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The Church of Kopimism is officially recognized by->

Submitted by SgtChaireBourne
SgtChaireBourne writes "Just before Christmas, Sweden became the first country to officially recognize the Church of Kopimism as a religious organization, founded in 2010. It took the Church three tries before succeeding in becoming recognized. The Church holds that information is holy and copying is a sacrament and the value multiplies through copying. Therefore, copying is central for the organization and its members. "Being recognized by the state of Sweden is a large step for all of kopimi. Hopefully, this is one step towards the day when we can live out our faith without fear of persecution," said Isak Gerson, spiritual leader of the Church."
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Medicine

Deep-brain stimulation fixes depression long term->

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes "Deep depression that fails to respond to any other form of therapy can be moderated or reversed by stimulation of areas deep inside the brain. Now the first placebo-controlled study of this procedure shows that these responses can be maintained in the long term.
Neurologist Helen Mayberg at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, followed ten patients with major depressive disorder and seven with bipolar disorder, or manic depression, after an electrode device was implanted in the subcallosal cingulate white matter of their brains and the area continuously stimulated.
All but one of twelve patients who reached the two-year point in the study had completely shed their depression or had only mild symptoms."
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Comment: Re:Adult Gaming? Hah! (Score 1) 343

by Benwick (#27927649) Attached to: On the Advent of Controversial Video Games

Go beat the straw man for a while...

There's plenty of academic, philosophical, and artistic critique of video games out there. The field changes so quickly for technological reasons that the articles (when focusing on a particular game or games) suffer from rapid obsolescence. Nevertheless they exist.

Interactive fiction (e.g. text adventures, remember Infocom?) was a hot topic in the academic world in the early 1980s. As the consumption of video games has increased, so has the academic analysis/criticism. I'm not going to provide a bibliography here since Google, Lexis/Nexis, etc. will make it fairly easy.

Your ignorance of something is not proof of its nonexistence.

Space

Statue of Galileo Planned for Vatican 333

Posted by Zonk
from the isn't-it-ironic dept.
Reservoir Hill writes "Four hundred years after it put Galileo on trial for heresy the Vatican is to complete its rehabilitation of the scientist by erecting a statue of him inside Vatican walls. The planned statue is to stand in the Vatican gardens near the apartment in which Galileo was incarcerated. He was held there while awaiting trial in 1633 for advocating heliocentrism, the Copernican doctrine that the Earth revolves around the Sun. The move coincides with a series of celebrations in the run-up to next year's 400th anniversary of Galileo's development of the telescope. In January Pope Benedict XVI called off a visit to Sapienza University, Rome, after staff and students accused him of defending the Inquisition's condemnation of Galileo. The Vatican said that the Pope had been misquoted and since the episode, several of the professors have retracted their protest."
User Journal

Journal: Huh?

Journal by Benwick

Why the hell would I waste my time writing in this journal?

Never have so many understood so little about so much. -- James Burke