Into the Void

Andrew Beacock’s Blog: Oddiophile’s Technorati Tags Bookmarklet is available here

I originally used the simpletags plugin for WordPress, but it has a couple of little quirks. I began manually typing in the links with images - they have the added benefit of telling Technorati about page views even when my visitors don’t click. What a pain.

I went looking for a bookmarklet and found the one I linked to above. It works great and has saved me a lot of time, but doesn’t do the images. So here’s my modification.

Leslie’s Technorati TagGen

In IE, right click on the link below, select “Add to Favorites” and file it under Links. You’ll get a warning that it’s unsafe - that’s because it’s javascript, not because it’s doing anything horrible.

When you click the bookmarklet link in your link bar you’ll get a popup window prompting you to enter your tags. Enter the tags separated by spaces. If the tag is a phrase, you should use + signs instead of the spaces inside the phrase. Then hit the OK button. The window will now contain the tag code. Copy it, hit ok to close the popup, then paste it into your blog.

And there you are. I hope you find it useful.

Proof of Creationism

Well, why didn’t you guys just say so! Billions of cans and jars, billions of scientific experiments a year. Life does NOT evolve from peanut butter!

College’s foot bath plans spark backlash

I agree that public funds shouldn’t be used to create foot baths for the Muslims to use before their five-times-a-day prayers. I’m also against the use of public funds to install sexist urinals for males who are perfectly capable of peeing in the general vicinity of the toilet. :-/ We could kill two birds with one stone by installing troughs with running water like they have in some parts of the world. =:-o And where are the bidets?

That was humor, in case any stereotypically humor-challenged schizoaffectives or lesbians are reading this. (You dykes all know I’m bi, right?)

I’m also against the policy of the colleges and universities that I personally have attended of having a small chapel on campus for the Christians. If you have to pray every day, you know where it is. If you don’t, then a) you probably don’t worship with the other Christians who stop into the chapel every day, and b) you probably think you are somehow *entitled* to use publicly-funded college facilities for the purpose.

Have I failed to offend anyone yet? Ok, then, I’ll keep going.

The ACLU hasn’t gotten involved because the university, after public hearings on the topic, decided to use the student-funded college maintenance fund to include the foot baths in new construction, NOT public funding. We’re talking about new construction that includes urinals, baby-changing stations, and other accommodations in the unisex bathrooms, I might add. The Moslems were accidentally pulling the sinks away from the wall and splashing water on the floor, so the foot baths are about safety and saving money, NOT about encouraging heresy.

The students on campus are mostly ok with this, so why are a bunch of conservative think-tanks getting all huffy about it? I don’t feel that it is my business. You don’t like it, don’t wash your feet in the sink. The other Christians have to pee in there!

This was brought to my attention by a Catholic, of all people. A good Catholic education includes a lot of reading about other religions, unlike that of the Fundamentalists. Some of these people wouldn’t read at all if they weren’t pressured by their friends and family to read the bible. Simplistic.

I don’t see the Christians being prevented from praying. What I do see is the flat-earth Fundamentalists demanding that the rest of us learn their simplistic, literal interpretation of a text that was originally intended to simplify the facts of cosmology, geology and evolution for a Semitic tribe of uneducated wandering goat-herders. Simplistic.

There were great civilizations in nearby parts of the world at that time, civilizations whose religions quickly incorporated new discoveries in the temporal world, things like the ptolemiac model of the solar system - you know, that the earth rotates around the sun? Maybe you don’t…

You’d know more about it if the Christians didn’t burn down the library at Alexandria in the 4th century A.D., *pretending* it was a pagan temple. A millennium-long Dark Ages followed. Millenia later, in the 17th century A.D., Galileo was threatened with death if he didn’t recant similar heretic theories about the motion of the earth.

They’re up to their same old tricks in the U.S., apparently trying to create another thousand-year Dark Ages. Next they’ll be burning books.

Why Does the Christian Right Hate Harry Potter? [with picture of book burning featuring harry potter books!] (reddit.com)

They’re Burning Books Again

Church group burns Potter books

Burning Sensations: How would-be censors promote free speech.

And the canonical (so to speak) list of Harry Potter information

Personally I think it’s time for every world religion to start policing its extremists. Extremists balance out their hate by cashing in on the good works of the majority of their fellow worshippers, using threats of damnation or worse. Now there’s a sin for you.

I have no problem if the student body at UMich wants to fund foot baths themselves. The alternative is to ban them from washing their feet before engaging in private prayer, and that’s xenophobic nonsense.

Harry Potter Muslims prayer in school Christian Dark Ages publicly funded book burning conservative think-tanks urinals Fundamentalists

Inside the Hotdog Factory: 39 Years Ago Today: Anniversary of the Death of Lenny Bruce

An insight into neurolinguistics from an unexpected source. Lenny Bruce had died over 10 years before I first heard this on a vinyl LP back in the late ’70s.

“Believe me, I’m not profound, this is something that I assume someone must have laid on me, because I do not have an original thought. I am screwed. I speak English. That’s it. I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to somebody else. Then I must just take, ding ding ding, somewhere.”
– Lenny Bruce

neurolinguistics Lenny Bruce

UPenn’s Center for Resuscitation Science

Interesting web site. It’s about how we define the moment of death. They are turning Emergency Medicine on its head.

If you have advance directives, a living will or a DNR order, it’s because you don’t want to wind up a vegetable after a medical emergency or because you have an incurable, fatal condition. Advanced directives are NOT intended to force the ER doctors to let you die when medical treatment can easily fix you right up. With the exception, of course, of folks whose religion forbids medical treatment.

When I was a whitewater rafting guide I had to be certified in Advanced First Aid and Life Support. This program took four weekends to complete. It was hard for me to put in that kind of sustained effort, now that I think about it, but it really helped my confidence on the job. The point of the course was to enable the guides to stabilize someone injured on the river until we could get real medical help. And it wasn’t a far stretch to consider CPR in case a guest had a heart attack on the river.

Read the UPenn web site. Look at the powerpoint presentations. Read the doctors’ curriculum vitae.

Again: it’s about how we define the moment of death.

So.

Google “cellular reperfusion injury” and read a few of the articles that come up.

Your cells don’t die right away when you die. When oxygen-deprived they go into a kind of stasis and even after several hours a doctor can still extract undamaged, living cells. They haven’t stopped, they’ve just slowed down. You don’t fade out in that first magic 5 minutes. You fall into a deep coma, then actual cell death takes hours - or longer.

This is completely different than what the public and most of the medical profession believes at this time. The current belief is that no pulse equals death. Which really sucks for a few folks who have temporary a artificial heart that whirrrrrs instead of beating. But I digress.

So if you want to define death in terms of brain activity as monitored on an Electroencephalogram (EEG), well, the EEG can only measure down to about 0.5 Hz. This is a limitation of our technology. As you fall asleep brainwaves slow from 30Hz maximum down to around 4Hz. If you go into a deep coma, they slow down even more. No brainwave equals death, then. Except that our technology has serious limitations. Well, it turns out that brain cells go into stasis too.

Now here’s where it gets weird.

Think about what they do in the ER. It’s all about reperfusion, getting oxygen back into the brain as quickly as possible. Jump-start the heart, pump oxygen into the lungs, get a cold patient warm. Well, it turns out that if you pump too much oxygen into a cell that’s in stasis, it self-destructs. That magic 5 minutes isn’t the time that it takes the cells to die. The magic 5 minutes is the time it takes for some of the cells to go into stasis, that is, enough that the self-destruction, or apoptosis, causes wide-spread damage to the body on reperfusion. The heart seems to be the most susceptable organ.

The gist of the web page I linked to is that if someone is brought into the ER suffering from cardiac arrest, they have a better chance at survival if the ER doctors immediately cool them down and add some chemicals to prevent apoptosis before beginning slow reperfusion. The Resuscitation Medicine department at the U of P is working on establishing a new set of protocols.

Where it gets scary is here:

If they bring you in after the magic 5 minutes, present ER protocols can’t save you. Not without massive, permanent damage to the heart and to the brain. They declare you, and that’s it. The body is sent to a funeral home and cremated or injected with preservatives, sometimes long before the several-hour deadline (so to speak) is up.

No wonder the Irish hold wakes. The British, after discovering that an unsettling number of people had been buried alive - used to attach bell cords to the wrists of folks they buried. Saved by the bell.

IRL your family can decide to keep your brain-dead corpse alive despite anything you said in life. Witness what poor Terri Schaivo’s parents did to keep her mindless body alive long after her spirit was gone.

I’ll be watching the Rescusitation Medicine story with great interest.

Rescusitation Medicine apoptosis Emergency Medicine cellular reperfusion injury EEG cardiac arrest moment of death

Astronaut Wally Schirra Crosses Final Frontier

Last month, he expressed fondness for his home planet, telling an Associated Press reporter that he had left three times and had found nowhere else to go. He spoke during interviews about the dust clouds he saw over India and China in the first decade of space travel and worried about pollution. He also talked about seeing the world as one home, rather than a globe divided by borders. One month before crossing his own final frontier, he said in an AP interview: “Please take care of Spaceship Earth.”

We will do our best.

Technorati: Astronaut Wally+Schirra space+travel Spaceship+Earth pollution space+travel

?????? (dreaded haggis) / Gotovim.RU2

For some reason I was looking up “dreaded haggis” on Google the other day. Oh, right, to scare the Russians. Much to my surprise, I found a recipe for it on a Russian site. Why should the Sassanachs be the only ones to have to suffer?

‘J.B.S. Haldane was once asked what the study of biology could tell one about the Almighty. “I’m really not sure,” said Haldane, “except that He must be inordinately fond of beetles.” There are thought to be at least 300,000 species of beetles. By contrast there are only about 10,000 species of birds.’

Nobel Laureate Prof. Francis Crick
in “How I Got Inclined Towards Atheism,” an excerpt from What Mad Pursuit: A Personal View of Scientific Discovery

Whether flying fighter jets or frolicking on the Oprah set, TC has always entertained us to the max.

While looking at disturbing pictures^W^W^W^W doing some follow-up research one of of my previous entries, I revisited a fun article about [tag]Tom Cruise[/tag] on Foreign Dispatches. It’s called What’s Wrong With This Image? and puts forth an interesting theory as to why TC is what he is, whatever that may be.

To remind anyone who doesn’t like to click links from strangers, and rightly so! - holoprosencephaly (NIH link) results from failure of the forebrain to split and rotate in the early embryonic stage. There are genetic forms, however, it is often due psych meds such as lithium or to ethanol abuse. In the most severe cases, the baby has brain and facial deformities that are incompatible with life.

Some of the least severe cases are marked by a single front incisor and mild retardation.

Cruise’s dental oddity (along with his dyslexia, small stature and family history) is an indicator of holoprosencephaly, a genetic disorder which might explain why Nicole Kidman’s pregnancies during their marriage ended in stillbirths.

I suggest that the sensitive reader not google holoprosencephaly or click any links in this paragraph. Especially not this sweet kitten picture on Fox News (where else). I think it’s rather cute in a “there but for the grace of g*d go I” sort of way.

Hey, it’s science.

Update 2/5: In defense of TC, let me state that his odd dental configuration appears to be from having lost an incisor. When you aren’t googling holoprosencephaly, you won’t find pictures of what a single wide incisor looks like.

Amazon.com: Cat’s Cradle: Books: Kurt Vonnegut

I wound up writing this review because recently, in a flight of fancy, someone conjectured that perhaps in other parts of the universe silicon forms four bonds, making ring structures - similar to the carbon-based benzene ring that is the basis of all organic materials - possible. My question was whether silicon-based amino-acid analogues would “teach” the silicon in this part of the universe to form the same kind of rings. Carbon-based DNA teaches raw amino acids how to make more DNA, so that begs the question of whether such structures would propagate.

Ice-9 does just that.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle isn’t quite as absurd as it seems.

Ice-9 is a form of ice with a different structure than regular ice. It is frozen solid at room temperature. Further, when it comes into contact with liquid water, it causes the water to freeze into more Ice-9. Given that 4/5ths of the earth’s surface is covered by ocean, and that our bodies are mostly made of water, you can probably deduce that keeping the Ice-9 in a thermos where it can’t come in contact with other water is an important plot element.

A seed crystal is often necessary to initiate a phase change or precipitation, so it is conceivable that Ice-9 could initiate a catastrophe. The science fiction part is that we haven’t discovered a form of water that is solid at room temperature.

Incidentally, there’s not much danger from oxygen-breathing silicon-based life forms because instead of exhaling carbon dioxide they’d exhale glass. They won’t be bothering us here on earth when they show up.

However, electricity-breathing silicon creatures like the semiconductor nodes that make up the Internet could be a threat. Google’s server network has almost - not quite, but almost - reached a level of complexity where consciousness and intention are possible.

Some reviewers on amazon.com thought that Ice-9 was a metaphor for the atom bomb. Since the possibility of thermonuclear armageddon was so over-arching in real life at the time I first read the book, I didn’t place any emotional emphasis on that subtext. After all, it wasn’t necessary to know that Godzilla was a metaphor for the atom bomb and the damaging effects of residual radiation in order to enjoy his antics.

Cat’s Cradle was a fun social commentary that didn’t benefit at all from atomic metaphor. Ice-9 was merely a plot device, a Deus-Ex-Machina that brought about the natural consequences of great social granfalloons.

Bokonon isn’t the first religion founded by a science-fiction author, either, but that’s another topic for another day.

Like all of Vonnegut’s books, Cat’s Cradle looks at society and personalities and relationships with a new, slightly mad perspective. It is hard to walk away from Cat’s Cradle without re-evaluating the Granfalloon that is organized religion, or any other carefully-crafted social institutions.