Tuesday various

  • The drugs! They do nothink! The placebo effect appears to be getting stronger. It’s an interesting article, and the whole thing has some pretty far-ranging implications, but I was especially intrigued by this aside:

    One recent afternoon in his lab, a young soccer player grimaced with exertion while doing leg curls on a weight machine. Benedetti and his colleagues were exploring the potential of using Pavlovian conditioning to give athletes a competitive edge undetectable by anti-doping authorities. A player would receive doses of a performance-enhancing drug for weeks and then a jolt of placebo just before competition.

    Using the placebo response to cheat at sports? Hmm. [via]

  • Meanwhile, in other medical news, depression may be good for you [via]
  • Missing Link found in church: both more and less than the headline suggests. [via]
  • Have I mentioned recently how much I dislike Antonin Scalia?

    As a constitutional matter, Scalia is not wrong. The court has never found a constitutional right for the actually innocent to be free from execution. When the court flirted with the question in 1993, a majority ruled against the accused, but Chief Justice William Rehnquist left open the possibility that it may be unconstitutional to execute someone with a “truly persuasive demonstration” of innocence. Oddly enough, for at least some members of the current court that question is now seemingly irrelevant: In Scalia’s America, the Cameron Todd Willingham whose very existence was once in doubt is today constitutionally immaterial. Having waited decades for an innocent victim of capital punishment, the fact that we have finally found one won’t matter at all. In this new America we can execute a man for an accidental house fire, while the constitution stands silently by.

    I think there are several strong arguments against the death penalty, but for me the most convincing has always been that it demonstrably sends innocent people to their death. [via]

  • Maybe I should cast Scalia in this interesting class assignment from Jeffrey Ford:

    In one of my classes this semester, we are reading Dante’s Inferno….Our reading will lead to a number of assignments, but one of them will be a written canto that will deal with the students choosing one of their most despised political, religious, or cultural figures and developing a circle of Hell for that individual, the tortures of which somehow metaphorically fit the perceived sin of the offender. They must also choose some political, religious, literary, or cultural icon to be their Virgil. I put this out to ditch readers who are up to the challenge and ask — Who would be your guide? Who would be the sinner? What would the bole of Hell be like that the sinner is trapped in for eternity?

    Hmm.