Monthly Archives: August 2001

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Roadtrip to Nova Scotia!

I’ll be on the road for the next few days enroute to Nova Scotia, Canada driving through most of New England. I’ll be stopping by in Vermont to meet an old high school friend at Dartmouth and then taking the ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine, over to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. On my way back I’ll stop by Boston and visit my friend at MIT in Boston… get some great grub at Penang and Toscy’s and then head on back to the ‘burgh. Here’s a visual…


So needless to say, my Net access will be limited and I won’t be writing as often. But I promise to put up a few more pictures when I’m back!

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Rants and Raves

Girl, Interrupted

Honestly, I really don’t remember seeing the movie based on this book, that is why I picked it up. Figured it would be good to listen to the book in it’s original form. But it turned out that I must have seen the movie at some point or seen a similar movie as the beginning of the book sounded very familiar and the descriptions and even the names of the characters sounded familiar. I guess I’d have to see the movie again to really recall if I’d seen it before!

Anyhow, on to the book… Susanna Kaysen’s description of her time spent in a mental hospital is definitely intriguing. Her description makes one question the line between sanity and insanity. Between reality and psychosis. The descriptions of the characters at the hospital is first class. Their behavior, their qirks, their likes and dislikes as seen through the author’s eyes exemplifies the flailings of the mind. The experience of the author and her fellow “patients” at the “hospital” really makes one question the virtues of psychotherapy.

Her dissection of her diagnosis of having a borderline personality disorder as defines in the Diagnosis and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) published by the American Psychiatric Association really makes one wonder as to whether there is any merit what to ever to psychiatry and especially to getting a “diagnosis” based on statistics and perceptions of the person’s behavior. To some extent the lines the author quoted from the DSM diagnosis did not seem to far of from the open-ended horoscopes or reading of the shamans, astrologers and psychics which are always open to interpretation with very little objectivity.

My biggest complaint with the book was that it lacked continuity. I guess my bias for structure and flow impeded my ability to simply go with the flow of the authors words. I tried to tie the ends together and bridge the when sometimes it’s better not to even attempt it. Though I liked the book, unfortunately, it didn’t move me as deeply as I would have expected. My expectations were probably too high. So the most I can give this book is a partial thumbs up.

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Rants and Raves

Vector

I’ve always liked Robin Cook’s books. I guess it is because I always seem to learn something from them. I like books that I learn things from, yet they are not completely bone-dry and academic in nature. A book which makes you learn without you realizing it is definitely up my alley. Robin Cook’s style seems to lend itself to that since he is a medical doctor by training that is writing fiction, but based on real life events and real life science and medicine.

In Vector, Robin Cook does an excellent job of depicting the dangers of bio-terrorism. I already wrote about this is the writings section of the site. Though the story is somewhat predictable, the author has done a great job of providing vivid descriptions in the book which truly make it come to life. The one pitfall was that too many things seemed to just fall into place in order to help the protagonist get to the bottom of the investigation. It was borderline unrealisic how the coincidences played out, but everything is still possible.

Overall, the book made for a enertaining and thought-provoking story which deserves a thumbs up since I pretty much listened to all 11 CDs (over 800 minutes) in a single marathon session!

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Thought -- caught in the act!

The Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice

I’ve been listening to the radio and hearing more and more noise about the Taliban in Afghanistan… just the stories that one can find on the Taliban are enough to make one wonder…

The articles mentioned above are just the tip of the ice-berg. CNN has an excellent special report on the Taliban, which is really worth looking at to get a sense of the insanity that still prevails in some parts of the world.

Their “Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice” has got to be the most ridiculous form of beaurocracy that I have ever heard of. In fact it puts the word beaurocracy to shame. Because this is not just government meddling in people’s live, but it is a clear and outright suppression of basic human rights. Come on… banning the Net? How can anyone live without the Net!! …okay, bad joke, but seriously…

What is happening in Afghanistan is akin to what happened in Germany prior to the World War II. In fact, in some ways it seems even more extreme. but since Afghanistan is one of those countries whose economy has been decimated over the past 20 years of stupidity and insanity that has prevailed in that nation and therefor it has little to no impact on the global economy, you don’t hear much about it at all. There is all this talk about human rights abuse in China, but very little with regards to what is happening in Afghanistan. Because China has an impact on the global economy and Afghanistan doesn’t matter.

Unimaginable that in this day and age, things like this can still happen. But then again, if Adolf Hitler could convince so many people to follow his screwed up belief system, what’s preventing some Islamic fundamentalist in Afghanistan from doing the same?

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Thought -- caught in the act!

Bio-terrorism

The book I listened to over the past weekend (Vector by Robin Cooke) was a work of fiction based on Bio-terrorism. At the end of the book the authour’s note made some pointed observations about the threat of N.B.Cs – Nuclear, Biological or Chemical weapons. Each one has the power to literally annihilate huge masses of people, animals, plants and pretty much the immediate world around us. It’s indeed stuff that makes you sit up and wonder.

In the examples of real-life examples of bio-terrorism that the author mentioned were those initiated by followers of Rajneesh – salmonella poisoning of salad bars in Oregon which affected 751 people in 1994, infectious muffins causing dysentery in 1996 and the infamous Sarin gas attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan in 1995.

What is scary about Nuclear, Bilological and Chemical warfare is not the sheer power of mass destruction that it posesses, but the fact that the knowledge of these weapons of mass destruction is accessible to people who are so screwed up in their heads so as to use it for terroristic activities. Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City is said to have been incited by the FBI raid on Waco Texas. The bombing of the US embassy’s in Kenya by Islamic fundamentalist and militant group led by Osama Bin Laden. So there is more than enugh evidence of people who believe that killing others in the name of their religious or fundamentalist beliefs is justified. I shudder at the thought of any such people using biological/chemical weapons instead of the conventional methods they have employed thus far.

In a recent conversation with a friend of mine, I remember passing a remark that these days I often wonder whether Darwinism has been reversed especially when it comes to human beings. Innocent people are killed by psychopaths. The birth rate in uneducated masses is significantly higher than that amongst those who are educated.

Bilogolocal and chemical warfare is indeed a real threat and as suggested by the author in his closing note, the only prevention against such attacks is counter-intelligence. Once again information becomes the key.

One of the characters in the book had a quote something along the lines that the threat of bio-terrorism is so real that the question is not if, but when it will happen…

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