Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind

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Future of the MindAuthor Michio Kaku is well known for his books and television popularizing science. He has recently tackled brain research.  His current book, The Future of the Mind, includes popular touches such as references to movies and TV and stories from his own life (wow, he was tough competition in high school science fairs!). The book has been on the New York Times best-seller list, and I thought it was a readable, well-prepared effort; I have watched some of Kaku’s TV shows and in places in the book I can hear his voice in my head as I read.  But somehow this book didn’t completely grab me.  I skimmed through some of the sections, but since the chapters can stand-alone, that worked well for me.

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Dr. Kaku

Kaku mentions Phineas Gage, whose accident in 1848 marked “the origins of modern neuroscience.”  When dynamite powder he was tamping down exploded, a metal rod rocketed completely through his head leaving behind massive brain damage, but Gage survived.  Kaku mentions the standard story that Gage’s personality was changed much for the worse by his accident. By coincidence, I found an article in Slate.com that says this standard story may be wrong, that the tale of his changed personality comes from a single, vague report immediately after the accident, and his subsequent life demonstrates he recovered to a remarkable extent.  But whatever the truth abut Gage, Kaku’s point remains: “it would alter the course of science.”  Continue reading →

New York Minute

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The Urban Dictionary explains that a “…New York minute is an instant…Johnny Carson once said, ‘It’s the interval between a Manhattan traffic light turning green and the guy behind you honking his horn’.” It apparently originated in Texas sometime around 1967 and refers to “…the frenzied and hectic pace of New Yorker’s lives. A New Yorker does in an instant what a Texan would take a minute to do.”

Social Security Debt Collection

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There was a recent media dust-up over the Social Security Administration seizing tax refunds to recoup over-payments that happened more than a decade ago. However, Stephen Ohlemacher of the Associated Press explained that the program would be halted at least temporarily in his article titled “Social Security halts effort to collect old over-payments.” A 2008 law allows use of a “…Treasury program to seize federal payments to recoup debts that are more than 10 years old. Previously, there was a 10-year limit on using the program.”  “The Social Security Administration says it has identified about 400,000 people with old debts. They owe a total of $714 million.” Some of the disputed benefits were paid to surviving parents or guardians of children eligible for survivor benefits or the benefits paid to a disabled child. The agency says it has already collected $55 million, and at least some of it was collected from children and grandchildren of those who were overpaid. Continue reading →

The Predictable Surprise

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book cvr_ predictable surpriseThe subtitle of this book by Sylvester J. Schieber is “The Unraveling of the U.S. Retirement System.” The book is neither a fun nor easy book to read (unless you are a compulsive accountant). However, you should consider the book if you want to know about the history and current status of Social Security and other retirement plans. Sadly, I must say the book does not have easy answers for how we can get our politicians to address some daunting problems. The dust cover explains, “Social Security is projected to deplete its funds in the 2030s. Pensions from previous generations have either disappeared or been completely reengineered…Americans are faced with the conundrum of how to pay for a growing retired population with dwindling financial resources.” The author believes privatizing part of Social Security would be a good first step, but has given up on that idea because politicians have made it a toxic idea.

I consider the most important part of the book to be a series of quotes made by Barack Obama at a roundtable discussion with the editorial board of the Washington Post four days before his first inauguration. “As soon as the economic recovery takes place, then we’ve got to bend the curve and figure out how we get federal spending on a more sustainable path…We are going also to have a discussion about entitlements and how we get a grasp on those…As bad as these deficits that have already been run up have been, the real problem is with our long-term deficits, actually, have to do with our entitlement obligations…So we’re going to have to shape a bargain. This, by the way is where…some very difficult issues of sacrifice, responsibility, and duty are going to come in because what we have done is kick this can down the road and we are now at the end of that road. We are not in a position to kick it any further…I have told my folks, to some consternation on their part, that we have to signal seriousness in this by making sure that some hard decisions are made under my watch and not under somebody else’s because the usual game is to say, ‘well, here’s what is going to happen but, by the way, it just happens to start in the ninth year from now.’ What we have to signal is that we are willing to make hard decisions now.”  (This passage is on pages 373-374 of the hard cover book I read. I’m providing a link to the full recorded statement.) Continue reading →

Ukraine’s Nuclear Weapons and Russia

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The recent aggression of the Russians against Ukraine made me wonder whether the Ukranians regretted sending their nuclear weapons back to Russia after declaring their independence from the Soviet Union. I realized I needed a history review to better understand the situation. According to the Office of the Historian of the U.S. Department of State, the collapse of the Soviet Union arguably could be traced to Mikhail Gorbachev’s decision to “…loosen the yoke of Soviet control over Eastern Europe.” That led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the overthrow of Communist rule throughout Eastern Europe. The Soviet destabilization continued until the attempted coup by hard-line Communists against Gorbachev in August 1991. That failed coup led Ukraine and Belarus to declare their independence.  Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan had nuclear weapons at that time.

The Ukrainian Week states, “Ukraine had to give up its nuclear weapons to become a sovereign state and have its independence recognized by the entire world.” The people of Ukraine were dominantly anti-nuclear as a result of the Chernobyl disaster.  Also, the nuclear weapons had been produced by the Soviet Union, and retaining them would have tied Ukraine to the Soviet (later Russian) military industrial complex.  Ukraine also judged that the criteria announced by the U.S. required that they disarm themselves of nuclear weapons to gain recognition. They remembered the sad experience of the 1920s when the West did not recognize Ukraine and it became a target of Bolshevik aggression. Recent events do not bode well for them trying a different approach to assuring their national sovereignty. Continue reading →