below the mineshaft
Last night I was dumb enough to revisit mad-cow.org, which I'm not even linking because I'm angry with it. They have this thoroughly irresponsible section labeled "Bovine-CJD: might you already have it?" Early-onset symptoms include anxiety, depression, memory problems and pains in the arms and legs. Of course, after reading it, I immediately noticed "Hey, I do have pains in my arms and legs." Sort of. I expect that my brain can will these pains to occur if it thinks they're supposed to be there. Christ, I never used to be hypochondriac. In high school I would walk around campus ingesting leaves from random plants to see what would happen.
The life and times of John Nash, who invented game theory as a graduate student and immediately moved on to a spectacular decades-long madness in which he claimed, among other things, to be the Emperor of Antarctica. (I knew a schizophrenic in Palo Alto, unrelated, also obsessed with Antarctica.) Nash eventually recovered and won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics.
Survey sez Americans are not getting enough sleep or sex, and 34% of adults sleep alone.
Nélida Piñón is a Brazilian author of short and strange stories like "The Warmth of Things," in which a fat kid turns into a tamale, or is possibly a tamale the whole time. It's unclear. Oddly, her books are standard Parisian university fare in French translation, but she sells poorly at home.
