"Lance" gmail.com> wrote February 17, 2008

Taking Play Seriously
By ROBIN MARANTZ HENIG

On a drizzly Tuesday night in late January, 200 people came out to
hear a psychiatrist talk rhapsodically about play

A warning from the Telegraph - also, it seems, a bit of nominative
determinism:

"
Why beer harms science

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor

Beer is bad for science, according to a pioneering study of the
effects of alcohol on creativity in research.

Although scientists spend much time agonising over how to measure
scientific productivity and revealing what influences it, none of them
have looked into the effects of social life.

A glass and bottle of Czech beer Pilsner Urquell
A glass and bottle of Czech beer Pilsner Urquell

One of the most frequent social activities in the world is drinking
alcohol - around two billion are thought to partake - and Dr Tomas
Grim, who is a behavioural ecologist at Palacky University, Czech
Republic, decided to investigate, reporting the discovery that it
harms science in the prestigious ecological journal Oikos.

NYT
February 19, 2008
Basics
What People Owe Fish: A Lot
By NATALIE ANGIER
Being a resolute hydrophobe who has no more desire to go for a swim
than might a kitten in a bag or Luca Brasi in “The Godfather,” I admit
I never thought of myself as a large, scaleless fish out of water.

Yet after reading Neil Shubin’s brisk new book, “Your Inner Fish,” and
speaking with other researchers who use fish to delve into the history
of vertebrates in general and ourselves in particular, I realize that
many traits we take pride in, the body parts and behaviors we exalt as
hallmarks of our humanity, were really invented by fish.

You like having a big, centralized brain encased in a protective bony
skull, with all the sensory organs conveniently attached? Fish
invented the head.

NYT
February 19, 2008
Mind
‘Have You Ever Been in Psychotherapy, Doctor?’
By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.
A curious thing happened to one of my psychiatric residents not long
ago. One of his patients caught him off guard with a challenging
question: “Have you ever been in psychotherapy yourself?”

He was uncomfortable answering the question directly, so he spent some
time trying to discover why it mattered to his patient. “He wanted to
know if I knew what it felt like to be ill and helpless,” the resident
said.

It was an interesting question, and it made me wonder whether one
could be a good therapist without having been in psychotherapy. If the
answer was no, it would appear to be at odds with what we do in the
rest of medical practice.

After all, we don’t require neurologists to have a spinal tap or
cardiac surgeons to have undergone bypass surgery before performing
these medical procedures.

"It is unworthy of excellent men to lose hours, like slaves,
in the labor of computation, which could be safely relegated
to anyone else if the machine were used."

Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, 1646-1716
(quoted in material which came with the HP35, circa 1972)

"If we were able to understand sufficiently well the order of the
universe,
we should find that it surpasses all the desires of the wisest of us,
and that it is impossible to render it better than it is,
not only for all in general, but also for each one of us in
particular." [G.W.L.]

Baron Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, 1646-1716, co-inventor of
Calculus.

Bios and relation to Newton:
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/leibnitz.htm
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/pub/HistMath/People/Leibniz/RouseBall/RB_Leib...

"Leibniz invented the Step Reckoner, a machine capable of addition,
subtraction, multiplication, division, and finding square roots."
http://www.andrews.edu/~calkins/math/biograph/bioleib.htm

Tests have shown that those whose levels are particularly low are in
for a long depressive episode and may find that their bodies do not
respond well to regular antidepressant medications because of this
missed vitamin. George http://www.best-depression-info.com