A physical basis for fearlessness and the New Orleans Saints

by Thunderchild tm

Study shows why it is so scary to lose money
[Via Reuters Health eLine]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – People are afraid to lose money and an unusual study released on Monday explains why – the brain’s fear center controls the response to a gamble.

[More]

The amygdala has a site of intense interest because it seems to be the crossroads from many emotional memories. It is interesting to see that some people with damaged amygdalas will actually bet in situations that few other people would. They had little fear.

I wonder if something similar, not damage but altered processing in the amygdala, allowed the coach for the New Orleans Saints, Sean Payton, to make some really awesome gambles in the Superbowl. In almost every one of his gambles, the odds were distinctly in his favor, yet most coaches would not have gambled.

In fact, the odds were substantially in his favor on the surprise onside kick. Statistics show that if you can succeed 37% of the time, you will be ahead. Yet surprise onside kicks work about 55% of the time. In fact, Payton felt they had a “60 or 70 percent chance.“

Yet, very few coaches would have done such a thing. Many, particularly in the Superbowl, get too conservative. Playing not to lose rather than to win. That is why so many Superbowls are so boring.

And Payton is even more of a gambler. He used $250,000 out of his own salary to bring in Gregg Williams as defensive coordinator. The defense that gave them enough confidence to go for it on 4th and short at the end of the first half. The defense that stopped the Colts, allowing the Saints to get the ball back and quickly get a field goal.

Instead of playing safe, so no one would second guess the calls, they went for it, with the attitude ‘we may never be here again so let’s go for broke.’ But, and this is key, every one of their gambles had a firm statistical basis, bringing some of the same approaches baseball does with situational probabilities.

This is the key difference between amygdala-damaged fearlessness and what the Saints did. Their fearless behavior was actually based on firm rational reasoning and really exposed the ultra-conservative nature of the NFL, at least in the Superbowl.

[Listening to: Tunnel of Love from the album "Private Investigations - The Best Of" by Dire Straits]

Just breathe

by szlea

Slow breathing may soothe pain
[Via Reuters Health eLine]

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – The simple practice of slow breathing may help people deal with the physical and emotional reactions to moderate pain, a small study suggests.

[More]

One of the best things learned when I took karate in college was using slow breathing to relax and calm myself after a hard workout. Simply taking several deep breathes through my nose and exhaling through my mouth can often get me centered quite rapidly. Put me flat on my back while playing certain classical works (The New World Symphony, for instance) and I am ‘gone.’ I enter a zone where there is no pain, no discomfort, where the personal ‘I’ does not exist.

Learning to breathe like that was a great thing to learn and I have used it to help others when they are in pain. Simply concentrating on the nature of the breathe seems to focus the brain on things other than pain. Nice to se someone actually coming up with the physical explanation.

[Listening to: You Don't Believe from the album "The Best Of The Alan Parsons Project" by Alan Parsons Project]

Some useful concussion information

11:38 PM (PT) – Recognizing Sports Concussions: Keeping Youth Athletes Safe
[Via ResearchChannel On-Air Schedule]

[More]

I wrote about some of the recent information about concussions. This is a lot more information about the effects on young athletes and reflects much of the background for the recent law in Washington State dealing with student concussions, named for a student athlete who suffered brain damage after a concussion, Zachary Lystedt..

There is now a nationwide effort, called the Zachary Lystedt Brain Project to get similar legislation passed. Two states, Washington and Oregon, have such laws and there are coalitions in 42 others. The six states that are behind the curve are: Arkansas, Delaware, Louisiana, Nevada, North Dakota and Wyoming. Let’s hope they get started soon.

[Listening to: Smoke On the Water from the album "Machine Head" by Deep Purple]

That’ll show them!

In Texas, a Trial and Possible Prison Time for Reporting a Doctor

[Via NYT > Health]

A nurse is facing third-degree felony charges for informing state regulators that a doctor at her rural hospital was practicing bad medicine.

[More]

Small town politics looks it has destroyed the lives of two nurses who were trying to help their patients. Even the state seems to feel this is not appropriate. Sure sounds like a poor place to live.

Grace is the real hero of Avatar

by Alan Light

Review of James Cameron’s Avatar, An Ecological and Evolutionary Allegory
[Via Evo.Sphere]

Introduction

[Warning: this essay contains many spoilers. Please see Avatar before reading.]

James Cameron’s Avatar is the feel-good movie of the decade for biophiles and Gaians. The movie is one long, consciously realized allegory about the human love and need for nature. To accomplish the allegorical story, the film uses specific ecological and evolutionary hypotheses about the nature of life and humanity’s relationship to nature. An allegory conveys non-literal meanings, teaches lessons, and communicates messages by means of symbolic figures, actions, and representation. An allegory is an extended metaphor or series of metaphors, and an artistic allegory (as contrasted with a literary allegory) uses visual (rather than verbal) symbolic representation to accomplish these tasks.

A literary metaphor asserts that two usually different things are the same (“all the world’s a stage”; “With cat-like tread, upon our prey we steal”); it uses a word or phrase to invoke a direct similarity between the word or phrase used and the nominally dissimilar thing described. Visual metaphors do the same: they equate two different things (an actor striding across a stage and holding his arms out to form a world; pirates loudly stomping across a stage to pursue burglary while claiming they are quiet as cats to hilarious effect). Visual metaphors in the service of allegory use visual imagery to evoke physical and emotional similarities between the images depicted on stage or screen and the nominally dissimilar objects, actions, places, and people they portray.

Avatar is continuously filled with such visual metaphors that creates its allegory, which makes it an exceedingly rich and artful movie. Movies are supposed to entertain at a minimum, but I appreciate films that rise about mere entertainment and become art, and I appreciate even more movies that use their art to communicate deeply-felt emotional and moral truths about humans and nature through cinematic allegory. The fact that Avatar is so popular demonstrates that it has accomplished this rare feat, despite the usual film-goers lack of comprehension about what they are viewing beyond the superficial fantasy, romance, and shooting, justifiably giving James Cameron some well-earned acclaim and my grateful thanks.

Despite this success, the explanation of what precisely Cameron intended his movie to accomplish has remained elusive. Movie critics and reviewers have examined Avatar from many different themes and points of view but have continued, I believe, to miss the point. The movie is not complex, but because it is an allegory, Avatar’s ultimate message is not literal, and because it uses multiple visual, cinematic metaphors that are unfamiliar to mainstream movie critics and reviewers, interpreting the metaphors and allegory has proven difficult for them and and finding the film’s meaning has proven elusive. Critics and reviewers must use their intelligence and interpretive abilities to discern a film’s meaning. Doing this requires specific background knowledge on which to base an analysis and interpretation, and their lack of this background knowledge explains why so many have failed to understand Avatar. This essay explains what has happened and why this is the case. In a word, their ignorance of biology and religion has caused their interpretations to fail.

[More]

This is a well thought out discussion of the movie. I have mentioned a few of my ideas earlier. Everyone talks about Jake as the hero and the saviour of the Na’vi.

But one of the important aspects of the movie for me is that Jake failed. His approach lost and was going down in flames. All his flying fighters were gone. The infantry and cavalry had failed. The bomber was seconds away from its mission.

The scientist, Grace Augustine, is the reason that Jake and the Na’vi win. Without her, the corporate guys win.

This is because in her death, she merged her consciousness with the ‘planetary’ consciousness. In essence, the whole world became an avatar of Grace

The planet and ecology, Gaia as mentioned in the article, always had the ability to drive off the humans. But it did not recognize them as outsiders but as part of the normal ecology. So it took no action against them

But when Grace entered the consciousness of the planet, she was able to inform it of what was really going on. This is made clear when Jake ‘talks’ with the tree the might before battle. He explicitly tells the planet to look for Grace and listen to her.

Without the sacrifice of Grace, the planet would not have known that it had to combat the humans. Once it did, it mobilized its forces to accomplish the victory.

Without the planet’s help, Jake and the Na’vi would not have won. Without Grace, the planet would not have helped.

Jake was a catalyst but Grace was the spark that resulted in a win for the moon, Pandora, and its inhabitants

How science corrects itself

<i>by MinutesAlone

Reporting about 2035 error full of errors

[Via Deltoid]

Bidisha Banerjee and George Collins have written the definitive account of the error in the WG2 report about Himalayan glaciers:

Dozens of articles and analyses of this situation, whether dashed-off blog posts or New York Times coverage, exhibit a curious consistency. Not a single article or analysis appears to include all relevant issues without introducing at least one substantial error. It’s as though the original documents contained a curse which has spread to infect every commentator and reporter. The curse seems to stem from not reading sources carefully (or at all), which, ironically, was the IPCC Working Group II’s central failing, and also a major issue in the documents that were the basis of the defective paragraph.

[More]

The article is a wonderful summation of how almost everyone involved, from scientists to journalists, got this wrong. It does not absolve WG2 from responsibility for incorrectly responding to reviewers and not making the changes that it said it had made. And it provides a useful explanation for what happened in the two critical sentences.

It is also a nice example of what can happen when primary sources are not available and people rely on secondary review articles written without any peer review. Errors got copy and pasted without real review of the facts. Poorly worded sentences were left in place.

The article is a nice example of how we can have a good chance of correcting things. This work is done by humans and some humans can make mistakes. Some were made here.

But WG1 did get things right and did correctly state what was going on with glaciers. So, the portion that was wrong can be corrected but its error does not nullify the rest of the document, which got the relevant facts correct. That is not how science works.

[Listening to: I've Seen All Good People from the album "Yesyears Disc 1" by Yes]

Reporters who lie

by boliyou

Leakegate
[Via Deltoid]

Jonathan Leake recently wrote a story alleging that the statement in the IPCC AR4 WG2 that up to 40% of the Amazon forest could vanish due to climate change was “bogus”. Deltoid can now reveal that Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the claim about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake’s query and informed him the claim was basically correct:

At the time of the IPCC [report], there was ample evidence that a large portion of the Amazon forest is very close to the lower limit of rainfall that is necessary to sustain dense forest. We published an article in 1994 in Nature in which we estimated that approximately half of the forests of the Brazilian Amazon were periodically exposed to severe drought and soil moisture depletion, especially during El Nino events.

Nepstad told me the same thing in response to my query after Leake’s story was published. He included copies of his relevant papers which confirmed what he told me. Nepstad goes into more detail here:

The IPCC statement on the Amazon is correct, but the citations listed in the Rowell and Moore report were incomplete. (The authors of this report interviewed several researchers, including the author of this note, and had originally cited the IPAM website where the statement was made that 30 to 40% of the forests of the Amazon were susceptible to small changes in rainfall). Our 1999 article (Nepstad et al. 1999) estimated that 630,000 km2 of forests were severely drought stressed in 1998, as Rowell and Moore correctly state, but this forest area is only 15% of the total area of forest in the Brazilian Amazon. In another article published in Nature, in 1994, we used less conservative assumptions to estimate that approximately half of the forests of the Amazon depleted large portions of their available soil moisture during seasonal or episodic drought (Nepstad et al. 1994). After the Rowell and Moore report was released in 2000, and prior to the publication of the IPCC AR4, new evidence of the full extent of severe drought in the Amazon was available. In 2004, we estimated that half of the forest area of the Amazon Basin had either fallen below, or was very close to, the critical level of soil moisture below which trees begin to die in 1998. This estimate incorporated new rainfall data and results from an experimental reduction of rainfall in an Amazon forest that we had conducted with funding from the US National Science Foundation (Nepstad et al. 2004). Field evidence of the soil moisture critical threshold is presented in Nepstad et al. 2007.

[More]

It is always a worry when reporters distort and mislead in order to sell a story. They get more readers and inflame them with slanted reporting. Yellow journalism has more than once sent nations to war. If lying helps them sell papers, then they lie.

It seems as though something similar might have happened here. And, given, the libel laws in Britain have already found one man guilty when using the term bogus for something that actually was bogus, I wonder if the paper will also be charged with using the term for something that is “basically correct.” The headline declares something as bogus which is not.

[Listening to: Rawhide from the album "The Magnificent Westerns" by The City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra & Chorus & Crouch End Festival Chorus]

Obstruction of all by one man

Question

[Via Balloon Juice]

You probably heard about this:

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has put an extraordinary “blanket hold” on at least 70 nominations President Obama has sent to the Senate, according to multiple reports this evening. The hold means no nominations can move forward unless Senate Democrats can secure a 60-member cloture vote to break it, or until Shelby lifts the hold.

“While holds are frequent,” CongressDaily’s Dan Friedman and Megan Scully report (sub. req.), “Senate aides said a blanket hold represents a far more aggressive use of the power than is normal.”

The Mobile Press-Register picked up the story early this afternoon. The paper confirmed Reid’s account of the hold, and reported that a Shelby spokesperson “did not immediately respond to phone and e-mail messages seeking confirmation of the senator’s action or his reason for doing so.”

It goes without saying that this shows what a great, venerable institution the Senate is, what a serious, bipartisan legislator Shelby is, and (of course) what a failure Obama has been at changing the tone in Washington.

Here’s what I’d like to know: is there any limit to how much a strong-willed minority can slow things down in the Senate? Could a new Republican Senator do something like this every day and bring everything to a complete halt for months on end?

[More]

One Senator is blocking “all executive nominations on the Senate calendar.” One guy holding up all executive nominations. Now I would like to assume that only the civilian nominations are being held up, not the non-civilian. The latter mainly deal with promotions for officers. No Senator in his right mind would do anything to block those.

So why is he blocking all those nominations, something that appears to be unprecedented in our history? For earmarks:

According to the report, Shelby is holding Obama’s nominees hostage until a pair of lucrative programs that would send billions in taxpayer dollars to his home state get back on track. The two programs Shelby wants to move forward or else:

- A $40 billion contract to build air-to-air refueling tankers. From CongressDaily: “Northrop/EADS team would build the planes in Mobile, Ala., but has threatened to pull out of the competition unless the Air Force makes changes to a draft request for proposals.” Federal Times offers more details on the tanker deal, and also confirms its connection to the hold.

- An improvised explosive device testing lab for the FBI. From CongressDaily: “[Shelby] is frustrated that the Obama administration won’t build” the center, which Shelby earmarked $45 million for in 2008. The center is due to be based “at the Army’s Redstone Arsenal.”

Yep, one guy is holding these nominations hostage so he can get pork for his state. None of these nominations can proceed until he gets what he wants. From what I read, it takes a vote of 60 to overcome the hold. Meaning that all the other Republicans have to go along with this in order for it to succeed. If even 1 or 2 of them voted for cloture, this abuse of the hold would fail.

And, of course, as soon as he gets what he wants, another obstructionist can do the same thing until he gets what he wants. And so on. Thus obstructionists can prevent the Executive branch from having the people needed to do its business.

It will be interesting to see if all the other Republicans get behind such an abuse.

Because this really does not have much to do with party but to illustrate how amazingly undemocratic the Senate has become. Because, as with filibuster abuse, once this tactic has been used, it will be used again by both parties. A strong Democratic minority could do the same thing to a Republican government.

All to fill the pork barrels.

[Listening to: Simple Man from the album "Pronounced Leh-Nerd Skin-Nerd" by Lynyrd Skynyrd]

This is why Macs are so cool!

Iron Man + MacBook = Awesome

[Via Edible Apple]

Check out this awesome Iron Man decal on a MacBook. Bad ass.

[More]

It was cool enough that Apple laptops have the glowing Apple logo on the top. But this creative use takes it to a whole ‘nother level. They have a couple of other ones:

Snow White

and Bart (from the Nirvana cover, I think)

I would love to see some more of these:

Green Lantern,

or Captain America

or Dr. Strange

or Silver Surfer and Galactus

or Thor

The Web never forgets

What people said about the iPod when it was first announced | Edible Apple

[Via Edible Apple]

Given the perplexing backlash and seeming hatred being directed at the iPad, we thought it’d be somewhat instructive to go back in time and take a look at what some people were saying about the iPod when Steve Jobs first announced Apple’s first MP3 player back in October, 2001. When first released, the original iPod cost $399, came with a 5GB hard drive, was FireWire equipped, and had 10 hours of battery life. Still, many people at the time considered it too expensive while others were utterly unimpressed. Put simply, there’s a reason why Apple doesn’t let its customer base drive their product line.

[More]

It is really fun to read historical naysayers and see just how off they are. Their excuses indicate that they just did not understand what the iPod was nor why people would want it. Simply because it was not what THEY wanted or did not fit THEIR market needs, it was a failure.

I guess its success must look like magic to them, or some sort of conspiracy. They most likely can not fathom that there is a rational reason. They did not see the ecosystem it fit into, how iTunes would drive its success and how, ultimately, the iPod is not what people saw but a way to ‘handle’ their music without having to see a piece of hardware. The iPod disappeared when music was being listened to. That is a hard problem to solve for most hardware makers who really do not want their product to disappear when someone is using it. They fear that people will lose any loyalty.

With Apple products, I can just do what I need to without thinking about the hardware itself. Or even the software most times. There is almost a seamless quality between cause and effect – what I want to do and what gets done. The computer, iPod, iPhone seldom intrudes.

Not so on many other devices. When I work on a PC, I always know I am on a computer and often feel as though there is a barrier between me and what I want to do. Same with most cell phones, audio equipment, etc. The hardware often blocks what I want to do.

That is why I feel confident that when the iPad is released, I can do all sorts of things. If I want to read, I will be able to read. If I want to browse, I will browse. I won’t be configuring things or reading manuals in order to use the device.

Apple’s real success has been its invisibility.

[Listening to: Scuttlebuttin' from the album "Couldn't Stand The Weather" by Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble]

[Listening to: Voodoo Chile (Slight Return) from the album "Couldn't Stand The Weather" by Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble]

Twenty years of obstruction in one

Talking Point
[Via Booman Tribune]

President Obama spoke to the Senate Democratic Conference today and he pointed something out. Last year the Senate cast more cloture votes than were cast in the 1950’s and 1960’s combined. In other words, as he put it, the Republicans produced 20 years of obstruction in a single year. That’s a talking point I’d like to see repeated so often that even the most disengaged voter hears it and understands it.

[More]

The figure is based upon Senate figures. While I am sure you would have to cherry pick the years the point is well taken.

The filibuster as a tool of obstruction is a modern choice and really took off after the rules were changed in the 70s to make it easier to obstruct (no more having to stand on the floor and continue debating a la Mr Smith Goes to Washington). Cloture is the vote to stop debate. If it passes, the filibuster is broken and debate on the bill stops.

The data goes up to the 110th Congress, the first one with a Democratic majority since 2002. It set a record. The 111th Congress had 73 motions, 40 votes on cloture and 36 passed.

Now that is already on a course to pass the 110th Congress in number of filibusters. What is really different this time is the percentage of votes on cloture vs cloture passing. When Democrats are in the minority, the percentage of votes that made it through the cloture vote was usually small. For example, in the 104th Congress, there were 50 votes on cloture but only 9 passed.

In the 110th, the percentage was up to 50% . Half the time when cloture was voted on, it passed. Previously, the most times cloture was invoked in any Senate was 34. It was invoked 61 times in the 110th, almost double the previous high.

in the first year of the 111th Congress, cloture was voted on 40 times (It is on pace to shatter the record of the 110th Congress). Yet, 90% of all the cloture votes resulted in passing, meaning there is at least 60 Senators in favor. This is an amazing number, something not seen in any other Congress in history.

90% of the cloture votes pass! Throughout history, the majority of cloture votes fail.

So, if 60% of the Senators are in favor, why in the world are they having to invoke cloture? Because the Republicans are demanding it. Not because they can actually change the vote but because it slows down the Senate tremendously to invoke cloture and stop debate.

Obstruction is the reason.

Senate rules are actually anti-democratic. One senator can gum up the works and bring things to a standstill. One Senator can prevent hearings on all sorts of things, such as approval of Executive Branch employees. There are over 1100 positions that require Senate approval.

This too has been done by the Republicans, leaving a huge number of really important positions empty simply so they can obstruct governing.

I expect that losing the 60 votes they need to invoke cloture, the percentage will again drop, simply because now there is no way to get to 60. The obstruction will still continue. There will just be no way to route around its damage.

New uses for tobacco

by net_efekt

Tobacco plant-made therapeutic thwarts West Nile virus
[Via EurekAlert! - Biology]

(Arizona State University) A new therapeutic made from tobacco plants has been shown to arrest West Nile virus infection, according to a new study by Arizona State University scientist Qiang Chen and his colleagues.

[More]

They created tobacco plants that produce engineered antibodies to the West Nile virus. The antibodies are just as effective as ones produced in mammalian cell culture and can be produced to pretty high yields – up to 0.5 g of antibody per gram of leaf tissue.

Finding other, lucrative uses for tobacco plants means that the farmers in the East can still make a good living and the rest of us can have helpful products, some that even save our lives.

Corrupting elected judges

by Seattle Municipal Archives

Campaign finance, corruption, and elected judges

[Via Thoughts from Kansas]

As the Times puts it: Former Justice O’Connor Sees Ill in Election Finance Ruling:

“Gosh,” she said, “I step away for a couple of years and there’s no telling what’s going to happen.” Justice O’Connor criticized the recent decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, only obliquely, reminding the audience that she had been among the authors of McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, the 2003 decision that was overruled in large part on Thursday. …

She has become increasingly vocal in recent years about doing away with judicial elections. Most states elect at least some of their judges; federal judges are appointed.

“Judicial elections are just difficult to justify in a constitutional democracy in which even the majority is bound by the law’s restraints,” Justice O’Connor said Tuesday.

She added that last week’s decision was likely to create “an increasing problem for maintaining an independent judiciary.”

[More]

O’Connor obviously does not like the decision and she makes a point that others have not. Corporate money can flood into judicial elections also. What happens when the judiciary gets corrupted as much as Congress is now. How can we view the rule of law when elections can be bought with any sort of corporate money?

Corruption of the courts would, as O’Connor says:

“We can anticipate that labor unions and trial lawyers, for instance, might have the financial means to win one particular state judicial election,” she said. “And maybe tobacco firms and energy companies have enough to win the next one.

“And if both sides unleash their campaign spending monies without restrictions, then I think mutually-assured destruction is the most likely outcome.”

[Listening to: Bungle In The Jungle from the album "War Child" by Jethro Tull]

Now they don’t need lobbyists

This is a speech Larry Lessig gave at the conservative Cato Institute. After explaining the growth of a politics economy that corrupts both parties, he asks the audience what they are going to do about it.

Larry Lessig uses Reagan and right-winf views to ask why government does not get smaller, even when conservatives are in power. They should be a barrier against the tendency of Democrats to increase government. But they are not.

His answer is that they really do not want to. Or at least enough of them do not want to so that nothing gets changed.

He provides an explanation of how corporate money has corrupted both parties. It has now created an economy where there is no real reason or need for politicians to actually reduce government or to deregulate businesses.

The politicians actually do things that look very stupid but are actually quite good at getting money from companies. The politicians do not want to lessen money they get from corporations. They want to make sure that money keeps coming.

So, they do not favor regulations that would really simplify some things because it would shut off the spigot. Health care reform is really good for them, on both sides, because they get huge amounts of money from a wide variety of corporations or unions. Many do not actually want anything to happen (it would shut off the money flow) but are really glad that the bills are working their way through.

This is the corruption. There is no longer any balance between the different aspirations of the two parties. The Democrats generally want government to help people in need. This is important at some times but must be balanced by the Republican tendency towards small government. Lessig explains how Reagan framed this in a way that makes some sort of sense.

And then he shows how what members of both parties are doing and how it makes no sense. Democrats are spending on things that do not help people and Republicans are happy to increase the size of government and deficits.

Now both parties are, in large part, driven by very different aspirations that mentioned above – they want to make a lot of money. Not to help people nor to maintain fiscal responsibility.

In the economy Lessig describes, the money has to be funneled through lobbyists, since the corporations are not able to give the money directly. In the new world the Supreme Court gave us, they no longer need to go through lobbyists.

They can cut out the middle man and pay the politicians directly. How can this be good for ‘little d’ democracy?

One solution that Lessig mentions, from the left, is to cut off the head of this monster, to remove the need for politicians for large amounts of money – go to public funding. Now 70% of their time is no longer needed for fundraising and the quid pro quo of corporate money is gone, as it is no longer needed. All that is left is plain old bribery and we do know how to deal with that.

Lessig’s purpose is to challenge the conservative thinkers at the Cato Institute to come up with a right wing solution. How will the right address this problem?

Spaceman or SPACEMAN

Spaceman

[Via BBC News | Science/Nature | World Edition]

So what is the new Nasa vision for exploration?

[More]

So why does the BBC call it Nasa and not NASA? Is this just some weird anglo-American difference, like colour/color? What is the rationale?

[Listening to: Someday Never Comes from the album "Chronicle" by Creedence Clearwater Revival]