Rockin on back to Alaska

With vice-wannabe-prez Sarah Palin going back to where she came from, along with the rocks in her head, PALINSPASTIC is a particularly good word for the day.

Sensible celebs? Whatever next?

Wow!  I’m posting about a celebrity figure with approval (and one I’ve never heard of before)

Lawrence Lessig (a constitutional law prof and bigwig in Creative Commons licensing and advocacy, for more details see CreativeCommons.org and the similarly inspired GPL) just published a post "Latest ccFamous", which described some celebs who didn’t sell rights to photos of their new baby to some trashy rag for squillions, but got their own photographer and released the photos under a Creative Commons Licence.

Specifically, the licence is BY-NC-ND (details below the fold).

All I can say is well done Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale, whoever you are!  You’ll have certainly made your fans happy, who can click along to www.gwenstefani.com

A CC BY-NC-ND Gwen and baby for the fans

Not if there is an umbilibutton!

I’ve finally found a way to describe my eating habits in easy words.  Rather than say "Poulo-Pisco-Ovo-Lacto-Vegetarian", or "I don’t eat placental mammals" (but do advocate eating roo for health and environmental reasons – see notes below), given that a placenta implies an umbilicus, I can simply say:

I don’t eat anything with a belly button.

On Nature-Deficit Disorder

My Scientific American Mind and Brain RSS feed (choose one for yourself here) pointed to an article that went in a very different direction than I expected from it’s title.

I thought Does consumerism make us crazy? (2008-11-05) would discuss the stress from being in the rat race, climbing the greasy pole, etc, but instead, it went on to point out that a lack of childhood exposure to nature, associated with consumerism (I’d be specific and say "urban consumerism"), makes us crazy, even without the stressors associated with being an economic work unit rather than a human..

Richard Louv, author of the book, "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder", argues that kids are so plugged into television and video games that they’ve lost their connection to the natural world.  This disconnect, Louv maintains, has led not only to poor physical fitness among our youth (including obesity), but also long-term mental and spiritual health problems.

Interpreting disgust and contempt

PLoS has just published a paper that’ll get misrepresented by gender bigots and shock-jocks in print or the airwaves, but does offer some interesting factoids.

The paper is: Aleman A, Swart M (2008) "Sex Differences in Neural Activation to Facial Expressions Denoting Contempt and Disgust" PLoS ONE 3(11): e3622. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0003622 (available as HTML and PDF).

Basically male and female brains (no accounting yet for masculinized or feminized brains due to in-utero hormone loads) react differently to contempt (which relates to social hierarchy) and disgust (relating to ideals of physical purity).  The reaction also varied according to gender of the face being viewed.