The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is distancing itself from the the American Psychiatric Association and its upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5).

While they acknowledge that the goal of DSM "is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology" they are no longer convinced that approach has value if we are going to solve 21st century cognitive science problems.  It is, paraphrasing the statement  of Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, more of a dictionary than a manual.  He uses the term "Bible" instead of 'manual' but I would have used 'glossary' rather than 'dictionary'.

Is Google On The Level?

I have often complained about the way that Google search behaves.  For instance, try looking up the capacitance of a lead-acid battery.  Good luck with that - Google positively insists that you ought to want to search for capacity.

"A detailed study of four-jet hadronic events at LEP 1.5 has been reported by the ALEPH collaboration. From selected four-jet events, the invariant masses of jet pairs are computed, and out of the three jet combinations, the one with the lowest difference in jet-pair masses is retained. [...] Not only is the total number of four-jet events observed by ALEPH at 130-140 GeV larger than expected from QCD, but this excess is contained in a narrow window around 105 GeV for the sum of jet-pair masses. In this window, about two times the width of the estimated resolution, nine events are observed with only 0.8 events expected from QCD."

J.Mnich, "Recent Results from LEP", SLAC XXIV Summer Institute, 1996.

This is another of my poems for children of all ages.

It is very fortunate for me that the grammar police have never been issued with tazers.
.
.
.
.
Paddles At The Beachside

The rains is gone
the sand are dry
The sun is shone
the bird is fly.

The wavies flow
just like heart beat
I think we go
and paddle our feet.




Image courtesy: Trevor Edwards (Lucky Trev) Sheppey Pictures And Postcards.

Last weekend I participated in a chess tournament in Mogliano. This year the event was not as strong a tournament as this used to be - only 24 players, two of them international masters.  Anyway there was room for fun, since the time control was of 90 minutes for the whole game, with 30 second increments per move. This fostered a livelier play with lots of blunders especially during the second half of the games: of course the quality of the games was low with so little time to think, and younger players were favoured with respect to older ones like myself.

There a lot of rules governing how you name new species. But that doesn't mean that fun things can't still get through.
This is Kootenichela deppi, a new 540 million year old arthropod from a deposit related to the Burgess Shale in British columbia, Canada.





Dave told me he was going to call it this a while back. I didn't believe him. Lucky I didn't make a bet.

Why is it named after Johnny Depp? Well, these are its claws,



and here's it's reconstruction,

What Is Exogenous Semiotic Entropy ?

The phrase exogenous semiotic entropy is from a recent "peer reviewed" "paper".  It looks like something that came out of a buzzphrase generator which was having a bad hair day.  The phrase is, of course, complete nonsense.  As it stands.

However

If you read THE WIRED WORLD IN 2013 Annual Trend Report you may have seen my article predicting we would make a big advancement on the road to growing one of the Big 5 organs from a person's own stem cells this year.  That will mean no more driver's license donor permission, no waiting lists and no immunosuppressive drugs.

Trigemina, a company focused on creating non-narcotic pain relief drugs, is enrolling patients in a Phase II clinical trial of inhaled oxytocin to treat chronic migraine. Trigemina's oxytocin product, known as T1-001 (no doubt to be renamed to something lyrical if it comes to market), has already shown promising results in preliminary studies, the company says.

This use makes perfect sense: Oxytocin is a general analgesic (pain reducer), and it also contributes to relaxation and healing.

Content Is King

Whether writing or making videos, create content that will appeal to your chosen demographic and then make it fun.  Even better: present it in Dave's unique non-scripted overly enthusiastic style!
David L. Jones - inventor of the beesdick as a new S.I. unit - knows how to appeal to electronics aficionados almost everywhere.  I say almost because there are some who don't like the way he does what he does.  And the threat from one viewer to "beat him to death with a teaspoon" should have attracted the attention of Interpol.