Concepts, Ideas, Thoughts & Bullsh!t

I have long believed in the mind body connection. I have noticed recently more and more stories like the one below. Often these type of stories just scrape the surface in an attempt to not offend common current thinking. This story was published by the Telegraph.co.uk which bills itself as "Britain's No.1 quality newspaper website". While I have used excerpts from this story to make a larger "Thought Provoking" point, I have included a link to the entire story.

New kidney 'changed my whole personality'

A woman claims to have undergone a complete "personality transplant" after receiving a new kidney.

Cheryl Johnson, 37, says she has changed completely since receiving the organ in May. She believes that she must have picked up her new characteristics from the donor, a 59-year-old man who died from an aneurysm.

Now, not only has her personality changed, the single mother also claims that her tastes in literature have taken a dramatic turn. Whereas she only used to read low-brow novels, Dostoevsky has become her author of choice since the transplant.

Cellular memory is the hypothesis...

Academics in America have developed a theory called cellular memory phenomenon to explain the personality changes that are allegedly experienced by some transplant recipients.

Cellular memory is the hypothesis that such things as memories, habits, interests, and tastes may somehow be stored in all the cells of human bodies, i.e. not only in the brain.

Examples include a Massachusetts woman with vertigo who became a climber; a Milwaukee lawyer who began eating Snickers, having always hated chocolate; and a seven-year-old girl who had nightmares about being killed after being given the heart of a murdered child.

However, the only case recognised by the scientific community is that of a 15-year-old Australian girl whose blood type changed following a liver transplant.

Body memory is a belief that the body itself is capable of storing memories, as opposed to only the brain. It was cited by some to explain certain claims of having memories for events where the brain was not in a position to store memories.

The Daily Mail reports the following story:

Shocking examples of cellular memory

Professor Gary Schwartz's findings are backed up by Dr Paul Pearsall, author of The Heart's Code, a book dealing with the same phenomenon.

Their casebook also includes:

A woman who was terrified of heights until she was given the lungs of a mountain climber. Dottie O'Connor, from Massachusetts, is now a climber.

A seven-year-old girl had nightmares about being killed after being given the heart of a child who had been murdered.

Paul Oldam, a lawyer from Milwaukee, received the heart of a 14-year-old boy and inherited his craving for Snickers.

And a man of 25 received a woman's heart and, to his girlfriend's delight, now wants to go shopping all the time

Here is the real question... Is the Brain NECESSARY?

A post in Alternative Science asked this question:

IS YOUR BRAIN REALLY NECESSARY?
By Richard Milton
Alternative Science

Is your brain you really necessary? The reason for my apparently absurd question is the remarkable research conducted at the University of Sheffield by neurology professor the late Dr. John Lorber.

When Sheffield's campus doctor was treating one of the mathematics students for a minor ailment, he noticed that the student's head was a little larger than normal. The doctor referred the student to professor Lorber for further examination.

The student in question was academically bright, had a reported IQ of 126 and was expected to graduate. When he was examined by CAT-scan, however, Lorber discovered that he had virtually no brain at all.

Instead of two hemispheres filling the cranial cavity, some 4.5 centimetres deep, the student had less than 1 millimetre of cerebral tissue covering the top of his spinal column. The student was suffering from hydrocephalus, the condition in which the cerebrospinal fluid, instead of circulating around the brain and entering the bloodstream, becomes dammed up inside.

Normally, the condition is fatal in the first months of childhood. Even where an individual survives he or she is usually seriously handicapped. Somehow, though, the Sheffield student had lived a perfectly normal life and went on to gain an honours degree in mathematics. This case is by no means as rare as it seems. In 1970, a New Yorker died at the age of 35. He had left school with no academic achievements, but had worked at manual jobs such as building janitor, and was a popular figure in his neighbourhood. Tenants of the building where he worked described him as passing the days performing his routine chores, such as tending the boiler, and reading the tabloid newspapers. When an autopsy was performed to determine the cause of his premature death he, too, was found to have practically no brain at all. Do you need your brain? Professor Lorber has identified several hundred people who have very small cerebral hemispheres but who appear to be normal intelligent individuals. Some of them he describes as having 'no detectable brain', yet they have scored up to 120 on IQ tests.

Later in that post was this:

One of the few biologists to propose a radically novel approach to these questions is Dr. Rupert Sheldrake. In his book A New Science of Life Sheldrake rejected the idea that the brain is a warehouse for memories and suggested it is more like a radio receiver for tuning into the past. Memory is not a recording process in which a medium is altered to store records, but a journey that the mind makes into the past via the process of morphic resonance. Such a 'radio' receiver would require far fewer and less complex structures than a warehouse capable of storing and retrieving a lifetime of data.

CITB EDITOR'S NOTE: The name Dr. Rupert Sheldrake may sound familiar to CITB readers. It is Dr. Sheldrake that is directing the experiments detailed in our post titled Do You Have Telephone Telepathy?

As I stated at the start of this post, my intent was to make a larger "Thought Provoking" point, and here it is...

To see the potential in this story requires one to do some "Outside The Box" thinking. This is something that I feel it is our duty at CITB to encourage. This story does not require a quantum leap of logic - it just requires you to see possibilities until more scientific data can be gathered. But, of course, such a crazy idea couldn't possibly be true, could it?

CITB Quote of the day: "Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is usually more important than the outcome." - Arthur Ashe

This may be slightly off-topic for this blog, so I'll say up front that if any Mac blogs (or Mac-related web sites) would like to pick this up and republish it, please feel free. Having said that, I've been using a Mac mini for a little over a month (alongside a Windows box) and there are a few annoyances I've discovered that don't appear to have easy resolutions (and please feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about any of these!). These have all been observed under Leopard. Listed in reverse order, starting with the least annoying and progressing to most annoying (to me, anyway):

Finder won't save FTP passwords - you may not realize that you don't really need an external FTP client to connect to an FTP site. Finder lets you do it (while in a Finder window, use Go|Connect to Server from the top menu bar, then specify the FTP address as you would in a web browser, starting with ftp://). It will pop up a box asking for your user name and password, and that box includes a checkbox that offers to remember your password on your keychain - except that it doesn't, at least when I tested it. Once you've done this, the site opens in a finder window, and (assuming you have the proper permissions on the server) you can move files back and forth just as you can to or from any networked drive. The annoyance here is that you have to re-type the password each time. My solution? I use muCommander (a cross platform, twin-pane file manager, somewhat like the old Norton Commander program) for FTP transfers - it will remember the passwords, works very well, and it's free!
Unexplained program crashes - sometimes, for no apparent reason, a program will just crash, and a box pops up asking if you want to restart it or ignore it. This seems to happen frequently when I'm actually trying to quit a program (some programs are worse than others in this regard) but at least in those cases I'm actually wanting the program to quit. More annoying is when it happens for no apparent reason while trying to do something perfectly normal, like opening a file. This happens with both Apple-supplied apps and third-party apps. The saving grace is that this rarely happens in a way that you actually lose data, so it's just annoying that you have to restart the program (or click a button to ignore the error when you really want to quit).
Firewall blocks incoming connections only - Leopard provides a firewall, but it only blocks incoming connections, and seems to allow or disallow connections on a per-application basis only (in other words, if you allow one incoming connection to an app, you allow them all). It has no way to prevent rogue apps from "phoning home", and third-party Mac apps seem much worse about phoning home without express user permission than PC apps (although many do ask first, and in some cases the only reason for "phoning home" is to check for new versions). There is a third-party add-on that provides outgoing connection blocking but it costs money, and some users have reported problems after installing it, which is why I'm not naming it here. C'mon, Apple, one of the reasons people buy Macs is because they perceive them to be more secure than PC's, so at least give us a firewall preference panel that doesn't look like it was thrown together in a single afternoon, and actually allows flexibility in blocking both outgoing and incoming connections.
No simple way to paste plain text - Let's say you want to do a copy and paste of some text from your web browser to an outgoing mail. You'll get different results depending on the browser you are copying from, but under no circumstances will you get plain text. On a PC, using Eudora, I could always do Control-Shift-V to paste plain text. Try using Command-Shift-V in Apple Mail and it does change the formatting, but also pastes the text as if it were a quote from the message being replied to. The ONLY way I've found around this is to use a utility called Plain Clip, which sits in the dock, and when you click on it it changes whatever text is in the clipboard to plain text. But that's cumbersome to use when you are in the middle of a keyboard operation (you have to move a hand from keyboard to mouse to perform this operation). I can't believe there's no keystroke combination that will simply strip the formatting from text and paste it as plain text, but if there is, I sure haven't found it. Edit: Would you believe that pressing Alt-Command-Shift-V (or in AppleSpeak, Option-Command-Shift-V) sometimes works to paste plain text? Yes, that's a FOUR key combination. Wonder what genius came up with that one?!
No way to delay outgoing mail - While on the subject of the Apple Mail program, I'm the type of person who frequently composes a mail, clicks Send, and then realizes that I should have added something (like a URL to a web page) or perhaps included another recipient. Sometimes, infrequently, I realize I shouldn't have sent it at all. On the PC, in Eudora, I could set it up so that it only sent out mail in batches at predefined intervals (I used 20 minutes), which let me catch most of my "mistakes" before they were actually sent. With Apple Mail, you click Send and boom! It's gone, with no "cooling off" period whatsoever. I would be oh, so happy if someone would come out with a "delayed send" plugin for Mail, that you could click and it would delay sending until 20 minutes into the future (or some other predefined period) - and if you then reopened and edited the message, the clock would reset. There are, of course, times when I really do want the message to go out immediately, but most of what I send is not time-sensitive and I'd really appreciate the opportunity to have an automatic delay on sent e-mail (and one that does not involve clicking around and making an event in iCal, or something that's more difficult than it should be).
iCal can't set a recurring alarm for the exact time of the event - And speaking of iCal, maybe I'm missing something obvious, but it doesn't seem to have a fast and elegant way to set up a simple recurring reminder (such as, I want an alarm to pop up on my computer at 9:00 AM on the third of every month). You have to create an event, and then you can specify that it's a recurring event and then specify the popup alarm, but annoyingly you cannot set the alarm to the exact start of the event - it can be one minute before or one minute after (if you manually enter those), or 15 minutes before or 15 minutes after if you take the defaults. But sometimes you don't want to create an event in the usual sense of the word, you just want a simple reminder at a specific time, and iCal makes this more difficult than it should be. Bonus iCal annoyance: If you enter someone's birthday in the Address book, an entry shows up on that day in iCal, but there's no way to associate an alarm with it. Didn't anybody at Apple consider that you might want to have a popup reminder a day or two before the birthday?
This is the one that really bugs me. On a Mac mini, you can plug in any USB keyboard, or just about any keyboard if you get a cheap PS2 to USB adapter (these are easy to find on eBay), so you can still use all those free-after-rebate keyboards you stocked up on several years ago. A minor annoyance, at least for me, is that if I simply reboot the computer without powering it down completely for a few seconds, it doesn't recognize the keyboard at all. But, that I could live with. What's really annoying is that the geniuses at Apple decided that the numeric keypad should only be a numeric keypad - the NumLock key is disabled, and there's no way to get the directional keys or Ins/Del keys to work (please note I'm talking about the keys on the numeric keypad, NOT the keys between the alpha keypad and the numeric keypad, which for the most part work fine though not always exactly as on a PC). The reason this is a HUGE annoyance for me is that I learned to type on a manual typewriter and when I want a number, I use the numbers in the row above the QWERTY line of keys. And for that reason, ever since there have been numeric keypads on keyboards I've always released NumLock and used the numeric keypad for navigation only. Do you have any idea how hard it is to unlearn a quarter century of habit? And there is simply no good reason that Apple could not have allowed PC keyboards to work as expected - their OS is built on Unix, after all, and I'm sure that most Unix-based operating systems don't disable the NumLock (no version of Linux does that to my knowledge). I hope that when whoever made the decision to eliminate the NumLock switch gets old, they are forced to change some longstanding habits just to accommodate some idiot designer's idea of how things ought to work. Can you tell I'm REALLY PISSED about this one? You would be too, if you hit the wrong key about 300 times a day (in my case it's the Delete key on the numeric pad), then had to backspace and find the right one. Yes, I finally did find a hack that works in a few programs (Apple Mail for one) but for whatever reason, it doesn't work in Firefox (such as when entering this post). Edit: Help is finally here! The program KeyRemap4MacBook now has the ability to fix the numeric keypad (even in Firefox). Be sure to get the latest release version (3.1.0 or better). In that program, you will want to enable "Use KeyPad as Arrow (PC Style NumLock)" and (optionally) "Use PC Style Home/End (Command+Arrow)" and/or "Application Key to F11" (the "Application" key is the one between the right-hand Windows/Command key and the right-hand Ctrl key on PC-style keyboards).

Well, that's my list of Mac irritants. Now, please don't get the wrong idea, there's a lot to like about the Mac, and some things are definitely easier on the Mac. Even my list of irritations are for the most part small stuff, but that's part of what makes them irritating - I have to think that none of the things on my list would take considerable effort for the coders at Apple to fix (except maybe the firewall thing), and many of them might only take an hour or so, maybe less. What I don't know is whether these things annoy anyone but me, or whether others have found acceptable workarounds.

One thing that might have been on this list a month ago, but isn't now, is a lack of good freeware and open-source software for the Mac, compared to what's available for Linux and the PC. It turns out that there's a wealth of Mac freeware out there, but you have to find the sites that list it, and they do exist. The annoyance, if you can call it that, is that on several of the Mac-based forums they just don't talk about the freeware much. It seems that there is a certain contingent within the ranks of Mac devotees that has the attitude that free software can't be good software, which is a myth long since discarded among Windows and Linux users (and I think the Mac folks are coming around, but some of them are doing a lot of kicking and screaming about it). Here are links to a few good Mac freeware sites that also have RSS newsfeeds:

http://www.thriftmac.com/

http://www.freemacware.com/

http://www.myosxfreeware.com/

Edit: Also see this blog post: 20 Resources for OS X Freeware

There are probably other good Mac freeware sites (feel free to mention them in a comment, but be aware that I'll actually check the link, so don't try to spam!)

This article republished from http://michigantelephone.wordpress.com/

CITB Quote of the day: "There Are No Victims Only Volunteers" - Dr. Phil

SearchWarp.com Is On A Mission!

SearchWarp.com's mission is to foster intelligent discussion from diverse viewpoints while providing useful information to the World. Their vision is to be a platform for common people to be heard while airing sometimes uncommon points of view. They pledge to do what they can to use their small corner of the World Wide Web to make the Internet a better place!

[ http://searchwarp.com/ ]

Writing Links For Writers

Internet-Resources.com is THE authority for Writing Links for Writers. It is the greatest maintained source of Writers' Resources on The Web. It was declared "One of the 101 Best Websites For Writers" (Writer's Digest 2006). CITB gives the our HIGHEST recommendation as a resource site.

[ http://www.Internet-resources.com/writers/ ]

Language Is A Virus - Writers Block Tools

Widgets to Cure Writer's Block - Poetry Generator - Random Line Generator - Title-o-Matic - Creative Writing Prompts - Creative Writing Exercises & Writing Prompts - Visual Inspiration for your Writing - Character Generator - Brainstorm Writing Techniques

[ http://www.languageisavirus.com/ ]

TextOpus - All The Text Tools You Need!

You will find here all the text tools you need - everything from sorting lines to advanced encryption and hashing! Letter Case Conversions like - All Uppercase - All Lowercase - Title Case. In addition it can do special text conversions like Shuffle Letters, Clean Text, Reverse Text, Strip Tags, Compress and Statistics. This website was created to help you do operations on text. You can use these tools for fun or work(commercial usage allowed!)

[ http://textop.us/ ]

Specialty Dictionaries

Not even a native speaker knows all the words of his own language. Technical vocabulary is used only by specialists and so is not generally known by non-specialists. Here you will find dictionaries and glossaries of specialized words in the English language. New specialties and dictionaries are constantly being added to YourDictionary.com's Specialty Dictionary Department.

These are the CURRENT Specialty Dictionaries available:

Accounting, Advertising, Agriculture, Anthropology, Archeology, Architecture, Art, Astronomy, Automobiles, Aviation, Beauty, Beer, Beverages, Biography, Biology, Botany, Business, Carpentry, Ceramics, Chemistry, Children, Chocolate, Clothing, Coffee, Collecting, Computing, Construction, Cooking, Crafts, Criminology, Crosswords, Dance, Dentistry, Dialects, Dinosaurs, e-Commerce, Economics, Education, Elections, Electronics, Energy, Engineering, Entomology, Environment, Etymology, Film, Finance, Fish, Food Industry, Forestry, Furniture, Gambling, Games, Genealogy, Geography, Geology, Golf, Grammar, History, Horology, Humor, Hunting, Idioms, Insurance, Internet, Investment, Jewelry, Labor Relations, Law, Leather, Library, Linguistics, Liquor, Literature, Magic, Marketing, Mathematics, Measures, Media, Medicine, Metallurgy, Meteorology, Military, Mining, Multimedia, Music, Mythology, Names, Nationalism, Net Lingo, Oil & Gas, Paleontology, Paper-making, Pharmacy, Philosophy, Photography, Physics, Politics, Pools & Spas, Printing, Professions, Psychology, Publishing, Quotations, Railroads, Real Estate, Recreation, Religion, Retailing, Rhetoric, Robotics, Safety, Sailing, Science, Security, Shakespeare, Shipping, Slang, Sociology, Space, Sports, Statistics, Telecom, Terrorism, Textiles, Theater, Tools, Trade, Transportation, Travel, Water, Weather.

[ http://www.yourdictionary.com/specialty.html ]

OneWord - OneMinute

Do you want to be inspired. Do you need to write because that is how you improve - BY WRITING! Here is a concept that will be both fun and helpful. It is very simple. When you press the "GO" button you will see one word at the top of the new page. Then you have sixty seconds to write about it. Again it is very simple - as soon as you click "go" the page will load with the cursor in place and ready. Don't Think. Just Write.

[ http://oneword.com/ ]

CITB Quote of the day: "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover" - Mark Twain

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