Into the Void

Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New ‘Intelligent Falling’ Theory | The Onion - America’s Finest News Source

This would be funny if it weren’t so plausible.

“Traditional scientists admit that they cannot explain how gravitation is supposed to work,” Carson said. “What the gravity-agenda scientists need to realize is that ‘gravity waves’ and ‘gravitons’ are just secular words for ‘God can do whatever He wants.’”
–Dr. Ellen Carson, a leading Intelligent Falling expert known for her work with the Kansan Youth Ministry.

The Squid and the Bus « microecos

Ok, I had to follow up my baby squid post with a link to a site that proves once and for all that everything’s scarier in Russian.

Technorati: Science squid

SkyScout

SkyScout is a digital planetarium. You point it at the sky and it identifies whatever star or other celestial object you point it at.

I…
WANT

Technorati: celestron sky+scout planetarium

I have been thinking about about the environmental and medical effects of nano-pollution. Nanotechnology is a catch-all phrase that describes microscopic man-made objects. These come in many shapes and sizes - soccer-ball-shaped cages made of 60 carbon atoms, nanotubes the thickness of a hair, among others.

These objects persist in the environment after they’ve been used and disposed of. There has been little, if any, investigation into the effects of exposure to environmental nanotechnology.

Nanotechnological pollution is on the horizon. Fortunately, at least one group is looking into it. The Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) is trying to put together a multi-disciplinary collaborative network to establish guidelines for safely handling nano-materials.

We don’t have very long to get the guidelines and some procedures in place. An emerging illness called Morgellons Disease is quite possibly the earliest indication of what we can all expect from nano-pollution.

“Morgellons disease” is the name given to a cluster of symptoms that includes skin lesions, often with small fibers in the lesion. Fascinating stuff. Right now the medical profession is pooh-poohing it as a symptom of mental illness - Delusional Parasitosis. The folks at the Morgellons Research Foundation have posted as much information as is available on their web site.

The medical profession as a whole is particularly unscientific when it comes to identifying and treating new illnesses. Have you noticed? You can buy a lot of time if you pass the patient off to a psychiatrist.

It is possibile that some, if not all, cases of Morgellons are the result of exposure to tiny bits of nano-technology. These objects may lodge almost invisibly in the skin, causing unexplained lesions. Larger nanotubes or groups of smaller ones may appear to be fibers. According to a recent article in Popular Science, many of these objects are so small that when inhaled they can be carried directly into the brain using the same pathways as smells do.

Reading the Morgellons information reminded me of the few times I’ve come in direct contact with fiberglass insulation. You can’t see it, but it is painful and itchy. What if the fibers were microscopic? Would they still cause discomfort? I don’t know.

The dangers of asbestos were ignored for decades while thousands of workers died of the lung cancer it is now known to cause. I hope we don’t repeat the story with BuckyBalls.


Technorati: Morgellons+Disease nano-technology nano-tubes nano-pollution asbestos nanotube+modeler buckminsterfullerene buckyballs

Rethinking personal evolution.

Post-modernism is about creating a synthesis encompassing, integrating, and synergizing the existing, mutually exclusive domains of religion and science. A new spiritual paradigm, if you like buzz-words. Most of us have evolved far beyond the pre-industrial, that is, agrarian, monotheistic religions. Blind faith stopped being relevant before WWII, so you practically have to drop out of modern society to avoid moving to the next level. But don’t tell the poor devils unless you want a bloody Crusade right here in the US.

The atheists would claim that we have a god-shaped hole in our heads that we must fill with something, and this may be true. Now all the geeks don’t know what to do with this need for spirituality - or even exactly what it is that they’re needing!

KW has some great ideas, but he expressed an opinion in an interview that evolution is a sudden transformation rather than a process of gradual adaptation to the environment. I don’t agree that intermediate, incomplete forms are necessarily incompatible with survival. The universe doesn’t need miracles, *we* do.

To me, this idea that the Universe will bring you whatever you want if you are spiritual sounds a whole lot like the Protestant Work Ethic. If you work hard enough or if you believe hard enough, God will grant you grace. And all of your basest desires.

Look around you. There are a very few beacons shining above a sea of ignorance. Check out SoundsTrue. There are some excellent materials there - you just have to separate the wheat from the chaff.

In my opinion, we will achieve enlightenment only when humanity physically evolves enough to provide us with appropriate organs for it. I’m just burning karma until then.

Darwin loves you, man.

Technorati: post-modernism protestant+work+ethic blind+faith atheist transformation law+of+attraction burning+karma sea+of+ignorance spiritual monotheism pre-industrial darwin

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