskeletal components). http://louis-j-sheehan.com The authors next developed a quantitative physical model of cell shape and movement that could explain the main features of keratocyte shapes. Based on the findings that the surface area is constant and that the density of filamentous actin along the leading edge is graded, and based on previous observations that showed that the lamellipodial actin network undergoes treadmilling with net assembly at the leading edge and net disassembly towards the rear, Theriot and colleagues propose a model in which actin-network treadmilling drives from within the forward protrusion of an inextensible membrane bag (characterized in two dimensions by its total surface area). This model can quantitatively recapitulate the range of keratocyte shapes and predict both cell shape and motility. The second question concerns the relevance of cell shape for cellular functions. An emerging concept proposes that cell signalling is nonhomogeneous in space and that spatiotemporal dynamics of signalling molecule activities create a code that confers signalling specificity. Iyengar and colleagues used computational and experimental approaches to model the flow of spatial information from beta-adrenergic receptors (beta-ARs) to mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) in neurons in vivo. In hippocampal neurons, the cell body and dendrites have the same surface density of beta-ARs, generating similar adenyl cyclase activities and cyclic AMP (cAMP) levels near the cell surface. cAMP gradients arise from the spatial segregation of adenylyl cyclase activities and phosphodiesterase in the cytosol. Numerical simulations indicate a gradient decay length of sim4 µm that can decrease to sim2.5 µm when phosphodiesterase is activated. In the neuronal soma (20–30 µm diameter), cAMP becomes progressively hydrolysed as distance from the cell membrane increases. By contrast, in the dendrite, cAMP can remain high because of its small diameter (1–4 µm). Interestingly, similar phenomena occur in migrating cells, in which protrusions such as filopodia and lamellipodia at the leading edge are much thinner than the cell body and trailing edge. Signalling molecules, such as the GTPase CDC42, become preferentially activated in the leading edge, where the surface-to-volume ratio is increased. Ravi Iyengar and colleagues also addressed how spatial heterogeneity affects the propagation of the input signal to downstream effectors and how network design is linked to the spatial code implemented by signalling microdomains. Their results indicate that cell shape controls the dynamics of local biochemical activity of negative regulators to determine the size of signalling microdomains, and that negative regulators control the flow of spatial information to downstream components within the cell.</p> 4465611 2008-07-18 15:59:20 2008-07-18 15:59:20 open open cytosol-4465611 publish 0 0 post 0 invitrogen http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/07/13/invitrogen-4441167/ Sun, 13 Jul 2008 09:51:01 +0200 Beforethebigbang 4441167 2008-07-13 09:51:01 2008-07-13 09:51:01 open open invitrogen-4441167 publish 0 0 post 0 methane http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/07/12/methane-4436887/ Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:02:28 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>The Earth was an inhospitable place 635 million years ago, when ice sheets that extended to the equator. Scientists have long wondered how the planet rebounded from that icy era, known as “Snowball Earth.” Now a new study suggests that a stream of methane gas escaping from the ice brought the planet to a climate tipping point and transformed it into a lush, tropical world, in what researchers called one of the most severe climate change events recorded in Earth history. Paleoclimatology has become a hot field, as researchers believe that the planet’s dramatic prehistoric climate shifts can help predict the effects of present-day global warming. Since methane figures into one of the most ominous global warming scenarios, this latest study is being eagerly scrutinized for clues to our planet’s fate. On Snowball Earth, methane was trapped in the ice sheets. But ice sheets are inherently unstable. Once they reach a certain size, they begin to fall apart. The collapse of ancient ice sheets at the Equator would have unleashed trapped methane deposits and pushed global temperatures higher. Methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, then raised temperatures, leading to more collapsing ice sheets in a looping feedback cycle. Climate researchers point out that vast amounts of methane are now trapped in the permafrost and buried in icy deposits beneath the ocean floors. This latest study suggests that a warmer climate and oceans could thaw those deposits, and allow the methane to bubble up into the atmosphere. If global temperatures continue to rise, massive amounts of methane gas could be released from the 10,000 gigaton reserves of frozen methane that are currently locked in the world’s deep oceans and permafrost. Passing this climate tipping point would result in global warming that would be far worse and more rapid than scientists’ current estimates. … The study’s lead author suggests it could happen fast — not over thousands or millions of years, but possibly within a century. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info “This is a major concern because it’s possible that only a little warming can unleash this trapped methane,” Martin Kennedy, a professor at UC Riverside, said in a release. “Unzippering the methane reservoir could potentially warm the Earth tens of degrees, and the mechanism could be geologically very rapid” . Kennedy’s predictions on the potential timescale of the methane release are the most alarming to date; other researchers have predicted that it would take thousands of years for methane to be released from the oceans. But most climate researchers would probably agree with Kennedy’s preventative, prophylactic advice: Keep it zipped! In 2007, excavators of a remote site in southeastern Iran reported finding evidence of a writing system that dates back more than 4,000 years. Featuring odd geometric symbols, three baked mud tablets unearthed near the Iranian city of –Jiroft could reveal much about a sophisticated and independent urban culture that flourished between the Mesopotamian and Indus Valley civilizations. However, many scholars are skeptical about the authenticity of the finds, which they –suspect may have been planted by locals. Archaeologists first began digging at large mounds near Jiroft in 2001 after flash floods uncovered ancient graves nearby. The team has since found evidence of a large city dating to 2500 B.C. Then, in 2005, a worker brought Yousef Madjidzadeh, the archaeologist in charge of the excavation, a tablet covered with strange symbols on the front and back, saying he dug it up in his village a few hundred yards away. Last winter, Madjidzadeh ordered his team to dig at the spot, where they uncovered two more tablets. The three appear to show a progression: The first has 8 simple geometric signs; the second includes 15 slightly more complex signs, while the third has a total of 59 signs. The variants might be precursors to Elamite, the writing system used on the Iranian plateau in the late third millennium B.C. They could also be unrelated or, as some have said, fakes. Madjidzadeh vows to return in 2008 to uncover more tablets and silence his critics. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz That the warrior survived the arrow’s strike for even a short time was remarkable. The triple-barbed arrowhead, probably launched by an opponent on horseback, shattered bone below his right eye and lodged firmly in his flesh. The injury wasn’t the man’s first brush with death. In his youth he had survived a glancing sword blow that fractured the back of his skull. This injury was different. The man was probably begging for death, says Michael Schultz, a paleopathologist at the University of Göttingen. Holding the victim’s skull in one hand and a replica of the deadly arrow in the other, Schultz paints a picture of a crude operation that took place on the steppes of Siberia 2,600 years ago. “The man was crying, ‘Help me,’” Schultz– says. Thin cuts on the bone show how his companions cut away his cheek, then used a small saw to remove pieces of bone, but to no avail. Pointing to a crack in the skull, he describes the next agonizing step: An ancient surgeon smashed into the bone with a chisel in a final, futile effort to free the arrowhead. “Hours or a day later, the man died,” Schultz says. “It was torture.” The slain warrior’s remains were found in 2003, buried with those of 40 others in a massive kurgan, or grave mound, in southern Siberia at a site that archaeologists call Arzhan 2. To find out more about the lives and deaths of these ancient people, Schultz has spent years teasing out the secrets of their bones, using techniques like those employed at crime scenes. In April he announced the results of his research on the wounded warrior. His body, Schultz says, bore some of the earliest evidence of battlefield surgery. (Prior to this announcement, in October 2007, Schultz had reported a finding on a prince buried at the center of the Arzhan 2 mound. Using a scanning electron microscope, Schultz found signs of prostate cancer in the prince’s skeleton. This is the earliest documentation of the disease.) The Arzhan 2 skeletons, which belong to warrior-nomads the ancient Greeks called Scythians, are part of a spectacular series of finds in remote sites in central Asia. One of the discoveries dates back to the 1940s when mummies were found in the Altai Mountains, which run through Siberia and Mongolia. Later, after the fall of the Soviet Union, when some of the sites became more accessible for excavation, the pace of Scythian-related discoveries picked up. The warrior skeleton Schultz is talking about, for example, was found on a plain not far from the 1940s discovery. More recently, other well-preserved mummies—not skeletons—have been found at altitudes of 8,000 feet in the valleys of the Altai Mountains. Still other discoveries have been made on the coast of the Black Sea and the edge of China. Together, the evidence illuminates aspects of the Scythians’ unusual culture, from tattooing warriors to creating intricate metalwork. Never constituting an empire, the Scythians were a network of culturally similar tribes that ranged from Siberia to Egypt almost 3,000 years ago and faded away around A.D. 100. The Greek historian Herodotus describes the Scythians as murderous nomads. As for how the Scythians—who did not have a written language—perceived themselves, only their artifacts and human remains are left to speak for them. +++ For Hermann Parzinger, the 49-year-old German archaeologist who excavated the tombs of the wounded warrior and the cancerous prince, the Scythians have been an obsession. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de Even so, he and his Russian colleague Konstantin Chugonov were surprised to find that the grave mound contained the bodies of 26 men and women, most of them apparently executed to follow the ruler into the afterlife. One woman’s skull had been pierced four times with a war pick; another man’s skull still had splinters in it from the wooden club used to kill him. The skeletons of 14 horses were arranged in the grave. More impressive was the discovery of 5,600 gold objects, including an intricate necklace weighing three pounds and a cloak studded with 2,500 small gold panthers. After the Arzhan 2 finds, Parzinger—who until this year headed the German Archaeological Institute—was tantalized by the possibility of finding a well-preserved mummy that would give archaeologists and pathologists insights into the Scythian culture that bare skeletons never could. “High in the mountains, you can find remains in a preserved condition that just doesn’t exist in other places,” Parzinger, now head of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation in Berlin, says. “Instead of archaeology, it’s a kind of ethnography.” In the summer of 2006, his search took him to a windswept plain in the Altai Mountain range that is peppered with Scythian grave mounds. Parzinger worried that mummies in the highlands may not be around much longer, as global warming reverses the chill that has preserved them for millennia. A team of Russian geophysicists had surveyed the area in 2005, using ground-penetrating radar to look for telltale underground ice. Their data suggested that four mounds could contain some sort of frozen tomb. Parzinger assembled 28 researchers from Mongolia, Germany, and Russia to open the mounds, on the banks of the Olon-Kurin-Gol River in Mongolia. The first two mounds took three weeks to excavate and yielded nothing significant. A third had been cleaned out by grave robbers centuries earlier. The radar data for the fourth mound—barely a bump on the plain, just a few feet high and 40 feet across—were ambiguous at best. But a thrill went through the team as they dug into it. Buried under four and a half feet of stone and earth was a felt-lined chamber made of larch logs. Inside was a warrior in full regalia, his body partially mummified by the frozen ground. +++ Researchers recovered the mummy intact, along with his clothes, weapons, tools, and even the meal intended to sustain him in the afterlife. He shared his grave with two horses in full harness, slaughtered and arranged facing northeast. Mongolia’s president lent the team his personal helicopter to shuttle the finds to a lab in the country’s capital, Ulaanbaatar. The mummy’s body spent a year in Germany; his clothes and gear are at a lab in Novosibirsk, Russia. Before Parzinger opened his grave, the warrior had lain for more than 2,000 years on an ice lens, a sheet of ice created by water seeping through the grave and freezing against the permafrost below. The mummy “had been dehydrated, or desiccated, by the ice in the grave,” Schultz says. Scythian mummies show signs of primitive embalming: Internal organs were removed and replaced with grasses, for instance. The combination of ice and intentional preservation resulted in remarkably resilient specimens. When Schultz shows me the mummy, housed in the same lab as the skeleton of the wounded warrior, the temperature is a comfortable 70 degrees, and sunlight streams onto its leathery flesh. The mummy’s facial features were destroyed. But in this instance—unlike the case of the wounded warrior skeleton—the destruction was inflicted by nature. When the ice lens formed under the burial chamber, it expanded upward. “The extent of the ice was so high, the body was pressed against the logs on the ceiling and smashed,” Schultz says. The skull shattered, making facial reconstruction impossible. His chest, too, was crushed. Still, a lot can be learned. “You can establish a kind of biography from the body,” Schultz says. He notes that the mummy’s teeth are surrounded by pitted bone—evidence of painful gum disease, probably the result of a diet rich in meat and dairy but lacking in fruits and vegetables. Between 60 and 65 years old when he died, the man was slim and just about 5 feet 2 inches. At some point he had broken his left arm, perhaps in a fall. His vertebrae show signs of osteo–arthritis from years of pounding in the saddle. Badly worn arm and shoulder joints testify to heavy use. “That kind of osteo–arthritis and joint damage is very characteristic if you handle wild horses,” Schultz says. The clues reinforce what Parzinger and others have suspected: He belonged to the Scythians, a seminomadic culture that once dominated the steppes of Siberia, central Asia, and eastern Europe. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire Beginning around 800 B.C., the Scythians thundered across the central Asian steppes, and within a few generations, their art and culture had spread far beyond the steppes of central Asia. The Scythians’ exploits struck fear into the hearts of the ancient Greeks and Persians. Herodotus wrote about their violent burial customs, including human sacrifice (which the Arzhan 2 find tends to confirm) and drug-fueled rituals. He speculated that they came from mountains far to the east, in the “land of the gold-guarding griffins.” Archaeologists say the Scythians’ Bronze Age ancestors were livestock breeders living in the highlands where modern-day Russia, Mongolia, China, and Kazakhstan intersect. Then “something changed,” Par–zinger says. Beginning around 1000 B.C., a wetter climate may have created grassy steppes that could support huge herds of horses, sheep, and goats. People took to horseback to follow the roaming herds. Around 800 B.C., all traces of settlements vanish from the archaeological record. Archaeologists usually draw their clues from ordinary artifacts and human remains, so while the grave gold from the nomadic Scythians is sumptuous, the real prize is the ancient people themselves. A century of digging at lower altitudes and in the warm Ukrainian plains rarely yielded more than skeletons or jewelry. In the late 1940s, Soviet archaeologist Sergei Rudenko traveled to the Pazyryk region of the Altai Mountains and made some stunning finds. Richly appointed wooden chambers contained well-preserved mummies, their skin covered in elaborate, twisting animal tattoos. Their brains, intestines, and other organs had been removed and the corpses sewn up with horsehair. The dead had been dressed, armed, and laid to rest in chambers lined with felt blankets, wool carpets, and slaughtered horses. In 1992 Russian archaeologists began a new search for ice lenses—and mummies. Natalya Polosmak, an archaeologist in Novosibirsk, discovered the coffin of an elaborately tattooed “ice princess” with clothes of Chinese silk at Ak-Alakha, another site in the Altai Mountains. Other finds in this area included a burial chamber with two coffins. One coffin contained a man, the other a woman armed with a dagger, war pick, bow, and arrow-filled quiver. She wore trousers instead of a skirt. The find lent credence to some scholars’ suggestions of a link between the Scythians and the legendary Amazons. In the early 1990s, just a few miles from that site, Parzinger’s partner Vyacheslav Molodin uncovered the more modest mummy of a young, blond warrior. The burial style resembled that of Parzinger’s mummy, the one found at the Olon-Kurin-Gol River whose face was crushed by ice. Parzinger fears global warming may soon put an end to the search for Scythians. Rudenko’s dig diaries contain reports of weather far colder than what modern archaeologists experience in the Altai. “When you read descriptions from the 1940s and compare them with the climate of today, you don’t need to be a scientist to see there’s been a change,” Parzinger says. Geographer Frank Lehmkuhl from the University of Aachen in Germany has been studying lake levels in the Altai region for a decade. “According to our research, the glaciers are retreating and the lake levels are rising,” Lehmkuhl says. With no increase in the region’s rainfall, the change “can only come from melting permafrost and glaciers.” As the permafrost thaws, the ice that has preserved the Scythian mummies for so many centuries will thaw too. In the Olon-Kurin-Gol grave, the ice that once crushed the mummy against the roof of the burial chamber had receded nine inches by the time the chamber was opened. Within a few decades, the ice lenses may be completely gone. “Right now we’re facing a rescue archaeology situation,” Parzinger says. “It’s hard to say how much longer these graves will be there.” Neanderthals don’t have the best reputation. In the public mind, the heavy-browed hominids are thought of as a stupid species that couldn’t compete with brighter Homo sapiens, as the also-rans that therefore went extinct. But a newly discovered trove of Neanderthal tools in Sussex, England may help rehabilitate their image. The tools, which date from the end of the Neanderthal era at around 30,000 B.C., show surprising sophistication, archaeologists say. “The tools we’ve found at the site are technologically advanced and potentially older than tools in Britain belonging to our own species,” said [University College London]’s Matthew Pope. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise “It’s exciting to think that there’s a real possibility these were left by some of the last Neanderthal hunting groups to occupy northern Europe,” he added. “The impression they give is of a population in complete command of both landscape and natural raw materials with a flourishing technology — not a people on the edge of extinction”. The research team announced that the collection of flint tools were found at a site called Beedings on a hilltop that may have had strategic value for the huntsmen, as it would have provided an excellent view of game herds on the surrounding plains. The tools might have been used to hunt the horses, woolly mammoths, and woolly rhinoceros that roamed the British isles at the time. The tools themselves are more than just crude blunt instruments, Pope says. “Unlike earlier, more typical Neanderthal tools these were made with long, straight blades - blades which were then turned into a variety of bone and hide processing implements, as well as lethal spear points” [said Pope]…. Towards the end of their time in Europe, between 30-40,000 years ago (probably including the time period of British sites such as Kent’s Cavern in Devon, and Beedings), the Neanderthals diversified their tool-making, showing that they were adapting in new ways, possibly in reaction to the presence of incoming modern human populations (the Cro-Magnons) in adjoining regions of continental Europe. The Beedings site has been known about for more than a century, but the artifacts found there weren’t always treated with the proper respect. Some 2,300 stone tools were first uncovered at the start of the 20th Century when the foundations were being dug for a huge new house to be built at Beedings. But for many years, the tools were considered to be fakes. All but a few hundred of them were thrown down a well and never seen again [BBC News]. The newly excavated tools lend the earlier batch credibility, as researchers can demonstrate that these tools are similar in composition and style to Neaderthal tools found in northern Europe that were made between 35,000 and 42,000 years ago. A clump of hair that lay frozen in the Greenland tundra for 4,000 years has yielded DNA from the earliest Arctic residents, and offers clues to their origins. Researchers have long wondered who those rugged settlers were, and where they came from. Were they part of a massive migration that swept through all of North America, or were they a separate tribe that eventually gave rise to Greenland’s present-day Eskimos? Until now, no ancient human remains had been found in that harsh climate to allow researchers to study the genetics of those “Paleo-Eskimos.” But the new discovery sheds some light on the people, and suggests that neither of the earlier theories is correct; in fact, they were a distinct tribe that journeyed all the way from Siberia to Greenland, but didn’t stick around to populate the frozen north. The trove of information came from an unassuming source. The ancient clump of hair looks like something you’d sweep off a barbershop floor. “It’s kind of brown, got a bit of dirt in it, a bit of twigs, but … it looks [in] remarkably good condition,” says biologist Thomas Gilbert of the University of Copenhagen. University of Copenhagen researchers had spent months in Greenland trying to find human remains, with no success. They then learned of this hair sample, which was discovered in the 1980s in Disko Bay, in western Greenland, and was being kept in a museum collection. Gilbert’s team was able to isolate the sample’s mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from mother to child and therefore offers a genetic marker of maternal lineage. When they compared the DNA from the hair to DNA from other populations, they realized that the Paleo-Eskimos were not genetically similar to Native Americans, but they did have much in common with residents of the westernmost Aleutian Islands and Siberia. According to the research team’s report in Science, subscription required, this suggests that the ancient Eskimos migrated from East Asia via the Bering Strait land bridge. But Greenland’s modern Eskimos aren’t genetically similar to those early residents either, indicating that they couldn’t last in that icy environment. Lead author Gilbert and colleagues suggest that past ancient Eskimo populations succumbed to periods of climate cooling. “Obviously it’s an extremely tough environment up there, and it may be that the environments got so harsh that the populations got smaller and smaller and collapsed,” he said. Futurologists envision a world a million years from now in which the entire solar system has been turned into computronium and nanobots transform our garbage into foie gras. But in my experience, the repeated sin of futurologists is that they often extrapolate from what is new rather than from what is old. Computers and nanotechnology, impressive though they are, are things of relatively recent origin. As such, they are unlikely to be around for very long. To find something that will pretty certainly endure into the distant future, we are obliged, paradoxically enough, to go back much farther into the past. And if we could cast a look back several million years, we would see, among other things, laughter and numbers. So we can be pretty confident that laughter and numbers will survive long after most of what we’re familiar with is gone. The insight that old things tend to last and new things tend to disappear flows from the Copernican principle. This principle says, in essence, “You’re not special.” Before Copernicus, we imagined that we occupied a very special place at the center of the universe. Now we know better: We are on an average planet in an average galaxy in an average cluster. But the Copernican principle applies to time as well as to space. If there is nothing special about our perspective, we are unlikely to be observing any given thing at the very beginning or the very end of its existence. And that rather obvious point can lead to some interesting predictions. Consider the longevity of the human race. If there is nothing special about the moment at which we observe our species, then it is 95 percent certain that we are seeing Homo sapiens in the middle 95 percent of its existence—not the first fortieth (21⁄2 percent) or the last fortieth (21⁄2 percent). Humans have already been around for about 200,000 years. That means we can, with 95 percent confidence, expect the species to endure for at least another 5,100 years (1/39 x 200,000) but for no more than 7.8 million years (39 x 200,000). It was Richard Gott III, an astrophysicist at Princeton University, who pioneered this sort of reasoning. In a paper published in Nature on May 27, 1993, “Implications of the Copernican Principle for Our Future Prospects,” Gott noted that the Copernican-based calculation gives H. sapiens an expected total longevity comparable to that of other hominid species (H. erectus lasted 1.6 million years) and of mammal species in general (whose average span is 2 million years). It also gives us a decent shot at being around a million years from now. What else might be around in the Year Million? Consider something of recent origin, like the Internet. The Internet has existed for about 25 years now (as I learned by going on the Internet and looking at Wikipedia). By Copernican reasoning, this means we can be 95 percent certain that it will continue to be around for another seven-plus months but that it will disappear within 975 years. So in the Year Million, there will almost certainly be nothing recognizable as the Internet. (This is, perhaps, not a terribly surprising conclusion.) Ditto for baseball. Ditto for what we call industrial technology, which, having come into existence a little more than two centuries ago, is likely to be superseded by something strange and new in the next 10,000 years. Laughter and numbers, on the other hand, are good bets to survive a million years because they are two of the oldest things that are part of our lives today. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blog.ca How do we know this? Because we share both laughter and a sense of number with other species, and therefore with common ancestors that existed millions of years ago. Take laughter. Chimpanzees laugh. Charles Darwin, in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, noted that “if a young chimpanzee be tickled—the armpits are particularly sensitive to tickling, as in the case of our children—a more decided chuckling or laughing sound is uttered; though the laughter is sometimes noiseless.” Actually, what primatologists call chimp laughter is more like a breathy pant. It is evoked not only by tickling but also by rough-and-tumble play, games of chasing, and mock attacks—just as with children prior to the emergence of verbal joking at age 5 or 6. The human and chimpanzee lineages split off from each other between 5 million and 7 million years ago. On the reasonable assumption that chimp and human laughter are homologous rather than independently evolved traits, laughter must be at least 5 million to 7 million years old. (It is probably much older; orangutans also laugh, and their lineage diverged from ours about 14 million years ago.) So, by the Copernican principle, laughter is quite likely to be around in the Year Million. Now take numbers. Chimps can do elementary arithmetic, and they have even been trained to use symbols like numerals to reason about quantity. But the sense of number is not confined to primates. Animals as diverse as salamanders, pigeons, raccoons, dolphins, and parrots have the ability to perceive and represent numbers. A few years ago, researchers at MIT discovered that macaque monkeys had specialized “number neurons” in the brain region that corresponds to the human number module. Evidently the number sense has an even longer evolutionary history than laughter. So again, by the Copernican principle, we can be quite certain that numbers will be around in the Year Million. But what will our descendants’ mathematics look like? And what will make them laugh? The first question might seem the easier to answer. Mathematics, after all, is supposed to be the most universal aspect of human civilization, the part we assume would extend even to intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos. In Carl Sagan’s science fiction novel Contact, aliens in the vicinity of the star Vega beam a series of prime numbers toward Earth. The book’s heroine, who works for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), realizes with a frisson that the prime-number pulses her radio telescope is picking up must be generated by some form of intelligent life. But if the aliens beamed their jokes at us instead, we probably wouldn’t be able to distinguish them from the background noise. Indeed, sometimes we can barely distinguish the jokes in a Shakespeare play from the background noise. Just as nothing is more timeless than number, nothing is more parochial and ephemeral than humor, the core of laughter—or so we imagine. We are confident that a civilization a million years more advanced than our own would find our concept of number intelligible (and we, theirs), but our jokes would have them scratching their heads in puzzlement. +++ That is how we see matters at the moment. In the Year Million, though, I think the perspective will be precisely the reverse. Humor will be esteemed as the most universal aspect of culture. And number will have lost its transcendental reputation and be looked upon as a local artifact, like a computer operating system or an accounting scheme. If I am right, then SETI scientists should not be listening for primes but for something quite different. Prime numbers—the numbers that can’t be split up into smaller factors and are thus the atoms of arithmetic—have an almost holy status today. What makes them seem transhuman to us now is their sheer orneriness. There are infinitely many of them, and they seem to crop up almost at random among the rest of the numbers. “There is no apparent reason why one number is prime and another not,” the mathematician Don Zagier declared in his inaugural lecture at Bonn University in 1975. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com “To the contrary, upon looking at these numbers, one has the feeling of being in the presence of one of the inexplicable secrets of creation.” But the prime numbers are not really as transcendental as all that. They do obey a law. We just don’t grasp the law—yet. In 1859 the German mathematician Bernhard Riemann put forward what is now almost universally regarded as the greatest unsolved problem in mathematics: the Riemann hypothesis. This hypothesis holds the key to the primes’ true pattern, and once its truth or falsity is resolved, prime numbers will be rendered transparent to our understanding. How long must we wait? Mathematicians great and not so great have been trying to crack this nut ever since Riemann put it out there. “It will be another million years at least,” the late number theorist Paul Erdös pronounced, “before we understand the primes.” The Copernican principle yields a rather different estimate. The Riemann conjecture has been open since it was first posed 149 years ago. That means we can be 95 percent certain that it will survive as an open problem for at least another four years or so (1/39 x 149) but that it will be dispatched within the next six millennia ?(39 x 149), well short of the Year Million. When it is solved, the prime numbers will finally be stripped of their cosmic otherness. We will realize that, like the rest of mathematics, they are man-made, a terrestrial artifact. They will seem about as trivial as a game of tic-tac-toe. And how about laughter? Perhaps the best way to gauge future humor is to look at other primates: What do chimps find funny? The Central Washington University researcher Roger Fouts reported that Washoe, a chimpanzee who was taught sign language, once urinated on him while riding on his shoulders. The chimp snorted and made the sign for “funny.” Washoe was also observed playfully wielding a toothbrush as if it were a hairbrush. Moja, another of Fouts’s signing chimps, called a purse a “shoe” and wore it on her foot. A signing gorilla trained by another researcher appeared to derive amusement from offering rocks to people as “food.” Such supposed instances of simian humor (similar to the jokes of preschool children) involve the deliberate misnaming or misuse of things. They thus fit nicely under one of the three classic theories of humor, the incongruity theory, which holds that mirth results when two things normally kept in separate compartments of the mind are abruptly and surprisingly yanked together. But why should the perception of incongruity cause a spasm of noisy chest-heaving? Laughter has long been viewed as a so-called luxury reflex, one that serves no obvious evolutionary purpose. In recent years, though, practitioners of the art of evolutionary psychology have been more imaginative in coming up with Darwinian rationales. One of the more seductive comes from the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran of the University of California at San Diego, who has advanced what might be called the false-alarm theory of laughter. A seemingly threatening situation presents itself; you go into fight-or-flight mode; the threat proves spurious; you alert your (genetically close-knit) social group to the absence of actual danger by emitting a stereotyped vocalization —one that is amplified as it passes contagiously from member to member. Once the mechanism of laughter was set in place by evolution, the theory goes, it could be hijacked for other purposes: the expression of contempt for out-groups (as the superiority theory of humor claims) or the ventilation of forbidden sexual impulses (the relief theory of humor). But at the core of the original false-alarm mechanism of laughter is incongruity: the incongruity of a grave threat revealing itself to be trivial—–or, as the philosopher Immanuel Kant (an advocate of the incongruity theory) put it, “the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.” Incongruity is arguably the primeval kernel of laughter. And therefore, by the Copernican principle, it is likely to be the kernel of laughter in the Year Million. That is why I think humor and mathematics will ultimately switch places, so to speak. The transcendence that numbers seem to possess arises from mere kinks in our local understanding, kinks that will eventually get straightened out. But the essence of humor is the dialectic between something and nothing, the most universal categories of all. And what will jokes look like in the Year Million? We will laugh when incongruity is resolved in a clever way, when a strange-seeming something is exposed as a trivial nothing—when a proof of the Riemann hypothesis dissolves the Platonic otherness of the primes into obvious tautology, and what is today regarded as the hardest problem ever conceived by the human mind becomes a somewhat broad joke, fit for schoolchildren. We might laugh even harder at the thought that the end of the universe—its disappearance in a Big Crunch or expansion into dilute nothingness—itself has the logical form of a joke. http://louis1j1sheehan.us Stack was born in Los Angeles, California but spent his early childhood growing up in Europe. He became fluent in French and Italian at an early age, but he did not learn English until returning to Los Angeles. Raised by his mother, Mary Elizabeth (née Wood), Stack's parents divorced when Stack was one and his father, James Langford Stack, a wealthy advertising agency owner, died when Stack was nine. Stack always spoke of his mother with the greatest respect and love. When he wrote his autobiography Straight Shooting, he included a picture of him and his mother. He captioned it "Me and my best girl." Stack's grandfather was an opera singer from Illinois named Charles Wood, who went by the name Modini. By the time he reached 20 Stack achieved minor fame as a sportsman. Robert Stack was an avid polo player. He and his brother won the International Outboard Motor Championships in Venice, and at the age of 16 he became a member of the All American Skeet Team. He set two world records in skeet shooting and became National Champion. In 1971 he was inducted into the National Skeet Shooting Hall of Fame. [edit] Career Stack took drama courses at the University of Southern California. His deep voice and good looks attracted producers in Hollywood. When Stack visited the set of Universal Studios at age 20, producer Joe Pasternak offered him an opportunity to enter the business. Recalled Stack, "He said 'How'd you like to be in pictures? We'll make a test with Helen Parrish, a little love scene.' Helen Parrish was a beautiful girl. 'Gee, that sounds keen,' I told him. I got the part." Stack's first film, which teamed him with Deanna Durbin, was First Love in 1939. He was the first actor to give Durbin an on-screen kiss. As hard as it is to believe today, this film was considered controversial at the time. Stack won acclaim for his next role, 1940's The Mortal Storm. He played a young man who joins the Nazi party. This film was one of the first to speak out against Hitler. As a youth, Stack admitted that he had a crush on Carole Lombard and in 1942 he appeared with her in To Be or Not To Be. He admitted he was terrified going into this role. He credits Lombard with giving him many tips on acting and with being his mentor. Lombard was killed in a plane crash shortly before the film was released. During World War II, Stack served as gunnery instructor in the United States Navy. He continued his movie career and appeared in such films as Fighter Squadron (1948), A Date with Judy (1948) and Bwana Devil (1952). In 1954, Stack was given his most important movie role. He appeared opposite John Wayne in The High and the Mighty. Stack played the pilot of an airliner who comes apart under stress after the airliner encounters engine trouble. In 1957, Stack was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Written on the Wind. He starred in more than 40 films. Known for his steadfast, humorless demeanor, he made fun of his own persona in comedies such as 1941 (1979), Airplane! (1980), Caddyshack II (1988), and BASEketball (1998). He also provided the voice for the character Ultra Magnus in Transformers: The Movie (1986). Stack depicted the crimefighting Eliot Ness in the television drama The Untouchables from 1959 to 1963. The show portrayed the ongoing battle between gangsters and federal agents in a Prohibition-era Chicago. The show brought Stack a best actor Emmy Award in 1960. The Untouchables was a "realistic" cop show, in the tradition of Dragnet. Stack also starred in three other series, rotating the lead with Tony Franciosa and Gene Barry in the lavish The Name of the Game (1968-1971), Most Wanted, (1976) and Strike Force (1981). http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com Interestingly, in The Name of the Game, he played a former federal agent turned true-crime journalist, evoking memories of his role as Ness. In both Most Wanted and Strike Force he played a tough, incorruptible police captain commanding an elite squad of special investigators, also evoking the Ness role. Eventually, he would reprise the role in a 1992 TV movie, The Return of Eliot Ness. He began hosting Unsolved Mysteries in 1988, where his serious, ominous voice and stoic facial expressions lent an authentic gravitas to the program's dark subject matter. Reportedly, he had an enormous interest in the unexplained—psychic phenomena, ghosts and the like—because he himself had had an unusual experience of this nature. However, he also said that he valued the storytellers above the stories themselves and did not necessarily believe every case of this nature that he presented. He thought very highly of the interactive nature of the show, saying that it created a "symbiotic" relationship between viewer and program, and that the hotline was a great crime-solving tool. Unsolved Mysteries aired from 1988 to 2002, first on NBC from 1987 as specials (Stack did not host all the specials), then as a series from 1988-97, then on CBS (1997-99) and finally on Lifetime in 2001-02. Stack served as the show's host during its entire series run. Stack had undergone radiation therapy for prostate cancer in October 2002. He died of heart failure at his home in Los Angeles On May 14, 2003. Actress Rosemarie Bowe was married to Stack from 1956 until his death in 2003. Stack was the great-uncle of actor Taran Killam. He is interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, California. Rosemarie Bowe was crowned Miss Tomica and Miss Montana in 1950. In May 1951 Bowe competed in a contest to choose the queen of the sixth annual Home Show and Building Exposition. Along with Mary Ellen Nichols, she was a runner-up to the contest winner, Linda Peterson. When she arrived in California, Bowe secured work as a model. Her measurements were 36-25-36. She is 5'5" tall and has blue-green eyes. Her modeling agency was contacted by a high fashion photographer, Christa, who suggested she pose for national and fashion magazine portraits. Modeling for magazines such as Eye, Tempo, and Blightly, she eventually made the transition from model to actress in television. Her magazine credits include a Life Magazine cover. Bowe's look was at times likened to both Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly. She always modeled high fashion rather than lingerie or bathing suits. She was never asked by photographers to pose for cheesecake pictures as was many a pin-up girl. She once said, "Of all the auditions and interviews I have had with casting men, directors and producers, not one ever made a pass at me. I guess they were afraid of me." http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com She resided in Hollywood starting in 1950. Initially she was signed by film agent Charles Feldman. When his production plans stalled, she obtained a contract with Columbia Pictures. She was trained in dramatic acting by Benno Schneider. Her early experience as an entertainer included performing as a singer and dancer in amateur musicals. As a screen debutante Bowe appeared in Lovely To Look At (1952) with Kathryn Grayson and Red Skelton. The 16 beauties showcased include Jane Lynn, Alma Carroll, Shirley Kimball, Betty Sully, and Honey King. Bowe's part is uncredited, as is her depiction of a swimmer in Million Dollar Mermaid (1952). In 1954 she was in the casts of The Golden Mistress and The Adventures of Hajji Baba. The former was Bowe's first movie after requesting her release from Columbia. As "Ann Dexter" she was featured opposite John Agar in an R.K. Productions release, set in Haiti. During filming she almost drowned, was stung by a sea urchin with three hundred needles, and sustained bumps, bruises, and insect bites. Bowe was under option to 20th Century Fox when she filmed The Peacemaker (1956). Based on a novel, the western also featured James Mitchell. It was released by Hal R. Makelim Productions. Announced in April 1954, the Makelim plan for producing pictures "guaranteed a flow of film products through a fixed fee system." In 1956 she married Robert Stack. The couple became the parents of a daughter, Elizabeth Langford Stack, on January 20, 1957. They shared mutual passions for the outdoors, especially sailing and riding. Stack enjoyed skeet shooting as his favorite pastime. Rosemarie temporarily gave up her career when her children were young. In 1970 Bowe had an automobile accident in Sacramento, California in which she sustained serious internal injuries. She crashed into a concrete culvert because of a mechanical failure in the rented car she was driving. At the time Stack was filming The Name of the Game (TV series). http://sheehan.myblogsite.com He chartered a flight to come and be with her. Rosemarie Bowe is retired from show business. Her son, Charles Robert Stack, is also retired. </p> 4436887 2008-07-12 01:02:28 2008-07-12 01:02:28 open open methane-4436887 publish 0 0 post 0 20646957 wordpress skin http://wordpress.com/ 127.0.0.1 2015-04-03 05:59:37 2015-04-03 05:59:37 Excellent website I like the structure and quickly responsive technology utilized in the template your internet site uses. Great work thanks. 1 0 0 experience http://Louis9J9Sheehan9esquire.blog.ca/2008/07/12/experience-4436865/ Sat, 12 Jul 2008 00:43:59 +0200 Beforethebigbang <p>Whenever a writer is interviewed or subjected to a Q&A session after a reading, one of the questions that always comes up has to do with influence. If only we knew who made the author jealous enough to move him to emulation, a secret would be revealed and the mysteries of the creative process would be clarified. Such a curiosity is akin to wanting to trace the lineage of a foundling abandoned one snowy night on the steps of a convent. Locate the parents and discover the nature of the child. The question of literary influence itself is a tricky one. For one thing, it offers the author the opportunity to duck it by substituting for his actual influences certain names the dropping of which is designed to impress. Thus, an author may actually choose his parents by devising a more respectable list of forebears than the stuff that really formed his imagination or made him reach for a pen. A poet, for instance, might stroke his chin thoughtfully, look up at the ceiling, as if his influences resided there like putti, and say "Well, Yeats, of course. And Eliot. We mustn't leave out Eliot." Another tendency that limits and skews the discussion is that writers almost invariably stay within their own genre when pressed to identify influential predecessors. Poets name poets. Novelists nod to other novelists. But the truth is that influence enters us from all sides. It is the chlorine in the flood of experience that spills continuously into the conscious mind. A short-story writer may have been influenced by 18th-century Dutch painting as much as anything else -- or by his mother's cooking. A painter may have been marked by her love of album covers or the childhood love of her cousin. And with that said, I am free to confess that my own poetry would have not developed in the direction it did, for better or worse, were it not for the spell that was cast over me as a boy by Warner Bros. cartoons. The very first time I heard the pulse-quickening blast of the zany theme music by Carl Stalling -- enough to bring any American boy to attention -- and saw the colorful bull's-eye emblazoned on the big screen, I was hooked. I think what these animations offered me besides some very speedy, colorful entertainment was an alternative to the static reality around me that dutifully followed the laws of the physical world. The brothers Warner presented a flexible, malleable world that defied Newton, a world of such plasticity that anything imaginable was possible. Bugs Bunny could suddenly pull a lawn mower, or anything else that might come in handy, out of his pants pocket, and he wasn't even wearing pants. Flattened by a 500-pound anvil, Wile E. Coyote could snap back into shape in a heartbeat. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com A box containing a pair of Acme rocket-powered roller skates would arrive in the desert with no sign of a delivery service (though you suspected it would be called Ace Delivery). Plus, characters could jump dimensions, leaping around in time and space, their sudden exits marked by a rifle-shot sound effect. Anticipating the tricks of metafiction, these creatures could hop right out of the world of the cartoon and into our world, often Hollywood itself to consort with caricatures of Eddie Cantor and Marilyn Monroe. Or Bugs would do the impossible by jumping out of the frame and landing on the drawing board of the cartoonist who was at work creating him. This freedom to transcend the laws of basic physics, to hop around in time and space, and to skip from one dimension to another has long been a crucial aspect of imaginative poetry. Robert Bly developed a poetics based on the notion of psychic "leaping," where the genius of a poem is measured by its ability to leap without warning from the conscious to the unconscious and back again. Bly's short poem "After Long Busyness" provides an example of leaping by association and captures the skittish motions of thought: I start out for a walk at last after weeks at the desk. Moon gone, plowing underfoot, no stars; not a trace of light! Suppose a horse were galloping toward me in this open field? Every day I did not spend in solitude was wasted. As an early devotee of Looney Tunes cartoons, I was fascinated by the strange freedoms of these characters, especially their ability to shape-shift -- like Ovid on speed. Clearly, Bugs Bunny knows as much about leaping, not to mention whirling, zooming and, of course, hopping, as any of the great Spanish poets whom Bly credits with the knack of slipping through walls from one room of the psyche into another. Bugs can be in two places at once, which he is whenever Elmer Fudd points his shotgun down one of the two holes of the rabbit's underground residence. And just as Pirandello and other modern dramatists sought to break down the actor/audience barrier, so Looney Tunes allowed an animated character to talk directly to the movie house audience or to criticize the very hand of its animators, thereby betraying the text itself. In one cartoon which mixes animation with a live action sequence, Porky Pig barges into producer Leon Schlesinger's office demanding to be let out of his contract. Another cartoon opens quietly with the figure of Elmer Fudd in full hunting regalia tip-toeing left to right through the woods. Then, as if noticing a noisy late-comer to the theater or the sound of a shaken box of candy, Fudd stops, turns to face the audience, puts one of his four fingers to his lips and says in a seething whisper: "Shhhh! It's wabbit season." Ah, Elmer, you unlikely modernist! What were your creators reading? Was animator Chuck Jones curling up at night with a volume of French surrealist poetry? When watching cartoons isn't enough, there are plenty of books on the subject, from historical surveys to scholarly treatments. • Chuck Jones, the animator behind Looney Tunes, gives behind-thescenes stories in his 1989 memoir, "Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist." For a broader perspective, "Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons," written by film critic Leonard Maltin, surveys the field from its silent-film beginnings through the 1980s. • Studios put a lot of effort into their early cartoon scores, which incorporated classical music, popular songs, jazz and opera. In the 2005 "Tunes for 'Toons: Music and the Hollywood Cartoon," Daniel Goldmark looks at songs written for animated films from the 1930s to the 1950s. Included is a detailed analysis of the famous Looney Tunes parody of Wagner, "What's Opera, Doc?" • Animated films have inspired a number of academic readings, with scholars recently looking at portrayals of race and gender. Published in February, "The Idea of Nature in Disney Animation" argues that Disney films have helped shape perceptions of the environment. The animals in movies like "Bambi" have especially helped build empathy with the natural world, argues David Whitley, a lecturer at Cambridge University in the U.K. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com • "The Simpsons" has been a popular cultural studies topic lately. "The Gospel According to the Simpsons," updated in 2007, examines how the TV show depicts faith in America. Author Mark Pinsky provides lots of quotes, including one from Homer who is accidentally hit in the face with an ice cream cone while he's on a hunger strike. "Nice try, God," he says, "but Homer Simpson doesn't give in to temptation that easily." Strange as it may seem, these cartoons also provided me with an education about things that were not part of the curriculum of a Catholic grammar school of the 1950s. The nuns at St. Joan of Arc in Queens were adroit at teaching me spelling, geography, and lots of catechism, but Looney Tunes cartoons (despite their frivolous name) introduced me to much that lay beyond the precincts of a fairly sheltered childhood. They gave me my first taste of worldliness itself. As unsophisticated as any nine year old, I had never been to an opera when I saw Chuck Jones's Wagnerian parody in which Bugs sings Brünnhilde's role in a blonde wig stuffed under a helmet with horns. The first symphony orchestra I ever saw was a cartoon one with a fat man playing a tiny flute and a studious-looking dog with triangle duties -- plus, a conductor wielding a "baton" and wearing "tails." There I saw my first bassoon. Before I had ever been to a French restaurant, there on the movie screen was a canine waiter twirling his mustache and pouring wine for a poodle and his date at "Café de Paris." I was innocent of undertakers until I saw a large dog in a black suit measuring Daffy Duck for a coffin. I didn't know what "running away from home" meant until I saw Porky Pig walking toward the vanishing point with a stick over his shoulder, a polka dot kerchief tied to it containing the sum of his material possessions. I'm not sure I knew what Champagne was until I saw Pepé Le Pew popping a bottle while dressed in smoking jacket (huh?) and fancy slippers. A bullfight, badminton, a punch-clock, a barbershop complete with hot-towel cooker and razor strop -- all of these pieces of the adult world were delivered to me in Technicolor episodes six minutes long. This was the length that was set as a minimum for a "short" by movie theatre exhibitors and as a maximum by a frugal Leon Schlesinger. In the labor-intensive days before digital, one second of film involved 12 to 24 drawings. A good animator could produce just 15 seconds per week. In the end, it was the perfect-size package to deliver all this wacky news. The Mount Rushmore of Warner Bros. cartoons would be composed of the not-so-solemn faces of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and the token human, Elmer Fudd. As a young viewer, I had no doubts about the superiority of this gang to the characters of Disney. Disney cartoons were tame, conventional, Apollonian. Warner Bros.' were manic, unnerving, iconoclastic, spastic, Dionysian. The most telling difference was that the Disney characters had romantic partners, spouses, even families of a kind. There was something treacly about the scenes where Mickey and Minnie's smooches were accompanied by all those little red hearts floating in the air. Donald had his Daisy and somehow three nephews even though their parent, the duck's brother or sister, was never mentioned. The Disney characters were socialized, domesticated, bourgeois. Warner Bros. characters, with the exception of hen-pecked Porky and his Petunia, were mavericks -- unregenerate, anti-social. There is no Mrs. Fudd. And a Mrs. Daffy Duck? Inconceivable. Sex in the Warner toons was more likely to be transgressive and connected to deception, especially cross-dressing. Bugs is quick to put on a frock and kiss Elmer on the mouth but only for the purpose of fooling his perennial victim. Disney-romance led to marriage. Warner Brothers-romance was linked to guile and aimed at redress. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com The late 1920s to the mid-1950s were an innovative time for animation. Film studios introduced many iconic characters, and "pretty much every principle that animators use today was discovered," says animation historian Charles Solomon. Here are some highlights. My taste for these cartoons would grow into adulthood obsession, which I shared with a few friends. One fellow addict was Todd McEwen, whose novel "Arithmetic" ends with a tour-de-force paean to these cartoons, his language keeping pace with the pictorial speed of animation. My pal Michael Shannon was not only a fan but a brilliant re-enactor of many famous Looney Tunes scenes. He and I would habitually visit the Museum of Cartoon Art, then housed in a castle-like building in Rye, N.Y., where we would ignore Popeye, Pogo, Archie, and other distractions to sit in an otherwise empty screening room and order from a menu of Warner Bros. classics. I remember several debates we had on the directorial merits of Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng, always arriving at the same conclusion: Freleng's work was energetic and zany, but Chuck Jones was blessed or cursed with a touch of divine madness. Mr. Jones's illustrated autobiography, "Chuck Amuck," is peopled by a group of illustrators and idea-men like Tex Avery, Robert McKimson and Mike "Road Runner" Maltese, plus musical director Carl Stalling, sound-effects genius Treg Brown, and, of course, Mel Blanc who did nearly all the voices. Strange to think of these grown men, usually photographed in dark suits and ties, gathering in their own shack on the Warner Bros. lot to devise new ways for a rabbit to hoodwink a duck. But under the zaniness, Mr. Jones saw only human behavior. As he puts it: "Bugs Bunny is simply...trying to remain alive in a world of predators; Elmer Fudd considers himself a simple sportsman -- he hunts only for the "thwill" of it...Wile E. Coyote and Sylvester are simply trying to get something to eat." And what could be more human than the allegorical battle of cat and canary? Incidentally, one gem found in his book is that the actual camera crane used in the animation studios (up to 6,000 drawings had to be photographed per cartoon) was indeed an Acme product. And speaking of the good people who supplied the hungry coyote -- dinner napkin hopefully tied around his neck -- with his anvils, TNT plungers, and helicopter-in-a-backpack, one sign of the unflagging interest in Looney Tunes is the recent publication of "The Acme Catalog." Now anyone can purchase a Rocket Sled, a Y-Shaped Branch, or -- my favorite -- Instant Tunnel Paint. In his introduction, the Vice-President of Customer Service claims that the business "is guided by a simple two-word philosophy: caveat emptor -- 'the customer is always right,' or something." And that is evidence enough to reassure me that the Looney Tunes flag still flies high -- the unmistakable bull's-eye and Porky Pig letting us know that that is, indeed, all, folks. Wilber Hardee, a farm boy turned grill cook who went on to open the first Hardee’s hamburger stand in 1960, starting a chain that now has nearly 2,000 restaurants in the United States and overseas, died Friday at his home in Greenville, N.C. He was 89. The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Ann Hardee Riggs said. It was on an empty lot in Greenville, near East Carolina College (now a university), that Mr. Hardee opened that first hamburger stand on Sept. 3, 1960. There was no dining room, no drive-up window. Charcoal-broiled hamburgers and milkshakes sold for 15 cents apiece. There are now 1,926 Hardee’s restaurants, mostly in the Southeast and the Midwest, most of them franchises of CKE Restaurants, which bought the Hardee’s chain in 1997. Last year, the Hardee’s division, which specializes in Thickburgers weighing from one-third to two-thirds of a pound and costing up to $4.49, had revenue of $1.8 billion. Although he would hold an interest in more than 80 other restaurants during his career, Mr. Hardee did not make much of a profit as founder of the chain that bears his name. He sold his share in what was then a five-franchise operation in 1963, for $37,000. “Back in the ’60s, it was pretty good money,” Ann Hardee Riggs said, “but not that much.” Born in Martin County, N.C., on Aug. 15, 1918, Mr. Hardee was one of five children of Henry and Mary Hardee. Not interested in the family corn and tobacco farm, the young Mr. Hardee got a job as a grill cook at a local eatery. In World War II, he was a Navy cook in the Pacific. While home on furlough in 1945, he married Kathryn Roebuck. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com Mr. Hardee’s first wife died in 1980. In 1986, he married Helen Galloway. In addition to his daughter Ann, Mr. Hardee is survived by his second wife; two daughters from his first marriage, Mary Baker and Becky Eissens; a stepdaughter, Patricia Phelps; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren. After World War II, Mr. Hardee returned to Greenville and opened a restaurant; he and his wife lived in the back. By 1960, when he opened his first hamburger stand, Mr. Hardee already owned 15 restaurants. He took on two partners, Jim Gardner and Leonard Rawls, in 1961. They opened a second Hardee’s, in Rocky Mount, N.C. But difficulties with his partners soon led him to sell his share. Mr. Hardee later started another hamburger chain, called Little Mint, which eventually had about 25 franchised locations in North and South Carolina. The Hardee’s chain grew by leaps and bounds in the 1970s, helped in part by its jingle: “Hurry on down to Hardee’s, where the burgers are charco-broiled.” Ann Hardee Riggs said her father had never failed to get a kick out of seeing the red and white sign of the Hardee’s chain. “Anywhere he would go, he was proud to see his name up there,” she said. Regulators are cracking down on companies that sell genetic tests directly to consumers, threatening to crimp the growth of one of the hottest sectors of the biotechnology industry. The California Department of Public Health sent “cease and desist” letters to 13 genetic testing companies two weeks ago, telling them they could not solicit business from state residents. The companies include the early leaders in the field — 23andMe, Navigenics and deCode Genetics — which are trying to carve out a new business of offering personal genetic information for use in health and lifestyle planning. The California action follows efforts by New York State, which has sent letters to 31 genetic testing companies since November, saying they need licenses to solicit DNA specimens from the state’s residents. Pressure is also mounting for the federal government to take more action. A report in April by a federal advisory committee said there were significant gaps in the oversight of genetic tests that could lead to patient harm. The Department of Health and Human Services will hold a two-day public meeting July 7 and 8 to discuss regulation of personal genetic information services. The Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, has started investigations into possibly deceptive advertising or marketing of genetic tests, according to an agency official who spoke at a June 12 meeting convened by Senator Gordon Smith. The senator, an Oregon Republican, has been prodding federal agencies to take a stronger stance in overseeing genetic tests sold to consumers. Yet the move to regulate the tests is raising many issues. What are the standards for proving a genetic test is valid? Must a doctor always be involved in ordering such tests to protect patients, or is that an attempt by doctors to protect their turf? Some of the companies say people have a right to know the information in their genes and to guide their own health care. “We think your genetic information is a fundamental part of you,” said Anne Wojcicki, a co-founder of 23andMe. The company, based in Mountain View, Calif., has attracted attention not only because of its $1,000 genome testing service but because it is partly financed by Google and because Ms. Wojcicki is married to the Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Navigenics and 23andMe say they are not offering medical testing, but rather personal genetic information services. Using a saliva sample, they scan a person’s genome at multiple points looking for variations that might indicate a person is at a higher than normal risk for certain diseases. “This doesn’t say you have a disease,” said Mari Baker, the chief executive of Navigenics, which is based in Redwood Shores, Calif., and whose service costs $2,500. “It says you carry a genetic predisposition for the disease and should talk with a health care professional.” But not everyone agrees with that rationale. “We think if you’re telling people you have increased risk of adverse health effects, that’s medical advice,” said Ann Willey, director of the office of laboratory policy and planning at the New York State Department of Health. Genetic tests that are developed by clinical laboratories generally do not require approval by the Food and Drug Administration before they can be marketed. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com The laboratories themselves are regulated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Such regulation is meant to ensure that laboratories are proficient and that the tests are “analytically valid.” That means that if a test purports to detect a particular genetic variation, it does so reliably. But critics say such regulation does not assure that tests are “clinically valid” — that having a particular genetic variation actually means a person has a disease or is at risk for one. Critics also say many tests now being sold to consumers are not backed by adequate scientific studies. The California letters, sent on June 9 and 10, said the companies needed to have state licenses as clinical laboratories. In addition, they said, genetic tests could be ordered only by a doctor, not by consumers. “We started this week by no longer tolerating direct-to-consumer genetic testing in California,” Karen L. Nickel, chief of laboratory field services for the state health department, said during a June 13 meeting of a state advisory committee on clinical laboratories. Lea Brooks, a spokeswoman for the health department, said the letters were sent in response to consumer complaints about the cost and accuracy of the tests. Most of the attention so far has focused on Navigenics and 23andMe because of their high profiles and the fact that they acknowledged getting the state’s letters. The identities of most of the other recipients were unknown until Tuesday, when the state health department posted all 13 letters on its Web site. The other recipients include Knome, which is offering to do a complete sequence of a person’s genome for $350,000. Also on the list were a few companies that give diet advice based on a person’s genes (and in some cases also sell dietary supplements). There were also some companies that offer genetic tests for single conditions, like the risk of baldness or Alzheimer’s disease. The companies had until this Monday or Tuesday to respond to the agency, which will now review the responses. At least one company that received a letter, Sciona, has stopped offering its gene testing and related diet advice to residents of California and New York. DeCode’s Web site indicates that certain calculations of disease risk will not be available to residents of New York, California and several other states. But Navigenics and 23andMe say they believe they comply with the regulations and are continuing to accept samples from Californians. Navigenics has stopped accepting orders from New York while its laboratory seeks a state license. But 23andMe said it continues to accept orders from New York. Both companies say they do not need a license from California because the genome scans are actually performed by outside laboratories that do have state licenses. Navigenics said its tests are ordered by a physician because a doctor on contract to the company reviews customer orders before the specimens are passed to the testing laboratory. But Kathy Hudson, director of the Genetics and Public Policy Center at Johns Hopkins University, said that “some doc on the payroll at Genes R Us” is not the same as a personal physician. Dr. Hudson said it was “not surprising that the states are stepping in, in an effort to protect consumers, because there has been a total absence of federal leadership.” She said that if the federal government assured tests were valid, “paternalistic” state laws could be relaxed “to account for smart, savvy consumers” intent on playing a greater role in their own health care. Lara Logan, the CBS News chief foreign correspondent who deplored the lack of media coverage of Iraq and Afghanistan last week, will no longer be based overseas, the network said on Wednesday. Ms. Logan, who has covered both wars extensively for CBS, will be based in Washington, with a new title: chief foreign affairs correspondent. The position will probably give Ms. Logan, considered a rising star within CBS News, with more airtime on the “CBS Evening News” and “60 Minutes.” “She will still travel all over the world, but she will based in Washington instead of London,” said Sean McManus, the president of CBS News. “She will still periodically cover the war in Iraq, and she will still cover international stories.” http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com Ms. Logan’s guest appearance on Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” on June 17 caught some viewers — and also some CBS staffers — off guard. Speaking to the host, Jon Stewart, she used colorful language to complain about how little airtime the broadcast networks devote to war reporting. CBS News recently stopped assigning a full-time correspondent to Iraq, becoming the first American network to do so. Ms. Logan hyperbolically described how she demands to put her war stories onto television and said she would “blow her brains out” if she watched American news coverage. As heretical as her remarks may have come across, her appearance on the show had been booked by CBS News, and executives said Ms. Logan had not been reprimanded for her comments. Her new assignment has been planned for weeks, they said. Ms. Logan will cover foreign affairs, international security issues and United States policy, somewhat filling the role of State Department correspondent, which has been vacant for years. On Wednesday Mr. McManus was hesitant to label the move a promotion, instead calling it “an expansion of her role and an opportunity to get her on our CBS broadcasts more often.” Ms. Logan signed a multiyear renewal of her CBS contract last winter. In an interview last week she said CBS News officials have supported her international reporting. “They wish me well, they give me whatever I need, and I’m gone,” she said. Like any foreign correspondent, she said she would like more coverage of the world on television newscasts. “I would like there to be more coverage of the wars,” she said. “I’d like there to be more money to have a bureau in Afghanistan as well as in Iraq. I’d like to see Zimbabwe on the air. That’s part of what my job is, to fight for those things.” In extensive study of bird genetics has revealed so many surprises about avian evolution that researchers say textbooks and field guides will have to be rewritten. After comparing the genetic codes of 169 species researchers realized that many assumptions about bird evolution are wrong; for example, they found that falcons are not closely related to hawks and eagles, and that flamingos didn’t evolve from other waterbirds. “With this study, we learned two major things,” said Sushma Reddy, lead author and a fellow at The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois. “First, appearances can be deceiving. Birds that look or act similar are not necessarily related. Second, much of bird classification and conventional wisdom on the evolutionary relationships of birds is wrong” . Scientists believe birds, which first appeared roughly 150 million years ago, evolved from small feathered carnivorous dinosaurs. “Modern birds as we know them evolved really rapidly, probably within a few million years, into all of the forms we see. That happened 65 to 100 million years ago,” Reddy said in a telephone interview. Reddy said these quick changes have made bird evolution hard to pin down. The study, which appears in the journal Science [subscription required], divides birds into three major groups: land birds, like the sparrow; water birds, like the diving penguin; and shore birds, like the seagull. But in a surprising result, the genetic analysis revealed that shorebirds evolved later, which refutes the widely held view that shorebirds gave rise to all modern birds [Telegraph]. The study also suggests that distinctive lifestyles, like hunting from the air in the case of falcons and eagles, evolved several times during avian history. In another example, researchers say that flamingos didn’t evolve from other wading birds, but instead from a land-based bird that adapted to coastal living. The bird project was part of a larger, federally funded effort called Assembling the Tree of Life, which aims to trace the evolutionary origins of all living things, from marine bacteria to domesticated corn and Australian snakes. 1 This list is about black gold. Texas tea. Petroleum, or crude oil. Which is in no way related to the oils we eat or excrete. 2 If you are a creationist, crude oil was formed by thousands of years of heat and pressure applied to the carcasses of plants and animals that died in the Great Flood. If you’re not, you think oil comes from dinosaurs, right? 3 Wrong. Almost all oil comes from pressure-cooking dead zooplankton and algae—pond scum, in other words—which are among the oldest and most abundant life forms on earth. http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire2.blogspot.com 4 Don’t blame the Hummers. That pond scum ultimately produced trillions upon trillions of gallons of oil. But most of it bubbled up to the surface long ago and was consumed by greedy bacteria. 5 Oil companies seek the small fraction that remains, spending more than $150 billion a year hunting for new reserves. 6 Fashion march of the penguins: Thousands of tiny, colorful sweaters have been knit for these flightless birds, to keep them from preening themselves if they are doused in oil from a spill. 7 When you buy gasoline, you might want to make your purchase at night—it will be cheaper. Gasoline becomes more dense in cooler temperatures, and gas pumps measure gas by volume. 8 A tip for trippers: Keep your windows closed at high speeds—drag from open windows can reduce a car’s fuel efficiency by 10 percent. 9 Neatness counts too: Cleaning 100 pounds of junk from your car will get you up to 2 percent more miles per gallon. 10 Another trip tip: Instead of taking a break for lunch at a restaurant, cook food on your engine. Find out how (and get a recipe for Hyundai Halibut With Fennel) in the classic book Manifold Destiny. 11 The recipe for gasoline itself is complex. Depending on the blend, it can contain between 150 and 1,000 different chemical compounds. 12 Tighten your gas cap. A leaking or missing cap can release 30 gallons of fuel per year into the atmosphere. 13 In California alone, vapors from gas stations account for enough gasoline to fill two tanker trucks every day. 14 Speaking of tankers, that truck you’re trying to pass may be carrying 4,000 gallons of gas, which, if in a crash, can explode with the energy of 200 tons of TNT. 15 By the eighth century, a petroleum industry already existed in the Middle East. The streets of Baghdad were paved with tar derived from petroleum. 16 In oil-rich Baku, Azerbaijan, north of Iran, villagers could once dig a hole in the ground with their hands, drop in a live coal, and start a fire. 17 In the United States, when people first noticed oil, they didn’t quite grasp the energy angle. Instead they did what any industrious American would do: They bottled it, slapped a label on, and sold it as a health tonic. 18 Several hundred thousand bottles of the stuff are said to have been purchased and, perhaps, consumed. 19 Since they moved on from the health drink angle, Americans have laid down 161,000 miles of fuel pipeline in the United States. That’s more than half the distance to the moon. 20 Spies like pipelines. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis_J_Sheehan_Esquire_1 E ngineers use a robotic device known as a smart pig to inspect pipelines from the inside. Two James Bond movies so far have made oil pipelines and pigs part of the plot: The Living Daylights and The World Is Not Enough. You will have to wait until November to see if the pattern is repeated in the next Bond installment, Quantum of Solace. Hypnosis, ("sleep") is often thought to be "a trance-like state that resembles sleep but is induced by a person whose suggestions are readily accepted by the subject." The technique is sometimes used for medical purposes to relieve anxiety or otherwise improve or alter behavior. Its effectiveness has been clinically demonstrated in many areas, most notably in the area of accute pain relief. It is also used in popular stage acts in which subjects are persuaded to perform bizarre feats. Other variations include so-called "mass-hypnosis," in which crowds are simultaneously influenced, and autosuggestion in which subjects persuade themselves. However, these phenomena are unlike those typically associated with the classical phenomena of hypnosis. Although we can speak of a "history of hypnosis" prior to the 19th century, it should be clear that the word itself is the invention of 19th century Scottish physician James Braid. It is not clear if what is discussed as hypnosis prior to the 19th century in histories of hypnosis is in actual fact what we mean today by "hypnosis." During the Middle Ages and early modern period, hypnosis began to be better understood by physicians such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina). Hypnotic susceptibility is the measurable responsiveness that a person has to hypnosis. Not all people can be hypnotized, but about 10% of people respond exceptionally well.There is little evidence linking susceptibility to intelligence or personality traits, but some research has linked hypnosis to the amount of imagination in subjects. Recent research suggests that highly hypnotizable people have high sensory and perceptual gating abilities that allow them to block some stimuli from awareness. There is a common claim that no one can be hypnotized against his will. The American Society of Clinical Hypnosis's web site says "Hypnosis is a state of inner absorption, concentration and focused attention." It often appears as if the hypnotized participant accepts the authority of the hypnotist over his or her own experience. When asked after the conclusion of such a session, some participants claim to be genuinely unable to recall the incident, while others say that they had known the hypnotist was wrong but at the time it had seemed easier just to go along with his instructions. (Richard Feynman describes this, in his memoir Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, as his own hypnotic experience.) The esoteric publication Hypnotism, by Danish hypnotist Carl Septus, is an early reference work that notes the absence of the pupillary reflex sign. Septus states specifically that after subjects have been asked to open their eyes during a deep trance, light shone into the eyes does not cause pupil contraction. The hypnotist may use suggestion to keep the subject in hypnosis, but must avoid suggestions relating to eyes, visual focus, light, or the dilation or contraction of the pupils. Hypnotherapy is a term to describe the use of hypnosis in a therapeutic context. Many hypnotherapists refer to their practice as "clinical work". Hypnotherapy can either be used as an addition to the work of licensed physicians or psychologists, or it can be used in a stand-alone environment where the hypnotherapist in question usually owns his or her own business. The majority of these stand-alone certified hypnotherapists (C.Hts in the U.S., Diploma. Hyp or DHP in the UK) today earn a large portion of their income through the cessation of smoking (often in a single session) and the aid of weight loss (body sculpting) and possibly anorexia[citation needed]. Psychologists and psychiatrists use hypnosis predominantly for the treatment of dissociative disorders, phobias, habit change, depression and post-traumatic syndromes.There is no evidence that 'incurable' diseases (such as cancer, diabetes, and arthritis) are curable with hypnosis, but pain and other bodily symptoms related to the diseases are controllable.Some of the treatments practiced by hypnotherapists, in particular so-called regression, have been viewed with skepticism. The American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association have both cautioned against the use of repressed memory therapy in dealing with cases of alleged childhood trauma, stating that "it is impossible, without other corroborative evidence, to distinguish a true memory from a false one", and so the procedure is "fraught with problems of potential misapplication". In a lecture to the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH) during their annual conference at the State University Of New York, Dr. Milton Erickson taught the process of indirect hypnosis while Dr. Robert W. Habbick spoke of his research on the use of hypnosis in enhancing learning and reducing anxiety. Dr. Habbick explained the use of a triad of suggestions: "(a) enhancing confidence, while (b) strengthening focused interest in the work and (c) improving energy to do the studying necessary." The results of his controlled research pointed the way toward the need to apply hypnosis especially with students who have difficulty studying. In a more recent lecture, Dr. Habbick spoke in Boston to ASCH of the positive effects of using his suggested hypnosis triad with students at the Bureau of Study Council at Harvard University. Hypnodermatology is the practice of treating skin diseases with hypnosis. A study done at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine looked at two groups of patients facing surgery for breast cancer. The group that received hypnosis prior to surgery reported less pain, nausea, and anxiety after surgery than did the control group. There was a cost benefit as well, as the average hypnosis patient reduced the cost of treatment by an average of $772.00. In April 2008 a professional hypnotist, Alex Lenkei, successfully hypnotised himself before having surgery on his hand and was in no pain throughout the 80 minute operation. His blood pressure and heart rate were also monitored and remained normal, indicating that he truly did not experience any pain. An anaesthetist who remained on hand believes Mr Lenkei's body may have released chemicals which blocked pain. Michael R. Nash writes, in a july 2001 article for Scientific American titled "The Truth and the Hype of Hypnosis", "using hypnosis, scientists have temporarily created hallucinations, compulsions, certain types of memory loss, false memories, and delusions in the laboratory so that these phenomena can be studied in a controlled environment." In his book The Hidden Persuaders (1957) Vance Packard describes research involving the behavior of housewives in supermarkets in the 1950s. Cameras were hidden to measure a shopper's eye-blink rate as she compared items. It was assumed that her eye-blink rate would increase as she performed mental calculations to determine which product was the best value. In fact, the cameras recorded an eye-blink rate which indicated that the housewife was, according to Packard, usually in a hypnotic state while shopping. This led manufacturers to produce new brands of laundry detergent in competition with their own, existing brands, where the primary differences were in the product names, colors and shapes of designs on the packages, which were designed to appeal to women at different times of their menstrual cycles. The effects of this research can be noted today by visiting the laundry detergent section of any American supermarket. Hypnotism has also received publicity about its use in Forensics, Sports, Education, and physical therapy and rehabilitation. Though various conjectures are made about hypnosis, the field has received significant support from the science-oriented psychology community due to research into hypnotic phenomena conducted by practitioners and theorists (Sala 1999). http://louis_j_sheehan.today.com Both Heap and Dryden (1991) and Ambrose and Newbold (1980) consider that the theoretical debates on hypnotherapy have been productive, and that hypnosis has benefited from the attentions of those involved in the controversies, and conversely, that the developments of neurolinguistic programming and neo-Ericksonian hypnosis has been characterized by gullibility and fraudulence. Social constructionism and role-playing theory of hypnosis, discovered by Jun Zhou in the early 18th century,[23] suggests that individuals are playing a role and that really there is no such thing as hypnosis. A relationship is built depending on how much rapport has been established between the "hypnotist" and the subject (see Hawthorne effect, Pygmalion effect, and placebo effect). Some psychologists, such as Robert Baker and Graham Wagstaff, claim that what we call hypnosis is actually a form of learned social behavior, a complex hybrid of social compliance, relaxation, and suggestibility that can account for many esoteric behavioral manifestations. Nicholas Spanos states, "hypnotic procedures influence behavior indirectly by altering subjects' motivations, expectations and interpretations." Pierre Janet originally developed the idea of dissociation of consciousness as a result of his work with hysterical patients. He believed that hypnosis was an example of dissociation whereby areas of an individual's behavioral control are split off from ordinary awareness. Hypnosis would remove some control from the conscious mind and the individual would respond with autonomic, reflexive behavior. Weitzenhoffer describes hypnosis via this theory as "dissociation of awareness from the majority of sensory and even strictly neural events taking place." Anna Gosline says in a NewScientist.com article: "Gruzelier and his colleagues studied brain activity using an fMRI while subjects completed a standard cognitive exercise, called the Stroop task. The team screened subjects before the study and chose 12 that were highly susceptible to hypnosis and 12 with low susceptibility. They all completed the task in the fMRI under normal conditions and then again under hypnosis. Throughout the study, both groups were consistent in their task results, achieving similar scores regardless of their mental state. During their first task session, before hypnosis, there were no significant differences in brain activity between the groups. But under hypnosis, Gruzelier found that the highly susceptible subjects showed significantly more brain activity in the anterior cingulate gyrus than the weakly susceptible subjects. This area of the brain has been shown to respond to errors and evaluate emotional outcomes. The highly susceptible group also showed much greater brain activity on the left side of the prefrontal cortex than the weakly susceptible group. This is an area involved with higher level cognitive processing and behaviour." Ivan Pavlov believed that hypnosis was a "partial sleep". He observed that the various degrees of hypnosis did not significantly differ physiologically from the waking state and hypnosis depended on insignificant changes of environmental stimuli. Pavlov also suggested that lower-brain-stem mechanisms were involved in hypnotic conditioning. Currently a more popular "hyper-suggestibility theory" states that the subject focuses attention by responding to the hypnotist's suggestion. As attention is focused and magnified, the hypnotist's words are gradually accepted without the subject conducting any conscious censorship of what is being said. This is not unlike the athlete listening to the coach's last pieces of advice minutes before an important sport event; concentration filters out all that is unimportant and magnifies what is said about what really matters to the subject. An approach loosely based on Information theory uses a brain-as-computer model. In adaptive systems, a system may use feedback to increase the signal-to-noise ratio, which may converge towards a steady state. Increasing the signal-to-noise ratio enables messages to be more clearly received from a source. The hypnotist's object is to use techniques to reduce the interference and increase the receptability of specific messages (suggestions). Systems theory, in this context, may be regarded as an extension of James Braid's original conceptualization of hypnosis[32][page # needed] as involving a process of enhancing or depressing the activity of the nervous system. Systems theory considers the nervous system's organization into interacting subsystems. Hypnotic phenomena thus involve not only increased or decreased activity of particular subsystems, but also their interaction. A central phenomenon in this regard is that of feedback loops, familiar to systems theory, which suggest a mechanism for creating the more extreme hypnotic phenomena. A peer-reviewed article on the University of Maryland Medical Center's web site says: "Although studies on hypnosis as a treatment for obesity are not conclusive, most research suggests that hypnotherapy (when used in combination with cognitive behavioral therapy, exercise, and a low-fat diet) may help overweight or obese individuals lose weight." In 1996, the National Institutes of Health technology assessment panel judged hypnosis to be an effective intervention for alleviating pain from cancer and other chronic conditions. A large number of clinical studies also indicate that hypnosis can reduce the acute pain experienced by patients undergoing burn-wound debridement, enduring bone marrow aspirations, and childbirth. An analysis published in a recent issue the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, for example, found that hypnotic suggestions relieved the pain of 75% of 933 subjects participating in 27 different experiments. http://Louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us One controlled scientific experiment postulates that hypnosis may alter our perception of conscious experience in a way not possible when people are not "hypnotized", at least in "highly hypnotizable" people. In this experiment, color perception was changed by hypnosis in "highly hypnotizable" people as determined by (PET) scans (Kosslyn et al., 2000). Another research example, employing event-related functional MRI (fMRI) and EEG coherence measures, compared certain specific neural activity "...during Stroop task performance between participants of low and high hypnotic susceptibility, at baseline and after hypnotic induction". According to its authors, "the fMRI data revealed that conflict-related ACC activity interacted with hypnosis and hypnotic susceptibility, in that highly susceptible participants displayed increased conflict-related neural activity in the hypnosis condition compared to baseline, as well as with respect to subjects with low susceptibility." (Egner et al., 2005) Michael Nash said in a Scientific American article: "In 1998 Henry Szechtman of McMaster University in Ontario and his co-workers used PET to image the brain activity of hypnotized subjects who were invited to imagine a scenario and who then experienced a hallucination ... By monitoring regional blood flow in areas activated during both hearing and auditory hallucination but not during simple imagining, the investigators sought to determine where in the brain a hallucinated sound is mistakenly "tagged" as authentic and originating in the outside world. Szechtman and his colleagues imaged the brain activity of eight very hypnotizable subjects who had been prescreened for their ability to hallucinate under hypnosis ... The tests showed that a region of the brain called the right anterior cingulate cortex was just as active while the volunteers were hallucinating as it was while they were actually hearing the stimulus. In contrast, that brain area was not active while the subjects were imagining that they heard the stimulus." Self-hypnosis (or autosuggestion) — is hypnosis in which a person hypnotizes himself or herself without the assistance of another person to serve as the hypnotist — is a staple of hypnotherapy-related self-help programs. It is most often used to help the self-hypnotist stay on a diet, overcome smoking or some other addiction, or to generally boost the hypnotized person's self-esteem. It is rarely used for the more complex or controversial uses of hypnosis, which require the hypnotist to monitor the hypnotized person's reactions and responses and respond accordingly. Most people who practice self-hypnosis require a focus in order to become fully hypnotized; there are many computer programs on the market that can ostensibly help in this area, though few, if any, have been scientifically proven to aid self-hypnosis. Some people use devices known as mind machines to help them go into self-hypnosis more readily. http://louis-j-sheehan.net A mind machine consists of glasses with different colored flashing LEDs on the inside, and headphones. The LEDs stimulate the visual channel, while the headphones stimulate the audio channel with similar or slightly different frequencies designed to produce a certain mental state. The use of binaural beats in the audio is common; it is said to produce hypnosis more readily. Self-hypnosis is a skill that can be improved as time goes by. People use techniques such as imagining walking down 10 steps, feeling deeper relaxed as they imagine slowly walking down each step, one at a time. It is a good idea to initially seek the skills of a practicing hypnotherapist in order to understand what it feels like to be in a hypnotic trance. This greatly helps, as the individual can aim to replicate this state. Alternatively, a person may wish to use hypnosis recordings instead. This phenomenon, as expounded by Melvin Powers in 1955, involves altering the behavior of a subject by suggestion without inducing a trance. Related to the placebo effect, a subject becomes subconsciously convinced that what they are being told is inevitable reality, for example that the air in the room will cause them to swallow. They can be convinced that a completely benign substance is actually a drug that will induce whatever effect is suggested. In order to work, the subject must completely trust the source of the suggestion or be subconsciously convinced by a calm authoritative tone. Influencing crowds through common longings and yearnings by a demagogue is called mass hypnosis. Generally, mass hypnosis is applied to religious sessions. Many forms of music and dance can be used to create religious trance. In addition to direct application of hypnosis (that is, treatment of conditions by means of hypnosis), there is also indirect application, wherein hypnosis is used to facilitate another procedure. Some people seem more able to display "enhanced functioning", such as the suppression of pain, while utilizing hypnosis. Robin Waterfield writes, in his 2002 book Hidden Depths: The Story of Hypnosis, "a person can act, some time later, on a suggestion seeded during the hypnotic session. Post-hypnotic suggestions can last for a long time. http://louis-j-sheehan.com A hypnotherapist told one of his patients, who was also a friend: 'When I touch you on the finger you will immediately be hypnotized.' Fourteen years later, at a dinner party, he touched him deliberately on the finger and his head fell back against the chair." http://louis-j-sheehan.com Pratt et al., write, in their 1988 book A Clinical Hypnosis Primer, "A hypnotized patient will respond to a suggestion literally. A suggestion that requires conscious interpretation can have undesirable effects." They give the following report taken from Hartland, 1971, p.37: "A patient who was terrified to go into the street because of the traffic was once told by a hypnotist that when she left his room, she would no longer bother about the traffic and would be able to cross the road without the slightest fear. She obeyed his instructions so literally that she ended up in a hospital." In one case, a woman had experienced 10 years of fatigue, irritability, and periods of childish behavior during which her perceptions were distorted. The source of the problem was traced back to a stage performance 10 years earlier, when she was regressed to a traumatic period of her life. From Kleinhauz and Eli, 1987: In one case, a dentist using hypnorelaxation with a patient complied with her request to provide direction suggestions to stop smoking. The patient's underlying psychological conflicts, which the dentist was not qualified to assess, led to the development of an anxiety/depressive reaction. From Machovec, 1987: A woman undergoing psychotherapy facilitated by hypnosis attempted to use the procedures she had learned to relieve her husband's dental pain. During the deepening technique of arm levitation, her husband's fingertips 'stuck' to his head, and a therapist had to intervene to end the trance state." http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US Subjects have been known to cry or suffer a mental breakdown after extended periods of being in a trance like state of mind.[citation needed] False memory obtained via hypnosis has figured prominently in many investigations and court cases, including cases of alleged sexual abuse. There is no scientific way to prove that any of these recollections are completely accurate. The American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association have both cautioned against the use of repressed memory therapy in dealing with cases of alleged childhood trauma, stating that "it is impossible, without other corroborative evidence, to distinguish a true memory from a false one", and so the procedure is "fraught with problems of potential misapplication". Some believe that hypnosis is a form of mind control and/or brainwashing that can control a person's behavior and judgment and therefore could potentially cause them harm. These beliefs are not generally based on scientific evidence, as there is no scientific consensus on whether mind control even exists. But there are people interested in research and funding to help work on controlling others and perfecting mind control techniques. These techniques can be researched with the scientific method and reasoning skills. From the mental standpoint, a hypnotic subject is relaxed yet alert and always aware at some level. Some choose to think of this as a state of mind called "trance". Due to the popular but incorrect notion of hypnosis as mind control, some people believe that the ability to experience hypnosis is related to strength and soundness of mind. However, scientists note that personality traits such as gullibility or submissiveness or factors such as low intelligence are not related to hypnotize-ability. Research studies suggest that none of intelligence, gender, or personality traits (ref: below ...overactive imagination...) affect responsiveness to hypnosis and that hypnotize-ability may in fact be hereditary or genetic in nature. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US Another misconception in popular culture is that hypnosis is often the product of vivid imaginations and that hypnotic phenomena are merely imagined in the mind. However, research indicates many imaginative people do not fare well as good hypnotic subjects. (Ref above: ...No personality traits...) Furthermore, studies using PET scans have shown that hypnotized subjects suggested to have auditory hallucinations demonstrated regional blood flow in the same areas of the brain as real hearing, whereas subjects merely imagining hearing noise did not. It is a misconception that induction into hypnosis is time-consuming and requires complete relaxation. Hypnosis through lengthy relaxation or visual experiences is the most common form of induction, but instant inductions (2-10 seconds) is a method for induction or re-induction among stage hypnotists, as well as clinical hypnotists seeking to manage trauma or overcome anxiety and resistance. Authors John Cerbone and Richard Nongard refer to this phenomena as Speed-Trance, noting it is possible to hypnotize a subject in just a few seconds by causing confusion, loss of equilibrium, misdirection, shock, or eye fixation. However, the duration of time it takes to induce hypnosis does not always take into consideration the depth of trance that is secured. [Due to the stage hypnotist's showmanship and their perpetuating the illusion of possessing mysterious abilities, hypnosis is often seen as caused by the hypnotist's power. The real power of hypnosis comes from the trust the hypnotist can instill in his subjects. They have to willingly grant him the ability to take over their critical thinking and direct their bodies. Some people are very trusting, or even looking for an excuse to abdicate their responsibilities and are able to be hypnotized within seconds, while others take more time to counter their fears. In a stage hypnosis situation the hypnotist chooses his participants carefully. First he gives the entire audience a few exercises to perform and plants ideas in their minds, such as, only intelligent people can be hypnotized and only those wanting to