HAPPINESS IS A WARM ELECTRODE:

At his signal, two volts of electricity, enough to power a wristwatch, course through the wires and radiate outward from the tip a few millimeters in every direction. Millions of neurons bask in the electricity, and the effect is fairly immediate. Hire feels warm at first, a bit flushed.

And then it happens. The room looks brighter to her. The faces, the big, circular lights overhead, the ceiling—they all seem clearer. Malone asks her how she feels. “I’m really happy,” she replies, clearly surprised. “I feel like I could get up and do all sorts of things.” But even more telling than her words is the look on her face. For the first time in 20 years, with a halo bolted to her head and two freshly drilled holes in her skull, Hire smiles. . . . When I meet with her six months after the surgery, she doesn’t look like a person who spent 20 years trapped in a dark mental cave. She’s energetic. She shakes my hand firmly and looks me straight in the eye—something she says she simply wouldn’t have been able to do before. She laughs often (and my jokes aren’t even really funny). She now walks 50 miles a week, talks to her family constantly, chats with strangers at the post office. And her smile is a regular, everyday thing, not a freakish, fleeting appearance in a crowded operating room.

Read the whole thing.

ALAN GREENSPAN:

Mr. Greenspan, who calls himself a “lifelong libertarian Republican,” writes that he advised the White House to veto some bills to curb “out-of-control” spending while the Republicans controlled Congress. He says President Bush’s failure to do so “was a major mistake.” Republicans in Congress, he writes, “swapped principle for power. They ended up with neither. They deserved to lose.”

Hmm. That sounds kind of like my GOP “premortem,” doesn’t it? (“Add to this the GOP leadership’s failure to follow through on promised ethics reforms, and its addiction to pork-barrel spending, and you’ve got lots of reason to think that they don’t stand for anything except stuffing their pockets.”) Haven’t read the book yet, but it sounds interesting. It’s currently #2 on Amazon, so I guess a lot of people think so.

FREE IPHONE UNLOCKING FOR DUMMIES: Well, that’s the kind I’d need, if I owned an iPhone.

HYPOCRITICAL? OR REALIST? Google calls for Web privacy laws.

MICKEY KAUS: “Maybe Murdoch Bid on the Wrong Company: New York Times stock falls below $20 a share, down from $50 in 2002. … Soon even Ron Burkle will be able to buy the place!”

UPDATE: Reader George Zachar emails:

Shareholder equity in the New York Times company is roughly $825 million. That’s about the value of the Times’ interest in its new headquarters tower opposite the bus terminal. The implicit value of the Times newspaper and other properties is therefore zero.

I blame excessive ad-discounting.

WILL SALETAN on rigged studies. Similar result-oriented sloppiness on race/IQ research would get you drummed out of the academy. But maybe not sloppiness on other topics.

GIVING A NEW MEANING to the term “breast exam.”

A SHOCKING AYN RAND DEVELOPMENT: “An article in the New York Times about Rand and Atlas Shrugged that is notable for the absence of the expected condescending sneering.”

COVERING the Gathering of Eagles.

UPDATE: Michelle Malkin is liveblogging it.

IN THE MAIL: Aubrey de Grey’s new book, Ending Aging: The Rejuvenation Breakthroughs That Could Reverse Human Aging in Our Lifetime. Bring it on!

ANOTHER dumb McCarthyish political decision at the University of California. “After a group of UC Davis women faculty began circulating a petition, UC regents rescinded an invitation to Larry Summers, the controversial former president of Harvard University, to speak at a board dinner Wednesday night in Sacramento.” First Chemerinsky, now this. People are going to be a lot slower to accept invitations from the University of California in the future, I think. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, I could carve a better backbone out of a banana.

MASSACHUSETTS DECIDES THAT ROADS NEED more cowbell. Well, doesn’t everything?

IN MIAMI, FRED THOMPSON SPEAKS AGAINST GUN CONTROL LAWS:

‘I do not think that abrogating Second Amendment rights is a good idea,” the Republican said at the Versailles restaurant in Little Havana.

Miami’s pro-gun-control police chief is presumably too busy battling corruption charges to weigh in. But there’s a lot of that going around.

CALL IT THE HSU SCHOOL FOR SOCIAL RESEARCH: Arkansas returns Hsu money, but New School doesn’t. “Bob Kerrey — head of the New School — is considering a run for Senate in 2008. He ought to have the good sense to have returned the money already.” Maybe he’s not sure who it actually belongs to . . . .

JIM MORAN DOES IT AGAIN: “There are only so many mistakes he can make before it’s fair to call him an anti-Semite.” Are we there yet?

And this advice: “How should Democrats deal with this guy? Here’s a proposal: Ask Mark Warner.”

WHY DO SOY BURGERS TASTE SO AWFUL?

U.C. IRVINE IS working to rehire Erwin Chemerinsky. “He is noncommittal.” (Via TaxProf).

CANCER-RESISTANT MICE? Let’s hope we can do the same thing with people.

STRAPON, JETPOWERED BATWINGS! Now we’re getting somewhere! I think even Daniel Wilson would approve.

A ROUNDUP OF Milblogger interviews with President Bush.

RUDY GIULIANI BLASTS HILLARY ON THE WAR:

More here: “Hillary Clinton doesn’t say anything by accident. “

CHEMERINSKY UPDATE: “Right-wing bogeymen” still unaccounted for. And possibly fictional, though that raises further questions.

THOSE LAYERS OF EDITORS AND FACT-CHECKERS fail again: “A former consultant to ABC’s investigative unit admitted yesterday that he put his name on a purported interview with Barack Obama that he never conducted.”

And there’s more here: “The French Defense Ministry on Friday debunked the credentials of a former ABC News consultant who claimed to have worked as an adviser to the ministry, saying the man was just an intern for five months.”

AL GORE VISITS MINNEAPOLIS:

Brrr. Not complaining; just noting. Flower-slaying frost expected, which really is too soon. All that work, and they perish in a night.

I mean, I don’t actually know if Al was in Minneapolis today, I just kind of assumed.

GOOSE CREEK UPDATE:

PVC pipe filled with homemade “low-grade explosive mixture” and a videotape instruction for turning a remote-controlled toy car into a detonator were among the items found in the car driven by two University of South Florida students arrested in South Carolina and now facing federal explosives charges, according to a federal prosecutor. . . . They also found a laptop computer in the men’s car. On the laptop they found a 12-minute video on which a man shows how to turn a radio-controlled toy car into a remote-controlled detonator, Hoffer said.

Mohamed admits that it is him in the video, although you cannot see his face, Hoffer said. In the video, Mohamed said that he was showing how to make such a device “to save one who wants to be a martyr for another battle,” Hoffer said.

Mohamed also makes reference to a toy boat in the video.

The FBI seized a toy remote controlled boat in a box from Megahed’s home.

The plot thickens. (Via Michelle Malkin).

UPDATE: A cautionary note. The point is well-taken. I suspect that If CAIR weren’t defending them, people might be slower to assume their guilt. But given CAIR’s track record, that’s not entirely irrational.