The Best of Youth

In the summer of 1967, two bohemian-looking 20-year-olds were wandering through New York's Washington Square Park, filled with its usual crowd of students, tourists, drug dealers, chess players and folk singers.
. "Oh, take their picture," said a woman to her husband, eyeing the young couple. "I think they're artists. They might be somebody someday." Her husband shrugged.
. "They're just kids."
[From the review of the book, "Just Kids", by Patti Smith pictured above. With her is Robert Mapplethorpe on the Coney Island boardwalk in 1969. The two enjoyed a relationship for two decades. Review appeared in the Sunday Jan 17, 2010 SF Chronicle, Section F.]

Care For A Stroll? Do You Have The Time?

Eric Rohmer--famed French New Wave film director, critic

Eric Rohmer, a former film critic who became one of France's most respected film-makers and was internationally known for movies such as "My Night at Maud's" and "Claire's Knee," died Monday in Paris. He was 89.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy called the writer-director a"great auteur who will continue to speak to us for years to come."
"Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclast, light and serious, sentimental and moralist, he created the 'Rohmer' style, which will outlive him." Sarkozy said in a statement. . . . It was not until "My Night at Maud's", an art house film hit released in 1970, that Rohmer was established as a major force in cinema. The film earned Academy Award nominations for best foreign language film and for Rohmer's screenplay. CSM writer David Sterritt wrote in 2001, [that Rohmer] focused with "good-humored intensity on dilemmas of life, love, and the penchant of well-meaning people to find themselves in ethhical quandaries."
Kevin Thomas said that Rohmer, whose films were known for their long conversations between characters, "made his mark getting us to pay attention to what people said to each other." His most recent film, "The Romance of Astrea and Celadon," was released in 2007.
.
This obituary appeared in the SF Chronicle Friday January 15, 2009

Jewelry Formed Like Molecular Structures

36-year-old biochemist, Raven Hanna, designs jewelry made of sterling silver to resemble molecules, some of which affect human emotions: theobromine, caffeine, serotonin, dopamine and others. "I love the way people gravitate to the aesthetics of my jewelry," she said. Her creations often sell for $75 to $130. To purchase or find out more about Raven Hanna's jewelry, visit www.madewithmolecules.com
--from a Designer Profile in the Sunday Dec 30 SF Chronicle article by Nick Thomas

We Rewire When Learning

New Evidence in Learnings's Effect on Brain--by David Perlman, SF Chronicle Science writer
.
"Li Zuo, a neurobiologist at UC Santa Cruz, has discovered how learning and memory imprint their effects on the brain . . . that in learning a new task, the connections between specific cells in the brain are swiftly rewired, and that those fresh connections can become permanent . . . In other words, the new connections--known as synapses--remain fixed.
.
In the lab, she and her lab colleagues used some tricky, but harmless techniques available to brain researchers who study mice as models for the human condition.
.
The patiently trained scores of the mice, one at a time, to put a foreleg through a slot in a transparent plastic box and to grab a single speck of delicious birdseed no bigger than a pinhead.
Some of the mice they trained were only a few days old, while others were teenagers and adults.
Rewiring in under an hour
. After training, the scientists took high-tech movies of the living animals' brains--a procedure possible because the mice were genetically bred so their brain cell connections would show up on film glowing from fluorescence after each training exercise. It was painless to the mice.
. The synapses are formed by other tiny brain structures called dendritic spines. And in the lab, Zuo and her colleagues found that those microscopic spines not only rewired the connections in less than an hour after the mice were trained, but then remained stable permanently. After learning a different task, the mice were challenged again with the original birdseed task, and they performed almost flawlessly--proof that they hadn't forgotten, Zuo said. And a second set of movies of their brains showed that the earlier rewired synapses and dendritic spines had remained intact."

.
Jim Said: "It is also possible to feel it, or to be aware that it is occurring."

A Gilded Cherub For You

Happy Holidays To Everyone !

James K Polk--Westward Expansion

James K. Polk, the 11th President, has a reputation that languishes in obscurity, partly because he is said to be the driving force behind igniting the War with Mexico. He served only one term in office. Competing views of Polk have emerged, partly because of a new book being published this month, "A COUNTRY OF VAST DESIGNS, James K Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent", by Robert W Merry. Recent history has seen Polk relegated to the role of a shameful imperialist and seizer of territories along with being a carrier of the "slave-holder" sentiment into the formerly neutral West. With his victory in war with Mexico, he added territories comprising California, Nevada and Utah, as well as parts of New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and Wyoming. The book reminds historians that by 1845 The United States was the only functioning democracy in the world. The book also points out that Mexico, far from being a benevolent neighbor, was brutal and corrupt and a republic in name only. The war occurred from 1846 to 1848. Polk himself was said to be colorless and maddeninglly ambivalent in speeches, making him hard to label or characterize. He was said to be "smaller-than-life" but harboring "larger-than-life" ambitions and felt determined to act on his own counsel. He saw expansionism as the nation's work and believed that it would override all of the partisan concerns of the day. In this, he appears to have erred because the westward expansion appears to have inflamed the pro-slavery sentiments as well as the anti-slaver's belief that slavery should not go to the new territories. This unsettled the balance that was thought to have been achieved with The Missouri Comprise of 1820-21. These partision clashes led a dozen years later to the Civil War. His role as a promoter of the California Gold Rush is mentioned regularly in Haggin training. The new book plants a flag for a new thought that Polk was a shrewd expander of the American vision of itself and more than a greedy imperialist.