Belgian doctors give suicide injections to 45-year-twins who were going blind.

Marc and Eddy Verbessem, who were deaf, decided they didn't want to live anymore, and the doctors fulfilled their death wish.

Euthanasia is legal under Belgian law if those making the decision can make their wishes clear and are suffering unbearable pain, according to a doctor's judgement....

Mr Dufour, the doctor who presided over the euthanasia, told RTL television news that the twins had taken the decision in 'full conscience.' He said they were 'very happy' and it had was a 'relief' to see the end of their suffering.

'They had a cup of coffee in the hall, it went well and a rich conversation,' Mr Dufour said. 'Then the separation from their parents and brother was very serene and beautiful. At the last there was a little wave of their hands and then they were gone.'

This is a shocking story. We're told the men were "terrified" of being institutionalized once they went blind. But they hadn't gone blind yet, and they hadn't attempted to learn how to live independently while blind and deaf. Why not at least wait until they actually became blind? Why advance-euthanize? And what kind of a society facilitates death for the disabled while scaring them with the loss of their freedom? When are the blind institutionalized?

Where was the "unbearable pain"? There was no physical pain, only mental anguish, accepted as pain. And the anguish seems to have been premised on a fear of institutionalization. Why were they threatened by that? If their fear was reasonable, something is wrong with the treatment of the disabled in Belgium. If their fear was unreasonable, their decision should not have been enough even in a system that authorizes physician assisted suicide.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo (who is a doctor) offers a passage from Robert Jay Lifton's book "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing And The Psychology Of Genocide."

Quiet Santa.

For children with special needs.

"Attention is not some monolithic brain process. There are different types of attention..."

"... and they use different parts of the brain. The sudden loud noise that makes you jump activates the simplest type: the startle. A chain of five neurons from your ears to your spine takes that noise and converts it into a defensive response in a mere tenth of a second — elevating your heart rate, hunching your shoulders and making you cast around to see if whatever you heard is going to pounce and eat you. This simplest form of attention requires almost no brains at all and has been observed in every studied vertebrate."

Excerpt from "Why Listening Is So Much More Than Hearing."

That passage calls to mind the subject of "incitement" in the constitutional law of free speech. Here's Justice Brandeis in 1927:

Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty. To courageous, self-reliant men, with confidence in the power of free and fearless reasoning applied through the processes of popular government, no danger flowing from speech can be deemed clear and present unless the incidence of the evil apprehended is so imminent that it may befall before there is opportunity for full discussion. If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence. Only an emergency can justify repression. Such must be the rule if authority is to be reconciled with freedom. Such, in my opinion, is the command of the Constitution. It is therefore always open to Americans to challenge a law abridging free speech and assembly by showing that there was no emergency justifying it.

There's a distinction between what is heard and what is listened to.

***

I Googled "incitement and free speech" to get a nice clear link to insert in the sentence between the 2 links above. Virtually everything that came up on the first page of results had to do with the "Innocence of Muslims" video/Muhammad cartoons.

The movement of his eyes back and forth sounded like sandpaper on wood.

He heard his heart pounding, all the sounds of his own body. It tormented him for 10 years, but it was caused by something specific, and there was a surgical treatment.

Nostalgia for old sounds...

... that once exemplified newness.

What are the sounds you hear now that will soon enough disappear into the history of lost sounds?

We remember old songs and we take the trouble to listen to music, but do we pay attention to all the sounds that form our environment, the sounds that would represent the past to us if they were gone? What is the content of the sound in the place where you are right now? Do you mask it with music? Are you uneasy when things are too quiet, or do you settle down and notice that it's never completely quiet, that there are always sounds, little sounds that emerge in the near quiet? Are you taking the trouble to love them before they are gone?

"Pink noise" — a remedy for the annoying noise of a cubicle workplace?

It's "a soft whooshing emitted over loudspeakers that sounds like a ventilation system but is specially formulated to match the frequencies of human voices."

Autodesk ran the system for three months without telling the employees — and then, to gauge its impact, turned it off one day.

“We were surprised at how many complaints we got,” said Charles Rechtsteiner, Autodesk’s facilities manager. “People weren’t sure what was different, but they knew something was wrong. They were being distracted by conversations 60 feet away. When the system’s on, speech becomes unintelligible at a distance of about 20 feet.”

The original rationale for the open-plan office, aside from saving space and money, was to foster communication among workers, the better to coax them to collaborate and innovate. 

Every solution brings its own new problem, but then you can solve that problem, and get a new problem.

“Noise is the most serious problem in the open-plan office, and speech is the most disturbing type of sound because it is directly understood in the brain’s working memory,” said Valtteri Hongisto, an acoustician at the institute. He found that workers were more satisfied and performed better at cognitive tasks when speech sounds were masked by a background noise of a gently burbling brook.

The trite phrase is "babbling brook," and here's an instance where using the the trite phrase would have been greatly preferable to the deviation ("burbling brook"). The point is that speech is distracting because it is understood. A brook sounds like speech, which is why we've got that cliché "babbling brook." This is the perfect notion in this paragraph: The brook is speaking but we can't understand it.

Now, I think playing speech-like sound to people all day long is a dangerous thing to do to the brains in the room. Hearing voices is a symptom of insanity. Perhaps the endless barrage of almost-speech will make people insane or make them feel as if they are going slightly insane. One could become paranoid that the managers are actually inserting messages in the indecipherable babble, and — who knows? — maybe they are!

This new noise is supposed to be the solution for the way all the real-person talking in the cubicle office is making everybody crazy. But, don't worry. If the solution is a new kind of crazy, there will be a solution for that.

The Clintonville mystery is solved.

A swarm of microquakes!

"Clintonville noises: City's equipment fails to tape mystery booms."

"The city set up audio and video recorders overnight Wednesday but didn’t capture anything. There was at least one loud boom at 5 a.m. The booms started Sunday. Residents describe them as sounding like thunder, fireworks or someone slamming a heavy door."

They hear things, but then when officials set up recording equipment, nothing is recorded. I said it yesterday: I think it's nothing.

Or does your mind travel in the other direction? Failure to record the booms is evidence of the supernatural, like the way Dracula isn't reflected in a mirror?

Karl: Well, the mirror thing, he can't look in mirrors, can he?

Steve: Well he can look in mirrors but he can't see himself in a mirror.

Karl: That still doesn't work.

Ricky: It doesn't work at all Karl.

Karl: His centre parting is always really neat.



Steve: His centre parting is always really neat?

Ricky: (laughs) How does he do it if he can't look in the mirror.... I love the flaw in the Dracula film is that his centre parting is too neat, how did he do it without a mirror.... You know there aren't really vampires in that sense.

Karl: Yeah, yeah.

Ricky: Yeah but it still annoyed you that his centre parting was too neat.

Karl: Well if you're gonna do it, d'you know what I mean.

Ricky: I'd like to see him with a fringe sort of pushed forward and maybe a hood up "alright, I've come to suck your blood n' that, alright".

Steve: Yeah, just bits of tissue paper all over his face where he's cut himself shaving.

Ricky: "Oh, I can't see in bloody mirror, it's annoying me", I'd love to see that, a little Manc Drac, that would be great wouldn't it, Mancula, Count Mancula, "alright, you got any rave, you got any rave music, you got any Oasis", that would be brilliant, "he came from Manchester, please welcome Mancula", that would be great wouldn't it, his hair's a mess, "well I can't see in mirror".

"Mysterious Booms and Trembles Plague Wisconsin Town, Baffle Scientists."

The craziness never ends in this state.

“I think that right now the greatest possibility is that it is some sort of natural phenomenon. I think that it’s a possibility that there is some earth shifting going on underneath the ground that creates those popping sort of exploding popping or vibrating noises that people feel,” City Administrator Lisa Kuss said.

My guess: It's nothing. The town is called Clintonville, for what it's worth.

The misguided attack on Sandra Fluke continues, displaying irritating ignorance about women law students.

Robert Stacy McCain, I'm looking at you. Rush Limbaugh has apologized, but McCain bullies on:

Rather belatedly, we are becoming aware that this supposedly typical Georgetown coed is not very typical at all...

McCain links to a blog post from The College Politico, which begins:

Sandra Fluke is being sold by the left as something she’s not. Namely a random co-ed from Georgetown law who found herself mixed up in the latest front of the culture war who was simply looking to make sure needy women had access to birth control. That, of course, is not the case.

As many have already uncovered Sandra Fluke she is, in reality, a 30 year old long time liberal activist who enrolled at Georgetown with the express purpose of fighting for the school to pay for students’ birth control. She has been pushing for mandated coverage of contraceptives at Georgetown for at least three years...

Random co-ed?! She's a law student! I've been in law schools since 1978, and I've never heard female law students called "co-eds." What the hell is a co-ed? Even as a word for female undergraduates, it's like you're from 1931. Here's the original teenage heartthrob, Rudy Vallée, singing his great old college song, "Betty Co-ed":

Betty Co-ed has lips of red for Harvard,
Betty Co-ed has eyes of Yale's deep blue,
Betty Co-ed's a golden head for Princeton,
Her dress I guess is black for old Purdue!

I first learned the names of famous universities hearing that song on an LP of college songs that my parents had. The cover photo had rows of pretty girls each holding up a pennant with the name of a college on it.

Betty Co-ed's a smile for Pennsylvania,
Her heart is Dartmouth's treasure, so 'tis said,
Betty Co-ed is loved by every college boy,
But I'm the one who's loved by Betty Co-ed!

Here's the 1931 Max Fleischer film, featuring a Betty Boop prototype and Rudy Vallée saying "hi ho!" and starting a bouncing-ball singalong:



Now, Betty has a lot of boyfriends. Some may even call her a "slut." That was back in the day when a girl on campus caused quite a hubbub. Did Betty put out? What birth-control did Betty use? How much did it cost? Who paid? I don't know, but how many voters of today remember what college was like back when Rudy Vallée was making women swoon?

Now, Vallée's a fascinating character in the history of pop culture:

Vallée... was perhaps the first complete example of the 20th century mass media pop star. Flappers mobbed him wherever he went. His live appearances were usually sold out, and even if his singing could hardly be heard in those venues not yet equipped with the new electronic microphones, his screaming female fans went home happy if they had caught sight of his lips through the opening of the trademark megaphone he sang through.

Vallee had a gentle voice:

Vallée became the most prominent and, arguably, the first of a new style of popular singer, the crooner. Previously, popular singers needed strong projecting voices to fill theaters in the days before the electric microphone. Crooners had soft voices that were well suited to the intimacy of the new medium of the radio.

Ah, the radio! You can't sound too harsh on the radio, especially when you're pouring your sounds into the ears of women. I know one older woman who, finding Rush too harsh, has moved on Bill Bennett, who seems caring.

But back to my point: co-ed.  This is an old-fashioned label to stick on a woman, and it shouldn't be used anymore even to apply to undergraduates. But you just sound ignorant to call a female law student a "co-ed." And that ignorance continues with this talk of Sandra Fluke not being "a random co-ed." None of the students at an elite law school like Georgetown are "random." There's an elaborate, multi-factored admissions process, and it specifically looks for applicants who aren't coming straight from college but have taken time and shown engagement with social and political issues.

A "30 year old long time liberal activist" sounds exactly like the kind of person who would apply to law school and get accepted with enthusiasm, because the schools want students who will contribute to the classroom discussions about the things we talk about in law school, like sex discrimination. This is what classroom diversity means. And we want students who will take their law school education and use it different ways, especially in political activism. So what if Fluke "enrolled at Georgetown with the express purpose of fighting for the school to pay for students’ birth control"? I have no idea if that's why she selected Georgetown, but it's not a bad thing, it's not something law schools don't like, and it's not an unusual orientation for a law student to have.

McCain also tells us that Fluke has argued that it's sex discrimination for insurance not to cover "gender-reassignment" surgery. Sorry, this is typical law-journal material. Of course, an advocate in the category she belongs to would make arguments like this. Argue with these arguments all you want. But it doesn't make Sandra Fluke some nefarious pseudo law student. She sounds like a typical excellent law student at an elite law school.

Which is to say: the personal put-downs sound old-fashioned and sexist.

The right wing stepped in it with Fluke. Having stepped in it, they keep smushing around in it.

As a woman, as a law professor, as a woman law professor, I don't want to be seen anywhere near these guys. Could you start acting normal about women participating in public debate?

Now let's have a serious debate about insurance. Yeah. It's not much fun at all. But you've got to quit having your fun with women and sex — in this context! — or you are going to alienate more and more women voters — and men voters — every day. Good lord! It's super Tuesday. We should be talking about Mitt Romney, not Sandra Fluke. Yeah: Mitt Romney and insurance. Boring. Too bad.

The first 2 chords of Beethoven's Eroica, as played over the years...

... on recordings beginning in 1924:



I'm amazed at the variation. It makes me hyper-aware of how little discernment I have generally, listening to complex music.

(Via Metafilter.)

"When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place."

"The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that's reassuring."

Jonathan Franzen worries that ebooks — in place of print books — will reorient us in negative ways.

"Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it's just not permanent enough."

For serious readers, Franzen said, "a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience". "Everything else in your life is fluid, but here is this text that doesn't change," he continued. "Will there still be readers 50 years from now who feel that way? Who have that hunger for something permanent and unalterable? I don't have a crystal ball. But I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that. That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government."

The acclaimed author of Freedom and The Corrections – which are published as ebooks – has said in the past that "it's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction". He seals the ethernet port on his own computer to prevent him connecting to the internet while he writes, also removing the card so he is unable to play computer games and wearing noise-cancelling headphones to prevent distraction.

Of course, the internet and the fluidity of etexts have changed us, and the changes should be particularly upsetting to fiction writers. In the future, who will sit down with a tome and become one with the sealed-off complete world created by a novelist? The internet is calling. Who can read a book? To read books now, I load them up in my iPad and read some of one and then another and another. I rotate the texts to give reading books more of a feeling of clicking all over the place on the internet. That feels more exciting and natural to me now.

Does my iPad book mix include any Frantzen? Yeah, I've got "How to Be Alone" — a collection of essays, nonfiction. And my audiobook collection, which I listen to in bits and shreds, includes "The Discomfort Zone" — which is nonfiction, a memoir full of relatively disconnected scenes.

Speaking of impermanence and dissolution, Franzen says:

"One of the consolations of dying is that... 'Well, that won't have to be my problem'... Seriously, the world is changing so quickly that if you had any more than 80 years of change I don't see how you could stand it psychologically."

Well, you could take off the noise-cancellation headphones, plug the ethernet back in, and flow and float through change on a minute-by-minute basis. But that would only deprive you of what Franzen sees as a basis for a positive attitude toward death. You'll still die in the end, but without the consolation of being saved from what you found unbearable — change.

Now, I'm seeing in Franzen's reasoning the notion that we ought to want to curl up with a good long fiction book in order to relinquish our hold on life. Is that what draws us, instead, into the vivid, roiling experience of ever-changing texts on the web? It's life, and we want to live.

"He accepted death as a side-effect of stopping the noise."

Explains the psychiatrist of Robert McIndoe, 52, who allegedly killed himself because of the tinnitus he got from a Them Crooked Vultures concert.

Misophonia — "a newly recognized condition that remains little studied and poorly understood."

A newly recognized condition... or an old irritability with a name that helps irritable people feel less irritated by their own characteristic of being terribly irritated by other people?

Many people can be driven to distraction by certain small sounds that do not seem to bother others — gum chewing, footsteps, humming. But sufferers of misophonia... [are believed to have something that] is hard-wired, like right- or left-handedness, and is probably not an auditory disorder but a “physiological abnormality” that resides in brain structures activated by processed sound....

Misophonia (“dislike of sound”) is sometimes confused with hyperacusis, in which sound is perceived as abnormally loud or physically painful. But Dr. Johnson says they are not the same. “These people like sound, the louder the better,” she said of misophonia patients. “The sounds they object to are soft, hardly audible sounds.” One patient is driven crazy by her beloved dog licking its paws. Another can’t bear the pop of the plosive “p” in ordinary conversation.

Homophone phone message.

I got a phone message from someone who identified himself as someone I had talked about on an episode of Bloggingheads. What I heard: "You disgust me." What I figured out, on relistening: "You discussed me."

"A nice" or "an ice"?

Think you can hear the difference?

I hope so, because I need people to hear the difference between "Ann Althouse" and "an Althouse." I feel so indeterminate sometimes.

Does the iPhone erroneously amplify background noise to ear-splitting levels?

I have noticed this problem with and without using earbuds. I've been on the receiving and the giving end of it. Some relatively innocuous background noise — like mild wind, food frying, or water running — will become the dominant sound, drowning out the human being who is trying to be heard. The noise is excruciating, and the only option seems to be to end the call.

I'm guessing there is something wrong at the software level right now. The iPhone is sometimes especially smart about adjusting to the sound it hears. For example, if you stop talking, it switches to dead silence. I often find myself saying "Are you still there?" when I'm talking to someone who's using an iPhone, because it sounds the same as a dead line. Or sometimes the line — "line" isn't the right word anymore — has gone dead and I keep talking because I think it's that iPhone feature.

It seems as though the phone's software is sometimes fooled and interprets a background noise as the voice and, trying to help, it makes a correction. The result is horrendous. If I'm right about this, Apple needs to solve this problem quickly. After a wind-noise conversation 5 days ago, my ears are still not right. This is the stuff class actions are made of.