It's the most wonderful time of the year, according to a popular holiday song. Yet it's the most excruciating time for people who endure the biological tidings of discomfort and gloom that are linked to winter's arrival, according to a new study.http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
A specific shift of the body's daily pacemaker, akin to one that regulates seasonal behavior in many mammals, underlies recurring winter depression, contend psychiatrist Thomas A. Wehr of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) in Bethesda, Md., and his coworkers. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .
"These results vindicate what we suspected about this condition when we first described it in 1984," says NIMH psychiatrist Norman E. Rosenthal, a coauthor of the new report in the December Archives of General Psychiatry. Conducting a study big enough to probe the condition's biological bases has taken years, he notes.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire .http://LOUIS-J-SHEEHAN.ORG
Winter depression, or seasonal affective disorder (SAD), includes weight gain, increased sleep, decreased physical activity, and loss of interest in sex. Comparable responses occur in many mammals as sunlight wanes in winter. In these creatures, when the brain detects shortening of day length, it secretes melatonin for a longer time at night. Melatonin is a hormone that regulates sleep.
To see if similar melatonin changes occur in people, Wehr's group recruited 110 volunteers, half with SAD and half without. The scientists measured melatonin concentrations in blood samples obtained from the participants every 30 minutes for 24 hours in each season.
The researchers found that the duration of melatonin release was steady at 9 hours throughout the year in the participants without SAD. In those with SAD, nightly melatonin secretion lasted, on average, 38 minutes longer in the winter than in the summer, with the greatest durations being about 9 hours. This seasonal disparity was more pronounced in men than in women.
Melatonin secretion began at about the same time in the early evening for people in both groups. For volunteers with SAD, most of their extra melatonin activity in winter occurred at the end of the night. The lengthening of nightly melatonin secretion from summer to winter in SAD may somehow trigger the condition, Wehr and his colleagues theorize.
"This study provides important evidence that winter depression is, at least in part, related to biological rhythms," says psychiatrist Al Lewy of the Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland. In his studies of SAD patients, Lewy sees a delay in nightly onset of melatonin release. He suspects that it's caused by the later dawn each morning during the winter. His research suggests that morning doses of bright light dampen winter depression by advancing the start of nightly melatonin secretion by 1 to 2 hours (SN: 10/24/98, p. 260: http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/10_24_98/Fob1.htm) without necessarily lengthening the duration of that secretion.
Although Wehr's team has conducted the largest SAD study to date, questions remain about how to interpret the results, comments psychologist Michael Terman of Columbia University in the same journal.
For instance, Terman speculates, among 12 of the 55 SAD volunteers in the NIMH study who experienced euphoria, excess energy, and other manic symptoms in the summer, shorter periods of melatonin secretion may largely reflect early awakening in that season. Their exposure to early-morning light, rather than SAD, would have cut off melatonin secretion, Terman holds.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
destruction 4.des.000200 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
In 1997, in the child abuse case involving British nanny Louise Woodward, the words shaken baby syndrome leapt from medical textbooks into international prominence. Woodward was accused of shaking infant Matthew Eappen, fatally injuring him. In the 11 years since Woodward was convicted of second-degree murder and then released on a lesser sentence for involuntary manslaughter, a debate has simmered in the child abuse world, and it is now rising to a boil.http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
On one side of the courtroom, representing mainstream medical opinion, are those who believe shaken baby syndrome (SBS) is a valid diagnosis. They say that decades of clinical experience and criminal confessions—in which a parent has admitted to shaking a child with symptoms of SBS—bolster their case to the point of near-certainty. On the other side, a growing number of skeptics are now claiming that the evidence for the syndrome rests on dubious medical ground with questionable biophysical models supporting it.http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
Each side, too, is battling for the moral high ground. Those who give credence to SBS say they are using modern diagnostic technology (magnetic resonance imaging in particular) to catch child abusers who might once have gone unpunished. The skeptics, on the other hand, say that innocent families around the world have been left in ruins by prosecutors and child protective agencies who have wrongfully accused parents and child-care workers of child abuse.
Shaken baby syndrome excites such controversy partly because it invokes the specter of horrible cruelty to an innocent, often in the immediate wake of the child’s death. Yet in the classic SBS case, signs of child abuse that one might expect—suspicious bruises, burns, cuts, or other injuries—are missing. According to the 2001 textbook The Shaken Baby Syndrome: A Multidisciplinary Approach, “It is this absence of external signs of abuse which makes the early diagnosis of SBS so difficult.”
It is important to clarify that DISCOVER is weighing the science behind the textbook definition of shaken baby syndrome, not delving into casework involving children who do display “external signs of abuse.” This article is about the evidence for and against a specific syndrome, not the vital importance of child abuse prevention.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that as of 2005 there were between 1,200 and 1,600 confirmed SBS cases per year. While no official statistics are available on SBS prosecutions, Toni Blake of the American legal consulting firm 2nd Chair Services says that at least 2,000 to 3,000 lawyers and defendants have contacted her over the past decade to request assistance on SBS trials and appeals around the country. In 2007, she says, “we saw one of these cases overturned about once a month.”
As with baby Matthew Eappen in the Woodward case, SBS typically first presents itself when an infant is brought to a hospital or doctor’s office suffering a life-threatening condition such as convulsions, an inability to eat or to be awakened, or difficulty breathing. (SBS can also present with seemingly less serious symptoms, such as changes in feeding behavior.) The 2001 SBS textbook cites two studies (from the journals Annals of Emergency Medicine and Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology) showing that between 15 percent and 33 percent of SBS-symptomatic infants died, while one-third to one-half suffered permanent injury such as paralysis or mental retardation. Although many infants are hospitalized with life-threatening conditions, it is only on closer examination—CT or MRI scans of the infant’s head and ophthalmological examination of the infant’s eyes—that a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome comes into play.
“The thing we pick up on most easily is the bleeding,” says Randell Alexander, chief of the division of child protection and forensic pediatrics at the University of Florida at Jacksonville College of Medicine. “You see intracranial bleeding, between the brain and the skull...and then the other thing you see in about 90 percent of the cases is retinal hemorrhages.”
Once a doctor says that an infant must have been shaken, it triggers a hunt for the shaker. In one diagnostic step, the legal system is brought to bear on the baby’s family and anyone else near the infant at the time of the supposed shaking.
The symptomatic triad of bleeding between the brain and skull (known as subdural or subarachnoid hematomas), bleeding behind the retinas, and brain swelling is both the core of an SBS diagnosis and the point of departure for the syndrome’s skeptics. The medical proof that shaking alone can cause these internal head injuries is questionable, the skeptics say, when many other things, from infections to malnutrition to falls onto a hard surface, are known to be causes of similar symptoms in infants.
One such skeptic testified for the prosecution in the Woodward case but later changed his stance. Pediatric neuroradiologist Patrick Barnes of Stanford University said in an e-mail interview, “It is known from case records that SBS is misdiagnosed/overdiagnosed. It is not only a problem in medicine but a problem in the justice system.”
Nevertheless, “we’re not teaching Pat Barnes’s point of view in medical schools,” Alexander says. “What [SBS skeptics] say is generally not believed by a vast majority of doctors—and it’s not believed by medical organizations.” Alexander points to a 2001 position paper from the American Academy of Pediatrics stating that SBS “injuries are the result of violent trauma” and not from “short falls, seizures, or as a consequence of vaccination.”
Ronald Uscinski, a clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery at Georgetown Hospital and George Washington University, first entered the SBS arena when a colleague asked him to testify for the defense in the Louise Woodward case. During the quiet summer before the trial, Uscinski read every paper and monograph he could find on the syndrome.
Uscinski traced medical citations in SBS research back to a 1968 study involving rhesus monkeys subjected to collisions and violent accelerations. Uscinski already knew the study—it had been conducted by his mentor, Ayub Ommaya, the very same colleague who had brought him into the Woodward case. Uscinski says the study yields no firm conclusions about the consequences of shaking monkeys or, for that matter, babies.
“When I put all of this together, I said, my God, this is a sham,” Uscinski says. “Somebody made a mistake right at the very beginning, and look at what’s come out of it.”
In 2007 Uscinski took on an SBS case in Washington, D.C., testifying on behalf of two parents, Greg and Julianna Caplan, who were accused of SBS abuse. The Caplans were ultimately exonerated, yet they remained on the city rolls as potential child abusers until earlier this year. Uscinski wrote in an editorial in the Washington Post in March, “This is not to say that child abuse does not exist. I have witnessed such cases and have been deeply and painfully moved by the plight of innocents who have been injured or even killed....And yet I am no less moved by the plight of the wrongfully accused (and even convicted), their families and their loved ones. This is particularly so when such accusations are based on impure science, a flawed legal foundation, and completely inadequate or inappropriate public policy.”
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Unlike Barnes, other experts who testified for the prosecution in the Woodward trial continue to support the validity of SBS. One of these is Eli Newberger, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, who was among the physicians at Children’s Hospital in Boston who treated Matthew Eappen in 1997. Newberger founded the hospital’s child protection unit in 1970 and has testified in more than 600 child abuse cases since then, dozens of which, he says, were SBS cases. Although he remains affiliated with the child protection unit, he retired from hospital work in 1999. He continues to teach, write, and provide expert testimony in child abuse cases.
“By the time I was asked to testify in the Louise Woodward case...there was a great deal of clinical understanding about [SBS-related] trauma,” Newberger says. “The infant’s head is disproportionately larger in relation to the rest of its body than our heads are. A child can’t stop the to-and-fro excursions of the head with its neck. The brain bobbles about. The infant’s brain is softer than the adult’s.”
SBS skeptics, he says, muddy the waters “with so-called theoretical or historical perspectives on abuse.”
Money, Newberger suspects, has brought otherwise good people over to what he and his colleagues call the “dark side,” doubting SBS. “I have never ceased to be amazed about what highly regarded, well published, scientifically informed doctors will do when they’re offered large amounts of money,” he says.
For the record, Newberger charges $450 per hour to consult and testify in SBS and other child abuse cases. The University of Florida’s Alexander charges $300 per hour as an expert consultant but notes that all the money goes to the university. Uscinski has, by his own estimate, been in the courtroom as an expert witness in SBS trials nearly 100 times since 1997. His SBS work constitutes 15 percent of his income, he says. His rates are up to $750 per hour as a consultant and up to $10,000 per day on the witness stand for out-of-town cases. “If it’s a public defender’s case, you get paid half that or one-third of that, or even less,” Uscinski says. “Not everybody can afford that, and I charge according to what people can pay.”
Despite his confidence in the existence of SBS, Newberger adds that he has consulted for the defense on two or three SBS cases in which, he says, a “juggernaut” develops. “The department of social services sends out a social worker,” he says, describing the usual procedure after a doctor reports a possible SBS case to the authorities. “If a parent does not know exactly what’s happening, very frequently the first conclusion is that they’re trying to hide something. And sometimes parents are racking their brains, coming up with one or two possibilities. Then it looks like they’re changing their stories. That can be used to damn them.”
The Haynes family of Rantoul, Illinois were caught in just such a juggernaut. In October 2005 the father, Neal, was charged in a civil case with shaking his then 3-month-old son, Jake (not his real name). Although not accused of shaking the baby, the mother, Christy, was also charged with abuse and neglect (for permitting the alleged shaking). Jake had been hospitalized three times over two months for fever, infection, difficulty breathing, and symptoms of seizures. He survived his third hospitalization and returned home healthy, with his parents. However, when emergency room doctors discovered retinal and subdural hemorrhages, they concluded that Jake’s medical problems must have stemmed from his being violently shaken.
“The traditional school of thought says whoever had that child [last] is the one who gets the ticket to the ball,” says Kristen Fischer, Neal’s attorney.
Court-appointed advocates for Jake assembled a time line that made Neal the likely alleged abuser. State child protective services then seized Jake and helped launch a civil trial to terminate both parents’ rights to raise Jake or potentially ever to see him again. (Both the Champaign County Court Appointed Special Advocate executive director, Genevieve Lambert, and her attorney on the Haynes case, John DeLaMar, declined an interview for this article.)
Lawyers for the family ultimately called in Uscinski, among other experts. As the chief pediatric neurosurgeon at Georgetown University Hospital from 1983 to 1993, Uscinski operated on the brains of, he estimates, four babies who were said to be victims of SBS, and he saw three or four others. “I noticed something in each instance,” he says. “I noticed that there was always a better explanation in that particular case than shaking.”
In the Haynes case, Uscinski rendered a professional opinion that concluded, “There is no question but that [Jake] Haynes had a chronic subdural hematoma.” As a chronic (rather than acute) case, by definition the “hematoma had its genesis weeks or months earlier.” Uscinski suggested that baby Jake’s breech birth could have itself produced enough force on the brain to cause subdural bleeding. This kind of wound sometimes doesn’t heal and can go undetected for weeks or months, he says.
F. Edward Yazbak, a Massachusetts-based pediatrician, examined Jake’s medical records and wrote a 51-page report for the defense that pointed to other possible causes of baby Jake’s hemorrhages, including adverse reaction to his vaccinations, a vitamin C and K deficiency, and/or a toxic level of histamine in his blood.
In fact, because doctors had already concluded the cause of Jake’s internal trauma was shaking, and therefore that the child was safe from further injury, they made a crucial mistake in his follow-up care. Leaving aside the judicial impact of an incorrect SBS diagnosis on caregivers, this may be the most worrying aspect of such a mistake: the impact on the child’s health.
In Jake’s case, by early December 2005 his head had swollen to the point that he was above the 97th percentile for head circumference. In mid-December, Fischer recalls, the doctors “decided that the hematoma hadn’t grown, but the brain was atrophying from the terrible abuse.” They sent the child home.
By late December, following the ongoing case, the defense’s Yazbak learned about Jake’s enlarging head size—brought about, he concluded, by a subdural hematoma that was in fact bleeding again. “[Yazbak] said this child has got to see a specialist immediately,” Fischer says. “If it’s unchecked, he’ll die.” The lawyers called a meeting with state child protective services, petitioning for a second opinion on Jake’s condition. Ultimately he was sent to a hospital in St. Louis, where doctors operated on the hematoma and put in a shunt.
The doctors “had gotten into the routine that it was shaken baby syndrome,” Fischer says. “And they could not get out of that routine.”
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Neal and Christy Haynes spent $200,000 on their defense—retaining Yazbak and Uscinski as well as experts in pediatric ophthalmology and neuroradiology to provide expert testimony—and endured 14 months of trials and hearings. Then the charges against them were dropped. “The court further finds that...[Jake] Haynes is neither an abused minor nor a neglected minor,” Judge Chase Leonhard ruled. “Let this boy become a man in the home of loving parents and family. Please make it so.”
The fact that the Hayneses were able to tap leading medical experts who were willing to reduce their rates to devote scores of hours to their case is just the first of a number of fortuitous turns their story took. According to jury consultant Blake, theirs is more the exception than the rule.
“What Shaken baby skeptics say ?is generally not believed by a vast majority ?of doctors or medical organizations.”
SBS cases today, she says, practically require top-flight, credentialed medical SBS specialists on the witness stand who can produce a credible alternative scenario—more than just the reasonable doubt that courts theoretically require. Otherwise, she says, what remains is typically the testimony of doctors who believe that, absent a serious car accident or a two-story fall, only shaking can produce a subdural hematoma. And shaking means someone is guilty of child abuse.
“For the jury...the defense needs to prove what happened to this baby,” she says. “Unless you’ve got the money to hire top experts, you’re probably going to prison....It’s guilty until proved innocent.”
Cheri Landers, chief of the division of pediatric critical care at Kentucky Children’s Hospital in Lexington, says that if an infant were brought into the emergency room suffering seizures and was discovered to have a subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhaging, she would want to ask the family about the background before rendering a diagnosis. “We would need to find out...was there any known trauma?” she says. According to Landers, a severe car accident, for instance, could explain subdural and retinal hemorrhages and consequent seizures. She points to a 1993 article in the journal Neurosurgery that examined the retinas of 140 children involved in car accidents. Two had hemorrhages, and both were in high-velocity side-impact crashes.
“When we discover no reason for the trauma,” she adds, “that is the point where we come to the conclusion that there is no reason for this other than shaking.” Landers cites a 2000 study in the journal Pediatrics that evaluated 19 Florida infants with subdural hemorrhages who were referred to the state’s child protective services in 1997. The authors selected nine of these cases and followed them up, reporting that every child was the victim of “inflicted injury, inappropriate infant handling, and/or high-risk social settings” such as a family with a history of domestic violence.
Neuropathologist Jan Leestma of Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, who testified for the defense in the Woodward case, has come to a different conclusion. Leestma reviewed 324 apparent or alleged child abuse cases from 1969 to 2001 and published his results in a 2005 issue of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology. Fifty-four of these cases involved shaking a baby. He found only 20 percent (11 cases) yielded no evidence of any impact to the baby’s skull—such as a fall from a changing table.
“When you have an impact, that trumps everything else,” Leestma says. Shaking means “10 g’s, versus 200 g’s” for an impact.
Impacts and falls are a world apart from shaking. Impacts could be anything from a simple but tragic accident to negligence to child abuse. But shaking means one thing: attempted infanticide.
What happens to infants when they are shaken or suffer an impact? Kirk Thibault is a biomechanical engineer with the Essington, Pennsylvania, firm Biomechanics, Inc. A research scientist who has studied the physical properties and stress loads of infant and adult brains, Thibault has been hired as an expert in, as he recalls, “seven or eight” SBS cases since 1998. (His father, Lawrence, is a research pioneer in the field and testified for the defense in the Woodward case.) Thibault the younger charges $300 per hour for expert consultation and testimony.
“I do not think of myself as an advocate for anyone, but I do advocate for the science,” he says.
Thibault points to a 2003 study in the Journal of Neurosurgery that used lifelike infant dolls with crash test dummy accelerometers inside their heads. A team of four bioengineers and neurologists from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia then simulated vigorous infant shakings—as might happen in an SBS case—as well as shakes that ended in an impact and drops from one-, three-, and five-foot heights.
The group concluded that shaking their model infants produced results “statistically similar” to one-foot falls onto concrete or a carpet pad or higher falls onto a foam mattress. These results were well below reported thresholds for causing the kind of intracranial bleeding observed in SBS babies, suggesting that shaking wasn’t enough to induce SBS.
“It’s drilled into people’s heads that shaking will kill these kids,” Kirk Thibault says. “I don’t know that shaking can’t kill a child. I assume you can probably shake a child to death. I have no idea.... What I specifically look at is whether shaking can cause loads [on the brain] that...can cause subdural hematomas. The flip side of that is people abuse kids,” Thibault says. But he adds, “You can’t simply categorically say this is all nonaccidental. I say one case at a time.”
Neurosurgeon Jean-Sébastien Raul, an assistant professor at the Institute of Legal Medicine at the University of Strasbourg in France, says he has a computer model of infant shaking that could help clarify the controversy. In a 2006 paper published in the International Journal of Legal Medicine, Raul concluded that, biophysically, shaking alone can produce the kinds of subdural hematomas that are seen in SBS cases.
Raul’s group drew from published properties of human baby brains and skulls and pig brains and skulls—markedly similar, he says, in biophysical properties. The group ran computer simulations that examined the behavior of veins that bridge the brain and the covering tissue surrounding the brain. Rupture of “bridging veins,” he says, is a known and well-understood cause of subdural hematomas.
Raul says he knows the 2003 Journal of Neurosurgery paper well but argues that the authors looked only at acceleration inside the skull. “We are looking at the relative motion between the brain and skull,” he says. It is this additional factor, he thinks, that produces the bleeding inside the shaken infant’s skull.
Thibault points out that Raul’s group conducted computerized experiments involving unknown situations without first confirming that their model could reproduce known experimental results. For instance, in 1984 Nobuhiko Aoki and colleagues at Nagoya University in Japan studied medical case records of infants who had fallen and hit their heads. Some had died, some had survived. All, Aoki said, had subdural hematomas and retinal hemorrhages and thus could potentially be seen as SBS cases. “You first have to [run your computer model] outside of the vacuum of your model,” Thibault says. “At least demonstrate that you can draw a line and say this is a threshold...and now I’m going to re-create every single one of Aoki’s falls.”
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Leestma says, more simply, “These programs are like Pixar cartoons. You can do wonderful things, but is it real or a creation?”
“When you’ve been around this as long as I have, CONFESSIONS DON’T MEAN NEARLY AS MUCH as you’d think they do.”
Raul says his group has begun to verify its computer model with experimental data, but this work hasn’t been published yet.
The science behind SBS moves slowly forward. Meanwhile, Toni Blake’s office at 2nd Chair Services gets several phone calls or e-mails a day, on average, from a new set of parents or siblings or child-care workers accused of causing SBS (and wrongly so, they claim). SBS cases have been prosecuted around the world for the past 30 years. An unknown number of families have been affected. Certainly some SBS cases bring an abusing parent to justice and save children in the process. But if the skeptic argument is correct, then other SBS cases involve putting an innocent family member behind bars.
Blake tracks SBS cases for both SBSDefense.com and 2nd Chair Services. She has followed 169 shaken baby cases in which medical records were available and which occurred between 1997 and 2007. Forty-one percent of the babies survived, she reports. (Her study is unpublished.) Thirty-one cases she followed resulted in a confession involving “some form of shaking or shaking with impact,” she says. But such confessions, often used as the silver bullet to defeat SBS skeptics, became less conclusive upon further scrutiny. Thirteen of the confessions were admissions that the “abuser” had merely shaken the infant as a way to attempt to revive it. Another 15 admitted to “abuse” in a more general sense, which could have involved striking the child or hitting it against a wall or floor. Just three people in Blake’s data set admitted to abuse by shaking—and shaking only. And at least one of those three infants, she says, already had a subdural hematoma, before the shaking incident.
Scott Coffee, a public defender in Clark County, Nevada, says, “Shaken baby proponents say you have people confess to shaking babies, and that proves that shaking babies had to cause the injuries. The problem is, when you’ve been around this as long as I have, confessions don’t mean nearly as much as you’d think they do.”
Coffee, a public defender for the past 13 years, says child abuse cases often raise the stakes so high that a bias toward false confessions may be concealed within the data. When DISCOVER contacted him last summer, Coffee was working on an SBS case in which the accused abuser had been in jail for six years awaiting trial and potentially faced a first-degree murder charge. (Infanticide by abuse qualifies as first-degree murder in Nevada, Coffee says.)
The sentence Coffee’s client would be given, if he went to trial and lost, was either 20 to 50 years, 20 years to life, or life without parole. Agreeing to confess to shaking the child, Coffee says, would considerably reduce any sentence.
In July 2001 Coffee’s client was taking care of his 11-month-old son, Mike (not his real name), whom pediatrician Yazbak later described as suffering from “multiple medical problems” including malnutrition and possible blood coagulation deficiency. On July 10 Mike stopped breathing. According to Coffee, his client attempted CPR and called 911 before taking the child to a Las Vegas emergency room. Mike ultimately died on life support. Bruises were found on his abdomen and back, and paramedics had found a cut under his eyelid. Postmortem examinations revealed a subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhaging.
With an existing criminal record that he feared would bias the trial, Coffee’s client opted to plead to shaking baby Mike. “I’m sure at some point during the failed attempt to resuscitate Mike, he was shaken, and as the local doctors were willing to testify that shaking caused the death, there wasn’t a problem getting the plea down,” Coffee said in an e-mail. In October 2007 Coffee’s client was sentenced to 10 years to life for second-degree murder.
Around the same time, the Wisconsin Law Review published a paper entitled “Shaken Baby Syndrome: Medical Uncertainty Casts Doubt on Convictions.” The paper’s author, Molly Gena, now a Milwaukee-based lawyer for Legal Action of Wisconsin, says her review of recent SBS decisions indicates the tide is beginning to turn.
“It started with the British cases,” Gena says, referring to a review ordered by the British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, of 297 alleged child abuse cases, some of which were SBS convictions based only on the triad of internal symptoms: subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhage, and brain swelling. In one case, R v. Harris, the court concluded that “the mere presence of the triad on its own cannot automatically or necessarily lead to a diagnosis of [SBS].”
An SBS case in which Gena assisted as a law student (State of Wisconsin v. Audrey Edmunds) followed similar lines, with the court ruling in January 2008 that “there has been a shift in mainstream medical opinion....There are now competing medical opinions as to how [alleged shaken baby] Natalie’s injuries arose.”
Opposed though he is to the SBS skepticism that informed these recent court findings, Newberger of Harvard Medical School says he doesn’t disagree with them. http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
“Yes, there are competing explanations,” Newberger says. “The traditional explanation [for subdural hematomas] was that there were bridging veins that are sheared and...explode blood into the space. But does anybody really know that? That’s the issue.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
On one side of the courtroom, representing mainstream medical opinion, are those who believe shaken baby syndrome (SBS) is a valid diagnosis. They say that decades of clinical experience and criminal confessions—in which a parent has admitted to shaking a child with symptoms of SBS—bolster their case to the point of near-certainty. On the other side, a growing number of skeptics are now claiming that the evidence for the syndrome rests on dubious medical ground with questionable biophysical models supporting it.http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
Each side, too, is battling for the moral high ground. Those who give credence to SBS say they are using modern diagnostic technology (magnetic resonance imaging in particular) to catch child abusers who might once have gone unpunished. The skeptics, on the other hand, say that innocent families around the world have been left in ruins by prosecutors and child protective agencies who have wrongfully accused parents and child-care workers of child abuse.
Shaken baby syndrome excites such controversy partly because it invokes the specter of horrible cruelty to an innocent, often in the immediate wake of the child’s death. Yet in the classic SBS case, signs of child abuse that one might expect—suspicious bruises, burns, cuts, or other injuries—are missing. According to the 2001 textbook The Shaken Baby Syndrome: A Multidisciplinary Approach, “It is this absence of external signs of abuse which makes the early diagnosis of SBS so difficult.”
It is important to clarify that DISCOVER is weighing the science behind the textbook definition of shaken baby syndrome, not delving into casework involving children who do display “external signs of abuse.” This article is about the evidence for and against a specific syndrome, not the vital importance of child abuse prevention.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that as of 2005 there were between 1,200 and 1,600 confirmed SBS cases per year. While no official statistics are available on SBS prosecutions, Toni Blake of the American legal consulting firm 2nd Chair Services says that at least 2,000 to 3,000 lawyers and defendants have contacted her over the past decade to request assistance on SBS trials and appeals around the country. In 2007, she says, “we saw one of these cases overturned about once a month.”
As with baby Matthew Eappen in the Woodward case, SBS typically first presents itself when an infant is brought to a hospital or doctor’s office suffering a life-threatening condition such as convulsions, an inability to eat or to be awakened, or difficulty breathing. (SBS can also present with seemingly less serious symptoms, such as changes in feeding behavior.) The 2001 SBS textbook cites two studies (from the journals Annals of Emergency Medicine and Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology) showing that between 15 percent and 33 percent of SBS-symptomatic infants died, while one-third to one-half suffered permanent injury such as paralysis or mental retardation. Although many infants are hospitalized with life-threatening conditions, it is only on closer examination—CT or MRI scans of the infant’s head and ophthalmological examination of the infant’s eyes—that a diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome comes into play.
“The thing we pick up on most easily is the bleeding,” says Randell Alexander, chief of the division of child protection and forensic pediatrics at the University of Florida at Jacksonville College of Medicine. “You see intracranial bleeding, between the brain and the skull...and then the other thing you see in about 90 percent of the cases is retinal hemorrhages.”
Once a doctor says that an infant must have been shaken, it triggers a hunt for the shaker. In one diagnostic step, the legal system is brought to bear on the baby’s family and anyone else near the infant at the time of the supposed shaking.
The symptomatic triad of bleeding between the brain and skull (known as subdural or subarachnoid hematomas), bleeding behind the retinas, and brain swelling is both the core of an SBS diagnosis and the point of departure for the syndrome’s skeptics. The medical proof that shaking alone can cause these internal head injuries is questionable, the skeptics say, when many other things, from infections to malnutrition to falls onto a hard surface, are known to be causes of similar symptoms in infants.
One such skeptic testified for the prosecution in the Woodward case but later changed his stance. Pediatric neuroradiologist Patrick Barnes of Stanford University said in an e-mail interview, “It is known from case records that SBS is misdiagnosed/overdiagnosed. It is not only a problem in medicine but a problem in the justice system.”
Nevertheless, “we’re not teaching Pat Barnes’s point of view in medical schools,” Alexander says. “What [SBS skeptics] say is generally not believed by a vast majority of doctors—and it’s not believed by medical organizations.” Alexander points to a 2001 position paper from the American Academy of Pediatrics stating that SBS “injuries are the result of violent trauma” and not from “short falls, seizures, or as a consequence of vaccination.”
Ronald Uscinski, a clinical assistant professor of neurosurgery at Georgetown Hospital and George Washington University, first entered the SBS arena when a colleague asked him to testify for the defense in the Louise Woodward case. During the quiet summer before the trial, Uscinski read every paper and monograph he could find on the syndrome.
Uscinski traced medical citations in SBS research back to a 1968 study involving rhesus monkeys subjected to collisions and violent accelerations. Uscinski already knew the study—it had been conducted by his mentor, Ayub Ommaya, the very same colleague who had brought him into the Woodward case. Uscinski says the study yields no firm conclusions about the consequences of shaking monkeys or, for that matter, babies.
“When I put all of this together, I said, my God, this is a sham,” Uscinski says. “Somebody made a mistake right at the very beginning, and look at what’s come out of it.”
In 2007 Uscinski took on an SBS case in Washington, D.C., testifying on behalf of two parents, Greg and Julianna Caplan, who were accused of SBS abuse. The Caplans were ultimately exonerated, yet they remained on the city rolls as potential child abusers until earlier this year. Uscinski wrote in an editorial in the Washington Post in March, “This is not to say that child abuse does not exist. I have witnessed such cases and have been deeply and painfully moved by the plight of innocents who have been injured or even killed....And yet I am no less moved by the plight of the wrongfully accused (and even convicted), their families and their loved ones. This is particularly so when such accusations are based on impure science, a flawed legal foundation, and completely inadequate or inappropriate public policy.”
+++
Unlike Barnes, other experts who testified for the prosecution in the Woodward trial continue to support the validity of SBS. One of these is Eli Newberger, an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, who was among the physicians at Children’s Hospital in Boston who treated Matthew Eappen in 1997. Newberger founded the hospital’s child protection unit in 1970 and has testified in more than 600 child abuse cases since then, dozens of which, he says, were SBS cases. Although he remains affiliated with the child protection unit, he retired from hospital work in 1999. He continues to teach, write, and provide expert testimony in child abuse cases.
“By the time I was asked to testify in the Louise Woodward case...there was a great deal of clinical understanding about [SBS-related] trauma,” Newberger says. “The infant’s head is disproportionately larger in relation to the rest of its body than our heads are. A child can’t stop the to-and-fro excursions of the head with its neck. The brain bobbles about. The infant’s brain is softer than the adult’s.”
SBS skeptics, he says, muddy the waters “with so-called theoretical or historical perspectives on abuse.”
Money, Newberger suspects, has brought otherwise good people over to what he and his colleagues call the “dark side,” doubting SBS. “I have never ceased to be amazed about what highly regarded, well published, scientifically informed doctors will do when they’re offered large amounts of money,” he says.
For the record, Newberger charges $450 per hour to consult and testify in SBS and other child abuse cases. The University of Florida’s Alexander charges $300 per hour as an expert consultant but notes that all the money goes to the university. Uscinski has, by his own estimate, been in the courtroom as an expert witness in SBS trials nearly 100 times since 1997. His SBS work constitutes 15 percent of his income, he says. His rates are up to $750 per hour as a consultant and up to $10,000 per day on the witness stand for out-of-town cases. “If it’s a public defender’s case, you get paid half that or one-third of that, or even less,” Uscinski says. “Not everybody can afford that, and I charge according to what people can pay.”
Despite his confidence in the existence of SBS, Newberger adds that he has consulted for the defense on two or three SBS cases in which, he says, a “juggernaut” develops. “The department of social services sends out a social worker,” he says, describing the usual procedure after a doctor reports a possible SBS case to the authorities. “If a parent does not know exactly what’s happening, very frequently the first conclusion is that they’re trying to hide something. And sometimes parents are racking their brains, coming up with one or two possibilities. Then it looks like they’re changing their stories. That can be used to damn them.”
The Haynes family of Rantoul, Illinois were caught in just such a juggernaut. In October 2005 the father, Neal, was charged in a civil case with shaking his then 3-month-old son, Jake (not his real name). Although not accused of shaking the baby, the mother, Christy, was also charged with abuse and neglect (for permitting the alleged shaking). Jake had been hospitalized three times over two months for fever, infection, difficulty breathing, and symptoms of seizures. He survived his third hospitalization and returned home healthy, with his parents. However, when emergency room doctors discovered retinal and subdural hemorrhages, they concluded that Jake’s medical problems must have stemmed from his being violently shaken.
“The traditional school of thought says whoever had that child [last] is the one who gets the ticket to the ball,” says Kristen Fischer, Neal’s attorney.
Court-appointed advocates for Jake assembled a time line that made Neal the likely alleged abuser. State child protective services then seized Jake and helped launch a civil trial to terminate both parents’ rights to raise Jake or potentially ever to see him again. (Both the Champaign County Court Appointed Special Advocate executive director, Genevieve Lambert, and her attorney on the Haynes case, John DeLaMar, declined an interview for this article.)
Lawyers for the family ultimately called in Uscinski, among other experts. As the chief pediatric neurosurgeon at Georgetown University Hospital from 1983 to 1993, Uscinski operated on the brains of, he estimates, four babies who were said to be victims of SBS, and he saw three or four others. “I noticed something in each instance,” he says. “I noticed that there was always a better explanation in that particular case than shaking.”
In the Haynes case, Uscinski rendered a professional opinion that concluded, “There is no question but that [Jake] Haynes had a chronic subdural hematoma.” As a chronic (rather than acute) case, by definition the “hematoma had its genesis weeks or months earlier.” Uscinski suggested that baby Jake’s breech birth could have itself produced enough force on the brain to cause subdural bleeding. This kind of wound sometimes doesn’t heal and can go undetected for weeks or months, he says.
F. Edward Yazbak, a Massachusetts-based pediatrician, examined Jake’s medical records and wrote a 51-page report for the defense that pointed to other possible causes of baby Jake’s hemorrhages, including adverse reaction to his vaccinations, a vitamin C and K deficiency, and/or a toxic level of histamine in his blood.
In fact, because doctors had already concluded the cause of Jake’s internal trauma was shaking, and therefore that the child was safe from further injury, they made a crucial mistake in his follow-up care. Leaving aside the judicial impact of an incorrect SBS diagnosis on caregivers, this may be the most worrying aspect of such a mistake: the impact on the child’s health.
In Jake’s case, by early December 2005 his head had swollen to the point that he was above the 97th percentile for head circumference. In mid-December, Fischer recalls, the doctors “decided that the hematoma hadn’t grown, but the brain was atrophying from the terrible abuse.” They sent the child home.
By late December, following the ongoing case, the defense’s Yazbak learned about Jake’s enlarging head size—brought about, he concluded, by a subdural hematoma that was in fact bleeding again. “[Yazbak] said this child has got to see a specialist immediately,” Fischer says. “If it’s unchecked, he’ll die.” The lawyers called a meeting with state child protective services, petitioning for a second opinion on Jake’s condition. Ultimately he was sent to a hospital in St. Louis, where doctors operated on the hematoma and put in a shunt.
The doctors “had gotten into the routine that it was shaken baby syndrome,” Fischer says. “And they could not get out of that routine.”
+++
Neal and Christy Haynes spent $200,000 on their defense—retaining Yazbak and Uscinski as well as experts in pediatric ophthalmology and neuroradiology to provide expert testimony—and endured 14 months of trials and hearings. Then the charges against them were dropped. “The court further finds that...[Jake] Haynes is neither an abused minor nor a neglected minor,” Judge Chase Leonhard ruled. “Let this boy become a man in the home of loving parents and family. Please make it so.”
The fact that the Hayneses were able to tap leading medical experts who were willing to reduce their rates to devote scores of hours to their case is just the first of a number of fortuitous turns their story took. According to jury consultant Blake, theirs is more the exception than the rule.
“What Shaken baby skeptics say ?is generally not believed by a vast majority ?of doctors or medical organizations.”
SBS cases today, she says, practically require top-flight, credentialed medical SBS specialists on the witness stand who can produce a credible alternative scenario—more than just the reasonable doubt that courts theoretically require. Otherwise, she says, what remains is typically the testimony of doctors who believe that, absent a serious car accident or a two-story fall, only shaking can produce a subdural hematoma. And shaking means someone is guilty of child abuse.
“For the jury...the defense needs to prove what happened to this baby,” she says. “Unless you’ve got the money to hire top experts, you’re probably going to prison....It’s guilty until proved innocent.”
Cheri Landers, chief of the division of pediatric critical care at Kentucky Children’s Hospital in Lexington, says that if an infant were brought into the emergency room suffering seizures and was discovered to have a subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhaging, she would want to ask the family about the background before rendering a diagnosis. “We would need to find out...was there any known trauma?” she says. According to Landers, a severe car accident, for instance, could explain subdural and retinal hemorrhages and consequent seizures. She points to a 1993 article in the journal Neurosurgery that examined the retinas of 140 children involved in car accidents. Two had hemorrhages, and both were in high-velocity side-impact crashes.
“When we discover no reason for the trauma,” she adds, “that is the point where we come to the conclusion that there is no reason for this other than shaking.” Landers cites a 2000 study in the journal Pediatrics that evaluated 19 Florida infants with subdural hemorrhages who were referred to the state’s child protective services in 1997. The authors selected nine of these cases and followed them up, reporting that every child was the victim of “inflicted injury, inappropriate infant handling, and/or high-risk social settings” such as a family with a history of domestic violence.
Neuropathologist Jan Leestma of Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago, who testified for the defense in the Woodward case, has come to a different conclusion. Leestma reviewed 324 apparent or alleged child abuse cases from 1969 to 2001 and published his results in a 2005 issue of the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology. Fifty-four of these cases involved shaking a baby. He found only 20 percent (11 cases) yielded no evidence of any impact to the baby’s skull—such as a fall from a changing table.
“When you have an impact, that trumps everything else,” Leestma says. Shaking means “10 g’s, versus 200 g’s” for an impact.
Impacts and falls are a world apart from shaking. Impacts could be anything from a simple but tragic accident to negligence to child abuse. But shaking means one thing: attempted infanticide.
What happens to infants when they are shaken or suffer an impact? Kirk Thibault is a biomechanical engineer with the Essington, Pennsylvania, firm Biomechanics, Inc. A research scientist who has studied the physical properties and stress loads of infant and adult brains, Thibault has been hired as an expert in, as he recalls, “seven or eight” SBS cases since 1998. (His father, Lawrence, is a research pioneer in the field and testified for the defense in the Woodward case.) Thibault the younger charges $300 per hour for expert consultation and testimony.
“I do not think of myself as an advocate for anyone, but I do advocate for the science,” he says.
Thibault points to a 2003 study in the Journal of Neurosurgery that used lifelike infant dolls with crash test dummy accelerometers inside their heads. A team of four bioengineers and neurologists from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia then simulated vigorous infant shakings—as might happen in an SBS case—as well as shakes that ended in an impact and drops from one-, three-, and five-foot heights.
The group concluded that shaking their model infants produced results “statistically similar” to one-foot falls onto concrete or a carpet pad or higher falls onto a foam mattress. These results were well below reported thresholds for causing the kind of intracranial bleeding observed in SBS babies, suggesting that shaking wasn’t enough to induce SBS.
“It’s drilled into people’s heads that shaking will kill these kids,” Kirk Thibault says. “I don’t know that shaking can’t kill a child. I assume you can probably shake a child to death. I have no idea.... What I specifically look at is whether shaking can cause loads [on the brain] that...can cause subdural hematomas. The flip side of that is people abuse kids,” Thibault says. But he adds, “You can’t simply categorically say this is all nonaccidental. I say one case at a time.”
Neurosurgeon Jean-Sébastien Raul, an assistant professor at the Institute of Legal Medicine at the University of Strasbourg in France, says he has a computer model of infant shaking that could help clarify the controversy. In a 2006 paper published in the International Journal of Legal Medicine, Raul concluded that, biophysically, shaking alone can produce the kinds of subdural hematomas that are seen in SBS cases.
Raul’s group drew from published properties of human baby brains and skulls and pig brains and skulls—markedly similar, he says, in biophysical properties. The group ran computer simulations that examined the behavior of veins that bridge the brain and the covering tissue surrounding the brain. Rupture of “bridging veins,” he says, is a known and well-understood cause of subdural hematomas.
Raul says he knows the 2003 Journal of Neurosurgery paper well but argues that the authors looked only at acceleration inside the skull. “We are looking at the relative motion between the brain and skull,” he says. It is this additional factor, he thinks, that produces the bleeding inside the shaken infant’s skull.
Thibault points out that Raul’s group conducted computerized experiments involving unknown situations without first confirming that their model could reproduce known experimental results. For instance, in 1984 Nobuhiko Aoki and colleagues at Nagoya University in Japan studied medical case records of infants who had fallen and hit their heads. Some had died, some had survived. All, Aoki said, had subdural hematomas and retinal hemorrhages and thus could potentially be seen as SBS cases. “You first have to [run your computer model] outside of the vacuum of your model,” Thibault says. “At least demonstrate that you can draw a line and say this is a threshold...and now I’m going to re-create every single one of Aoki’s falls.”
+++
Leestma says, more simply, “These programs are like Pixar cartoons. You can do wonderful things, but is it real or a creation?”
“When you’ve been around this as long as I have, CONFESSIONS DON’T MEAN NEARLY AS MUCH as you’d think they do.”
Raul says his group has begun to verify its computer model with experimental data, but this work hasn’t been published yet.
The science behind SBS moves slowly forward. Meanwhile, Toni Blake’s office at 2nd Chair Services gets several phone calls or e-mails a day, on average, from a new set of parents or siblings or child-care workers accused of causing SBS (and wrongly so, they claim). SBS cases have been prosecuted around the world for the past 30 years. An unknown number of families have been affected. Certainly some SBS cases bring an abusing parent to justice and save children in the process. But if the skeptic argument is correct, then other SBS cases involve putting an innocent family member behind bars.
Blake tracks SBS cases for both SBSDefense.com and 2nd Chair Services. She has followed 169 shaken baby cases in which medical records were available and which occurred between 1997 and 2007. Forty-one percent of the babies survived, she reports. (Her study is unpublished.) Thirty-one cases she followed resulted in a confession involving “some form of shaking or shaking with impact,” she says. But such confessions, often used as the silver bullet to defeat SBS skeptics, became less conclusive upon further scrutiny. Thirteen of the confessions were admissions that the “abuser” had merely shaken the infant as a way to attempt to revive it. Another 15 admitted to “abuse” in a more general sense, which could have involved striking the child or hitting it against a wall or floor. Just three people in Blake’s data set admitted to abuse by shaking—and shaking only. And at least one of those three infants, she says, already had a subdural hematoma, before the shaking incident.
Scott Coffee, a public defender in Clark County, Nevada, says, “Shaken baby proponents say you have people confess to shaking babies, and that proves that shaking babies had to cause the injuries. The problem is, when you’ve been around this as long as I have, confessions don’t mean nearly as much as you’d think they do.”
Coffee, a public defender for the past 13 years, says child abuse cases often raise the stakes so high that a bias toward false confessions may be concealed within the data. When DISCOVER contacted him last summer, Coffee was working on an SBS case in which the accused abuser had been in jail for six years awaiting trial and potentially faced a first-degree murder charge. (Infanticide by abuse qualifies as first-degree murder in Nevada, Coffee says.)
The sentence Coffee’s client would be given, if he went to trial and lost, was either 20 to 50 years, 20 years to life, or life without parole. Agreeing to confess to shaking the child, Coffee says, would considerably reduce any sentence.
In July 2001 Coffee’s client was taking care of his 11-month-old son, Mike (not his real name), whom pediatrician Yazbak later described as suffering from “multiple medical problems” including malnutrition and possible blood coagulation deficiency. On July 10 Mike stopped breathing. According to Coffee, his client attempted CPR and called 911 before taking the child to a Las Vegas emergency room. Mike ultimately died on life support. Bruises were found on his abdomen and back, and paramedics had found a cut under his eyelid. Postmortem examinations revealed a subdural hematoma and retinal hemorrhaging.
With an existing criminal record that he feared would bias the trial, Coffee’s client opted to plead to shaking baby Mike. “I’m sure at some point during the failed attempt to resuscitate Mike, he was shaken, and as the local doctors were willing to testify that shaking caused the death, there wasn’t a problem getting the plea down,” Coffee said in an e-mail. In October 2007 Coffee’s client was sentenced to 10 years to life for second-degree murder.
Around the same time, the Wisconsin Law Review published a paper entitled “Shaken Baby Syndrome: Medical Uncertainty Casts Doubt on Convictions.” The paper’s author, Molly Gena, now a Milwaukee-based lawyer for Legal Action of Wisconsin, says her review of recent SBS decisions indicates the tide is beginning to turn.
“It started with the British cases,” Gena says, referring to a review ordered by the British attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, of 297 alleged child abuse cases, some of which were SBS convictions based only on the triad of internal symptoms: subdural hematoma, retinal hemorrhage, and brain swelling. In one case, R v. Harris, the court concluded that “the mere presence of the triad on its own cannot automatically or necessarily lead to a diagnosis of [SBS].”
An SBS case in which Gena assisted as a law student (State of Wisconsin v. Audrey Edmunds) followed similar lines, with the court ruling in January 2008 that “there has been a shift in mainstream medical opinion....There are now competing medical opinions as to how [alleged shaken baby] Natalie’s injuries arose.”
Opposed though he is to the SBS skepticism that informed these recent court findings, Newberger of Harvard Medical School says he doesn’t disagree with them. http://Louis-j-sheehan.com
“Yes, there are competing explanations,” Newberger says. “The traditional explanation [for subdural hematomas] was that there were bridging veins that are sheared and...explode blood into the space. But does anybody really know that? That’s the issue.” Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Sunday, December 7, 2008
state 44.sta.0002 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire . State and federal governments spent $1.4 billion on programs in 2004 to conserve 1,260 of the nation's threatened and endangered species. One-third of those funds went to protecting fish, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service analysis, released last month. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com
The 219-page report states that nearly $800 million went for programs to conserve individual species. Nine of the top 10 expenditures—or $273.8 million—went for fish, including four Chinook salmon populations and two steelhead trout communities. Other animals in the top 10 species-by-species expenditures were the Steller sea lion, coho salmon, bull trout, sockeye salmon, red-cockaded woodpecker, pallid sturgeon, chum salmon, and right whale. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com
At $474.8 million, fish expenditures were roughly four times as great as the amount spent to protect birds or mammals and many more times as large as the amount spent for groups such as flowering species, insects, and the nation's vanishing amphibians.
Almost $560 million went for support services, such as law enforcement and coordination of conservation programs. Another $60 million paid for new land acquisitions critical to preserving the habitat of endangered species. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
The 219-page report states that nearly $800 million went for programs to conserve individual species. Nine of the top 10 expenditures—or $273.8 million—went for fish, including four Chinook salmon populations and two steelhead trout communities. Other animals in the top 10 species-by-species expenditures were the Steller sea lion, coho salmon, bull trout, sockeye salmon, red-cockaded woodpecker, pallid sturgeon, chum salmon, and right whale. http://louis5j5sheehan5.blogspot.com
At $474.8 million, fish expenditures were roughly four times as great as the amount spent to protect birds or mammals and many more times as large as the amount spent for groups such as flowering species, insects, and the nation's vanishing amphibians.
Almost $560 million went for support services, such as law enforcement and coordination of conservation programs. Another $60 million paid for new land acquisitions critical to preserving the habitat of endangered species. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
time exist 66.exi.1110003 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
« Putting the Heat in the Hot Big Bang
The Atom Smashers on PBS Nov. 25 »
What if Time Really Exists?
The Foundational Questions Institute is sponsoring an essay competition on “The Nature of Time.” Needless to say, I’m in. It’s as if they said: “Here, you keep talking about this stuff you are always talking about anyway, except that we will hold out the possibility of substantial cash prizes for doing so.” Hard to resist. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
The deadline for submitting an entry is December 1, so there’s still plenty of time (if you will), for anyone out there who is interested and looking for something to do over Thanksgiving. They are asking for essays under 5000 words, on any of various aspects of the nature of time, pitched “between the level of Scientific American and a review article in Science or Nature.” That last part turns out to be the difficult one — you’re allowed to invoke some technical concepts, and in fact the essay might seem a little thin if you kept it strictly popular, but hopefully it should be accessible to a large range of non-experts. Most entries seem to include a few judicious equations while doing their best to tell a story in words.
All of the entries are put online here, and each comes with its own discussion forum where readers can leave comments. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us A departure from the usual protocols of scientific communication, but that’s a good thing. (Inevitably there is a great deal of chaff along with the wheat among the submitted essays, but that’s the price you pay.) What is more, in addition to a judging by a jury of experts, there is also a community vote, which comes with its own prizes. So feel free to drop by and vote for mine if you like — or vote for someone else’s if you think it’s better. There’s some good stuff there.http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
time-flies-clock-10-11-2006.gifMy essay is called “What if Time Really Exists?” A lot of people who think about time tend to emerge from their contemplations and declare that time is just an illusion, or (in modern guise) some sort of semi-classical approximation. And that might very well be true. But it also might not be true; from our experiences with duality in string theory, we have explicit examples of models of quantum gravity which are equivalent to conventional quantum-mechanical systems obeying the time-dependent Schrödinger equation with the time parameter right there where Schrödinger put it.
And from that humble beginning — maybe ordinary quantum mechanics is right, and there exists a formulation of the theory of everything that takes the form of a time-independent Hamiltonian acting on a time-dependent quantum state defined in some Hilbert space — you can actually reach some sweeping conclusions. The fulcrum, of course, is the observed arrow of time in our local universe. When thinking about the low-entropy conditions near the Big Bang, we tend to get caught up in the fact that the Bang is a singularity, forming a boundary to spacetime in classical general relativity. But classical general relativity is not right, and it’s perfectly plausible (although far from inevitable) that there was something before the Bang. If the universe really did come into existence out of nothing 14 billion years ago, we can at least imagine that there was something special about that event, and there is some deep reason for the entropy to have been so low. But if the ordinary rules of quantum mechanics are obeyed, there is no such thing as the “beginning of time”; the Big Bang would just be a transitional stage, for which our current theories don’t provide an adequate spacetime interpretation. In that case, the observed arrow of time in our local universe has to arise dynamically according to the laws of physics governing the evolution of a wave function for all eternity.
Interestingly, that has important implications. If the quantum state evolves in a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, it evolves ergodically through a torus of phases, and will exhibit all of the usual problems of Boltzmann brains and the like (as Dyson, Kleban, and Susskind have emphasized). So, at the very least, the Hilbert space (under these assumptions) must be infinite-dimensional. In fact you can go a bit farther than that, and argue that the spectrum of energy eigenvalues must be arbitrarily closely spaced — there must be at least one accumulation point.http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
Sexy, I know. The remarkable thing is that you can say anything at all about the Hilbert space of the universe just by making a few simple assumptions and observing that eggs always turn into omelets, never the other way around. Turning it into a respectable cosmological model with an explicit spacetime interpretation is, admittedly, more work, and all we have at the moment are some very speculative ideas. But in the course of the essay I got to name-check Parmenides, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Augustine, and Nietzsche, so overall it was well worth the effort.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
The Atom Smashers on PBS Nov. 25 »
What if Time Really Exists?
The Foundational Questions Institute is sponsoring an essay competition on “The Nature of Time.” Needless to say, I’m in. It’s as if they said: “Here, you keep talking about this stuff you are always talking about anyway, except that we will hold out the possibility of substantial cash prizes for doing so.” Hard to resist. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
The deadline for submitting an entry is December 1, so there’s still plenty of time (if you will), for anyone out there who is interested and looking for something to do over Thanksgiving. They are asking for essays under 5000 words, on any of various aspects of the nature of time, pitched “between the level of Scientific American and a review article in Science or Nature.” That last part turns out to be the difficult one — you’re allowed to invoke some technical concepts, and in fact the essay might seem a little thin if you kept it strictly popular, but hopefully it should be accessible to a large range of non-experts. Most entries seem to include a few judicious equations while doing their best to tell a story in words.
All of the entries are put online here, and each comes with its own discussion forum where readers can leave comments. http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us A departure from the usual protocols of scientific communication, but that’s a good thing. (Inevitably there is a great deal of chaff along with the wheat among the submitted essays, but that’s the price you pay.) What is more, in addition to a judging by a jury of experts, there is also a community vote, which comes with its own prizes. So feel free to drop by and vote for mine if you like — or vote for someone else’s if you think it’s better. There’s some good stuff there.http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
time-flies-clock-10-11-2006.gifMy essay is called “What if Time Really Exists?” A lot of people who think about time tend to emerge from their contemplations and declare that time is just an illusion, or (in modern guise) some sort of semi-classical approximation. And that might very well be true. But it also might not be true; from our experiences with duality in string theory, we have explicit examples of models of quantum gravity which are equivalent to conventional quantum-mechanical systems obeying the time-dependent Schrödinger equation with the time parameter right there where Schrödinger put it.
And from that humble beginning — maybe ordinary quantum mechanics is right, and there exists a formulation of the theory of everything that takes the form of a time-independent Hamiltonian acting on a time-dependent quantum state defined in some Hilbert space — you can actually reach some sweeping conclusions. The fulcrum, of course, is the observed arrow of time in our local universe. When thinking about the low-entropy conditions near the Big Bang, we tend to get caught up in the fact that the Bang is a singularity, forming a boundary to spacetime in classical general relativity. But classical general relativity is not right, and it’s perfectly plausible (although far from inevitable) that there was something before the Bang. If the universe really did come into existence out of nothing 14 billion years ago, we can at least imagine that there was something special about that event, and there is some deep reason for the entropy to have been so low. But if the ordinary rules of quantum mechanics are obeyed, there is no such thing as the “beginning of time”; the Big Bang would just be a transitional stage, for which our current theories don’t provide an adequate spacetime interpretation. In that case, the observed arrow of time in our local universe has to arise dynamically according to the laws of physics governing the evolution of a wave function for all eternity.
Interestingly, that has important implications. If the quantum state evolves in a finite-dimensional Hilbert space, it evolves ergodically through a torus of phases, and will exhibit all of the usual problems of Boltzmann brains and the like (as Dyson, Kleban, and Susskind have emphasized). So, at the very least, the Hilbert space (under these assumptions) must be infinite-dimensional. In fact you can go a bit farther than that, and argue that the spectrum of energy eigenvalues must be arbitrarily closely spaced — there must be at least one accumulation point.http://Louis1J1Sheehan.us
Sexy, I know. The remarkable thing is that you can say anything at all about the Hilbert space of the universe just by making a few simple assumptions and observing that eggs always turn into omelets, never the other way around. Turning it into a respectable cosmological model with an explicit spacetime interpretation is, admittedly, more work, and all we have at the moment are some very speculative ideas. But in the course of the essay I got to name-check Parmenides, Heraclitus, Lucretius, Augustine, and Nietzsche, so overall it was well worth the effort.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
personality
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. Preliminary data suggest that deceitful, violent men diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder have a reduced amount of gray matter in the brain's prefrontal cortex. Some type of prefrontal deficit may underlie this controversial disorder, asserts a team led by psychologist Adrian Raine of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com
Magnetic resonance imaging revealed these brain-tissue deficits in 21 men with antisocial personality disorder, compared with no such deficits in 26 men addicted to alcohol or illicit drugs, 21 men with other mental disorders, and 34 men with no psychiatric disorders.
If the finding holds up, prefrontal deficits may turn out to be either a cause or a result of antisocial personality disorder, the scientists say in the February Archives of General Psychiatry. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com
Magnetic resonance imaging revealed these brain-tissue deficits in 21 men with antisocial personality disorder, compared with no such deficits in 26 men addicted to alcohol or illicit drugs, 21 men with other mental disorders, and 34 men with no psychiatric disorders.
If the finding holds up, prefrontal deficits may turn out to be either a cause or a result of antisocial personality disorder, the scientists say in the February Archives of General Psychiatry. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
results 993.res.662 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
After a fire rages through a forest, what’s left is charcoal, which can remain in the soil for centuries, even millennia. Scientists hoping to capitalize on this persistence and sequester carbon by burying charred wood may be disappointed: Apparently, charcoal in forest soil stimulates microbial activity that accelerates carbon loss from organic material covering the forest floor.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Although scientists have long known that charcoal isn’t biologically inert, its effect on organic matter in soil is poorly understood, says David A. Wardle, a soil ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå. To address the dearth of information, Wardle and his colleagues conducted field experiments in the forests of northern Sweden.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Wardle’s team buried small mesh bags that had one of three fillings: charcoal, carbon-rich humus or a half-and-half mix of charcoal and humus. The charcoal was burnt wood from crowberry, the most common shrub found at the Swedish forest sites, and the humus was collected from those sites as well. The researchers left the bags at three types of sites: one in a mature, 450-year-old forest, one in a forest that had recently experienced a fire and one in a forest halfway to maturity. They recovered the bags one, two, four and 10 years later.
After 10 years, each bag of charcoal, on average, still weighed the same, but more than 26 percent of the mass in the bags containing only humus was missing, presumably organic matter that had been lost via decomposition. Using those data, the team expected the charcoal-humus mix to have lost about 13 percent of its mass in 10 years, says Wardle. Instead, about 23 percent of the mass in those bags disappeared, he and his colleagues report in the May 2 Science. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
Analyses of the samples revealed a higher rate of microbial activity in the charcoal-humus mixtures than in humus alone, says Wardle. It wasn’t clear whether that activity accelerated the rate of decomposition or generated water-soluble substances that later leached from the bags. In particular, says Wardle, tiny fungi like to feed on the organic compounds that charcoal absorbs and concentrates.
The new report “provides really important findings,” says Tom DeLuca, a forest ecologist with The Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Mont. Most previous studies of charcoal’s effects on ecosystem processes have lasted only weeks or months, he notes. Insights about how charcoal alters decomposition rates in soil are particularly timely, he adds, because some scientists have suggested that burying large amounts of charcoal could be an effective way to sequester carbon.
The new results are particularly significant because boreal forests — those found at high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, like those in Sweden — hold about 703 billion metric tons of carbon, says David U. Hooper, an ecosystem ecologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Moreover, about 89 percent of that carbon sits in the soil, not the plants themselves.
Thus, he notes, a boreal forest fire would deliver a “triple whammy” of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Besides the effect described by Wardle and his colleagues, combustion of the trees and material lining the forest floor releases a large pulse of the greenhouse gas. Finally, he notes, charcoal left in the wake of a fire tends to darken the ground. That causes the ground to absorb more sunlight and warm considerably, thereby boosting long-term rates of decomposition and carbon dioxide production. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Although scientists have long known that charcoal isn’t biologically inert, its effect on organic matter in soil is poorly understood, says David A. Wardle, a soil ecologist at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Umeå. To address the dearth of information, Wardle and his colleagues conducted field experiments in the forests of northern Sweden.Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Wardle’s team buried small mesh bags that had one of three fillings: charcoal, carbon-rich humus or a half-and-half mix of charcoal and humus. The charcoal was burnt wood from crowberry, the most common shrub found at the Swedish forest sites, and the humus was collected from those sites as well. The researchers left the bags at three types of sites: one in a mature, 450-year-old forest, one in a forest that had recently experienced a fire and one in a forest halfway to maturity. They recovered the bags one, two, four and 10 years later.
After 10 years, each bag of charcoal, on average, still weighed the same, but more than 26 percent of the mass in the bags containing only humus was missing, presumably organic matter that had been lost via decomposition. Using those data, the team expected the charcoal-humus mix to have lost about 13 percent of its mass in 10 years, says Wardle. Instead, about 23 percent of the mass in those bags disappeared, he and his colleagues report in the May 2 Science. http://www.blog.ca/user/Beforethebigbang
Analyses of the samples revealed a higher rate of microbial activity in the charcoal-humus mixtures than in humus alone, says Wardle. It wasn’t clear whether that activity accelerated the rate of decomposition or generated water-soluble substances that later leached from the bags. In particular, says Wardle, tiny fungi like to feed on the organic compounds that charcoal absorbs and concentrates.
The new report “provides really important findings,” says Tom DeLuca, a forest ecologist with The Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Mont. Most previous studies of charcoal’s effects on ecosystem processes have lasted only weeks or months, he notes. Insights about how charcoal alters decomposition rates in soil are particularly timely, he adds, because some scientists have suggested that burying large amounts of charcoal could be an effective way to sequester carbon.
The new results are particularly significant because boreal forests — those found at high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, like those in Sweden — hold about 703 billion metric tons of carbon, says David U. Hooper, an ecosystem ecologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham. Moreover, about 89 percent of that carbon sits in the soil, not the plants themselves.
Thus, he notes, a boreal forest fire would deliver a “triple whammy” of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Besides the effect described by Wardle and his colleagues, combustion of the trees and material lining the forest floor releases a large pulse of the greenhouse gas. Finally, he notes, charcoal left in the wake of a fire tends to darken the ground. That causes the ground to absorb more sunlight and warm considerably, thereby boosting long-term rates of decomposition and carbon dioxide production. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Sunday, November 2, 2008
robots 65.rob.3 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
1 “Robot” comes from the Czech word robota, meaning “drudgery,” and first appeared in the 1921 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). The drama ends badly when the machines rise up and kill their creators, leaving a sole lonely survivor. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
2 They say it was an accident. The first known case of robot homicide occurred in 1981, when a robotic arm crushed a Japanese Kawasaki factory worker.
3 More than a million industrial robots are now in use, nearly half of them in Japan.
4 Archytas of Tarentum, a pal of Plato’s, built a mechanical bird driven by a jet of steam or compressed air—arguably history’s first robot—in the fifth century B.C.
5 Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for an armored humanoid machine in 1495. Engineer Mark Rosheim has created a functional miniature version for NASA to help colonize Mars.
6 Slow but steady: The real Mars robots, Spirit and Opportunity, have logged 10.5 miles trudging across the Red Planet for more than three years. The unstoppable droids were built to last 90 days.
7 The United States’ military corps of 4,000 robots includes reconnaissance Talon bots that scout for roadside bombs in Iraq and PackBots that poked around for Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Afghanistan. Apparently without much success.
8 PackBot’s manufacturer, iRobot, has also sold more than 2 million Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, with the same environment-sensing technology.
robot-2-150.jpgrobot-3-150.jpg
9 Low tech vs. high tech: Taliban fighters in Afghanistan have reportedly used ladders to flip over and disable the U.S. military robots sent to scout out their caves.
10 Elektro, the world’s first humanoid robot, debuted in 1939. Built by Westinghouse, the seven-foot-tall walking machine “spoke” more than 700 words stored on 78-rpm records to simulate conversation.
11 Life is tough in Tinseltown: Elektro later appeared in the 1960 B movie Sex Kittens Go to College.
12 R2-D2 is the only character that appears unchanged (by aging, say, or a funky black outfit) in all six Star Wars movies.
13 R2’s dark secret: It was played by actor Kenny Baker, who by the end was mostly given the boot and replaced by CGI.
14 Chris Melhuish of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory created robots that use bacteria-filled fuel cells to produce electricity from rotten apples and dead flies. The goal: robots that forage for their own food. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
15 Mini Me: Australian researchers are trying to build a microrobot that would mimic the swim stroke used by E. coli bacteria. It would be injected into a patient so it could take a biopsy from the inside.
16 Cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick calls himself the world’s first cyborg, with computer chips implanted in his left arm. He can remotely operate doors, an artificial hand, and an electronic wheelchair.
17 Winebot, built by Japan’s NEC System Technologies and Mie University, can ID scads of different wines, cheeses, and hors d’oeuvres . . . up to a point. It recently mistook a reporter’s hand for prosciutto.
18 MIT’s Media Lab is trying to make robots personal, developing RoCo—a computer with a monitor for a head and neck—and Leonardo, a sort of super-Furby designed to respond to emotional cues.
19 No strings attached! Robotics expert Henrik Christensen predicts humans will be having sex with robots within four years. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
20 Hans Moravec, founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, predicts that robots will emerge as their own species by 2040. “They could replace us in every essential task and, in principle, operate our society increasingly well without us,” he concludes, oddly cheery.
2 They say it was an accident. The first known case of robot homicide occurred in 1981, when a robotic arm crushed a Japanese Kawasaki factory worker.
3 More than a million industrial robots are now in use, nearly half of them in Japan.
4 Archytas of Tarentum, a pal of Plato’s, built a mechanical bird driven by a jet of steam or compressed air—arguably history’s first robot—in the fifth century B.C.
5 Leonardo da Vinci drew up plans for an armored humanoid machine in 1495. Engineer Mark Rosheim has created a functional miniature version for NASA to help colonize Mars.
6 Slow but steady: The real Mars robots, Spirit and Opportunity, have logged 10.5 miles trudging across the Red Planet for more than three years. The unstoppable droids were built to last 90 days.
7 The United States’ military corps of 4,000 robots includes reconnaissance Talon bots that scout for roadside bombs in Iraq and PackBots that poked around for Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Afghanistan. Apparently without much success.
8 PackBot’s manufacturer, iRobot, has also sold more than 2 million Roomba robotic vacuum cleaners, with the same environment-sensing technology.
robot-2-150.jpgrobot-3-150.jpg
9 Low tech vs. high tech: Taliban fighters in Afghanistan have reportedly used ladders to flip over and disable the U.S. military robots sent to scout out their caves.
10 Elektro, the world’s first humanoid robot, debuted in 1939. Built by Westinghouse, the seven-foot-tall walking machine “spoke” more than 700 words stored on 78-rpm records to simulate conversation.
11 Life is tough in Tinseltown: Elektro later appeared in the 1960 B movie Sex Kittens Go to College.
12 R2-D2 is the only character that appears unchanged (by aging, say, or a funky black outfit) in all six Star Wars movies.
13 R2’s dark secret: It was played by actor Kenny Baker, who by the end was mostly given the boot and replaced by CGI.
14 Chris Melhuish of the Bristol Robotics Laboratory created robots that use bacteria-filled fuel cells to produce electricity from rotten apples and dead flies. The goal: robots that forage for their own food. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
15 Mini Me: Australian researchers are trying to build a microrobot that would mimic the swim stroke used by E. coli bacteria. It would be injected into a patient so it could take a biopsy from the inside.
16 Cybernetics professor Kevin Warwick calls himself the world’s first cyborg, with computer chips implanted in his left arm. He can remotely operate doors, an artificial hand, and an electronic wheelchair.
17 Winebot, built by Japan’s NEC System Technologies and Mie University, can ID scads of different wines, cheeses, and hors d’oeuvres . . . up to a point. It recently mistook a reporter’s hand for prosciutto.
18 MIT’s Media Lab is trying to make robots personal, developing RoCo—a computer with a monitor for a head and neck—and Leonardo, a sort of super-Furby designed to respond to emotional cues.
19 No strings attached! Robotics expert Henrik Christensen predicts humans will be having sex with robots within four years. http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com/
20 Hans Moravec, founder of Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute, predicts that robots will emerge as their own species by 2040. “They could replace us in every essential task and, in principle, operate our society increasingly well without us,” he concludes, oddly cheery.
Saturday, November 1, 2008
ape Louis J. Sheehan
Human beings and nonhuman apes inhabit neighboring branches on the tree of life, but there are differences. Humans have less hair and perpetually enlarged mammary glands, and unlike other apes, we sweat a lot. In 1960, to explain these differences, marine biologist Sir Alister Hardy posited a water-dependent species that preceded human beings. Hardy pointed out that only aquatic mammals like walruses and hippopotamuses have naked skin and subcutaneous fat—human traits not shared by other apes.
Hardy’s “aquatic apes” were not giant beasts living like Aquaman; rather, the species that eventually became Homo sapiens waded in and out of water and learned to swim and dive. This exposure to water, according to the theory, led to the development of human traits like walking upright.
A version of this hypothesis has been around since Greeks theorized that all living things came from the sea, but it gained the most popularity in 1972, when Elaine Morgan, an award-winning Welsh television writer, advocated for it in her book The Descent of Woman. She continued to champion the hypothesis in later books, including The Aquatic Ape.
But the aquatic ape hypothesis never got much support from the scientific community. Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College in New York, says the hypothesis is more an exercise in comparative anatomy than a theory supported by data.
Hardy’s “aquatic apes” were not giant beasts living like Aquaman; rather, the species that eventually became Homo sapiens waded in and out of water and learned to swim and dive. This exposure to water, according to the theory, led to the development of human traits like walking upright.
A version of this hypothesis has been around since Greeks theorized that all living things came from the sea, but it gained the most popularity in 1972, when Elaine Morgan, an award-winning Welsh television writer, advocated for it in her book The Descent of Woman. She continued to champion the hypothesis in later books, including The Aquatic Ape.
But the aquatic ape hypothesis never got much support from the scientific community. Eric Delson, a paleoanthropologist at Lehman College in New York, says the hypothesis is more an exercise in comparative anatomy than a theory supported by data.
zodiac63.zod.3 Louis J. Sheehan
DNA tests being conducted by the FBI could soon reveal whether a former Seguin resident led a ghastly double life.
Two Seguin women awaiting the result say they wouldn’t be surprised if they confirmed that Jack Tarrance, who lived in a Seguin mobile home park in the 1990s, had also been San Francsco’s feared “Zodiac” killer of the late 1960s.
Authorities do not have a full DNA profile of the man who shot or stabbed at least seven people in the Bay Area — killing five — and sent notes to newspapers describing his dark deeds.
In 2000, Tarrance’s stepson, Dennis Kaufman, saw a documentary about the Zodiac slayings and aspects of the killer’s profile as portrayed in the piece seemed to fit the man who’d come into his mother’s life in 1970. The “Zodiac” killer was familiar with electronics and with codes — Tarrance was a Ham radio enthusiast — and used the codes in some of his letters, which described his deeds and in one case told of other killings he claimed to have committed.
Kaufman realized the killer sounded very familiar — and began wondering about his stepfather.
At first, Kaufman said he set out to convince himself Tarrance wasn’t the killer. But the more he looked, the more parallels he found.
Tarrance moved his family very regularly. He’d only stayed in Seguin a few years, near the end of his mother’s life, who died in a Seguin nursing home in 1997 and is buried in Lockhart.
Kaufman could demonstrate that his stepfather was familiar with the areas where the attacks took place.
On his Internet Web site, Kaufman displays examples of the handwriting of Tarrance and the “Zodiac,” and they look very similar.
Like “Zodiac,” Kaufman said, Tarrance would later claim other killings, and even expressed concern at one point that his stepson would put him in prison.
In his late years, Tarrance publicly disavowed being “Zodiac,” even though Kaufman has recordings that might suggest otherwise.
Kaufman, who was five years old when his mother married Tarrance, says he attended 30 different schools while growing up.
A Seguin woman who has known Tarrance for 32 years says he regularly moved between Texas, the California bay area and the Pacific northwest.
The woman, in her 70s, was one of two Seguin residents who gave interviews to the Seguin Gazette Enterprise on condition their names and addresses not appear in the newspaper because of their concerns about interest in the case — and about who might be interested.
“I’ve already been stalked,” she said, referring to a recent incident in which she called police because of a prowler on her property.
She said Tarrance moved here with his wife, Nora, and son, Charlie, in about 1990.
He lived on Social Security and not much else and was not gainfully employed when he came to Seguin — as he usually wasn’t.
“I think he moved here so they could eat at my house,” she said. “They’d come over every day about 3:30 p.m. and play dominoes — and of course, they’d stay for dinner.”
The woman said her husband had never trusted Tarrance and always told her to never allow him in the house if he wasn’t home.
But she was never worried, she said, because she knew Tarrance and the rest of his family loved her and always had.
“I knew him for 32 years,” she said. “He told me once he absolutely would have killed anybody in any place if they’d ever hurt me. He absolutely thought I’d hung the moon.”
That wasn’t necessarily a mutual feeling, though.
“He’s a thief. I always knew Jack was capable of anything, and he holds no surprises for me,” she said. “In fact, if he ever looked at anything of value in my house, I’d put it away.”
The last time he visited, in 2004 just two years before his death, the woman said she believed Tarrance took ornaments from her Christmas tree — and a Hallmark holiday train piece from a shelf.
While less than completely enamoured with Tarrance, she said in reflecting back over the years, he had made statements that offered some tantalizing hints about his past.
“I believe Jack is fully capable of (the killings) because he’s made some statements that don’t make me doubt it at all,” she said.
One example: one time he asked her how many people she’d seen die — which she believed was an odd question to ask a woman — and she said two, her mother and her first husband.
“He said, ‘I’ve seen so many people die, I lost count a long time ago,’” she recalled.
The FBI agents who visited just more than a week ago to collect the DNA sample told her the test results could come in about six weeks. She said she looked forward to finding out.
“They said they’d let me know, and depending on the results they’d know what questions they’d want to ask,” she said.
The second Seguin woman is related to the first, but asked that her name, the precise relationship and her address be left out of this story to protect her identity, as well.
“A lot of strange people are interested in this case,” she said.
She found out about her possible “Zodiac” connection after Kaufman called Seguin looking for someone who could provide the DNA sample.
Like the first woman, she said she was initially shocked to learn that a man she believed she’d known for years could be a serial killer.
“(She) called me and said, ‘Dennis says Jack’s the Zodiac killer,” the resident recalled. “I said, ‘No way!’ She said, ‘Google it.’ I read the information and said, ‘Yes, he must be. But he doesn’t seem like the type.’”
On reflection, though, she wasn’t so sure. Tarrance was no Santa Claus, either, she said.
He was a country boy who came from a tough, bad family out of North Texas, she said, and it likely shaped his personality, and made a point of saying that Tarrance was related to her only by marriage.
“My blood isn’t like that,” she said.
For about two years in the 1980s, the woman said, she and Tarrance had homes on the same lot in Austin — and both worked in service stations for the same oil company. She managed one, and he worked the night shift at another one nearby.
“He was very, very smart, but he never wanted to be a manager even though they would ask him,” she said. “He liked the graveyard shift. He was definitely a loner. He was the kind who stayed up all night and would sleep all day.”
She never knew Tarrance to have friends.
“You only saw him with family,” she said.
She said it was plain, in hindsight, that he had a dark side.
One time, she fought off a robber at her service station, telling him he’d have to shoot her before she’d give him access to the company safe, and she was struck later that day, she said, when she told Tarrance about the robbery.
“He told me, ‘It’s a good thing it wasn’t me — I’d have shot him on the spot.’”
Tarrance almost always carried a gun, and on the rare occasions he didn’t, the woman said, he always carried a big, ugly knife.
“It was big enough to definitely gut you,” she said.
He even recommended she carry one — and gave her a brief course in its correct use that makes her shudder today.
“He told me if I’d ever got in a fight to get them in the stomach and rip upwards,” she recalled. “Always stick it in and rip up — you don’t have the strength it would take to rip down.”
It never occurred to her then, she said, to ask, “How many times have you done this yourself?”
“I’m glad I never made him mad,” the woman said.
Was former Seguin resident Jack Tarrance California’s infamous “Zodiac” killer? His stepson, Dennis Kaufman says he believes he was — an assertion that has raised considerable controversy on the Internet. Kaufman makes his case at
http://thezodiackiller.digitalzones.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
Two Seguin women awaiting the result say they wouldn’t be surprised if they confirmed that Jack Tarrance, who lived in a Seguin mobile home park in the 1990s, had also been San Francsco’s feared “Zodiac” killer of the late 1960s.
Authorities do not have a full DNA profile of the man who shot or stabbed at least seven people in the Bay Area — killing five — and sent notes to newspapers describing his dark deeds.
In 2000, Tarrance’s stepson, Dennis Kaufman, saw a documentary about the Zodiac slayings and aspects of the killer’s profile as portrayed in the piece seemed to fit the man who’d come into his mother’s life in 1970. The “Zodiac” killer was familiar with electronics and with codes — Tarrance was a Ham radio enthusiast — and used the codes in some of his letters, which described his deeds and in one case told of other killings he claimed to have committed.
Kaufman realized the killer sounded very familiar — and began wondering about his stepfather.
At first, Kaufman said he set out to convince himself Tarrance wasn’t the killer. But the more he looked, the more parallels he found.
Tarrance moved his family very regularly. He’d only stayed in Seguin a few years, near the end of his mother’s life, who died in a Seguin nursing home in 1997 and is buried in Lockhart.
Kaufman could demonstrate that his stepfather was familiar with the areas where the attacks took place.
On his Internet Web site, Kaufman displays examples of the handwriting of Tarrance and the “Zodiac,” and they look very similar.
Like “Zodiac,” Kaufman said, Tarrance would later claim other killings, and even expressed concern at one point that his stepson would put him in prison.
In his late years, Tarrance publicly disavowed being “Zodiac,” even though Kaufman has recordings that might suggest otherwise.
Kaufman, who was five years old when his mother married Tarrance, says he attended 30 different schools while growing up.
A Seguin woman who has known Tarrance for 32 years says he regularly moved between Texas, the California bay area and the Pacific northwest.
The woman, in her 70s, was one of two Seguin residents who gave interviews to the Seguin Gazette Enterprise on condition their names and addresses not appear in the newspaper because of their concerns about interest in the case — and about who might be interested.
“I’ve already been stalked,” she said, referring to a recent incident in which she called police because of a prowler on her property.
She said Tarrance moved here with his wife, Nora, and son, Charlie, in about 1990.
He lived on Social Security and not much else and was not gainfully employed when he came to Seguin — as he usually wasn’t.
“I think he moved here so they could eat at my house,” she said. “They’d come over every day about 3:30 p.m. and play dominoes — and of course, they’d stay for dinner.”
The woman said her husband had never trusted Tarrance and always told her to never allow him in the house if he wasn’t home.
But she was never worried, she said, because she knew Tarrance and the rest of his family loved her and always had.
“I knew him for 32 years,” she said. “He told me once he absolutely would have killed anybody in any place if they’d ever hurt me. He absolutely thought I’d hung the moon.”
That wasn’t necessarily a mutual feeling, though.
“He’s a thief. I always knew Jack was capable of anything, and he holds no surprises for me,” she said. “In fact, if he ever looked at anything of value in my house, I’d put it away.”
The last time he visited, in 2004 just two years before his death, the woman said she believed Tarrance took ornaments from her Christmas tree — and a Hallmark holiday train piece from a shelf.
While less than completely enamoured with Tarrance, she said in reflecting back over the years, he had made statements that offered some tantalizing hints about his past.
“I believe Jack is fully capable of (the killings) because he’s made some statements that don’t make me doubt it at all,” she said.
One example: one time he asked her how many people she’d seen die — which she believed was an odd question to ask a woman — and she said two, her mother and her first husband.
“He said, ‘I’ve seen so many people die, I lost count a long time ago,’” she recalled.
The FBI agents who visited just more than a week ago to collect the DNA sample told her the test results could come in about six weeks. She said she looked forward to finding out.
“They said they’d let me know, and depending on the results they’d know what questions they’d want to ask,” she said.
The second Seguin woman is related to the first, but asked that her name, the precise relationship and her address be left out of this story to protect her identity, as well.
“A lot of strange people are interested in this case,” she said.
She found out about her possible “Zodiac” connection after Kaufman called Seguin looking for someone who could provide the DNA sample.
Like the first woman, she said she was initially shocked to learn that a man she believed she’d known for years could be a serial killer.
“(She) called me and said, ‘Dennis says Jack’s the Zodiac killer,” the resident recalled. “I said, ‘No way!’ She said, ‘Google it.’ I read the information and said, ‘Yes, he must be. But he doesn’t seem like the type.’”
On reflection, though, she wasn’t so sure. Tarrance was no Santa Claus, either, she said.
He was a country boy who came from a tough, bad family out of North Texas, she said, and it likely shaped his personality, and made a point of saying that Tarrance was related to her only by marriage.
“My blood isn’t like that,” she said.
For about two years in the 1980s, the woman said, she and Tarrance had homes on the same lot in Austin — and both worked in service stations for the same oil company. She managed one, and he worked the night shift at another one nearby.
“He was very, very smart, but he never wanted to be a manager even though they would ask him,” she said. “He liked the graveyard shift. He was definitely a loner. He was the kind who stayed up all night and would sleep all day.”
She never knew Tarrance to have friends.
“You only saw him with family,” she said.
She said it was plain, in hindsight, that he had a dark side.
One time, she fought off a robber at her service station, telling him he’d have to shoot her before she’d give him access to the company safe, and she was struck later that day, she said, when she told Tarrance about the robbery.
“He told me, ‘It’s a good thing it wasn’t me — I’d have shot him on the spot.’”
Tarrance almost always carried a gun, and on the rare occasions he didn’t, the woman said, he always carried a big, ugly knife.
“It was big enough to definitely gut you,” she said.
He even recommended she carry one — and gave her a brief course in its correct use that makes her shudder today.
“He told me if I’d ever got in a fight to get them in the stomach and rip upwards,” she recalled. “Always stick it in and rip up — you don’t have the strength it would take to rip down.”
It never occurred to her then, she said, to ask, “How many times have you done this yourself?”
“I’m glad I never made him mad,” the woman said.
Was former Seguin resident Jack Tarrance California’s infamous “Zodiac” killer? His stepson, Dennis Kaufman says he believes he was — an assertion that has raised considerable controversy on the Internet. Kaufman makes his case at
http://thezodiackiller.digitalzones.com
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
obese 993.obe.43 Louis J. Sheehan
1. Child-safety seat manufacturers are starting to make bigger models after a recent study showed that over 250,000 U.S. children age 6 and under are too fat to use them.
2. According to a study by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, nearly half the 4,000 people responding to an online survey about obesity said they would give up a year of their life rather than be fat.
3. Between 15 percent and 30 percent also said they would rather walk away from their marriage, give up the possibility of having children, be depressed, or become alcoholic rather than be obese.
4. Five percent and 4 percent, respectively, said they would rather lose a limb or be blind than be overweight.
5. From 1991 to 2000, the average weight of Americans increased by 8.5 pounds.
6. In 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration increased its estimate of the weight of the average male from 170 to 184 pounds.
7. Airlines spent $275 million on 350 million additional gallons of fuel in 2000 to compensate for the additional weight of their passengers. Now we know why the peanuts are no longer free!
8. Stand by your man: More than a decade ago, Manuel Uribe, now weighing 1,200 pounds (the equivalent of five baby elephants) and bedridden for the past five years, was abandoned by his wife because she was frightened by his increasing size.
9. Virgin Atlantic paid Barbara Hewson from Wales the equivalent of US$24,100 in 2002 as compensation after she was squashed by an obese person sitting next to her on a transatlantic flight. Barbara suffered a blood clot in her chest, torn leg muscles, and acute sciatica and was bedridden for a month.
10. Duke University Medical Center found that women and men who lost 10 percent of their total body weight reported a significant improvement in their sexual quality of life.
11. Obesity ranks second among preventable causes of death. Tobacco use is number one.
12. According to the Department of Veteran Affairs, of the 7.5 million veterans who receive their health benefits from the agency, more than 70 percent are overweight and 20 percent have diabetes, which may lead to blindness, amputations, and kidney and heart problems.
13. Two years ago, the Hardee's fast-food chain introduced the 1,420-calorie 107-fat-gram "Monster Thickburger." It contains two 1/3-pound slabs of Angus beef, four strips of bacon, three slices of cheese, and mayonnaise on a buttered sesame-seed bun.
14. Mississippi is the home of the mud pie, Cajun fried pecans, sweet potato crunch, fried shrimp, and catfish. Mississippi is also home to the country's fattest people—more than 25 percent of adult Mississippians are obese. Coincidence?
15. Recent studies have shown that obesity can cause you to lose sleep.
16. On the other hand, a lack of sleep may result in obesity.
17. It's a vicious cycle.
18. Never forget your past: Aborigines and the Pima indians of Arizona developed obesity, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension after transitioning to a Western lifestyle.
19. If the entire morbidly obese population of the U.S. lived in one state, it would be the 12th highest-populated state, with more people than Virginia. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com/
20. A 2003 study reported that 21 percent of all New York City elementary students from all income levels are obese.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Thursday, October 30, 2008
noses 43.nos.4993 Louis J. Sheehan
A mold that gives hibernating bats fuzzy, white noses turns out to be a previously unknown form of cold-loving fungus. And it may be a cold-blooded killer too.
A novel form of a Geomyces fungus ranks as a possible cause of the deadly white-nose syndrome recently described in New England bats, David Blehert of the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisc., and his colleagues report online October 30 in Science.
White-nose syndrome, described only in the last two years, strikes its victims during their winter hibernation. Bats cuddled along the walls of caves or mines develop a white fuzz on their noses and wings, grow gaunt and then die.
A recreational explorer’s photograph from Howes Cave west of Albany, N.Y., in February 2006 provides the first record of the syndrome, Blehert says. Five sites turned up in New York state the next winter, and 33 in four states in winter of 2007.
“The bat community is alarmed,” says Marianne Moore of Boston University, who studies bat immunology. The syndrome has hit at least six species, including the widespread little brown bat and the endangered Indiana bat.
Hibernation sites struck by the syndrome lose 80 to 100 percent of their bats on average, Moore says. Northeastern bats hunt insects, including some pests, she says, so a sudden bat deficit “could be a huge problem.”
Knowing at last what the fungus is will let biologists develop screens to search for it and see if it’s the cause or just an opportunistic mold attacking a weak animal, says Blehert.
Culturing and identifying the fungus causing the white nose-fuzz wasn't easy, Blehert says. When researchers first took samples from stricken bats to grow on lab dishes, many microorganisms appeared but none was consistently linked to the sick animals. Researchers reluctantly decided to try refrigerating their lab cultures; the chill mimics cave conditions but slows down microbial growth.
The strategy worked though, as a Geomyces fungus gradually appeared, flourishing at between 5 and 10 degrees Celsius. It had spores in a fat-banana shape that researchers had never seen before. The mold showed up in most of the bats sampled and matched spore scrapings prepared directly in the caves.
Other molds grow at low temperatures, as the neglected corners of any office refrigerator will prove. What’s unusual about the new Geomyces mold is that it won’t tolerate higher temperatures, Blehert says.
Human noses, for example, are way too warm and probably too active for the fungus. In hibernation though, “a bat for all practical purposes is almost dead,” Blehert says. The heart rate of an alert bat, some 700 beats per minute or more, drops to about four beats per minute during hibernation, and its body chills to only a few degrees above the ambient temperatures in the cave.
That’s good news for bats that migrate or live far to the south. Northern hibernating species, however, could be at risk from the possible spread, he says.
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stone age 54.sto.412 Louis J. Sheehan
Two phases of cultural development in southern Africa heralded Stone Age human migrations, a new study suggests. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
Technological revolutions rocked our world long before the information age. Between 80,000 and 60,000 years ago, it was spurts of innovative toolmaking, rather than extreme climate changes, in southern Africa’s Stone Age cultures that heralded a human exodus out of Africa, a new investigation suggests.
Environmental changes in southern Africa, including those brought on by a massive volcanic eruption in Sumatra around 74,000 years ago, played a secondary role at best in instigating ancient cultural advances and intercontinental migrations, say geologist Zenobia Jacobs of the University of Wollongong, Australia, and her colleagues. Other researchers regard ancient climate fluctuations as key motivators of human movement out of Africa.
Jacobs’ team dated sediment at nine sites that have yielded remains of either of two key toolmaking traditions in southern Africa, known as the Still Bay and Howieson’s Poort industries. Still Bay tools were made by striking flakes off prepared pieces of stone for use as lance heads or skinning knives. Howieson’s Poort implements included small blades, scrapers and chisels. Symbolic artifacts and personal ornaments have been found with both tool types.
“Still Bay and Howieson’s Poort industries may be the southern African manifestations of a pan-African technological revolution that catalyzed human migration out of Africa,” Jacobs says.
Both industries flourished for brief periods, the scientists report in the Oct. 31 Science. The Still Bay industry only lasted from about 72,000 to 71,000 years ago. The Howieson’s Poort industry emerged around 65,000 years ago and ended shortly after 60,000 years ago. No known climate changes accompanied the rise of these ancient cultures, suggesting that such bursts of innovation were not responses to environmental change, the investigators propose.
Age estimates relied on measures of doses of ionizing radiation trapped in single grains of quartz from artifact-bearing soil. The method can determine how much time has passed since soil was exposed to light. The researchers calibrated those dates with earlier age estimates for the sites based on oxygen isotope data from Antarctic ice cores — providing more precise dates.
“This is the single most important geochronology paper on the origins of modern humans in the last 20 years,” remarks anthropologist Curtis Marean of Arizona State University in Tempe. Jacobs’ group provides the best estimates to date for the timing of the Still Bay and Howieson’s Poort industries, he says.
Other researchers have suggested that a time gap existed between these Stone Age cultures, notes anthropologist Teresa Steele of the University of California, Davis. But more surprising is the new study’s further suggestion that about 10,000 years passed between the end of the Howieson’s Poort industry and the start of ensuing toolmaking traditions in southern Africa, Steele says.
Jacobs’ new age estimates for the two ancient cultures may vary by as much as several thousand years in either direction, making it difficult to confirm that environmental changes did not inspire toolmaking innovations, she adds.
Evidence of a roughly 7,000-year gap between the Still Bay and Howieson’s Poort industries suggests that people left southern Africa during cold, dry episodes that regularly occurred as the last Ice Age approached, comments anthropologist Stanley Ambrose of the University of Illinois in Urbana. Genetic and linguistic studies indicate that those groups moved to eastern Africa.
Ambrose suspects the new dates for the two tool industries are slightly off, though. Ice cores such as those used by Jacobs’ team offer limited insight into the timing of ancient climate changes, he says. Sections of cores can only be dated by correlating geochemical markers in the ice with evidence from datable events elsewhere, he says.
A better set of comparison dates for Jacobs’ study comes from another Stone Age site in southern Africa, Blombos Cave, Ambrose asserts. Still Bay artifacts found there have been dated to between 77,000 and 74,000 years ago. If that’s true, then the Still Bay industry may have been cut short by a widespread ice age that followed a massive volcanic eruption on Sumatra 74,000 years ago, he hypothesizes.
When the Howieson’s Poort industry eventually got off the ground, it represented the first time that local bands in southern Africa expanded into a network of interacting groups, Ambrose holds. That not only sparked a huge increase in the long-distance transport of stone for tool making but enabled risky journeys out of Africa, in his view. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
Jacobs doubts that the Sumatran volcanic eruption or any other climatic event directly affected ancient southern Africans’ cultures. Innovations in stone toolmaking may either have caused or resulted from population expansions and migrations within Africa, she says.
Scientists now need to gather data on local environmental changes in southern Africa to see if they correspond to the Still Bay and Howieson’s Poort industries, Marean suggests. “That is soon to come,” he says.
Friday, October 24, 2008
Eurystheus 776.eur.453 Louis J. Sheehan
The Typhon was one of the giants who rose up against the gods after they had successfully suppressed the Titans. Some of the giants had a hundred hands; others breathed fire. Eventually they were subdued and buried alive under Mt. Etna where their occasional struggles cause the earth to shake and their breath is the molten lava of a volcano. Such a creature was Typhon, the father of the Nemean lion.
Eurystheus sent Hercules to bring back the skin of the Nemean lion, but the skin of the Nemean lion was impervious to arrows or even the blows of his club, so Hercules had to wrestle with it on the ground in a cave. He soon overcame the beast by choking it.
When, upon his return, Hercules appeared at the gates of Tiryns, Nemean beast pelt on his arm, Eurystheus was alarmed. He ordered the hero henceforth to deposit his offerings and to keep himself beyond the city limits. Eurystheus also ordered a large bronze jar to hide himself in.
From then on, Eurystheus' orders would be relayed to Hercules through a herald, Copreus, son of Pelops the Elean.
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Thursday, October 23, 2008
eighth labor Hercules 667.8.k445 Louis J. Sheehan
This is a retelling of the eighth of twelve labors the Greek hero Hercules performed for EurystheusIn the eighth labor Hercules, with a few companions, heads to the Danube, to the land of the Bistones in Thrace. First, however, he stops off at his old friend Admetus' house. There Admetus tells him the mourning he sees around him is for just some member of the household who has died, but not to worry about it. He insinuates the dead woman is no one important, but in this he deceives. It is Admetus' wife Alcestis who has died, and not just because it was her time. Alcestis has died in place of her husband.http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
His concern assuaged by Admetus' statements, Hercules takes the opportunity to indulge his passions for food, drink, and song, but the staff is appalled. Finally the truth is revealed and Hercules, suffering a pang of conscience again, goes off to rectify the situation. He descends into the Underworld, wrestles with Thanatos, and returns with Alcestis is tow.
After a brief scolding of his friend and host Admetus, Hercules continues on his way to an even worse host.
Ares' son Diomedes, King of the Bistones, in Thrace, offers newcomers to his horses for dinner. When Hercules and his friends arrive, the king thinks to feed them to the horses, but Hercules turns the table on the king and after a wrestling match -- prolonged because it is with with the war god's son -- Hercules feeds Diomedes to his own horses. This meal cures them of their taste for human.
There are many variations. In some Hercules kills Diomedes. Sometimes he kills the horses. In one version of Euripides, his Heracles, the hero harnesses the horses to a chariot. The common thread is that the horses eat people and Diomedes dies defending them. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
In Apollodorus' version, Hercules brings the horses back to Tiryns where Eurystheus, once again, releases them. They then wander off to Mt. Olympus where wild beasts eat them. Alternately, he breeds them and one of the descendants becomes the horse of Alexander the Great.
Louis J. Sheehan
Wednesday, October 22, 2008
Twelfth Labor uur99434.tl.76 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Twelfth Labor - Hercules (Heracles - Herakles)
Apollodorus Labor 12 - Hound of Hades
This is Apollodorus' tale of the twelfth of twelve labors the Greek hero Hercules performed for Eurystheus, the bringing back of the hell hound Cerberus. This was not the first time the hero had to venture into the Underworld.
[2.5.12] A twelfth labour imposed on Hercules was to bring Cerberus from Hades. Now this Cerberus had three heads of dogs, the tail of a dragon, and on his back the heads of all sorts of snakes. When Hercules was about to depart to fetch him, he went to Eumolpus at Eleusis, wishing to be initiated. However it was not then lawful for foreigners to be initiated: since he proposed to be initiated as the adoptive son of Pylius. But not being able to see the mysteries because he had not been cleansed of the slaughter of the centaurs, he was cleansed by Eumolpus and then initiated. And having come to Taenarum in Laconia, where is the mouth of the descent to Hades, he descended through it. But when the souls saw him, they fled, save Meleager and the Gorgon Medusa. And Hercules drew his sword against the Gorgon, as if she were alive, but he learned from Hermes that she was an empty phantom. And being come near to the gates of Hades he found Theseus and Pirithous, him who wooed Persephone in wedlock and was therefore bound fast. And when they beheld Hercules, they stretched out their hands as if they should be raised from the dead by his might. And Theseus, indeed, he took by the hand and raised up, but when he would have brought up Pirithous, the earth quaked and he let ho. And he rolled away also the stone of Ascalaphus. And wishing to provide the souls with blood, he slaughtered one of the kine of Hades. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis8J8Sheehan/
But Menoetes, son of Ceuthonymus, who tended the kine, challenged Hercules to wrestle, and being seized round the middle, had his ribs broken; howbeit, he was let off at the request of Persephone. When Hercules asked Pluto for Cerberus, Pluto ordered him to take the animal provided he mastered him without the use of the weapons which he carried. http://www.soulcast.com/Louis8J8Sheehan/
Hercules found him at the gates of Acheron, and cased in his cuirass and covered by the lion's skin, he flung his arms round the head of the brute, and though the dragon in its tail bit him, he never relaxed his grip and pressure till it yielded. So he carried it off and ascended through Troezen. But Demeter turned Ascalaphus into a short-eared owl, and Hercules, after showing Cerberus to Eurystheus, carried him back to Hades.
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Alcmena 5567.her.jjf78 Louis J. Sheehan
While it was a pretty amazing feat to clean the Augean Stables -- by diverting a body of water -- a greedy Hercules tried to exact double reward/payment for it. Neither of his bosses would pay. King Augeas of Elis refused to surrender one tenth of his cattle after learning that Hercules had been hired by someone else to do the task, and Erystheus said that a task undertaken for pay couldn't count as a (community service) labor. (See the reason for which Hercules undertook the labors in Hercules Labors - Madness and Atonement). In effect, it was a dirty job and a double or triple cross when Hercules exacted his revenge. However, when people talk about the Augean Stables, they usually mean only the incredible feat of cleansing and nothing else.
See: Apollodorus on the 5th Labor. http://myface.com/Louis_J_Sheehan
More interesting to me is the comment by deTraci on the influence of stepfathers:
It was expected to be an unpleasant task for the hero, but since he'd grown up with not one but two stepfathers renowned for wisdom - including one of my faves, King Radamanthes of Crete - Hercules simply rerouted two rivers to do the job.I've studied Hercules for many years, researching this point and that, forgetting more than I remember. One point I had forgotten or, possibly, never noticed, is that Rhadymanthys married Hercules' mother Alcmena. I checked in Timothy Gantz' Early Greek Myths. There appear to be two main versions of this story.
- In the Afterlife:
In one, Alcmena marries Rhadymanthus after death in the Isles of the Blessed (Antoninus Liberalis 33). Alternately, Hercules gives his mother to Rhadymanthus in marriage in the Elysian Plains (Palatine Anthology 3.13). - In Life:
In the second version, Alcmena marries while still alive, but after the death of her first husband, Amphitryon, Hercules' human father (or stepfather). Alcmena and Rhadymanthus live in Boeotia (Apollodorus 2.4.11, Plutarch Lys. 28.5). Amphitryon died in a battle between the Thebans and the Minyans in which Hercules, an adult, also fought.
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Augean Stables I 556.as.3345 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
When Sen. Joe Biden suggested that a potential Obama administration would have to be "cleaning the Augean Stables" a la Hercules, it wasn't long before I was being asked just what are those stables and where in Greece are they?
The Augean Stables - not to be confused with the Aegean Islands - were owned by a king named Augeus who possessed a huge cattle stable in the region of Elis in the Peloponnese which had never been cleaned during its many years of use. Putting it right became one of the 12 Labors of Hercules, task number five to be specific, who was given a single day and night to clean them out. It was expected to be an unpleasant task for the hero, but since he'd grown up with not one but two stepfathers renowned for wisdom - including one of my faves, King Radamanthes of Crete - Hercules simply rerouted two rivers to do the job. Augeus felt cheated, but the job was done.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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sejanus 884.tib.43 Louis J. Sheehan
Lucius Aelius Sejanus came from Etruria and was the son of Strabo (an equestrian who was to become praetorian prefect and then governor of Egypt). Sejanus was a trusted advisor of the second Roman emperor, Tiberius.
When Tiberius came to the throne, he appointed Sejanus praetorian prefect. Sejanus began to manipulate the praetorian guard into a personal guard for the emperor for efficiency and power. When Tiberius' son Drusus died in 23, Sejanus tried (unsuccessfully, because as an equestrian he was too low class) to marry his widow Livilla. Even without the marriage, he continued to amass power, and when Tiberius retired to Capri in 27, Sejanus was left as regent. Sejanus became co-consul with Tiberius in 31.
Sejanus tried to destroy the Julio-Claudian heirs and may have conspired with Livilla in the death of Drusus. Opposition to Sejanus resulted in charges of treason (maiestas). The informers (delatores) received part of the estate of those accused of treason. Sejanus' power came from two sources, the 9000 praetorians and the support of the emperor, but when Tiberius learned that Sejanus was plotting against him, he had Sejanus arrested and executed on October 18, 31 A.D. Following his death, the supporters and family of Sejanus were hunted down.
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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Tuesday, October 21, 2008
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Monday, October 20, 2008
transportation 883.we Louis J. Sheehan
The
The new report is “a wonderful example of what happens when federal scientists are given the freedom to actually do their jobs,” says Kassie Siegel of the Center for Biological Diversity. The Center joined two other groups in the suit that prompted the deadline from the U.S. District Court of the Northern District California Oakland Division in August, 2007.
WILDER FIRESAs temperatures warm, wildfires will very likely intensify. Already recent years have brought increases in both their extent and severity. Courtesy of National Park Service
The report, after dealing with the cause, lists changes already observed within the
Tuesday, October 7, 2008
stalagmite 7773.r4 Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire. The dates at which some Midwestern cave formations began to grow could help researchers chronicle the earthquake history of Missouri and surrounding states, according to work reported October 5 in Houston
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