Our exercise this week was another wordlist poem: using word from the following list: action balance cascade appreciate romance fauna courageous rhythm timber/tymbre quench fire stoke enchant negative lichen

balance
the dark and the light
balance
the positive and negative
balance
enchantment and disgust
balance
the stoking and the quenching of the fire
balance
action and acceptance
balance
courage and fear

it is the time when the axis is orthogonal to the sun
when we turn neither toward
nor away from
not staring into the light
blinded by it
not turning out backs to it

Some discussion over on Slashdot about the placebo effect. Following are some of my posts on the topic.

If I could explain the placebo effect I'd be a millionaire.

The problem is that there are several different things that get lumped under the label "placebo effect":

• Patient experiences no difference in their perception of symptoms, but feels compelled by social pressure to report an improvement. I.e., "It still hurts as much as ever, but I don't want to disappoint Dr. Smith, so I'll say it's better."
• Patient has no difference in symptoms, but perceives them differently. The pain signal arriving at the brain is unchanged, but comes to be processed differently.
• Patient believes in ability of the healer or treatment, gains confidence that they will recover, stress responses are reduced, and the immune and parasympathetic responses are improved.
• Patient gains feelings of acceptance into their tribe/social group as a result of being tended to by the healer. Stress responses are reduced, and their relationship to their community is transformed; a new psychological perspective may be adopted that changes their "will to live" and perception of their "quality of life". Humans are social animals, and I think the social aspects of healing have been tremendously underexamined.
• Patient comes to feel empowered over their own health because they are able to take simple actions, and so are eventually led to make lifestyle changes that lead to improvements.
• Patient benefits from non-specific aspects of treatment. For example, after placebo surgery, skilled nursing during recovery may well have benefits. (I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that every double-blind placebo-controlled study of a surgical technique, has found the surgery to be no better than a placebo cut. Yet many "skeptics" who demand rigorous double-blind studies of "alternative" treatments will go under the knife without a second thought.)

This week's missions: first, write one-half of a telephone conversation

Yeah, hi. It's me.

Got your message. What's up?

Yeah, sure.

Uh huh. Uh huh.

That's cool.

That's your mom's husband, right?

Uh huh.

Ha-ha!

Oh, not much. Finished painting that bedroom a few days ago, so that's good. Oh, and I bought a new vacuum cleaner today. On sale at Target.

Yeah. Well, needed one that would get up the dog hair. It's a Bissel.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm trying to write something.

Yeah, usual Sunday night thing.

Uh huh.

Our exercise this week was another "intelligence test", where we made up goofy multiple-choice questions for each other, then wrote poems based off the answers we chose. My questions:

1) Where would you look for your lost keys?

• in a pants pocket
• in your dog's mouth *
• in between the pages of a book
• in a parallel universe

2) When is the best time to see the moon?

• on election day
• at night
• at last call at the bar *
• 12:17 in the morning on February 29th

In case you haven't heard about it yet, this Washington Post op-ed, by Vera Leone of the Drug Policy Alliance, lays out the story of Cheye Calvo. He's mayor of Berwyn Heights (where, BTW, I lived in 1989 when I was a student at UMCP ). A UPS package full of cannabis (part of a smuggling scheme that targets innocent customers) came to his door; when he brought it inside, SWAT thugs broke in, shot his dogs, held him in handcuffs for hours. Apologies from the county stormtroopers responsible? None.

Of course, the only reason this gets attention is because it was a white middle-class suburban guy with connections; if you're poor and black or brown, this is standard operating procedure in the "War on Drugs".

Sweet.

Sci-fi made real: a man who's been paralyzed for 20 years, walking thanks to a robotic exoskeleton. "The device, called ReWalk, is the brainchild of engineer Amit Goffer, founder of Argo Medical Technologies, a small Israeli high-tech company. Something of a mix between the exoskeleton of a crustacean and the suit worn by Robocop, ReWalk helps paraplegics - people paralysed below the waist - to stand, walk and climb stairs."

From the New York Times blog "The Lede": "Ohio is an election battleground state with perennial problems at the polls. So what have election officials in some precincts of the state been doing to keep their voting machines safe from tampering? Taking the machines home with them and stashing them in their garages in the days before a big election."

Oy.

New Scientist reports that magpies have been shown to recognize themselves in a mirror. Previously, only humans, four other ape species, bottlenose dolphins, and Asian elephants had shown this ability.

I didn't watch much of the Olympics, partly because the events I want to see never get covered, partly because I'm still uneasy about the whole Beijing hosting thing. But two bits worth noting:

• During the opening ceremonies, the Microsoft Windows "Blue Screen of Death" made an appearance. Ha, ha. "Perhaps this is simply Microsoft's idea of 'product placement', as the BSOD is one of the more recognizable features of Windows, and perhaps transcends all language barriers," quips macenstein.com.

Tonight's Zelda's exercises. Two tonight.

The first was to write a poem from images of a pivotal event. In two parts:

1) write about some pivotal event, using as much concrete detail as possible

I was eleven years old when I took my first computer programming class. It was as part of a special summer program for "gifted" students at Western Maryland College. This was before the days of PCs in every house; we were working on a minicomputer, a PDP/11, and had to connect from old style blue-on-black CRT terminals with heavy-duty keyboards that clacked when you typed, using acoustic-coupler modems. You dialed - really dialed, on black Bakelite rotary phones - the extension number for the computer, waited for the ethereal whistle of data, then placed the handset into a pair of suction-cup like cuffs on the modem.