Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

Oh, I don't mean that it isn't a significant medical advance, just that this whole "controversy" about it just seems pretty stupid to me.

Okay, so according to this article, the primary issues of controversy are that one or both of the people involved (donor and recipient,) may have tried to commit suicide.

The reason that this is (apparently) a big deal is because some doctors have expressed concern that such a "psychologically challenging" operation was being done on a woman who may have questionable emotional stability.

But that just makes me think, oh, so leaving her with a terribly disfigured face with no lips or nose and you can see her teeth and jaw moving when she talks, that's better? Gosh, that wouldn't be a problem at all.

Think about it, whether or not the initial injury was the result of a suicide attempt, who WOULDN'T be unstable after having their freaking lips chewed off? If the transplant can help, then what's the problem?

I think that what this really all boils down to is that a lot of people are very squeamish about their faces, and there is somehow this perception that changing part of her face will give her problems with her self-identity, but frankly I don't see how it would.

After all, how we look can have an impact on how we see ourselves, but is anyone really going to have a serious psychological identity crisis because now their nose and lips look a little bit different? You don't even see it unless you look in a mirror. It's not like a brain transplant or something, it's not like she's an identical twin of the other woman now. The facial features are largely determined by the bones behind the skin anyway, so even if she had received a full-face transplant, she wouldn't look just like the other woman.

Okay, so rant over, it just irritates me that people who claim to be "expressing concern for the mental stability" of the patient are doing that by turning the whole thing into a circus.

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Mona Lisa "Happy", computer finds

A computer has been used to decipher the enigmatic smile of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, concluding that she was mainly happy.
The painting was analysed by a University of Amsterdam computer using "emotion recognition" software.

It concluded that the subject was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry, journal New Scientist was told.

You know, I hear they also used a sophisticated computer model to determine that, before the arms broke off, the Venus de Milo was actually flipping the bird.

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Alleged footprints of early Americans found in volcanic rock in Mexico are either extremely old - more than 1 million years older than other evidence of human presence in the Western Hemisphere - or not footprints at all, according to a new analysis published this week in Nature.

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