The Binary Circumstance

From the Independent Online Edition:

“We are praying for you … you will be in my prayers.” In this ostentatiously religious country, such phrases drop routinely from the lips of presidents, politicians and ordinary people when wishing someone well before an operation. But do prayers make any difference? If a major scientific study here is to be believed, the answer is, no. Indeed, if a patient knows there is organised prayer on his or her behalf, such intercession might actually make matters worse.

These are the main, if highly tentative, findings of one of the most ambitious exercises yet to evaluate the power of therapeutic prayer. The $2.5m (£1.4m) study was done over a decade at six major US medical centres and involved 1,800 patients who had heart bypass surgery.

This is just the type of response you can expect from those who put faith above science:

“God must be smiling broadly,” said Sister Carol Rennie, the prioress of St Paul’s Monastery in St Paul, Minnesota, one of three praying congregations. “It [the study] tells me frankly that God’s way of working with people is a mystery, and that technology can’t determine the effects of prayer.”

The New York Times (reg. req.) also reported on this major study.

From the Seattle-PI:

The keys to happiness are simple — grow up, get married, have children, go to church and try to forget about the wilder days of youth.

Fifty-two percent of Americans say they are “very happy” with their lives, according to a Scripps Howard/Ohio University survey of 1,007 adult residents of the United States. Forty-three percent said they are “fairly happy,” 3 percent said they are “not too happy” and 2 percent are undecided.

That might not seem sufficiently ebullient for a nation that embraces the pursuit of happiness as an inalienable right. But the survey found Americans with particular lifestyles — especially those having a family and planting roots in a community — are much more likely to say they have found contentment.

I’m doomed.

But wait!

Those just happen to be the groups of people who have the social advantages in our society. They’re the ones with the license to keep the rest of us as their slaves, rarely missing a chance to steal the freedom and money of others by imposing their will on the marketplace.

There’s more.

The study was sponsored by the Scripps Howard Foundation. This is a portion of their mission statement.

The Scripps Howard Foundation is the corporate foundation of The E.W. Scripps Company. Our mission is to advance the cause of a free press through support of excellence in journalism, quality journalism education and professional development. The Foundation helps build healthy communities and improve the quality of life through support of sound educational programs, strong families, vital social services, enriching arts and culture, and inclusive civic affairs, with a special commitment to the communities in which Scripps does business.

It looks like their “study” gave them a “scientific basis” for their agenda. The journalists and editors who covered the story are so lacking in excellence, none of them reported the correlation between the mission of those who paid for the study and the results.

I’ll file this under science even though its junk science.

The analysis of the data, which did include other factors such as wealth, did not attempt to correlate social power and the ability to control one’s own destiny with happiness.

From the Seattle Times:

Smart children have a different rhythm in their heads, a seesaw pattern of growth that lags years behind other young people, say government scientists who mapped the brains of hundreds of children.

Seeking a link between neural anatomy and mental ability, researchers at the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) and McGill University in Montreal discovered it where they least expected — not in sheer brain size or special structures, but in the patterns of childhood growth.

Brain development in children with the highest IQs peaked four years later than among average children, the researchers reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

[…]

Among average children studied, those with an IQ measuring between 83 and 108, the growth of the cortex peaked at age 8. Among those with high intelligence, those with an IQ between 109 and 120, growth peaked at age 9.

The smartest children, those with IQs between 121 and 145, displayed a pattern of brain growth that peaked at 11 or 12.

The anatomical scans revealed that among the smartest children, the cortex displayed the longest period of growth and most rapid rate of change.

“There is something very dynamic about these brains,” said Dr. Judith Rapoport of the NIMH. “What the intelligent children have is a very malleable brain.”

No single brain scan could reveal a child’s IQ. The patterns revealed themselves across a large group. They are differences measured in fractions of a millimeter of brain tissue that emerge over a decade or more.

“These are tiny changes,” Shaw said. “But in brain terms, it is a lot.”

Investigators looking for a motive in this week’s Capitol Hill mass murder may not have found a real motive, but they may have found what set him off. They don’t seem to realize it, however.

Seattle police detectives investigating Saturday’s Capitol Hill shootings have been unable to open Kyle Huff’s computer but are not optimistic it will provide a motive for the mass killing.

Police confiscated two computer hard drives, one installed recently, from Huff’s North Seattle apartment, but computer viruses have prevented police from retrieving data, said Capt. Tag Gleason, head of the violent-crimes unit.

“It’s a piece of information we’re looking at. We’re not banking on it as a smoking gun,” Gleason said.

Huff, a 28-year-old pizza-delivery driver, gunned down six people at a Capitol Hill party Saturday morning before shooting himself. It was the worst mass killing in Seattle in 23 years.

For a person who is already angry and feeling out of control in his life, not being able to make his computer work might just be the straw that broke the camel’s back.