Matter & Beyond - metaphysics

this is ill to think about
consciousness doesn't have particulate matter, but we know it exists...
thanks khari

Further Justice for Oscar Grant

Mehserle judge rules some testimony hearsay

Tuesday, May 26, 2009 | 12:22 PM

Bay City News

OAKLAND, CA -- An Alameda County Superior Court judge said today he won't allow witnesses to testify that they overheard former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle mention using his Taser stun gun before he fatally shot Oscar Grant III on New Year's Day.

At least one witness for the defense in Mehserle's preliminary hearing on a murder charge was expected to testify that Mehserle said he planned to use a Taser on Grant.

The defense has contended that Mehserle, 27, meant to fire his Taser gun when he shot and killed 22-year-old Grant on the platform of the Fruitvale BART station.

Mehserle's attorney, Michael Rains, said this morning the testimony should be admissible because it would help show Mehserle's state of mind at the time of the shooting.

However, Judge C. Don Clay decided not to allow the testimony, concluding that it would amount to hearsay.

Clay also opted to allow the defense to present a short segment of slow-motion video of the interaction between Grant and the BART officers just before the shooting.

The defense claims the enhanced video will show that Grant was resisting the officers. The prosecution contends Grant was cooperative.

The shooting occurred after Mehserle and other officers were called to the Fruitvale station to respond to reports of a fight on a train.

Mehserle's partner, Officer Jon Woffinden, began testifying last week and was being cross-examined this morning. BART Officer Tony Pirone is expected to testify later today.

Before you judge my gold grill...

Ancient Gem-Studded Teeth Show Skill of Early Dentists

May 18, 2009—The glittering "grills" of some hip-hop stars aren't exactly unprecedented. Sophisticated dentistry allowed Native Americans to add bling to their teeth as far back as 2,500 years ago, a new study says.

Ancient peoples of southern North America went to "dentists"—among the earliest known—to beautify their chompers with notches, grooves, and semiprecious gems, according to a recent analysis of thousands of teeth examined from collections in Mexico's National Institute of Anthropology and History (such as the skull above, found in Chiapas, Mexico).

Scientists don't know the origin of most of the teeth in the collections, which belonged to people living throughout the region, called Mesoamerica, before the Spanish conquests of the 1500s.

But it's clear that people—mostly men—from nearly all walks of life opted for the look, noted José Concepción Jiménez, an anthropologist at the institute, which recently announced the findings.

"They were not marks of social class" but instead meant for pure decoration, he commented in an e-mail interview conducted in Spanish.

In fact, the royals of the day—such as the Red Queen, a Maya mummy found in a temple at Palenque in what is now Mexico—don't have teeth decorations, Jiménez said.

Other evidence of early Mesoamerican dentistry—including a person who had received a ceremonial denture—has also been found.

Knowledgeable Dentists

The early dentists used a drill-like device with a hard stone such as obsidian, which is capable of puncturing bone.

"It's possible some type of [herb based] anesthetic was applied prior to drilling to blunt any pain," Jiménez said.

The ornamental stones—including jade—were attached with an adhesive made out of natural resins, such as plant sap, which was mixed with other chemicals and crushed bones, Jiménez said.

The dentists likely had a sophisticated knowledge of tooth anatomy, Jiménez added. For example, they knew how to drill into teeth without hitting the pulp inside, he said.

"They didn't want to generate an infection or provoke the loss of a tooth or break a tooth."

—John Roach

Adele - Cold Shoulder

David LaChapelle: one of the greatest

Zoe Keating - Sun Will Set

Girl Racer on Hamiltons tail!

Alice Powell on racing into the record books at Brands Hatch

A 16-year-old Oxfordshire girl has become the youngest person ever to compete in the Michelin Formula Renault UK Championships at Brands Hatch.

Alice Powell, who does not have even a provisional driving licence, raced for Lewis Hamilton's former team in the Formula Renault Championship.

She came 13th and 15th in her two races on Sunday.

The competition launched the careers of Formula One stars Hamilton and Finnish driver Kimi Raikkonen.

Alice's ambition is to become the first successful female in Formula One racing and has said she wants to be a role model for girls entering motor sport.

I thank my grandma for keeping it alive with small notes in the mail

The slow death of handwriting

Christmas cards, shopping lists and what else? The occasions in which we write by hand are fewer and fewer, says Neil Hallows. So is the ancient art form of handwriting dying out?

A century from now, our handwriting may only be legible to experts.

For some, that is already the case. But writer Kitty Burns Florey says the art of handwriting is declining so fast that ordinary, joined-up script may become as hard to read as a medieval manuscript.

"When your great-great-grandchildren find that letter of yours in the attic, they'll have to take it to a specialist, an old guy at the library who would decipher the strange symbols for them," says Ms Florey, author of the newly-published Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting.

FAMOUS HANDWRITING

King Henry VIII wrote this love letter to Anne Boleyn (pic: British Library)

Jane Austen completed her last novel, Persuasion, in 1816

In 1864, Lewis Carroll wrote his most famous work for Alice Liddell.

Aged 16, Winston Churchill wrote to his mother Lady Randolph Churchill

Jimi Hendrix's lyrics for Machine Gun were written in 1969

BACK 1 of 5 NEXT

She argues that children - if not this generation then one soon to come - may grow up using only a crude form of printing for the rare occasions in life they need to communicate by pen.

The way handwriting is taught has undoubtedly changed. At Ms Florey's school in 1950s America, a nun beat time with a stick as the class copied letters from the blackboard. It was not a place for individuals. There was a right way to form letters and very many wrong ways.

For much of the last century British schools ran in a similar way. At my primary school in the 1970s, whole classes were devoted to work being "written up for best" and I remember a story coming back unmarked because I had crossed out a single word. I wonder what my teachers would have made of a James Joyce manuscript.

Crossing 7s

Many found the experience tedious, but for left-handers it could be torture. Often they were forced to write with their right, while their "bad" hand was tied down.

More than a century of children turning out letters by the yard produced a great conformity. In the 1940s Ealing drama, Went The Day Well?, a contingent of German soldiers sets up camp in the English countryside, disguised as Royal Engineers. One reason they get rumbled is that a soldier writes a "7" with a line through it. "Why should they form their figures in a continental way?" a villager asks.

If everything we do still had to be done by hand, there would not be enough hours in the day Registrar Ruth Hodson Send us your handwriting

These days, the shape of a child's ovals, loops and slants matters less than what they write. "Content is everything," says Mark Brown, head teacher of St Mary's Catholic Primary School in Axminster, Devon. "The emphasis is much more on having a go, and expressing yourself, and getting the ideas down."

He says letter formation is still taught in the early years of primary school, but the appearance of handwriting takes less of a priority as children get older, provided it remains legible.

Some parents expect handwriting to be drilled in the same way as they experienced themselves, but Mr Brown argues the content of children's writing has significantly improved as a result of the change in emphasis, and that they write far more at school than they will as adults.

Scrawling

So once we leave school, does it really matter? Apart from the odd shopping list, do people still need to use a pen?

Some do. Registrars of births, deaths and marriages have been recording life's significant events in their usually impeccable writing since 1837.

Writer's hand: Not a word crossed out in this instance of Neil Hallows' writing

"All registrars are conscious that they follow a long and noble tradition," says Ruth Hodson, interim registration manager for Peterborough City Council.

But even their fountain pens will soon barely be heard scratching on the registers. Under a modernisation programme, an increasing amount of the information is being entered directly on to a computer.

Ms Hodson is unsentimental. "If everything we do still had to be done by hand, there would not be enough hours in the day."

But perhaps handwriting gains its greatest importance when it is least legible. The reputation of doctors for scrawling was enhanced by a study in the British Medical Journal which found medics' writing was considerably worse than other healthcare workers or administrative staff. Poor writing has often been blamed for medication errors.

Gwyn Williams, a junior doctor in Carmarthen, says that despite technological advances, a great deal of clinical communication is still handwritten.

Remember this?

"We have to write so much, on so many occasions, with the clock ticking. The end result is so difficult to interpret that even I have to concentrate on occasions to work out what [I have written].

"There doesn't seem to be any other logical way of doing it. Typing clinical notes on a computer seems so cumbersome in the limited time available that I can't see how it would work."

In many jobs though, a person can go for months, even years, writing only the odd phone message in their own script.

Nevertheless, some employers still ask for a handwritten application, or a sample of writing, although the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development warns employers they need to be clear about the reason for that, to avoid accusations of discrimination.

10-page letters

There are those who see handwriting's slip in educational priority and increasingly eccentric role in the workplace as evidence that, in the West at least, we are forgetting an ancient art form.

A panic, perhaps, and one witnessed every time the dominant style of writing changed or a new form of technology seemed to threaten it. An early typewriter led the Scientific American in 1867 to marvel that "the weary process of learning penmanship in schools will be reduced to [writing] one's own signature and playing on the literary piano".

Maybe a couple of times a week [pupils] could produce something handwritten that is judged partly on its legibility, or even its beauty Kitty Burns Florey

But look at the decline in letter writing. The students I knew two decades ago who knocked out 10-page letters during a morning in bed have probably not yet written 10 pages of handwritten prose of any kind this year.

For Ms Florey, the answer should start in the classroom. Not a return to the nuns with sticks, but for children to value handwriting by learning a simple, legible, attractive script from the start - in her view a form of italic - and then keep reinforcing it beyond the early years.

"Maybe a couple of times a week [pupils] could produce something handwritten that is judged partly on its legibility, or even its beauty."

Adults too can improve their writing, in a matter of weeks with a textbook and expert advice. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs has said that if he had not taken a calligraphy course at college, he would not have thought of putting multiple typefaces on the Mac.

Perhaps the best argument for keeping our pens is that otherwise, in a society that is recorded in more detail than any which came before it, we will leave plenty of data but very little of our personalities behind.

Our descendants may struggle to read our letters, but they'll never even see most of our texts and e-mails.

SHOW US YOUR HANDWRITING 1. Here are three examples of handwriting, courtesy of the Magazine team (in ascending order of readability) 2. We've written the pangram: "How quickly daft jumping zebras vex" and underneath our name and age 3. Now we want you to write the same sentence, with your name and age underneath 4. E-mail a picture or scan of your handwriting to yourpics@bbc.co.uk with the subject line "HANDWRITING", and we'll feature as many as possible next week

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It's Your Turn: Male Contraception

New male contraceptive injection appears effective

Updated Tue. May. 5 2009 1:11 PM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

An injection for men appears to be just as effective at preventing pregnancy as the birth control pill, finds new research that could revolutionize contraception.

In testing in China, only one man in 100 fathered a child while on the injections, the study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism reports.

The contraceptive is a form of testosterone that is injected into the buttocks once a month. It works by temporarily blocking sperm production.

Chinese researchers injected 1,045 healthy Chinese men aged 20 to 45 years with a 500 mg of testosterone undecanoate in oil, once a month for 24 months. All of the study participants had had at least one child and all their female partners, aged 18 and 38 years, also had normal reproductive function.

They found the contraceptive was almost 99 per cent effective, with a failure rate of only 1.1 per 100 men.

There were no serious side effected reported in any of the men, unlike previous studies on hormonal male contraceptive. Some of the side effects of those formulations have been mood swings and a lowered sex drive.

In all but two of the men in this study, reproductive function returned to normal range within six months of stopping the injections.

"For couples who cannot, or prefer not to use only female-oriented contraception, options have been limited to vasectomy, condom and withdrawal," said Dr. Yi-Qun Gu, of the National Research Institute for Family Planning in Beijing, China.

"Our study shows a male hormonal contraceptive regimen may be a potential, novel and workable alternative."

It should be noted though that almost a third of the 1,045 men in the 30-month trial did not complete the study. No reason was given.

Gu says while the results of this trial are encouraging, more long-term testing needs to be done on the safety of the regimen, with a focus on cardiovascular, prostate and behavioral safety.

Gu said if further tests proved successful, the treatment could become widely available in five years.

**** right, so if you guys can't take minor mood swings and lowered sex drives, how do you think we feel, our list is longer.