Well, Now We Know

As my friend Bob puts it, now that I've reached "advanced middle age," i.e., that would be pressing almost 7 decades on this planet, I can't remember shit. There's a wide, real wide, variety of health issues that people have at this stage of life, but there's one complaint that's universal. The older you get, the less you can remember. What's clear is stuff that happened years and years ago. What happened yesterday . . . well, not so much. This piece I ran across offers an explanation.

According to Michael Yassa, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, the reason things get tougher to remember as we get older is because the pathways leading to the hippocampus degrade over the years. Since the hippocampus is where memories are stored, it makes sense that with age our brains just find it more and more difficult to process information we receive into things we remember. 

In essence, it's not that our brains are "filling up" with information; it's just that our brains get less effective at writing and storing that information as we get older. It's the reason, according to Yassa, why we're so nostalgic as we get older: it's just easier to look back on memories our brains have already stored than to create new ones that are just as vivid. At the same time, Yassa's research doesn't suggest how we can fix the process; only that the research could be useful in treating Alzheimer's in the future.

Invincible Ignorance

"Are we never going to learn that the flotsam of our invincible ignorance will always come back to haunt us on a rising tide?"

A quote from Paul VanDevelder's book Savages and Scoundrels: The Untold Story of America's Road to Empire Through Indian Territory, which won the 2011 Oregon Book Award.

How many ignorant things of the nation variety can you think of that have been done in your lifetime? I can think of several, but the first that comes to mind is getting militarily involved in the Middle East. Those wars will haunt us . . . and our children's children.

What's yours?

Happy Belated Birthday, Bob

Yesterday was Bob Dylan's 70th birthday. I'm just discovering that today. I copy this entire section from yesterday's Writer's Almanac. I've grown up with Bob Dylan. He's been a constant companion, and I've passed him on to my kids. All these many years--since the early '60s--I've marveled at his talent, delighted in his poetry, pondered his contradictions, and loved his music. There's none like him. His influence on music and my generation is unmeasurable.

It's the 70th birthday of Bob Dylan (books by this author), born Robert Zimmerman in 1941. He was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and grew up in nearby Hibbing, just off the road that ran all the way up from New Orleans and lent its name to his sixth album, 1965'sHighway 61 Revisited. He moved down to Minneapolis and studied art at the University of Minnesota, and though he'd started out his musical career with a rock 'n' roll band, he soon converted to folk, playing gigs at a coffeehouse, the 10 O'clock Scholar, in the Dinkytown neighborhood north of campus. Rock was catchy, but it wasn't deep enough to satisfy him, and he later said: "I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings." He left Dinkytown for New York and became the darling of Greenwich Village's folk community. 

By the mid-1960s, he'd gone electric, forsaking folk and returning to his rock roots. It wasn't a popular move among his fans, and at a show in England they booed him and called him "Judas." He responded by cranking the amps even louder, never one to worry about a rapport with his audience. 

His lyrics evolved too, from protest songs into more literary undertakings, influenced by Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and John Keats (to say nothing of Dylan Thomas, who inspired Zimmerman's name change). He's been called one of America's great contemporary poets, and his lyrics are studied in college poetry classes, stripped of the music. Boston University lecturer Kevin Barents directs students to consider the iambic and ballad meter on Dylan's album John Wesley Harding. Oxford professor Christopher Ricks puts him on a par with Milton, Keats, and Tennyson. He's been nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature every year since 1996. He wrote a volume of poetry and prose calledTarantula in 1966 (published in 1971), even though he had famously proclaimed himself "a song-and-dance man" in 1965, when asked outright if he was a songwriter or a poet; The New Yorker published two of his poems from that period in 2008. Perhaps it's best to draw the distinction where he did, in the liner notes for The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: "Anything I can sing, I call a song. Anything I can't sing, I call a poem." 

He's also kept up with his art, drawing and painting to fill the time when he's on the road. Some critics compare his style to Degas, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Matisse. Others say he is "spasmodically brilliant," and one art history professor said he "paints like any other amateur." The artist himself says, in his typically laconic style: "I just draw what's interesting to me and then I paint it. Rows of houses, orchard acres, lines of tree trunks, could be anything. I can turn it into a life and death drama."

Related articles

• Happy Birthday, Mister Zimmerman (waituntilnextyear.com)
• Maria Rodale: Ten Reasons Why I Love Bob Dylan (huffingtonpost.com)

Some Items . . .

. . . in USA Today that caught my eye this morning:

First, this editorial cartoon. What can I say? This is right on the money. I won't be voting for Obama in 2012. You can take that to the bank.

• Speaking of banks, apparently over 3,700 federal contractors got $24 billion in stimulus money who owed at least $750 million in back taxes, and probably a lot more according to the GAO. What's the matter with this administration? This is intolerable.

• Defaults on student loans are increasing. The average debt load for graduating seniors is $24,000. Holy cow! This is almost eight thousand dollars more than Susan and I paid for our first house. Trends are "disturbing." Half of the students at for-profit schools like University of Phoenix will default; one-third of the students at community colleges; and one-quarter of those in four-year schools. Observation: I've taught at all three of the these kinds of institutions, and this does not surprise me at all. Purist that I am, I discovered--although I admit to being a real slow learner about this--that the purpose of what used to be called higher education is not to educate anybody about anything; it's to keep the money flowing. Especially at for-profit schools like the University of Phoenix. After several years teaching for them both on-ground and online, I got fired from both jobs because I expected students to perform and to actually do the assignments. Hell, even at the University of Oklahoma, I had a graduate student tell me that he had "paid good money for this course" and he deserved an A.

• A new sex survey by the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention, described as "prestigious," by the way, finds that far from the common one in ten reckoning for the number of homosexuals in the population, the actual figure is between two and five percent. There are all kinds of other data--for some it is "preference" rather than "orientation"--but this one is the most striking to me. To tell the truth, I never thought that ten percent of the population was gay. It always struck me as a ridiculously high number. Now we've got some hard data.

Somewhere Only We Know

This English group is called Keane . . . I can't help it. I like this sweet-sounding stuff. And I cannot help but observe, from the vantage point of all these years, that the singer appears to be not a day over 16.

Yet Another Oil Crisis

Did you know that the U.S. consumes 8 percent of the world's olive oil, yet produces only about 1 percent of it? I'm not at all surprised to see that Spain is hands down leader in olive oil. When Susan and I visited there, we would go for miles on the train when all you could see on both sides of the track were olive groves. For miles and miles.

Another lesson here: big consumers of olive oil live longer and have far less heart disease. More proof that what God put here for us to begin with beats any improvement we've attempted.

Goog Lab Tools -- Chapter 2

I can't drift away from this topic without sharing a couple of other things with you. I sent this site, Art Project, to my artsy daughter a few days ago and she never responded. She's a busy person, so perhaps she hasn't gotten to it yet. This site lets you tour 17 of the world's most famous museums--Van Gogh in Amsterdam; Met, Frick, & Moma in NYC, Uffizi in Florence, for example--and examine art works really up close if you want, much closer than you would be allowed to approach in many of these museums. I've always been a sucker for sites like this. In fact, there is an incredible amount of art you can look at on the Internet. Just for starters, try this.

This little program called Google City Tours is kinda neat for those of us who want to hit the high points and avoid all that tiring research. Just type in the name of a place, click, and presto! you've got a little walking tour mapped out, complete with suggested time to spend at the attraction site and the travel time (on foot) to get there. Be advised, though, Google CT is picky about the cities it will tour in. Oklahoma City and Norman didn't rate in OK, and Baton Rouge didn't make it in Louisiana. But Cairo works, and Portland OR, and New Orleans, and Dallas+Ft Worth and Cleveland, and Mainz, Germany, and St Petersburg, Russia, and finally, Basel, Switzerland. I wore out about 15 minutes just playing around at these places.

Finally, let me suggest you take a look at "Google Reader - Play," that's what they call it. It's just a place that throws a potpourri of various stories at you, somewhat like their Fast Flip, only my little test, hardly scientific, I thought the stories on the former were more interesting and catchy, but that's only a matter of opinion.

Have fun, y'all!

Google Lab Tools

Don't know about you all, but every so often I go poking around in the Google labs to see what those guys are cooking up lately. I always find something interesting, and quite often I find tools that are more than just interesting. Take, for example, Google Squared. You can use this to list characteristics of an item or facets of a subject. The home page has examples. I tried "kitchen spices" and "chess grandmasters" and "pork chop recipes" among others. You can save the lists, share them if you want. More than just entertaining.

Really downright useful for information junkies like me is Google News Timeline. The name is a bit of a misnomer, not because it doesn't describe the tool, but because it gives no indication of its vast scope. You can push the dates of queries back on this thing for centuries. And wonder of wonders, one the magazines it gloms in on is Baseball Digest, which is really slick for a guy who does baseball research. Best thing to do with this one, and with all of these tools, I suppose, is to play around with them. Push buttons, add and subtract categories. See what happens.

Like many Google tools, things that aren't meant to be tools are very cool too. Take for example Chrome Experiments. You can just get lost in this thing. Try Ball Pool, for example, and tell me this thing doesn't hook you in. Experiments will only work for you if you use the Chrome browser to access the Net--and just as an aside, if you have not given Chrome a whirl, you should. Only Firefox comes close to it in quality. Forget Microsoft's Internet Explorer. It's been out of the race for a long time.

Related articles

• "Google Labs Launches Page Speed" and related posts (geeknewscentral.com)
• New Google Tool Lets You Preview Instant Previews In Webmaster Tools (searchengineland.com)

What's in a Name?

The website where I found this, a place called LiveLeak--which by the way I would have never found but for All My Faves--is but one of a whole bunch of places on the Web where you can find and presumably post videos. They entitle this video "The Worst Congress Ever." That's a little oblique, don't you think? I suggest something along the lines of "The national catastrophe our collection of numbskulls we call Congress chose to ignore and still choose to ignore so they can spend their time engaged in pointless and destructive political posturing." So what's in a name? I don't think this map is subtle. I see no reason its title should be either.

I Smell a Smoky Rat

You all know about our vaunted Department of Justice, right? These are the guys who cannot find a way to prosecute a single one of the Wall Street criminals who even as we speak are rolling around in money like Scrooge McDuck in his basement . . . money that we taxpayers have coughed up for their benefit without receiving anything in return. . . . while housing prices continue their plummet and unemployment for people who actually work for a living remains around ten percent. This is the same DOJ which caved to pressure from the right and changed its mind on prosecuting 9/11 prisoners on US soil. The same DOJ which even people like me who keep up on these things cannot tell you of a single accomplishment. My take is these people are not interested in prosecuting anybody worth more than a million dollars.

Yeah, these guys. Well, guess what they're up to now? The always-popular-with-the-dunder-headed-public war on drugs. What better way for the do-nothing-for-justice Department of Justice to divert attention from its utter incompetence than to stir up trouble against medical marijuana? Basically the administration has pussy-footed this issue as it has so many others that the progressive wing of the party cares about. What's happening is that the DOJ has threatened to prosecute state officials if they are in any way involved in the licensing of the production or distribution of marijuana. This effectively scares state governments into the position of doing nothing to further medical marijuana interests in their states. Moreover, DOJ is going after producers of the drug with the tax code which prohibits any tax deductions for companies "trafficking in controlled substances." So if you're a grower or processor, you basically have no tax deductions for expenses connected with your business. Nice, eh?

All of this in the face of the administration's avowed policy of not going after the medical marijuana industry. Remember that pledge? Well, brothers and sisters, what's happening here is the administration doesn't want to appear "soft on drugs" next year, so it's blunting that issue right now. These people lie as easily as they breathe.

Related articles

• What's Up With Obama's Cynical Approach to Medical Marijuana? (alternet.org)
• Obama's Broken Promise: Why Are the Feds Still Meddling with States’ Medical Marijuana Laws? (alternet.org)
• Is the Drug Prosecution Landscape Actually Changing? (slog.thestranger.com)
• ACLU Asks Holder to Clarify His Medical Marijuana Policy (reason.com)