h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Madness can be pretty painful if it comes about because your creativity has temporarily dried up. Pink Floyd took madness and used it as part of the storyline for "Pink Floyd: the Wall." Salvador Dali used madness (or the apperance of madness) as a way of publicizing his work. For Robert Schumann and Scott Joplin, madness was a career-ending tragedy. For Sylvia Plath, the madness at the end of her life inspired her to her greatest work, but it also ended her life much too early.

Nowadays there's medication for everything. The downside is that a brilliant mind that's coincidentally beset by hallucinations and delusions can be cured by meds but also drained of much of its brilliance. That was essentially the crux of "A Beautiful Mind."
A lot of people take antidepressants these days, with probably some loss of memory as a side-effect. Maybe these meds slow the mind down, robbing it of some of its brilliance. That's a pity when the world has become so competitive, and so many careers can be made or broken by a person's capacity for hard mental work.

I remember the story about the man who had travelled far and as his journey came to a close he had only a desert to cross.
Feeling drained , and ill prepare he asked for help.
As you would expect in any good film the response is predictable” put your faith in God “.
I don’t think Charlton Hesston said it but you can imagine the scene.
So with these comforting words he sets off.
Journeys end reached and so as to remind himself of the arduous nature of his trek he looks back.
Ho dear , only one set of foot prints and now feeling disillusioned he looks up and says “ where were you when I needed you most “.
He stands and points to the foot prints , the reply , a classic one at that , clearly states ,” they are my foot prints , for it was me that carried you”.
An interesting concept, I believe that if the operating platforms that steer us through this maze called life , are robust enough then tablets have no more than a placebo effect.
I t is good medicine to rest when stressed as the mind liken to muscles can be over worked and bruised.
Going back to the story , where does a individual pin hope , it is reassuring to know that we operate on many mental platforms and can recover .
It would be a horrible thought to think that one day we woke up and thought stuff it and our heart stopped.
We are all made of this wonderful stuff called the Universe , it reaches out and touches us all, some of us need a little moral support on the way and I am sure it does not mind the rest of us delving in to its inner most secrets.

The thing is, a lot of doctors don't have time to steer patients to a good psychiatrist who might effect a cure by talking things over. Too many HMOs won't cover outpatient care of that sort, but they will cover prescriptions.

If it's tricky for professionals with years of training and experience to figure out which patients can manage without antidepressants, then how do people with no training or experience form a reasoned judgment about it? How does someone like Tom Cruise tell Brooke Shields that she shouldn't have taken medication for postpartum depression? It was a decision between Brooke and her doctor. The doctor, at least, was in a position to know something about it, and Brooke could afford to get a better doctor if she felt he wasn't giving her the right treatment. (Tom has apologized to Brooke.)

As for the HMOs that don't cover the services people need, that's a subject for a different thread. I could rant quite a bit about it...

...watching "Ratatouille" on TV as I write, an animated exploration of the existential quandry affecting a couple of dirty rats...

'Appreciation of modern art' notes, for example, Salvador Dali's "Floppy Watches" taken as an expression of frustration and repressed rage, as for example when one might take the miscreant by their scrawny neck, swing them round and round and round several times for the 440 degree twist, with another half turn for good measure, bring them crashing down on a sturdy fence rail in the middle of the back, jump up on top, planting one foot on the top of the pelvis, the other at tyhe base of the sternum, jump up and down a couple of times till one gets that soul-satisfying 'crunch', hop down on the same side as the 'face', planting one foot under the chin, reaching under the fence with one's hands, grasping the ankles of the miscreant, simultaneously pulling on the ankles and pushing with the foot, jump up, brush oneself off an walk away... ...though I'm a little tempted to go over a few of the political frustrations affecting Salvador Dali over his life and career, that's another story that would take some time, going beyond an interpretation of his 'Floppy Watches'.

One sees a similar emotive (and emotional) development in much of the grislier Hindu religious art, protest literature expressed in the form of visual wish fulfillments.

I'm reminded too of a favorite spanish language Mexican film which begins with a scene in which a couple of uniformed troops of the Mexican Federal Police are conducting a burial of two individuals outside the wall of a walled Mexican town (19th century setting). As the scene develops, the local parish priest pronounces a terrible curse over the graves, a scene so horrible that for a moment, one is thinking "Good God! They're dead already, surely we can forgive them and forget them in death!"

The remainder of the film, after the prelude, is a documentation of the crimes and misdeeds of the two bandits which led to their burial in unconsecrated ground.

...know the feeling?

Granted, this is a little off the topic of CERN, but one needs occasional recursions into emotive symbol to support a question of the cognitive and vice versa.

Starting over.

...reflections on "scientific fundamentalism" and the characteristic misconceits of it...

There is a popular misconception that Einstein proved that the speed of light is a universal invariant. As a matter of fact, he won his second Nobel prize for proving that speed of light varies with local gravitational flux densities. (The first one was for describing the principles of the photoelectric effect, opening the way for the development of things like semiconductors, lasers and modern physical chemistry.)

There are people who think that the speed of light is always the same irrespective of conditions, but it is unvarying only so long as the conditions of the medium through which its being transmitted remain the same.

The principle is fundamental to physical effects bridging the gap between relativity and quantum mechanics like the Cerenkov effect, and as a matter of fact even things like lenses and prisms wouldn't work if the speed of light didn't vary with the mass density of the medium its passing through, an effect first demonstrated and described by Fizeaue, who was mentioned by Einstein in Einstein's own book on 'special' relativity, in context of specifying limitations on the conditions of his arguments to "the speed of light in a vacuum", a qualification frequently extended to include "without any nearby interfering gravitational sources" by the more insightful authors since Einstein's publication of "General Relativity".

Many "scientific fundamentalists", though, dogmatically insist to the contrary, a point I often find infuriating.

...know nothings of the great unwashed pretending to an expertise they haven't got on a basis of "selective reading" and patent refusal to consider even incontrovertible proofs to the contrary of their deontological misconceits...

...meanwhile, any discussion always leaves a considerable body of assumption in the area of the 'understood', and since the backgrounds of knowlege of individuals vary, occasionally discussions of this and expansions on the 'understood' are necessary...

...more reflections of emotive character: One of Peter Seller's orchestrations, a cacophony which might have been whimsically described
as "The Music of Mars, in three part harmony and 3/3 time", or more aptly, "The Rock-House Rumble", for which it is an excellent synesthesia.

I believe one of the most complementary things said by one of the music critics assembled to audience the presentation was, "Stunning!"

sussed it outwe put all the world bankers in the collider circle and hang a $ bill in front of themthey'll soon reach light speed and THEN crash them - the big bangcan happen

Excellent plan, Prof!

Jab

I think that that experiment illustrates the principal of more bang for the buck.

you can't get blood from a stone and you can't get money from a YorkshiremanBUT you can get pure energy from a banker when monies involved

If you can find a banker who still has his/her job.

not ones been fired as yet

I hadn't planned on researching the truth of that. One of my friends that 100 banks will fail in the next few months. Every job in those banks will be gone. The accountholders will have their money transferred to banks that have not failed, helped by the Federal Deposit Insurance agency, which insures accounts up to $100,000 (soon to be $250,000 under the legislation signed last week by president Bush). Now, it's entirely possible that some of the employees of the failed banks will be hired by the new banks. I have known people who have gone from bank to bank like that. In the case of the massive Washington Mutual Bank, which failed and was bought out by J. P. Morgan Whatever, many of the branches simply changed the name that was on the doors. The real test will be whether any Washington Mutual employees can stand working for J. P. Morgan, which has an extremely different corporate culture.

But take my word for it, bankers lose their jobs when banks fail, and they may or may not have an easy time finding other jobs. The problem is that thirty years ago, the U.S. had more than 10,000 banks, far more than was absolutely necessary. The Reagan administration sought (and received) permission to allow for deregulation, which allowed banks to gobble each other up and spread across state lines. All well and good up to a point, but the virtue of having a local bank loaning mortgage money to local citizens is that the bankers *know* who is a good prospect for repaying the mortgage, and who isn't. The gargantuan banks that gradually took shape tried to diversify the risk by bundling up large numbers of mortgages and making derivatives of them. So, the bank that you got your mortgage from no longer has it, and may no longer even exist. Who is going to keep tabs on you> And who even cares, if your default will be swept under the rug and bought by the government in a trillion-dollar bailout that is ultimately paid for by the taxpayer and by inflationary deficit spending? Or maybe a consortium of governments of the 20 richest countries will produce a joint package to absolve you of your responsibility for not living beyond your means?

The depths of the abyss that we are plummeting into are as yet unknown. I will comment more as our journey continues.

Yep, I'm afraid that bankers AND OF COURSE ALL THEIR EMPLOYEES even on the High St., have to go when the bank goes bust. Guilty or not. Many employees have lost their jobs already.

Jab

Sorry to appear to shout at you, Prof. I wasn't shouting. I just wanted that bit to stand out, and caps is the only way we have on this site. I really wanted italics.

Jab

Interesting subjects: mental health, and the economy. Both on my mind. I'm losing money hand over fist at the moment; money I'm supposed to be living on in the distant future. *sigh* The money I get for disability is a tiny amount, not enough to live on. This financial crisis had better stabilize soon.

And God forbid McCain gets in and starts dismantling Medicare!

no worries Jabthe odd capital is needed sometimes

I believe that McCain is a good man who would do the best he could for the country he loves. The same is true for Mr. Obama and the two Vice-presidential candidates. A friend tried to tell me that Obama is a terrorist today. It must be a form of terrorism that only Republicans can detect . In any event, the winner of the election will solemnly swear to uphold the Constitution next January. There are processes in place to ensure that he keeps his promise.

A friend tried to tell me that Obama is a terrorist today.
a load of vote tickets things were sent out with osama on instead of Obama