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Sunday, Jun 22, 2003

brain powired

"The Medtronic was originally developed as a tool for brain surgery: by stimulating or slowing down specific regions of the brain, it allowed doctors to monitor the effects of surgery in real time. But it also produced, they noted, strange and unexpected effects on patients' mental functions: one minute they would lose the ability to speak, another minute they would speak easily but would make odd linguistic errors and so on. A number of researchers started to look into the possibilities, but one in particular intrigued Snyder: that people undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, could suddenly exhibit savant intelligence -- those isolated pockets of geniuslike mental ability that most often appear in autistic people."

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gods people

"To free ourselves from this self-defeating conundrum, American Jews must understand our unwitting complicity in this pact with, well, the devil. We must entertain the possibility that Israel, the nation, may not be the ultimate realization of Jewish ideals as much as a necessary compromise. Israelis get this; New Yorkers seem to have a little more trouble because we insist on seeing Jerusalem as somehow more sacred than Manhattan.

There are better arguments to be made for a Jewish homeland than the assertion that the "one and true God" gave it to us. (That’s not what abstract monotheism was invented for, anyway. She’s not just our God–she’s everyone’s.) After centuries of exile or worse by nation states with their own official religions, one Jewish strategy was to create our own nation, with its own official religion. Although long characterized by an independence from territory and local gods, Judaism might not be completely wrecked by the temporary suspension of these values for the greater priority."

[link]