This is another of those days where I wake up with a bad headache.. I'm now pretty certain that it's diet-related -- last night, I had a LOT of pizza, and often when I get these, I have a very large and unusual meal right before I went to bed (e.g. had lots of rice+olive oil+paneer) So, if I'm right, maybe I have a way of avoiding these blasted morning headaches.

Last night, in my cognitive science research methods book, I was browsing the section on ethics, and it's interesting how medical ethics often tacks on 'not harming the reputation of the field' as part of the values being pushed. It is an interesting shift in perspective that I really will need to get used to.. in some ways, it reminds me of the 'not embarassing the family' lecture I got so often when I was young. Another interesting case they brought up in that chapter was a study where they hooked electrodes to a specimen, explaining to them that they were measuring sexual arousal, and showed the specimen pictures of males and females. The meter was actually controlled by the experimenter, and the results of making specimens think they have latent homosexual tendencies were being studied. This, the book suggests, is widely thought to be unethical, even with debriefing afterwards, causing serious psychological harm. I'm not really sure what I think.. if it is granted that serious psychological harm is caused, then I wonder about a hypothetical where sexual arousal is being measured, and people who have no idea about these things are still shown the pictures and end up having 'latent homosexual urges' made visible to them. It's the same harm.. is the fact that it was intrinsic to them mitigating? Speaking of concepts like mitigation, are medical ethics in practice laid out like law? Or do IRBs and other parts of the infrastructure to advance this stuff weigh it all on the surface level? I think that it is structured to be a bit more proactive -- the science/medical community suffers when members of it breach the code of ethics (or so the theory goes), while the legal community doesn't suffer when random citizens break the law.. so in practice, experiments typically need to be approved before they're carried out. At least, that's the impression that I get from this book, the training I had to do for work, and classes so far. Another interesting tidbit -- apparently, E. Velten designed a method to induce temporary depression in subjects. I find this fascinating.

There was a competition to produce 30-second adverts to get BushJr out of office. The official site will let you see them, but it puts them in the middle of frames, and doesn't provide an easy way to let you download them. On the web, I'm a kleptomaniac, and I'll help you be one too. Here's easier links to download the 4 featured videos. Child's Pay If Parents Acted Like Bush What I have been up to.. Bring it On

If you want any of the other videos, figure out how to grab 'em yourself :)

This is an interesting story -- apparently in L.A., they want to make it illegal for people to wear things that make it harder for the police to arrest them. The place I saw the story originally had a user comment pointing to this sticker. It is, nontheless, a bit more tricky a problem than that. I've been to riots, and generally neither the police nor the rioters, in the ones I've seen, act very well. Property gets destroyed, roads get closed, and all sorts of fun stuff. I think there are better ways to make a political point (like surrounding government buildings, sit-ins in them, and dogging the people doing things worth protesting). There may be times when riots in the streets are the only option for a mass of people to protest the government (WTO meetings?), but they're severely overused. Losing a football game is not a reason to riot. I guess that's a digression from the issue at hand. Anyhow, chew on it -- I'm not going to weigh in on this one for now.

If you haven't seen it yet, be sure to visit the mars mission page. There's another recent scientific advance that'll change the future of humanity here.

There's been a lot of not-well-publicized nervousness on the topic of Kurdistan and Iraq recently. The Kurds, since after the first American invasion of Iraq, have had a large northern slice of Iraq for their own business, giving them a de facto state. As Iraq is being .. well, theoretically reconstructed, the question of what to do with the area is again open, and as I've noted before, all the countries that have land overlapping with the kurdish desired homeland have made very clear statements that they will not accept a recognized kurdish state. Iraq is making moves that suggest that northern Iraq will be a 'region' of Iraq that will have some moderate amount of self-determination. The Kurds are probably not too thrilled. One thing I do find interesting about Islam -- it is a faith that, by the texts, is more clearly for racial unity than Christianity... I find myself wondering if there's some tension between race-national tendencies in Kurds and the Kurdish flavour of Islam. There has been a call by antinationalist elements in Islam for the reinstatement of the Caliphate, and a single Islamic state stretching from Iran to Egypt to Turkey. Of course, these movements are labeled terrorist, but what Islamic state wouldn't label them as such when they're such a threat to their status quo... Do the Kurds want their nation for the traditional reasons (in contrast to Islamic values), because Iraq and Turkey are more secular and they're more religious, because Islamic states where they live haven't done a good job of adhering to the antiracist creed, or am I missing something?

Some weird fun.