For later reading

Oliver Sachs, on memories, and how some of our memories are falsely remembered, or embellished by remembering them

What is clear in all these cases—whether of imagined or real abuse in childhood, of genuine or experimentally implanted memories, of misled witnesses and brainwashed prisoners, of unconscious plagiarism, and of the false memories we probably all have based on misattribution or source confusion—is that, in the absence of outside confirmation, there is no easy way of distinguishing a genuine memory or inspiration, felt as such, from those that have been borrowed or suggested, between what the psychoanalyst Donald Spence calls “historical truth” and “narrative truth.”

Freakonomics has a similar article on memories that are not quite true.
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Dave Barry post of the day:

THINGS GUYS THINK ABOUT

What happens when a ping pong ball moving at supersonic speed hits a paddle?

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 Ten Mardi Gras recipes

and no, we don't celebrate Mardi Gras here in the provinces. We party all the time.

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For $60 you can have your dog's personality analyzed.

more links from Incredible things..

10 Valentine’s Day Gifts for the Special Geek in Your Life – Mashable
25 Incredibly Intricate Video Game Papercraft Builds – Bit Rebels
15 Craziest Valentine’s Day Gifts – Oddee
 Ridiculous Warning Labels – Neatorama
Valentine’s Gifts For Her: If It’s Hip, It’s Here – Cool Material
9 Bumper Stickers for People Who Don’t Suck – College Humor

 That last one includes this nice bumper sticker:

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SavageMinds (an anthropology blog) has a bunch of links to toilet stories.

No, not scatological stuff, but practical stuff (as a doc, this is part of our public health training).

Related item: using nano particles to clean water of germs

They also have a long article on torture justification in the recent film on OBL.

While not being an ideological condemnation of the prosecution of the ‘war on terror,’ it seems to me that it does portray the inhumanity, and figuratively the non-humanity, of those prosecuting it through the symbolism of affect (or its absence) it deploys.  The symbol is ultimately a kind of killer (affectless) insect.  This is what US ‘national security’ has become.

 My own essays on the dilemma are here and here.


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