If you ever give PowerPoint presentations, then check out this great presentation.

From John Tierney of the NY Times has written a good article on how the worst tyranny can come from those who think they are doing good:

After I wrote last year about Richard Paey, the wheelchair-bound patient who

From CBS:

CBS) The same judicial system that prosecuted Richard Paey for obtaining too much pain medication is now supplying him in prison with more than that amount to ease his tremendous pain.

60 Minutes correspondent Morley Safer reports on this case, in which an accident victim’s quest to medicate his pain ran afoul of drug laws, this Sunday, Jan. 29 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

A long-ago car accident and failed spinal operation put Paey in such severe pain that only escalating amounts of opiate medication could relieve it.

“As I got worse, I developed a tolerance also with the medication and so I needed larger doses,” says Paey, who describes the pain as burning in his legs. “It’s an intense pain that, over time, will literally drive you to suicide.”

Paey, who also suffers from multiple sclerosis, did try to commit suicide at one point.

In cased you missed it a few months ago, here’s the new “reimagined” trailer for The Shining. And here are two new trailers in the same vein, Top Gun: Brokeback Sqaudron and Sleepless in Seattle.

Via Kottke.

From LiveScience.com:

Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that’s contrary to their point of view.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects’ brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

“We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning,” said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. “What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts.”

Bias on both sides

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

IBM has announced a new voice recognition program:

IBM unveiled new speech recognition technology on Tuesday that can comprehend the nuances of spoken English, translate it on the fly, and even create on-the-fly subtitles for foreign-language television programs.

Historically, speech technology required the user to limit his speech to a fixed set of phrases in order to interact with a device. With IBM’s Embedded ViaVoice 4.4 software package, introduced on Tuesday, the company hopes to allow users to speak commands using phrasing that is natural to them.

I’ve played around with voice recognition in the passed and I haven’t been impressed, not necessarily by mistakes in the recognition, but becusae I don’t dictate well. I re-write most everything I write, and voice recognition is slower for that than using the mouse and keyboard. But maybe there are some new uses.

How cool is this guy?

Very interesting information and video about Russia’s explosion of the largest nuclear weapon of all time.

According to two economists, Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz (Stiglitz is a noble prize winner), the total economic cost of the Iraq War is between $1 and $2 trillion dollars.

There are tough times ahead for Blockbuster. In 1998, they were the movie studios single greatest source of revenue, but not anymore. Technology changes and Blockbuster hasn’t adapted. Here’s an interesting article by Edward Jay Epstein.