Friday, April 8, 2011
Storm
Here's a fantastic animated adaptation of comic/skeptic/awesomesauce purveyor Tim Minchin's poem "Storm," a verse-form rant about the miseries of woowoo, the glory of science, the delights of skepticism and the miracle of the actual world.
via:
Friday Book Club - Never Let Me Go
[ed. So, I've decided to start a Friday book club for people with unencumbered weekends and an interest in well-written fiction. Most of the books will be of a fairly recent vintage, although a few classics might get thrown in too, just for groans.
First up: Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro. I can't believe I'd never read this author's work until a week ago. The writing is spare and elegant, the story riveting. A movie based on the book is now available on dvd.]
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Sealed in a World That's Not as It Seems
By Michiko Kakutani,
NY Times
The teenagers in Kazuo Ishiguro's bravura new novel seem, at first meeting, like any other group of privileged boarding school students. They are constantly joining and abandoning rival cliques. They support and snipe at one another with petty rage and bantering good humor. They play sports, take art classes and obsess endlessly about sex. Their school, Hailsham, is a hermetic world unto itself - a prettily groomed English Arcadia that boasts a cool sports pavilion, spacious playing fields, a picturesque pond and winding bucolic paths. Their teachers keep telling them that they are "special," that they have an important role to play in later life.
Hidden at the heart of Hailsham, however, is a horrible, dark secret - a secret that the reader only gradually grasps.
As in so many of Mr. Ishiguro's novels, there is no conventional plot here. Instead, a narrator's elliptical reminiscences provide carefully orchestrated clues that the reader must slowly piece together, like a detective, to get a picture of what really happened and why.
Like the author's last novel ("When We Were Orphans"), "Never Let Me Go" is marred by a slapdash, explanatory ending that recalls the stilted, tie-up-all-the loose-ends conclusion of Hitchcock's "Psycho." The remainder of the book, however, is a Gothic tour de force that showcases the same gifts that made Mr. Ishiguro's 1989 novel, "The Remains of the Day," such a cogent performance.
This time, Mr. Ishiguro's art of withholding - his pared-down, Pintereque prose, his masterful narrative control, his virtuosic use of understatement and elision - is put in the service of a far-out science fiction plot involving clones and organ transplants. The result, amazingly enough, is not the lurid thriller the subject matter might suggest. Rather, it's an oblique and elegiac meditation on mortality and lost innocence: a portrait of adolescence as that hinge moment in life when self-knowledge brings intimations of one's destiny, when the shedding of childhood dreams can lead to disillusionment, rebellion, newfound resolve or an ambivalent acceptance of a preordained fate.
Attack Kits
by Jacob Aron
You don't need advanced hacking expertise to steal people's bank details any more. Thanks to downloadable attack kits, online theft is just a few clicks away. With just a small amount of technical know-how, attackers can use these simple software packages to install malware on a victim's computer and make an easy profit.
Two security reports released this week reveal the rise of such kits in the past year. Computer security company Symantec suggests that attack kits played a role in creating over 286 million variants of malware last year, and computer hardware manufacturer HP reports that the kits' ease of use, high success rates and ability to rake in illicit gains make them extremely popular.
Attack kit developers are also improving the quality of their software, says Mike Dausin, who manages advanced security intelligence for HP's DVLabs division. "They put so much effort into streamlining it, just as a normal software development company might," he says. "They're very professional, very focused on making money." It's not an entirely unexpected development: last year, security researchers predicted the growth of the cybercrime service industry.
Read more:
image credit:
Underwater Sculptures
by Caleb Garling
An underwater art museum off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula has opened a new “room” filled with concrete sculptures that depict scenes from modern life, while creating new homes for sea creatures.
Titled What Have We Done?, the installation at Museo Subacuático de Arte, or MUSA, features statues of a woman in an evening gown and a guy eating dinner in front of a television, among others. The newest aquatic exhibition opened last month in Punta Nizuc. The shallow region off the coast of Cancun has 12-foot-deep water well-suited for snorkelers.
“Water is a malleable medium,” principal artist Jason deCaires Taylor told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “The large number of angles and perspectives from which the sculptures can be viewed dramatically increases the unique experience of encountering the works.”
MUSA’s subsurface sculptures are designed not only as a gallery and artificial reef but as a diversion from the National Marine Park’s heavily trafficked coral reefs, which host 750,000 divers, snorkelers and swimmers each year. Whether feeding eels, exploring sunken ships or eyeballing angelfish, human adventurers have put an overwhelming pressure on the reefs, which provide the bio-scaffolding for complex sea ecosystems.
Taylor crafts his work out of pH-neutral concrete and inert fiberglass rebar, then grafts on broken shards of coral from damaged reefs. For instance, the folds of the woman’s evening gown are designed with the proper dimensions and depth to accommodate fish and plants looking to make a new home.
The sculptures then become artificial reefs, colonized by sea animals.
Read more:
More great photos of artificial reefs here:
An underwater art museum off Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula has opened a new “room” filled with concrete sculptures that depict scenes from modern life, while creating new homes for sea creatures.
Titled What Have We Done?, the installation at Museo Subacuático de Arte, or MUSA, features statues of a woman in an evening gown and a guy eating dinner in front of a television, among others. The newest aquatic exhibition opened last month in Punta Nizuc. The shallow region off the coast of Cancun has 12-foot-deep water well-suited for snorkelers.
“Water is a malleable medium,” principal artist Jason deCaires Taylor told Wired.com in an e-mail interview. “The large number of angles and perspectives from which the sculptures can be viewed dramatically increases the unique experience of encountering the works.”
MUSA’s subsurface sculptures are designed not only as a gallery and artificial reef but as a diversion from the National Marine Park’s heavily trafficked coral reefs, which host 750,000 divers, snorkelers and swimmers each year. Whether feeding eels, exploring sunken ships or eyeballing angelfish, human adventurers have put an overwhelming pressure on the reefs, which provide the bio-scaffolding for complex sea ecosystems.
Taylor crafts his work out of pH-neutral concrete and inert fiberglass rebar, then grafts on broken shards of coral from damaged reefs. For instance, the folds of the woman’s evening gown are designed with the proper dimensions and depth to accommodate fish and plants looking to make a new home.
The sculptures then become artificial reefs, colonized by sea animals.
Read more:
More great photos of artificial reefs here:
The Perfect Storm
Meanwhile, in his State of the Union address, President Obama included a call for more Americans to go to college in order to make us more competitive in a global context. This is "our generation's Sputnik moment," he said.
Many professors will recall that the arms race with the Soviet Union motivated a surge in support for higher education that lasted until the end of the 1960s. It was a rising tide that lifted all boats, including the arts and humanities. Fifty years later, perhaps the most visible remnant of the original "Sputnik moment" is the belief that everyone should go to college.
But that raises the question: What good does it do to increase the number of students in college if the ones who are already there are not learning much? Would it not make more sense to improve the quality of education before we increase the quantity of students?
Arum and Roksa point out that students in math, science, humanities, and social sciences—rather than those in more directly career-oriented fields—tend to show the most growth in the areas measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment, the primary tool used in their study. Also, students learn more from professors with high expectations who interact with them outside of the classroom. If you do more reading, writing, and thinking, you tend to get better at those things, particularly if you have a lot of support from your teachers.
Of course, those of us who teach at selective liberal-arts colleges have known that all along. But even students at expensive, elite institutions are not achieving as much as they should. Students are adrift almost everywhere, floating in the wreckage of a perfect storm that has transformed higher education almost beyond recognition.
Politicians and the public are quick to blame college faculty members for the decline in learning, but professors—like all teachers—are working in a context that has been created largely by others: Few people outside of higher education understand how little control professors actually have over what students can learn.
Here are some reasons:
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Morality Without God
When the sociologist Max Weber wrote of the disenchantment of the modern world in the late 19th and early 20th century, he struck a loud and resonant chord. Just look at the dog-eat-dog, bureaucratic, soulless world we live in. Ugh! How pleasant to dream of something better: a magical world unfolding in providential ways: perplexing, perhaps, and sometimes sad, but in the end benign, good and safe. How nice as well to be part of a congregation or church, united in celebrating these venerable enchantments through rituals, poetry and music, all expressing awe and wonder, gratitude, hope and consolation. On the one hand, meaningless bustle, absurdity and despair; on the other, peace, warmth and comfort. If these are the alternatives, the surprise is not that religions refuse to die, but that they ever become sickly. Let us say religionists are those who consider themselves to owe allegiance to a religion, and a secularist is anyone who isn’t a religionist. Religion is a many-faceted phenomenon, and any definition is bound to be contested. Religions do not require deities (at its purest Buddhism does not) nor even positive beliefs (the apophatic tradition holds that God is unapproachable by description). But it is characteristic of religionists to think their practices and thoughts give lives something valuable that cannot be found any other way.
Secularists, on the other hand, want to show that this is not an either/or, and that nothing of true value is lost when we grow out of reliance on old enchantments. I say true value, because everyone should admit there is a value in music and poetry, perhaps value in ritual, and a kind of value in myth and fiction. Outright falsehoods can be adaptive. Wishful thinking offers many comforts. But in stern secularist eyes this is not something of which to be proud.
Energy Is Ugly
For years, “not in my backyard” has been the battle cry of residents in Cape Cod who stand opposed to an offshore wind farm in Nantucket Sound. The giant turbines will forever mar the beauty of the landscape, they say.
Energy is ugly. Some forms more so than others, as nuclear near-meltdowns in Japan, the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and deaths in a West Virginia Coal Mine explosion have driven home in the last year. Energy kills plants, plankton, and people. It imperils the environment, poisons the oceans, and is threatening to turn part of Japan, one of the most advanced nations on the planet, into a contaminated zone for decades to come.
David Daniel knows this all too well. He built his dream home on 20 acres of lush wilderness, alive with panthers, wild boar, and deer, in Winnsboro, East Texas. Then a nightmare called tar sands appeared on his doorstep.
Tar sands are sandy soils laden with a tar-like substance called bitumen. Getting oil out of them is a dirty, dangerous, and deadly process. Daniel knew none of this when a neighbor phoned in the fall of 2008 to say that he’d seen trespassers on the property. “I went back [from work] and I found survey stakes that cut my property in half,” he recalls. Several months later, an eminent domain letter arrived, telling him that a pipeline carrying oil from Canada’s “oil sands” would cut through his pristine property. When he complained to TransCanada, the company in charge, its lawyer responded with a veiled threat: “Should I put the letter in the ‘cooperative’ or the ‘uncooperative pile?’”
So began the Daniel family’s struggles with TransCanada, whose powerful US backers include Koch Industries (best known for its stealth attacks on the federal government, and big spending on climate-change-denial campaigns). By the time TransCanada’s surveyors entered the Daniels’ lives, the corporation was already hard at work pushing a pipeline that would run from the Canadian border to Texas’s Gulf Coast, along the way slicing through the Daniels’ land and the properties of countless other Americans.
At no time did TransCanada’s representatives volunteer information about tar sands, leaving Daniel to do his own research. When he asked how tar sands oil would affect the pipeline, TransCanada responded only that the effects would be determined after the pipeline was put in place. “They made us feel like lab rats on our own property,” he says.
Behind his painful schooling in corporate arrogance lies a startling fact: Canada is the leading oil-supplier of the United States. Let me repeat that: the U.S. imports more oil from Canada than (yes) Mexico, which ranks second, and (believe it or not) Saudi Arabia, which ranks only third. Tar sands are largely responsible for Canada’s new petro-status. Nearly a million barrels of tar sands oil arrive in the U.S. every day. By 2025, Canada is expected to be producing 3.5 million barrels of tar sands oil daily. Most of that, says Ryan Salmon of the National Wildlife Federation, will be imported to the U.S. And believe me, when it comes to energy ugly, tar sands could take the cake.
Energy is ugly. Some forms more so than others, as nuclear near-meltdowns in Japan, the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, and deaths in a West Virginia Coal Mine explosion have driven home in the last year. Energy kills plants, plankton, and people. It imperils the environment, poisons the oceans, and is threatening to turn part of Japan, one of the most advanced nations on the planet, into a contaminated zone for decades to come.
David Daniel knows this all too well. He built his dream home on 20 acres of lush wilderness, alive with panthers, wild boar, and deer, in Winnsboro, East Texas. Then a nightmare called tar sands appeared on his doorstep. Tar sands are sandy soils laden with a tar-like substance called bitumen. Getting oil out of them is a dirty, dangerous, and deadly process. Daniel knew none of this when a neighbor phoned in the fall of 2008 to say that he’d seen trespassers on the property. “I went back [from work] and I found survey stakes that cut my property in half,” he recalls. Several months later, an eminent domain letter arrived, telling him that a pipeline carrying oil from Canada’s “oil sands” would cut through his pristine property. When he complained to TransCanada, the company in charge, its lawyer responded with a veiled threat: “Should I put the letter in the ‘cooperative’ or the ‘uncooperative pile?’”
So began the Daniel family’s struggles with TransCanada, whose powerful US backers include Koch Industries (best known for its stealth attacks on the federal government, and big spending on climate-change-denial campaigns). By the time TransCanada’s surveyors entered the Daniels’ lives, the corporation was already hard at work pushing a pipeline that would run from the Canadian border to Texas’s Gulf Coast, along the way slicing through the Daniels’ land and the properties of countless other Americans.
At no time did TransCanada’s representatives volunteer information about tar sands, leaving Daniel to do his own research. When he asked how tar sands oil would affect the pipeline, TransCanada responded only that the effects would be determined after the pipeline was put in place. “They made us feel like lab rats on our own property,” he says.
Behind his painful schooling in corporate arrogance lies a startling fact: Canada is the leading oil-supplier of the United States. Let me repeat that: the U.S. imports more oil from Canada than (yes) Mexico, which ranks second, and (believe it or not) Saudi Arabia, which ranks only third. Tar sands are largely responsible for Canada’s new petro-status. Nearly a million barrels of tar sands oil arrive in the U.S. every day. By 2025, Canada is expected to be producing 3.5 million barrels of tar sands oil daily. Most of that, says Ryan Salmon of the National Wildlife Federation, will be imported to the U.S. And believe me, when it comes to energy ugly, tar sands could take the cake.
Honeymoon From Hell
A newly-wed couple on a four-month honeymoon were hit by six natural disasters, including the Australian floods, Christchurch earthquake and Japanese tsunami.
Stefan and Erika Svanstrom left Stockholm, Sweden, on December 6 and were immediately stranded in Munich, Germany, due to one of Europe's worst snowstorms.
Travelling with their baby daughter, they flew on to Cairns in Australia which was then struck by one of the most ferocious cyclones in the nation's history.
From there, the couple, in their 20s, were forced to shelter for 24 hours on the cement floor of a shopping centre with 2500 others.
"Trees were being knocked over and big branches were scattered across the streets," Mr Svanstrom told Sweden's Expressen newspaper. "We escaped by the skin of our teeth."
They then headed south to Brisbane but the city was experiencing massive flooding, so they crossed the country to Perth where they narrowly escaped raging bush fires.
The couple then flew to Christchurch, New Zealand, arriving just after a massive magnitude 6.3 earthquake devastated the city on February 22.
Mrs Svanstrom said: "When we got there the whole town was a war zone.
"We could not visit the city since it was completely blocked off, so instead we travelled around before going to Japan."
Stefan and Erika Svanstrom left Stockholm, Sweden, on December 6 and were immediately stranded in Munich, Germany, due to one of Europe's worst snowstorms.
Travelling with their baby daughter, they flew on to Cairns in Australia which was then struck by one of the most ferocious cyclones in the nation's history. From there, the couple, in their 20s, were forced to shelter for 24 hours on the cement floor of a shopping centre with 2500 others.
"Trees were being knocked over and big branches were scattered across the streets," Mr Svanstrom told Sweden's Expressen newspaper. "We escaped by the skin of our teeth."
They then headed south to Brisbane but the city was experiencing massive flooding, so they crossed the country to Perth where they narrowly escaped raging bush fires.
The couple then flew to Christchurch, New Zealand, arriving just after a massive magnitude 6.3 earthquake devastated the city on February 22.
Mrs Svanstrom said: "When we got there the whole town was a war zone.
"We could not visit the city since it was completely blocked off, so instead we travelled around before going to Japan."
A Glimpse of The Future
The woodblock print shown above, currently on display in a Japanese exhibition, has generated some excitement because of the tower shown at the left of the image.
The "Toto Mitsumata no Zu" (the view of Tokyo's Mitsumata area) was created around 1831 by Kuniyoshi Utagawa (1798-1861), one of the leading ukiyo-e artists of the late Edo period...via:
The left side of the work shows two thin, high-rise buildings looking down on the town of old Tokyo across the river. The one on the far left is believed to be a fire-watch tower. However, experts say no building as tall as the mysterious one next to it existed back in those days...
"Back then, there were rules that prohibited people from constructing a building taller than Edo Castle," museum director Fumio Saito explained, adding, "The tower in the picture is looking down on the town of Edo (today's Tokyo), and it is surprising to see the artist's extraordinary creativity. It looks as if he had predicted the construction of Tokyo Sky Tree [left] in the area."
Virgin Galactic WK2
“Virgin America has the most advanced and carbon-efficient commercial fleet in the U.S. and when it touches down today at its new home it will share the runway with the future of commercial aerospace – SpaceShipTwo and WhiteKnightTwo,” said George Whitesides, President and Chief Executive Officer of Virgin Galactic. “We’re proud that two Virgin-branded companies can link the cutting-edge present to the future of commercial aviation. It is also fitting that today’s flights are helping to inspire the next generation of scientists, engineers and aviators.”
Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo (WK2) represents a giant leap forward in aerospace design and will enable safe and commercially-viable access to space for private individuals and academic researchers. The world’s largest all carbon composite aviation vehicle and the most fuel efficient aircraft of its size, WK2 can perform high and zero g maneuvers and possesses the high-altitude heavy-lift capability to air-release the world’s first commercial manned spaceship – SpaceShipTwo – on its journey into sub-orbital space. SpaceShipTwo is a rocket-powered space plane, which is intended to air-launch via a groundbreaking feather re-entry system. For more on the future of commercial space travel and the spaceships.
via:
Virgin Galactic:
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
The Empty Chamber
Just how broken is the Senate?
This is just one of those days when you want to throw up your hands and say, ‘What in the world are we doing?’ ” Senator Claire McCaskill, the Missouri Democrat, said.
“It’s unconscionable,” Carl Levin, the senior Democratic senator from Michigan, said. “The obstructionism has become mindless.”
The Senators were in the Capitol, sunk into armchairs before the marble fireplace in the press lounge, which is directly behind the Senate chamber. It was four-thirty on a Wednesday afternoon. McCaskill, in a matching maroon jacket and top, looked exasperated; Levin glowered over his spectacles.
“Also, it’s a dumb rule in itself,” McCaskill said. “It’s time we started looking at some of these rules.”
She was referring to Senate Rule XXVI, Paragraph 5, which requires unanimous consent for committees and subcommittees to hold hearings after two in the afternoon while the Senate is in session. Both Levin and McCaskill had scheduled hearings that day for two-thirty. Typically, it wouldn’t be difficult to get colleagues to waive the rule; a general and an admiral had flown halfway around the world to appear before Levin’s Armed Services Committee, and McCaskill’s Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight of the Homeland Security Committee was investigating the training of Afghan police. But this was March 24th, the day after President Barack Obama signed the health-care-reform bill, in a victory ceremony at the White House; it was also the day that the Senate was to vote on a reconciliation bill for health-care reform, approved by the House three nights earlier, which would retroactively remove the new law’s most embarrassing sweetheart deals and complete the yearlong process of passing universal health care. Republicans, who had fought the bill as a bloc, were in no mood to make things easy.
So, four hours earlier, when Levin went to the Senate floor and asked for consent to hold his hearing, Senator Richard Burr, Republican of North Carolina, and a member of Levin’s committee, had refused. “I have no personal objection to continuing,” Burr said. But, he added, “there is objection on our side of the aisle. Therefore, I would have to object.”
Burr had to object on behalf of his party because he was the only Republican in the chamber when Levin spoke. In general, when senators give speeches on the floor, their colleagues aren’t around, and the two or three who might be present aren’t listening. They’re joking with aides, or e-mailing Twitter ideas to their press secretaries, or getting their first look at a speech they’re about to give before the eight unmanned cameras that provide a live feed to C-SPAN2. The presiding officer of the Senate—freshmen of the majority party take rotating, hour-long shifts intended to introduce them to the ways of the institution—sits in his chair on the dais, scanning his BlackBerry or reading a Times article about the Senate. Michael Bennet, a freshman Democrat from Colorado, said, “Sit and watch us for seven days—just watch the floor. You know what you’ll see happening? Nothing. When I’m in the chair, I sit there thinking, I wonder what they’re doing in China right now?”
Wisdom of Ancestors
"High dwellings are the peace and harmony of our descendants," reads the centuries-old stone tablet above. "Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point."
This marker, and several more like it, some more than 600 years old, "dot the coastline" of Japan, according to a report in The Canadian Press. Not all of them were quite as specific: Some acted more as general warnings, lasting reminders of a risk that might only recur every fourth or fifth generation.
One, in the coastal town of Kesennuma, gave instructions: "Always be prepared for unexpected tsunamis. Choose life over your possessions and valuables." Another, in the city of Natori, simply advised, "If an earthquake comes, beware of tsunamis." This was a warning that not everybody heeded: in Natori, where 820 bodies have been found and 1,000 people are still missing, people still left "work early after the earthquake, some picking up their children at school en route, to check the condition of their homes near the coast."
But in the tight-knit community of Aneyoshi, where the marker pictured above still stands, the wisdom of their ancestors saved the homes and the lives of the tiny village's inhabitants. All of Aneyoshi's houses are built on higher ground, and 12-year-old resident Yuto Kimura explained to The Canadian Press:
Everybody here knows about the markers. We studied them in school. When the tsunami came, my mom got me from school and then the whole village climbed to higher ground.via:
Check Your E-mail
[ed. Beware, seriously creepy story. And sad.]
If you were desperate and hopeless enough to log on to a suicide chat room in recent years, there was a good chance a mysterious woman named Li Dao would find you, befriend you, and gently urge you to take your own life. And, she'd promise, she would join you in that final journey. But then the bodies started adding up, and the promises didn't. Turned out, Li Dao was something even more sinister than anyone thought.
"Check Your E-mail"
The three innocuous words seemed to offer Mark Drybrough the relief he sought. At 32, Mark was beyond tired. Life had long ceased to be the fun it once was. He had been a mischievous kid, an outgoing teenager who would make classmates laugh, leaping the school fence to freedom. At college in Coventry, England, he started out in high spirits, studying computer engineering and finding a girlfriend.
But after a year, the girl came down with a viral infection and then Mark did, and he never really recovered. Though he wasn't formally diagnosed, he felt certain that he'd developed chronic fatigue syndrome. Whatever he had—whether it was in his body or his mind—he couldn't summon the energy to get out of bed. Eventually he got dumped, stopped attending classes, and dropped out altogether.
For the next decade, Mark struggled to find the laughs. He lived in a small house in Coventry that his great-uncle had left him, but he couldn't maintain a job. He battled depression, going through dark periods when he refused to take medication, and he suffered psychotic fits. His mother, Elaine, paid his bills. He had no money, no car, no social life. He knew he was a disappointment—most of all to himself.
In July 2005, under the handle "spooky," Mark posted a request on the Web site alt.suicide.methods: "Does anyone have details of hanging methods where there isn't access to anything high up to tie the rope to. I've read that people have taken their own lives in jail, anybody know of inventive methods, the ones you don't get to read in the paper."
If you were desperate and hopeless enough to log on to a suicide chat room in recent years, there was a good chance a mysterious woman named Li Dao would find you, befriend you, and gently urge you to take your own life. And, she'd promise, she would join you in that final journey. But then the bodies started adding up, and the promises didn't. Turned out, Li Dao was something even more sinister than anyone thought.
"Check Your E-mail" The three innocuous words seemed to offer Mark Drybrough the relief he sought. At 32, Mark was beyond tired. Life had long ceased to be the fun it once was. He had been a mischievous kid, an outgoing teenager who would make classmates laugh, leaping the school fence to freedom. At college in Coventry, England, he started out in high spirits, studying computer engineering and finding a girlfriend.
But after a year, the girl came down with a viral infection and then Mark did, and he never really recovered. Though he wasn't formally diagnosed, he felt certain that he'd developed chronic fatigue syndrome. Whatever he had—whether it was in his body or his mind—he couldn't summon the energy to get out of bed. Eventually he got dumped, stopped attending classes, and dropped out altogether.
For the next decade, Mark struggled to find the laughs. He lived in a small house in Coventry that his great-uncle had left him, but he couldn't maintain a job. He battled depression, going through dark periods when he refused to take medication, and he suffered psychotic fits. His mother, Elaine, paid his bills. He had no money, no car, no social life. He knew he was a disappointment—most of all to himself.
In July 2005, under the handle "spooky," Mark posted a request on the Web site alt.suicide.methods: "Does anyone have details of hanging methods where there isn't access to anything high up to tie the rope to. I've read that people have taken their own lives in jail, anybody know of inventive methods, the ones you don't get to read in the paper."
Side of Bacon and Eggs
The cherry-flavoured, wheat lager by Marlborough brewery Moa is described as "a beer the ladies can enjoy too ... if you're having a champagne breakfast but don't fancy champagne, have a beer instead".
It contains 5.5 per cent alcohol and will be launched at Auckland's Quay Street Cafe this Thursday at 7am.
"You probably shouldn't drive there or tell the HR person in your office about it," the publicity material jokes.
National Addiction Centre director Doug Sellman described the marketing as "breathtakingly bold" and said people might be inclined to drink a "breakfast beer" because they were risk-takers.
"It's a completely irresponsible stunt from a health and addiction perspective, because it is normalising pathological behaviour."
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