The patient was a 15-year-old girl employed in a local bar. She was admitted to hospital after a knife fight involving her, a former lover and a new boyfriend. Who stabbed whom was not quite clear but all three participants in the small war were admitted with knife injuries. (…)

Precisely 278 days later the patient was admitted again to hospital with acute, intermittent abdominal pain. Abdominal examination revealed a term pregnancy with a cephalic fetal presentation. The uterus was contracting regularly and the fetal heart was heard. Inspection of the vulva showed no vagina, only a shallow skin dimple was present below the external urethral meatus and between the labia minora. An emergency lower segment caesarean section was performed under spinal anaesthesia and a live male infant weighing 2800 g was born…

The patient was well aware of the fact that she had no vagina and she had started oral experiments after disappointing attempts at conventional intercourse. Just before she was stabbed in the abdomen she had practised fellatio with her new boyfriend and was caught in the act by her former lover. The fight with knives ensued. She had never had a period and there was no trace of lochia after the caesarean section. She had been worried about the increase in her abdominal size but could not believe she was pregnant

{ Discover | Continue reading | ABC }

artwork { The Designers Republic }

Wolfie Blackheart is not an ordinary 18-year-old. She believes she is a wolf –technically, a werewolf– and so she wears a tail. She also wears a harness in case someone special wants to drag her around.

And last week, she used a pocketknife in her kitchen to decapitate a dog–already dead, according to Wolfie–that had been missing since Jan. 5.

{ San Antonio Express-News | Continue reading }

Chronic pain is associated with a loss of the normal capacity to know where your body is. Chronic pain is also associated with odd bodily feelings. To find out if people with chronic back pain had trouble ‘feeling’ their back, they were asked to draw on a piece of paper the outline of where they felt their back to be. This is a bit tricky to understand, but imagine you are surveying, in your head, how your body feels and then drawing its location. Anyway, you might have to read the paper to really get it. This is what we found: six out of six patients with low back pain, when they were trying to draw where they felt their back to be, said “I can’t find it” or “I’ve lost it”. When an independent investigator assessed sensory acuity on the back, sensory acuity was reduced in the same place the patient couldn’t feel properly. (…)

In short we think it demonstrates that chronic back pain is associated with distorted body image of the back.

{ Body in Mind | Continue reading }

When does a potential crisis become an actual crisis, and how and why does it happen? Why did most everyone believe there were no problems in the US (or Japanese or European or British) economies in 2006? Yet now we are mired in a very difficult situation. “The subprime problem will be contained,” said now controversially confirmed Fed Chairman Bernanke, just months before the implosion and significant Fed intervention. I have just returned from Europe, and the discussion often turned to the potential of a crisis in the Eurozone if Greece defaults. Plus, we take a look at the very positive US GDP numbers released this morning. Are we finally back to the Old Normal? There’s just so much to talk about. (…)

Before we get into the main discussion point, let me briefly comment on today’s GDP numbers, which came in at an amazingly strong 5.7% growth rate. While that is stronger than I thought it would be (I said 4-5%), there are reasons to be cautious before we sound the “all clear” bell.

First, over 60% (3.7%) of the growth came from inventory rebuilding, as opposed to just 0.7% in the third quarter. If you examine the numbers, you find that inventories had dropped below sales, so a buildup was needed. Increasing inventories add to GDP, while, counterintuitively, sales from inventory decrease GDP. Businesses are just adjusting to the New Normal level of sales. I expect further inventory build-up in the next two quarters, although not at this level, and then we level off the latter half of the year.

While rebuilding inventories is a very good thing, that growth will only continue if sales grow. Otherwise inventories will find the level of the New Normal and stop growing. And if you look at consumer spending in the data, you find that it actually declined in the 4th quarter, both annually and from the previous quarter. “Domestic demand” declined from 2.3% in the third quarter to only 1.7% in the fourth quarter. Part of that is clearly the absence of “Cash for Clunkers,” but even so that is not a sign of economic strength.

Second, as my friend David Rosenberg pointed out, imports fell over the 4th quarter. Usually in a heavy inventory-rebuilding cycle, imports rise because a portion of the materials businesses need to build their own products comes from foreign sources. Thus the drop in imports is most unusual. Falling imports, which is a sign of economic retrenching, also increases the statistical GDP number.

Third, I have seen no analysis (yet) on the impact of the stimulus spending, but it was 90% of the growth in the third quarter, or a little less than 2%.

Fourth (and quoting David): “… if you believe the GDP data - remember, there are more revisions to come - then you de facto must be of the view that productivity growth is soaring at over a 6% annual rate. No doubt productivity is rising - just look at the never-ending slate of layoff announcements. But we came off a cycle with no technological advance and no capital deepening, so it is hard to believe that productivity at this time is growing at a pace that is four times the historical norm. Sorry, but we’re not buyers of that view. In the fourth quarter, aggregate private hours worked contracted at a 0.5% annual rate and what we can tell you is that such a decline in labor input has never before, scanning over 50 years of data, coincided with a GDP headline this good.

“Normally, GDP growth is 1.7% when hours worked is this weak, and that is exactly the trend that was depicted this week in the release of the Chicago Fed’s National Activity Index, which was widely ignored. On the flip side, when we have in the past seen GDP growth come in at or near a 5.7% annual rate, what is typical is that hours worked grows at a 3.7% rate. No matter how you slice it, the GDP number today represented not just a rare but an unprecedented event, and as such, we are willing to treat the report with an entire saltshaker - a few grains won’t do.”

Finally, remember that third-quarter GDP was revised downward by over 30%, from 3.5% to just 2.2% only 60 days later. (There is the first release, to be followed by revisions over the next two months.) The first release is based on a lot of estimates, otherwise known as guesswork. The fourth-quarter number is likely to be revised down as well.

Unemployment rose by several hundred thousand jobs in the fourth quarter, and if you look at some surveys, it approached 500,000. That is hardly consistent with a 5.7% growth rate. Further, sales taxes and income-tax receipts are still falling. As I said last year that it would be, this is a Statistical Recovery. When unemployment is rising, it is hard to talk of real recovery. Without the stimulus in the latter half of the year, growth would be much slower.

So should we, as Paul Krugman suggests, spend another trillion in stimulus if it helps growth? No, because, as I have written for a very long time, and will focus on in future weeks, increased deficits and rising debt-to-GDP is a long-term losing proposition. It simply puts off what will be a reckoning that will be even worse, with yet higher debt levels. You cannot borrow your way out of a debt crisis. (…)

Now, there are bullish voices telling us that things are headed back to normal. Mainstream forecasts for GDP growth this year are quite robust, north of 4% for the year, based on evidence from past recoveries. However, the underlying fundamentals of a banking crisis are far different from those of a typical business-cycle recession, as Reinhart and Rogoff’s work so clearly reveals. It typically takes years to work off excess leverage in a banking crisis, with unemployment often rising for 4 years running. We will look at the evidence in coming weeks.

{ John Mauldin newsletter, January 29, 2010 | PDF | Continue reading | Read more: A Bubble in Search of a Pin }

photo { Alex Gaidouk }

When most people think about geography, they think about maps. Lots of maps. Maps with state capitals and national territories, maps showing mountains and rivers, forests and lakes, or maps showing population distributions and migration patterns. And indeed, that isn’t a wholly inaccurate idea of what the field is all about. It is true that modern geography and mapmaking were once inseparable. (…)

In our own time, another cartographic renaissance is taking place. In popular culture, free software applications like Google Earth and MapQuest have become almost indispensable parts of our everyday lives: we use online mapping applications to get directions to unfamiliar addresses and to virtually “explore” the globe with the aid of publicly available satellite imagery. Consumer-available GPS have made latitude and longitude coordinates a part of the cultural vernacular. (…)

Geography, then, is not just a method of inquiry, but necessarily entails the production of a space of inquiry. Geographers might study the production of space, but through that study, they’re also producing space. Put simply, geographers don’t just study geography, they create geographies. (…)

Experimental geography means practices that take on the production of space in a self-reflexive way, practices that recognize that cultural production and the production of space cannot be separated from each another, and that cultural and intellectual production is a spatial practice.

{ The Brooklyn Rail | Continue reading }

illustration { Olivier Vernon }

State Representative James Tokioka did some research and drafted a bill that prohibits catching, selling or even possessing walu in Hawaii.

“I talked [to] many people who sell fish, some of the hotel who [buys] fish, they are aware of it and they’re not buying it anymore,” said Rep. Tokioka.

Tokioka said people have shared their nightmares of severe diarrhea after consuming a large portion of the fish. The oily walu or Escolar contains a high-level of wax esters in its tissue that are beneficial to its deep-sea survival, but can be unkind to humans.

{ KRQE News 13 | Continue reading }

illustration { Mathias Schweizer, Malamerde, 2007 }

{ Courtesy of my friend Glenn }

{ Three-year-old reptile from Taipei in Taiwan has become hooked on nicotine }

What a surprise that big name philosophers, who in previous years did not hesitate to share their profound wisdom in a language that was philosophical but plain, nuanced but direct, now seemed to be hiding behind words. It was as if there was something they could not say. Their presentations became more academic, their focus more narrowed. The absence of a theme was obvious and that, I believe, was the only theme.

We are in a moment of cultural stagnation where the only thing to say is that we have nothing to say. The great contemporary philosophers of our age are in intellectual retreat. Something about this historical moment is leaving the discipline of Western philosophy blind. The great minds seem aware of a presence, but unable to get to it directly. So they fill the air with empty words that, while philosophically interesting, simply serve as a placeholder, a time-filler while events unfold.

{ Micah M. White/Adbusters | Continue reading }

In 1966, William Labov, the father of sociolinguistics, discovered that many people with New York accents — the stock Noo Yawk kind — didn’t like the way they talked. It was kind of sad. Labov found widespread “linguistic self-hatred,” he reported. People from New York and New Jersey described their own speech as “distorted,” “sloppy” and “horrible.” No wonder those great old accents came to be regarded as a class giveaway, to be thrown over in the name of assimilation, refinement and the acquisition of Newscaster English.

But that was the ’60s, back before the never-ending you-tawkin-t’me aria was enshrined in movies like “Mean Streets,” “Saturday Night Fever,” “Working Girl” and, of course, “Taxi Driver.” Before long, people were consciously cultivating the once-despised dialect. Now an extra-hammy version of the accent — which thrives in the New York City area, including northern New Jersey — is a point of fighting pride, most recently among the brawling bozos on MTV’s captivating and incendiary reality show “Jersey Shore.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

Johnny Boy: Y’know Joey Clams…
Charlie: Yeah.
Johnny Boy: …Joey Scallops, yeah.
Charlie: I know him too, yeah.
Johnny Boy: …yeah. No. No, Joey Scallops is Joey Clams.
Charlie: Right.
Johnny Boy: Right.
Charlie: …they’re the same person!
Johnny Boy: Yeah!
Charlie: ‘ey!
Johnny Boy: ‘ey…

{ Mean Streets, 1973 }

artwork { Mo Maurice Tan }

{ Rachel’s new blog }

NY dairy farmer kills 51 cows then turns gun on himself, ending his own life.

Four children found living in feces. Investigators claim they found no food inside the home except a single pack of Raman Noodles.

The Indonesian government has apologised to a woman who lost her leg when a military rocket slammed into her house after a test launch.

Crowbar assault in maggot farm raid.

People in the funeral industry estimate that around 1 percent of cremated remains are not claimed.

Woman sues Metra after toilet explodes on train. She used a toilet on the train, and upon flushing, the contents exploded out and “splattered” her, the suit claims.

Bestiality ban in Netherlands. In a 2007 survey, the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad found that distributors in the Netherlands were responsible for some 80 percent of bestiality videos worldwide.

New Zealand teenager auctioned her virginity online for $32,000 to raise tuition money. More than 1,200 made bids.

Mystery of hanged man’s corpse is revealed.

Britain and the US face a new al-Qaeda terror threat from so-called suicide body bombers with explosives surgically inserted inside them. Related: Intelligence officials say al-Qaeda will try to attack U.S. in next 6 months.

In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent.

Related: A humanitarian mission to aid Haitian earthquake victims turned into a major embarrassment in Puerto Rico on Friday as pictures emerged of doctors drinking, mugging for cameras and brandishing firearms amid the victims’ suffering.

Singapore gets ready to open its first casinos.

AIG plans to pay $100 million in another round of bonuses.

Greedy appraisers, who put lofty valuations on properties to please lenders and line their pockets, played a large role in the housing bubble. Are they the new organized crime?

In the next industrial revolution, atoms are the new bits.

Google economist explains why you won’t pay for online news.

What happened to Second Life?

Video games by the numbers.

Controversy rages over robot vasectomy reversal in Florida.

Need an artery? just print one out.

Why do human testicles hang like that? Related: On the origin of descended scrotal testicles [PDF]

Why I don’t have a girlfriend: An application of the Drake Equation to love in the UK [PDF]

Do humans and even monkeys tend to rationalize their choices?

Asexual organisms are extremely rare. But bdelloid rotifers have been reproducing without sex for millions of years. And now, researchers say they can explain how the tiny creatures have pulled it off for so long.

Painful memories that cause distress could soon be a thing of the past. Recent studies suggest memories can be manipulated, edited - and even deleted.

Physicist discovers how to teleport energy.

Moon may have formed in natural nuclear explosion, according to a new theory of lunar formation.

What actually gets taught on a homeopathy course.

In search of the world’s hardest language.

Virginia Woolf’s mental illness may have defined her craft.

Madness Manifest: Creativity, Art and the Margins of Mental Health.

Writers have been imagining the end of the world since soon after it began, but today’s practitioners deliver a new kind of bleakness.

In the hope that you might consider bringing your much-rumoured memoir to The House of Eliot … An open letter to Morrissey.
Leonardo da Vinci’s Resume.

This issue of the Annual Review of Critical Psychology mobilises an exploration and consideration of the utility of Lacan’s psychoanalysis for critical psychology in particular, and for critical research/theory/practice in general.

Among its crimes against humanity, Nazi Germany may have stolen more than five million cultural objects from the countries it conquered, including thousands of the world’s greatest artistic masterpieces. As the American and British armies and their allies began pushing back onto the Continent, an unusual front-line military unit with too few men and too little equipment accompanied them—members of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section (MFAA).

Times Square may have been Disneyfied, but it’s still home to the dirtiest hotel in New York.

A short history of restaurant criticism in New York.

New York City’s 5th annual pillow fight, Saturday, April 3, 2010.

Wearing me: a tale of T-shirt.

The fake freeway sign that became a real public service.

The membrane separating advertising and content has been torn.

What Was Advertising? The Invention, Rise, Demise, and Disappearance of Advertising Concepts in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Europe and America [PDF]

When doing the right thing could backfire.

How to be successful, famous, and wrong.

Secrets of the Tokyo underground.

Mythogeography: A Guide to Walking Sideways, a guide book that accompanies the rediscovery of slowly traversed space.

Next stop on the Viagra World Sex Tour: Finland.

Michael Jackson commemorative logo.

The 6 weirdest things women do to their vaginas.

Trucker’s delight [video/NSFW]

Exreme.

{ Hélio Oiticica, Sêco 14, 1957 | gouache on board | Galerie Lelong, 528 W. 26th Street, NYC | until February 6, 2010 }

You can’t buy happiness, but you can at least inherit it, said British and Australian researchers, after studying a thousand pairs of identical and non-identical twins. Their Eureka! on happiness is: Genes control half the personality traits that make people happy, while factors such as relationships, health and careers are responsible for the rest of our well-being.

The researchers identified common genes in identical twins that result in certain personality traits and predispose people to happiness. Sociable, active, stable, hardworking and conscientious people tend to be happier, the researchers reported in Psychological Science.

{ The Hindu | Continue reading }

More than a century ago, an Irish economist named Francis Edgeworth imagined a futuristic device that he called a hedonimeter. It would be, Edgeworth speculated, “an ideally perfect instrument, a psychophysical machine.” His hedonimeter would measure happiness by “continually registering the height of pleasure experienced by an individual.”

This may sound more like something out of science fiction than an idea from the annals of economic history. But Edgeworth’s fantasy grew out of his utilitarian approach to economics, with its assumption that the best way to make choices and allocate resources was to aim to maximize happiness in society. Today, the idea that happiness can indeed be measured and quantified remains at the heart of a new science of happiness.

Over the last few decades, psychologists, neuroscientists, sociologists, behavioral economists and other social scientists have been busy using cold, hard data to try to fill in some of the blank spaces on the map of human happiness. It turns out that no hedonimeter is necessary. Much of the latest data on happiness is generated simply by asking people how they feel. (…)

As historian of happiness Darrin McMahon said in a paper he presented at a 2006 Notre Dame conference on the subject, people “have never been as preoccupied, never been as obsessed, I would argue, with happiness as they are right now.”

{ University of Notre Dame | Continue reading }

read more { Happiness: Cognition, Experience, Language | Collegium, Volume 3, 2008 }

In the late 1970s, while working as a chiropractor and naturopath in Fergus, Ont., James Wilson began noticing patients with circadian rhythms out of whack.

They had trouble waking up in the morning, needed caffeine to get through the day, and felt a drop in energy mid-afternoon. Their second wind came at 11 p.m., revving them up for three hours.

Their deepest sleep, work permitting, was between 7 and 9 in the morning. They felt tired and unable to concentrate.

Their condition improved, Wilson says, when he treated their adrenal glands, boosting the hormones involved in regulating the body’s daily rhythms and dealing with stress.

His diagnosis was based on the pioneering work of the late Montreal endocrinologist Dr. Hans Selye. Modern life, Wilson concluded, is so relentlessly stressful that adrenal glands get overworked, burn out and produce lower levels of hormones needed to cope with stress.

Wilson says he coined the term “adrenal fatigue,” calling it the “21st century stress syndrome.”

{ Toronto Star | Continue reading }

Why do some clubbers shake it like a Polaroid picture while others prefer to perch on a bar stool? British psychologist Peter Lovatt, who has conducted rigorous field work in nightclubs, believes he can explain why some booty shaking is hot — and some is not. It’s all about your hormones. (…)

“Men can communicate their testosterone levels through the way they dance,” said Lovatt. “And women understand it — without noticing it.” (…) In women, the link between dancing style and testosterone levels were similar — but the reaction of men was just the opposite.

{ Spiegel | Continue reading }

photo { Arseni Khamzin }

{ J. D. Salinger, literary recluse, dies at 91 | Plus: Bunch of phonies mourn J.D. Salinger | via Joe }

The economist Jovanovic wrote, about a quarter of a century ago, “efficient firms grow and survive; inefficient firms decline and fail”. What he meant is that the market is Darwinian; it will rule out the least efficient firms, with habits and practices that make them perform comparatively badly, and it will make sure efficient firms prosper, so that only good business practices prevail.

Yeah right.

When you look around you, in the world of business, one sometimes can’t help wonder where Darwin went wrong… How come we see so many firms that drive us up the wall, how come we see silly business practices persist (excessive risk taking, dubious governance mechanisms, corporate sexism, grey suits and ties to name an eclectic few), and how come so many - sometimes well-educated and intelligent - people continue to have an almost unshakable belief that the market really is efficient, and that it will make the best firms prevail if you just give it time?

{ Freek Vermeulen | Continue reading }

Six months is all it took to flip Europe’s climate from warm and sunny into the last ice age, researchers have found.

They have discovered that the northern hemisphere was plunged into a big freeze 12,800 years ago by a sudden slowdown of the Gulf Stream that allowed ice to spread hundreds of miles southwards from the Arctic.

Previous research had suggested the change might have taken place over a longer period — perhaps about 10 years.

The new description, reminiscent of the Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, emerged from one of the most painstaking studies of past climate changes yet attempted.

{ Times | Continue reading }