BOM FINAL DE SEMANA

" NENHUM CAMINHO É LONGO DEMAIS QUANDO UM AMIGO NOS ACOMPANHA".

"ENQUANTO HOUVER AMIZADE COMO VOCÊ NO MUNDO, HAVERÁ PESSOAS DE SORTE COMO EU, SENDO PRIVILIGIADA PELA SUA AMIZADE".

OBRIGADA PELO SEU CARINHO, PELA SUA AMIZADE, PELA SUA CONFIANÇA. AGRADEÇO O CARINHO QUE SENTIMOS UM PELO OUTRO. MUITO OBRIGADA POR SERES MEU AMIGO(A). COM MUITO CARINHO..SANDRA

AGRADEÇO A SUA COMPANHIA!!!

Blog Coletivo-Uma Interação de Amigos-

MEUS MIMOS/SEUS PRESENTES- VOU TE ESPERAR POR LÁ.

Poetas-Um Voo Livre-

Sinal de Liberdade-uma expressão de sentimento-

TEM DESAFIO NO BLOG GRIFO PLANANTE

DESAFIO DO MÊS DE FEVEREIRO.

TODO MÊS TEM...
MEU QUERIDO AMIGO JOÃO MENERES E TODO SEU GRUPO PROMOVEM!!!.
VALE A PENA.
UM DESAFIO SUPER LEGAL.

© João Menéres

QUER SABER MAIS? ENTÃO VENHA E PARTICIPE.
CLIC NA IMAGEM E PARTICIPE DO DESAFIO DO MÊS DE FEVEREIRO...



AGRADEÇO A SUA COMPANHIA!!!

Blog Coletivo-Uma Interação de Amigos-

MEUS MIMOS/SEUS PRESENTES- VOU TE ESPERAR POR LÁ.

Poetas-Um Voo Livre-

Sinal de Liberdade-uma expressão de sentimento-

WMDs vs MDD

Weapons of Mass Destruction. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. They're really nasty, right?

Well, some of them are. Nuclear weapons are Very Destructive Indeed. Even a tiny one, detonated in the middle of a major city, would probably kill hundreds of thousands. A medium-sized nuke could kill millions. The biggest would wipe a small country off the map in one go.

Chemical and biological weapons, on the other hand, while hardly nice, are just not on the same scale.

Sure, there are nightmare scenarios - a genetically engineered supervirus that kills a billion people - but they're hypothetical. If someone does design such a virus, then we can worry. As it is, biological weapons have never proven very useful. The 2001 US anthrax letters killed 5 people. Jared Loughner killed 6 with a gun he bought from a chain store.

Chemical weapons are little better. They were used heavily in WW1 and the Iran-Iraq War against military targets and killed many but never achieved a decisive victory, and the vast majority of deaths in these wars were caused by plain old bullets and bombs. Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Kurds in Halabja killed perhaps 5,000 - but this was a full-scale assault by an advanced air force, lasting several hours, on a defenceless population.

When a state-of-the-art nerve agent was used in the Tokyo subway attack, after much preparation by the cult responsible, who had professional chemists and advanced labs, 13 people died. In London on the 7th July 2005, terrorists killed 52 people with explosives made from haircare products.

Nuclear weapons aside, the best way to cause mass destruction is just to make an explosion, the bigger the better; yet conventional explosives, no matter how big, are not "WMDs", while chemical and biological weapons are.

So it seems to me that the term and the concept of "WMDs" is fundamentally unhelpful. It lumps together the apocalyptically powerful with the much less destructive. If you have to discuss everything except guns and explosives in one category, terms like "Unconventional weapons" are better as they avoid the misleading implication that all of these weapons are very, and equivalently, deadly; but grouping them together at all is risky.

That's WMDs. But there are plenty of other unhelpful concepts out there, some of which I've discussed previously. Take the concept of "major depressive disorder", for example. At least as the term is currently used, it lumps together extremely serious cases requiring hospitalization with mild "symptoms" which 40% of people experience by age 32.

WMDs vs MDD

Weapons of Mass Destruction. Nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. They're really nasty, right?

Well, some of them are. Nuclear weapons are Very Destructive Indeed. Even a tiny one, detonated in the middle of a major city, would probably kill hundreds of thousands. A medium-sized nuke could kill millions. The biggest would wipe a small country off the map in one go.

Chemical and biological weapons, on the other hand, while hardly nice, are just not on the same scale.

Sure, there are nightmare scenarios - a genetically engineered supervirus that kills a billion people - but they're hypothetical. If someone does design such a virus, then we can worry. As it is, biological weapons have never proven very useful. The 2001 US anthrax letters killed 5 people. Jared Loughner killed 6 with a gun he bought from a chain store.

Chemical weapons are little better. They were used heavily in WW1 and the Iran-Iraq War against military targets and killed many but never achieved a decisive victory, and the vast majority of deaths in these wars were caused by plain old bullets and bombs. Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Kurds in Halabja killed perhaps 5,000 - but this was a full-scale assault by an advanced air force, lasting several hours, on a defenceless population.

When a state-of-the-art nerve agent was used in the Tokyo subway attack, after much preparation by the cult responsible, who had professional chemists and advanced labs, 13 people died. In London on the 7th July 2005, terrorists killed 52 people with explosives made from haircare products.

Nuclear weapons aside, the best way to cause mass destruction is just to make an explosion, the bigger the better; yet conventional explosives, no matter how big, are not "WMDs", while chemical and biological weapons are.

So it seems to me that the term and the concept of "WMDs" is fundamentally unhelpful. It lumps together the apocalyptically powerful with the much less destructive. If you have to discuss everything except guns and explosives in one category, terms like "Unconventional weapons" are better as they avoid the misleading implication that all of these weapons are very, and equivalently, deadly; but grouping them together at all is risky.

That's WMDs. But there are plenty of other unhelpful concepts out there, some of which I've discussed previously. Take the concept of "major depressive disorder", for example. At least as the term is currently used, it lumps together extremely serious cases requiring hospitalization with mild "symptoms" which 40% of people experience by age 32.

Play Pokemon Emerald Online Free Mac

Sweepstakes for my first birthday, blog! Ceramic restoration

February 17 Today marks one year this blog. I can not believe it to do so recently when some people and some of you have as much affection as if I knew of a lifetime. Really I have met wonderful people through this blog, to this window to the world. It fills me with happiness knowing that I have followers in a whole bunch of countries. I mostly found a second home in Argentina, where it seems that furniture is the national sport back, ha, ha ... Seriously, thank you so much support, comments, love, encouragement, even that you have given me this year and why this beautiful and functional drawing object that I've recovered, how could it be otherwise.
They sell like the Ikea, but it has its antiquity and charm of white that sticks to everything and that is fashionable. It can be used in cooking as a fruit bowl in bath soaps such as jewelry or in the bedroom. I've seen on the internet for almost any function that you please give.

Here you see how it was before cleaning, phosphating and paint to spray:



and requirements, simple and meant for all: leave a comment with your email to warn you in case of winning / a. You have until 14 March, long enough. On March 15 the results and publish the name of the winner / a. Good luck to all / as.

Boy Without A Cerebellum...Has No Cerebellum

A reader pointed me to this piece:

Boy Without a Cerebellum Baffles Doctors

Argh. This is going to be a bit awkward. So I'll just say at the outset that I have nothing against kids struggling with serious illnesses and I wish them all the best.


The article's about Chase Britton, a boy who apparantly lacks two important parts of the brain: the cerebellum and the pons. Despite this, the article says, Chase is a lovely kid and is determined to be as active as possible.

As I said, I am all in favor of this. However the article runs into trouble is where it starts to argue that "doctors are baffled" by this:

When he was 1 year old, doctors did an MRI, expecting to find he had a mild case of cerebral palsy. Instead, they discovered he was completely missing his cerebellum -- the part of the brain that controls motor skills, balance and emotions.

"That's when the doctor called and didn't know what to say to us," Britton said in a telephone interview. "No one had ever seen it before. And then we'd go to the neurologists and they'd say, 'That's impossible.' 'He has the MRI of a vegetable,' one of the doctors said to us."

Chase is not a vegetable, leaving doctors bewildered and experts rethinking what they thought they knew about the human brain.

They don't say which doctor made the "vegetable" comment but whoever it was deserves to be hit over the head with a large marrow because it's just not true. The cerebellum is more or less a kind of sidekick for the rest of the brain. Although it actually contains more brain cells than the rest of the brain put together (they're really small ones), it's not required for any of our basic functions such as sensation or movement.

Without it, you can still move, because movement commands are initiated in the motor cortex. Such movement is clumsy and awkward (ataxia), because the cerebellum helps to coordinate things like posture and gait, getting the timing exactly right to allow you to move smoothly. Like how your mouse makes it easy and intuitive to move the cursor around the screen.

Imagine if you had no mouse and had to move the cursor with a pair of big rusty iron levers to go left and right, up and down. It would be annoying, but eventually, maybe, you could learn to compensate.

From the footage of Chase alongside the article it's clear that he has problems with coordination, albeit he's gradually learning to be able to move despite them.

Lacking a pons is another kettle of fish however. The pons is part of your brainstem and it controls, amongst other things, breathing. In fact you (or rather your body) can survive perfectly well if the whole of your brain above the pons is removed; only the brainstem is required for vital functions.

So it seems very unlikely that Chase actually lacks a pons. The article claims that scans show that "There is only fluid where the cerebellum and pons should be" but as Steven Novella points out in his post on the case, the pons might be so shrunken that it's not easily visible - at least not in the place it normally is - yet functional remnants could remain.

As for the idea that the case is bafflingly unique, it's not really. There are no less than 6 known types of pontocerebellar hypoplasia caused by different genes; Novella points to a case series of children whose cerebellums seemed to develop normally in the womb, but then degenerated when they were born prematurely, which Chase was.

The article has had well over a thousand comments and has attracted lots of links from religious websites amongst others. The case seems, if you believe the article, to mean that the brain isn't all that important, almost as if there was some kind of immaterial soul at work instead... or at the very least suggesting that the brain is much more "plastic" and changeable than neuroscientists suppose.

Unfortunately, the heroic efforts that Chase has been required to make to cope with his disability suggest otherwise and as I've written before, while neuroplasticity is certainly real it has its limits.

Boy Without A Cerebellum...Has No Cerebellum

A reader pointed me to this piece:

Boy Without a Cerebellum Baffles Doctors

Argh. This is going to be a bit awkward. So I'll just say at the outset that I have nothing against kids struggling with serious illnesses and I wish them all the best.


The article's about Chase Britton, a boy who apparantly lacks two important parts of the brain: the cerebellum and the pons. Despite this, the article says, Chase is a lovely kid and is determined to be as active as possible.

As I said, I am all in favor of this. However the article runs into trouble is where it starts to argue that "doctors are baffled" by this:

When he was 1 year old, doctors did an MRI, expecting to find he had a mild case of cerebral palsy. Instead, they discovered he was completely missing his cerebellum -- the part of the brain that controls motor skills, balance and emotions.

"That's when the doctor called and didn't know what to say to us," Britton said in a telephone interview. "No one had ever seen it before. And then we'd go to the neurologists and they'd say, 'That's impossible.' 'He has the MRI of a vegetable,' one of the doctors said to us."

Chase is not a vegetable, leaving doctors bewildered and experts rethinking what they thought they knew about the human brain.

They don't say which doctor made the "vegetable" comment but whoever it was deserves to be hit over the head with a large marrow because it's just not true. The cerebellum is more or less a kind of sidekick for the rest of the brain. Although it actually contains more brain cells than the rest of the brain put together (they're really small ones), it's not required for any of our basic functions such as sensation or movement.

Without it, you can still move, because movement commands are initiated in the motor cortex. Such movement is clumsy and awkward (ataxia), because the cerebellum helps to coordinate things like posture and gait, getting the timing exactly right to allow you to move smoothly. Like how your mouse makes it easy and intuitive to move the cursor around the screen.

Imagine if you had no mouse and had to move the cursor with a pair of big rusty iron levers to go left and right, up and down. It would be annoying, but eventually, maybe, you could learn to compensate.

From the footage of Chase alongside the article it's clear that he has problems with coordination, albeit he's gradually learning to be able to move despite them.

Lacking a pons is another kettle of fish however. The pons is part of your brainstem and it controls, amongst other things, breathing. In fact you (or rather your body) can survive perfectly well if the whole of your brain above the pons is removed; only the brainstem is required for vital functions.

So it seems very unlikely that Chase actually lacks a pons. The article claims that scans show that "There is only fluid where the cerebellum and pons should be" but as Steven Novella points out in his post on the case, the pons might be so shrunken that it's not easily visible - at least not in the place it normally is - yet functional remnants could remain.

As for the idea that the case is bafflingly unique, it's not really. There are no less than 6 known types of pontocerebellar hypoplasia caused by different genes; Novella points to a case series of children whose cerebellums seemed to develop normally in the womb, but then degenerated when they were born prematurely, which Chase was.

The article has had well over a thousand comments and has attracted lots of links from religious websites amongst others. The case seems, if you believe the article, to mean that the brain isn't all that important, almost as if there was some kind of immaterial soul at work instead... or at the very least suggesting that the brain is much more "plastic" and changeable than neuroscientists suppose.

Unfortunately, the heroic efforts that Chase has been required to make to cope with his disability suggest otherwise and as I've written before, while neuroplasticity is certainly real it has its limits.