There is, of course, a working definition of disease, one that most of us share: a disease is a kind of suffering caused by something gone wrong in the body. Cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis—we label these diseases not simply because they inflict pain upon us, or impair the quality of our lives, but because doctors can specify their biochemistry—the neoplasms, the lack of insulin, the bacilli that can that can confirm the presence of the disease, that can be spotted and measured and, sometimes, eradicated.

A disease may be what the medical profession recognizes as such, but doctors are reluctant admit into their realm problems without some biochemical signature. Borderline cases—chronic fatigue syndrome, major depression, restless-legs syndrome—are vexing precisely because they lack those indicators. Doctors often leave conditions like these outside the pantheon of diseases, at least until they can demonstrate their biochemical cred. Which is why you shouldn’t be surprised to read sometime in the near future about a doctor who has inserted binge eaters into M.R.I. machines and proved that the disorder is a real disease.

The lack of this kind of proof that alcoholism is a disease is what led Jellinek to wrestle with the concept. It is also why the A.P.A. has to begin its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders with a loose and baggy four-paragraph definition of mental disorder that is no more satisfying than Jellinek’s was. Without biochemistry on their side, the authors of the manual have struggled to prove that the conditions they treat belong in the realm of physicians, and their efforts have done little to reduce suspicions that the profession is too eager to turn all our troubles into their disorders.

But psychiatrists are beginning to rethink this strategy. They are going on the offensive, claiming that psychiatry’s diagnostic uncertainty (and lack of biochemical findings) is pervasive in all of medicine. They point to the many physical illnesses—Alzheimer’s disease, peripheral neuropathy, even poison ivy rashes—diagnosed without resort to biological lab tests, and to the numerous diagnostic thresholds—such as glucose levels in diabetes and blood pressure in hypertension—that have been reworked over the years. So, they argue, it isn’t just psychiatry that fails to measure up to modern medicine. It’s also much of modern medicine.

via Do disease definitions come from science or say-so? : The New Yorker.

Two weeks ago, one student brought up the word slash as an example of new slang, and it quickly became clear to me that many students are using slash in ways unfamiliar to me. In the classes since then, I have come to the students with follow-up questions about the new use of slash. Finally, a student asked, “Why are you so interested in this?” I answered, “Slang creates a lot of new nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. It isn’t that often that slang creates a new conjunction.”

Let me explain. Lots of us use the slash (/) in writing to capture two or more descriptions of the same thing, with a meaning something like “or,” “and,” or “and/or”—e.g., “my sister/best friend” or “request/require.” The slash typically separates two things that are the same part of speech or parallel grammatically; and we can say that slash out loud if needed: “my sister slash best friend.”

Now I wouldn’t write that phrase down that way, with the slash spelled out, but students tell me they now often do.

via Slash: Not Just a Punctuation Mark Anymore – Lingua Franca – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

After human GeoCities site and Rackspace employee wrote this frothing “review” of Glass, he apparently didn’t think we believed him. “I will never live a day of my life from now on without it,” Scoble said of his beloved face computer, praising it as if his very life depended on it. “I’m never taking them off.” True to his word, there he is, red as a beet, mouth open in ecstasy. These seem the actions of someone in the midst of a crazed religious awakening, not a gadget test.

via Oh God Robert Scoble Is Wearing His Google Glasses in The Shower.

brofiling • white privilege radically changes the appearance….

About 200 years ago in the German city of Koenigsberg, a tree began to grow inside a brick fence. Because the owners never tended to the property, the tree was allowed to take over.

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Carolyn Porco, Cassini Imaging Team Leader and CICLOPS director, writes:

One of the most gorgeous sights we have been privileged to see at Saturn, as the arrival of spring to the northern hemisphere has peeled away the darkness of winter, has been the enormous swirling vortex capping its north pole and ringed by Saturn’s famed hexagonal jet stream.

Today, the Cassini Imaging Team is proud to present to you a set of special views of this phenomenal structure, including a carefully prepared movie showing its circumpolar winds that clock at 330 miles per hour, and false color images that are at once spectacular and informative.

Here are the images, in glorious hi-rez [ciclops.org].

via The Red Rose of Saturn – Boing Boing.

These narratives appeal to our collective sense of nostalgia: pink-cheeked farmwomen kneading homemade bread, mothers and daughters shelling sun-warmed peas on country porches, and multigenerational families gathered happily around the dinner table to tuck into Grandma’s hand-plucked roasted chicken. As the oft-quoted Michael Pollan saying goes, “Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food” (in my case, that would mean a steady diet of pierogies and cabbage).

Unfortunately, this cozy vision obscures the often-grimy truths about what cooking was really like for our foremothers and -fathers in the preindustrial, preconvenience era.

Contrary to the myth of the happy, apple-cheeked great-great-grandmother, cooking has rarely been seen as a source of fulfillment, historically speaking. In Colonial America, kitchen work was viewed as a lowly chore, often farmed out to servants (who, needless to say, did not spend a lot of time exulting in the visceral pleasures of pea shucking). In the 1800s, middle-class women supervised immigrant kitchen maids (or slaves), while pioneer women and rural housewives sweated over wood fires and heavy iron pots.

via Is Michael Pollan a sexist pig? – Salon.com.

In the mid-1800s, there were thousands of unique varieties of apples in the United States, some of the most astounding diversity ever developed in a food crop. Then industrial agriculture crushed that world. The apple industry settled on a handful of varieties to promote worldwide, and the rest were forgotten. They became commercially extinct—but not quite biologically extinct.

Even when abandoned, an apple tree can live more than 200 years, and, like the Giving Tree in Shel Silverstein’s book, it will wait patiently for the boy to return. There is a bent old Black Oxford tree in Hallowell, Maine, that is approximately two centuries old and still gives a crop of midnight-purple apples each fall. In places like northern New England, the Appalachian Mountains, and Johnny Appleseed’s beloved Ohio River Valley—agricultural byways that have escaped the bulldozer—these centenarians hang on, flickering on the edge of existence, their identity often a mystery to the present homeowners. And John Bunker is determined to save as many as he can before they, and he, are gone.

via Why Your Supermarket Only Sells 5 Kinds of Apples | Mother Jones.

Mere contact with M. tuberculosis doesn’t mean that an active case of tuberculosis will follow. After inhalation, the invaders travel until they reach cavities deep within the lungs. There they invade cells involved in immune response; those cells then invite reaction from other types of cells in the immune system, forming clumps in which the infected cells can fall into dormancy, becoming a latent TB infection. Most otherwise healthy people will never develop active disease. But for about one in ten, the infection flares, producing tissue damage around each clump. Sometimes the immune system can mount another counterattack, and the disease may wax and wane. Left untreated, active TB is the stuff of nightmares: up to two-thirds of its victims will die if no help comes to them.

That help has been available for almost sixty years. But not for seventeen desperately ill people in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa whose fate suggests that we may not enjoy our sense of invulnerability in the face of TB—and other infectious diseases we’ve conquered—for that much longer. Those afflicted suffer from a strain of tuberculosis that seems to resist every drug available to treat it. Seventeen is a tiny number, but the question those desperately ill people embody is whether we will do what is necessary to keep their numbers so small.

via New Life for a Deadly Disease: The Threat of Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis : The New Yorker.