http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,266860,00.html
possessions
I don't want to make this a political blog, but I feel that this important. Faux news has released an article, entitled Did The Devil Make Him Do It?, that suggests that the devil is responsible for the shooting and not Cho Seung-Hui. I think that this quote sums up the article quite well. "Was Cho Seung-Hui schizophrenic … psychotic … manic-depressive? Or were the shooting deaths of 32 people, including Cho himself, at Virginia Tech University part of the ongoing struggle between God and Satan … good against evil … lightness and darkness?"
They go to cite Richard Roberts whose religious views as a member of the Oral Roberts University, the worlds largest charismatic Christan university, makes him predisposed to believe in the supernatural and a lot less likely to second guess his ideas about what he believes to be supernatural. I find this deplorable. What in essence what he is doing is letting the worst mass murder in the nations history off the hook because he thinks something else did it. He ignores the possibility that the person was mentally ill or responsible for the ridicules notion that his off religious sect is the only possible answer. That is about as far as I want to go into the subject at the moment but I will do a larger article about the general idea of possessions for next week.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article1637528.ece
http://www.physorg.com/news95535411.html
stem cells
Some good news for those of you affected by type 1 diabetes. In human trials scientist have successfully cured diabetes! Bad news; the treatment uses stem cells which are currently greatly inhibited by the current administration. More good news; the senate approved a new bill lightning the restrictions on stem cell research and development. More bad news; the president said that he would veto the bill when it came for him to sign it. Still, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) recently published a paper describing the treatment of 15 type 1 diabetes sufferers who received a treatment that involved stem cells that, for 13 out of the 15 participants, either reduced there dependency of insulin injections or in some cases eliminated the need for them at all.
http://www.pinktentacle.com/2007/04/new-cement-conducts-electricity-like-metal/
cement tvs
OK, now this is the type of news that I like to see. The creative folks at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have come up with some neat shit. They made cement that conducts electricity. Before I summarize the article for you guys, I need to say "damn, that's really cool!" Now that I got that out of my system, professor Hideo Hosono and his team of researchers have altered the chemical structure of regular aluminum cement by "sealing the alumina cement compound along with titanium inside a glass tube and heating it to 1,100 degrees Celsius, the researchers were able to create a homogenized, symmetrical cage structure that conducts electricity like metal."
One possible use for this new technology is in LCD and plasma displays. The cement would be used to replace the Indium in the screens. Apparently, this cement could replace rare earth metals in lots of other products as well. Because the cement is much easier, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly, we can hope to see this new technology put into production sooner rather than later.
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL1015081120070411
pope = douche
Before I start this article, I'd like to point out that no one who really knows jack-shit about evolution calls themselves a "Darwinist". The term that is used to call a scientist who study evolution is a evolutionary biologist. And on that same note, anyone who makes the distinction between "macro" and "micro" evolution also is making the same mistake. There are no such things as "macro" or "micro" evolution, there is just evolution. Evolution is applied to all things that change and exists under a selective force that guides the change.
The first thing that I'd like to address about this article is its name: Pope Says Science Is Too Narrow To Explain Creation. Now, I don't like this statement at all. Basically I find it quite presumptuous and arrogant for the pope to say such things. I'm not saying science has the answer to every little thing but its growing and answering more and more each and every day. To say that science can't is basically saying that it doesn't exist. Another fallacy that the pope might be making is what is known as "the god of the gaps" argument, which he denies. Is saying is that science doesn't know there for god did it. Also this is completely separate from the topic of the rest of the article. This is because evolution makes no claim on the origin of life just the process through witch new life forms emerge.
The pope has recently released a press statement about the churches views on evolution. From what I read about it in an article (link above), the pope doesn't really know what he is talking about. He has, to his credit, done enough research in to evolution to say that, "evolution says my uncle's a monkey" but he still falls short of the main concept.
I feel it is necessary to briefly explain evolution before I critique this article. Evolution in its most basic sense is changing over time. This means that lots of things are evolving, from the Constitution of the United States, to your personalities. When we get into science terms things get much more specific. However, that basic idea is still there. For this article, I will describe biological evolution. Which is what most people think of when they hear the word 'evolution'. Biological evolution is the change in the inherited genetic traits that are passed from one generation to the next. Also another key component in biological evolution is the mutation. Mutations are errors that occur in the genetic code that are passed down from generation to generation. Most of these errors lead to negative results in the offspring, not something that we would expect to see if a benevolent intelligent designer was running the show, but every once in a while we see some positive results that makes that life-form more adapted to survive. Here's a link that might help clarify just what a mutation is. ( http://www.biology-online.org/2/8_mutations.htm )
The first comment that the pope made that I found to be misleading was that because evolution could not be reproduced in laboratories it should considered an incomplete science. This is wrong. Science does not necessarily require laboratory style experiments to prove something. A classic example of this is one of main fields of interest, astronomy. To my knowledge no one has ever reproduced a star or a black hole inside a laboratory. Yet we have mountains of evidence that they exist and there is little question in most peoples' minds that the cosmic phenomena are very real and play a great role in our every day lives. Evolution is the same way in many respects. We have incredible genetic, fossil, and geological evidence that supports the theory of evolution. In fact all the evidence that we have leaves us with one sane choice, to accept evolution as a scientific theory.
The next thing that I personally disagree with is the pope's assessment about what science does for the mysteries of the world. He claims that science leads us to a mechanical state of being where we lose our sense of reason, and get broken down into the "methodical cannon" and cannot escape. I think that science does the opposite of killing creativity and dulling the mysteries of life. I find that science does the opposite. I think knowing the process that take place adds to the majesty of nature. For example, when I look at a rainbow I don't just see some pretty colors, I see trillions of tiny water droplet prisms that each do their parts in bending light into a groovy spectrum.
The last bit that I would like to share with you is where the pope goes off a bit. He seems to be criticizing the vocabulary of evolution and ignores the concepts that they represent. Or possibly it is bad reporting on the writers part, but the ideas that are being portrayed are very misguided.
-"Just who is this 'nature' or 'evolution' as (an active) subject? It doesn't exist at all!" the Pope said.
-Benedict argued that evolution had a rationality that the theory of purely random selection could not explain.
He speaks as if nature and evolution are entities. They aren't what we have named processes that we find through observation. They really don't care what we think or do, because they just are. It's like saying "who is this 'up' that you speak of I have never met him before." Nature is what we call that which we live in, and evolution is one aspect of nature.
The second quote is another misguided notion that I see a lot when people think of natural selection. People believe that natural selection is a random selective force that lets some entities exists while killing off others. Only thing is that natural selection is not random. The mutations could be considered to be random, but natural selection is definitely not. Natural selection is the process through which favorable traits have a greater chance of being passed down from one generation to the next and less favorable traits do not. After you get that little bit of information down, it becomes a math problem. You can do this experiment your self if you wish.
Take a deck of cards. Then shuffle it up randomly. Start drawing cards, and placing them in a pile. Every time you draw three red cards, leave the third one out of the new pile. After you are done with your deck, start again with the used pile. Soon you should notice that there are substantially fewer red cards than black ones. What you have just done is illustrated natural selection. You have shown that something that has a greater chance of being removed from a gene pool (the red cards) will have less of a chance of being there the next time around. This concept with mutations is a simple demonstration of what evolution is.
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