Aug 21 2009
Wherever we look, there appears to be something there.
If astrophysicists are correct about dark energy and dark matter, what is visible is only about 4% or so of what is actually there.
And we seem to be placed in an improbably ideal place AND time from which to view it.
Aug 13 2009
It appears that calling someone a bird brain may not be such an insult after all
New research suggests birds are smarter than apes.
Scientists studied whether animals look at the physical world in the same way as humans and apes do.
In the study, the animals had to extract food from a horizontal tube by avoiding two holes cut into it where the food could fall out.
Researcher Professor Russell Gray says the animals were then given a similar puzzle – the only difference being it was a table with holes cut into it instead of a tube.
He says the crows not only learnt to do it very well, it appears they understood what was going on.
Gray says it is a common assumption humans are closely related to apes, and the finding that birds are actually smarter may come as a surprise.
Aug 01 2009
A friend of mine read my recent blog, “The Left At Christian Universities, Part 13,” and went to the website of one of the organizations that I identified as being problematic, CLUE.
On that website, she found links to this text, reporting CLUE’s activities in regard to trying to get “green truck” regulations implemented at Long Beach harbor:
We take it for granted that protectors of the environment and defenders of commerce are natural adversaries. Here in Long Beach, we are often asked to weigh the concerns of the uninsured mother of a severely asthmatic child against those of the woefully underpaid truck driver who would be deprived of his livelihood if required to purchase a greener rig.
Sameerah Siddiqui, an organizer for Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice (CLUE-LA) isn’t interested in any false compromise between the two: She wants Long Beach residents to see that local poverty and pollution are inextricably linked, and to that end, she is asking city clergy to help her start a dialogue between residents and port workers, as well as city officials and port management. “We’re calling on the clergy in Long Beach to organize around this issue, and to address the dual problems of poverty and pollution,” Siddiqui says. “And we would like interfaith leaders to respond in the way that they know best.
“Religious leaders are in contact with the community on a day-to-day basis, and they see the suffering: the rising incidence of asthma among children, the respiratory illnesses of older members of the congregation. At the same time, we invite them to talk to port truck drivers, to hear their stories about not being able to make ends meet, of how the burden of maintaining their trucks is so onerous that they can’t provide for their families, and on a day-to-day basis, they themselves are exposed to the highest levels of pollution [without benefit of] medical insurance. . . . If we really want to enact green policies-holistic policies that address both the environment and worker health-we need to look at that relationship between the two.”
CLUE-LA is a major partner in the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports. The Coalition-which pushed for the port’s adoption of the Clean Trucks Program-maintains that protecting the health of Long Beach residents requires a stable trucking work force that can afford to make capital improvements. And that requires employee status for truckers and, of course, an employer. Siddiqui isn’t directly involved with labor organization, but she argues that a coherent environmental policy can’t be accomplished without cohesion between labor and environmental constituencies. Facilitating a personal understanding between the two at the ground level with the support of Long Beach’s religious communities-getting people to sit across the table from one another in church meeting halls, to share their stories-is work she feels called to as a Muslim. “This is the future of America. All of our interests are interconnected.”
My friend’s question to me was, “What do you think of this?” I think the subtext may have been that this seems to be a public spirited group doing a good thing, and what’s wrong with that?
Jul 28 2009
Next week the IAU’s general assembly will convene for the first time since Pluto was axed from the list of planets. Surprisingly, IAU chief Karel van der Hucht does not expect anyone to challenge the ruling made in Prague, but Pluto fans can take heart: resistance remains strong.
If Pluto is reinstated, it will probably be thanks to discovery rather than debate. Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, believes that revelations within and beyond our solar system over the coming years will make the IAU’s controversial definition of a planet untenable (see diagram). “We are in the midst of a conceptual revolution,” he says. “We are shaking off the last vestiges of the mythological view of planets as special objects in the sky – and the idea that there has to be a small number of them because they’re special.”
And here I always thought Pluto was a dog.
Jul 24 2009
The REAL beginning of the Space Age?
Forty years after man stepped on the moon, Mary Wakefield says that the technology now exists for truly astonishing space travel and a new era fusing commerce and romance
So begins a truly fascinating article on the Space Age that may be about to begin. It includes an interesting analogy:
the first step…. is to realise that Apollo 11 mission is analogous not to Columbus’s but to the Viking discovery of America. In the 10th century Leif Eriksson, son of Erik the Red, landed with 35 men on the coast of North America. But Leif’s boats were too cumbersome for trade and his people unprepared for the ruthless ‘skraelings’, so their community soon died out. So too the Apollo programme was doomed by rushed decisions and cumbersome craft. JFK and LBJ chose their mission at random and their ship with a single thought in mind: beat Russia. No thought for our space-faring future.
Yes. SOMEBODY is going to explore, and exploit, space, and the resources that are there. But that may or may not be the USA. Europe, Russia, China, India, Japan, Brazil, even Israel, all have the capability to do what the USA may not get around to doing, if it is too complacent, too self-absorbed, too politically correct.
What we need is earth-to-orbit technology that’s more appropriate to the institutional scale of corporations, instead of governments. And that means space planes instead of rockets.
Once you’ve realised that the space age isn’t over, that it hasn’t even begun yet, the second step to understanding the point of space is to realise that like Columbus, we now have the right vehicles for proper exploration. All around the world right now light, cheap space planes (launched and landed horizontally) are rolling from the drawing-board to runway. Whereas a rocket-launched shuttle needs battalions of keepers to brush it up again ready for flight, space planes are more modest. They might even be as easy to maintain as jet planes and able to launch with a few days’ or hours’ notice, at the whim of an impetuous cosmonaut. Most of a rocket’s weight is taken up by the oxidiser, but clever space planes can suck in oxygen from the atmosphere to burn fuel at least part of the way to orbit. Space planes will offer a relatively cheap way of delivering cargo into orbit, and once that begins to happen, our universe begins to unfurl.
What’s maddening is that very much of what is now being proposed is OLD NEWS, and could have been done thirty or forty years ago. For example, solar power satellites:
There’s much vicious debate online between geeks about the efficacy of asteroid mining, but spaced-based solar panels are a given. Because there are no clouds in space (the sun always shines on ET) the panels will soak up more and more powerful rays, then they’d beam the energy back to earth. This isn’t science fiction, it’s future fact.
In April this year a company called Solaren signed a contract with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company in northern California. They plan to hoick a kilometre-wide panel into orbit in 2016 and beam back 200MW of energy.
G. Harry Stine was writing about this in the 1970s (!) and his book, “Space Power“, is still available online. Further, President Obama has been challenged to fund a national project building solar power satellites. But it seems he’d rather spend trillions on reducing the average quality of healthcare in America, insead of funding a project that would earn tens or hundreds of trillions for the national economy.
So we’ll see. Will the lingua franca of space travelers be English? Or Chinese? I’m not looking forward to buying electricty from Peking.
Jul 22 2009
We’ve commented here before about the necessity of research and development, and the fact that some programs of R and D are so huge that only governments have the resources and long-term commitment to fund them. And now, here is an article about where we would have been if Apollo had not been cancelled, and NASA had been fully funded to continue lunar and planetary exploration and colonization.
What if things had been different that summer? Suppose Congress had granted NASA’s wish, then fast-forward 40-odd years…
It’s a fascinating read, admittedly conjectural, but essentially believable, about where we would be today. And it would be better if we were.
In the meantime, Obama and nationalized healthcare are about to defund the huge bulk of medical and pharmaceutical research now under way, by the very simple mechanism of sucking the profit out of it, by adopting the European model of health care that’s killed the bulk of medical research there.
When I was 15, I was sure that by this time in my life, we’d be on Mars already. That just seemed to be the direction things were going, and indeed we landed on the moon just three years later. I find myself looking back with regret on the years we wasted, knowing that it’s entirely possible that I will not even live to see a Mars landing.
In forty years, will 57 yr olds of that year be saying, “When I was a kid, I thought by now we’d have personalized gene therapy that would cure cancer and most inherited diseases, replacement organs grown from stem cells, and significant life extension therapies…. but then Congress decided we should have nationalized health care, which quickly became health care rationing, and research just sort of really, really slowed down.”?
That decision may well be made in the next few weeks. If you care about your own prospects, or those of your kids and grand-kids, I suggest you tell your congressman to OPPOSE the total takeover of healthcare by the federal government, and specifically, to OPPOSE the so-called “public option,” which is guaranteed to provide the incentive for most employers to cancel their own insurance programs, and dump their employees into the public system.
Just as it will also remove the profit motive as an incentive for the bulk of pharmaceutical and medical research.
Jul 18 2009
Particle-size dependent bipolar charging of Martian regolith simulant
The intense dust devils and dust storms on Mars are believed to generate large electrostatic fields that significantly alter geophysical and geochemical processes on the planet. The existence of such fields must be related to a mechanism by which charged dust separates by polarity; it has been widely hypothesized that this separation originates from a particle-size dependence of the charge polarity, but this effect has never been demonstrated. To address this issue, we carry out experiments on the triboelectric charging of Martian regolith simulant (JSC-1 Mars), using a fluid flow apparatus wherein only particle-particle interactions occur, as is the case in Martian dust events. Our experiments show direct evidence that smaller particles tend to charge negatively and larger particles tend to charge positively, which provides a mechanism for the charge separation that creates electric fields in Martian dust events.
Translation: Mars dust sticks to stuff and it’s a mess. When you go there, better bring a vacuum cleaner.
In the meantime, the next time you’re in a dirty house, you can say that the occupants have suffered a “dust event.”
Jun 23 2009
The previous post in this series is here.
Long odds on space viruses seeding life
LIFE on Earth is unlikely to have come from space, says a new study on viruses. If life is ever found on another planet, however, the findings could help us judge whether it arrived from space or not.
What’s funny here is that scientists have come so close to giving up on the “spontaneous origin of life on Earth” theory that anyone who challenges the notion of “panspermia” is actually seen as being adventurous and contrary to an emerging scientific orthodoxy.
meta-message: Scientists have no fuzzy clue where life came from, or WHEN life came from… except that it appears on earth in a geologic eye-blink after the “late heavy bombardment”, and there was no era of “billions and billions of years” in the primordial soup — which never existed, anyway — for some lucky amino acids to form a little DNA, or RNA, or protein, or much of anything except simple acids and bases.
What we know is that life on Earth appeared at least 3.8 billion years ago, maybe 3.9 or even sooner…. and the Earth had barely cooled enough not to kill anything that was alive.
“Aunt Matilda, I think you accidentally dropped some living proto-cells on Earth on that last fly-by. Do you want to go back and get them? Or just leave them there? Won’t they rot?”
And atheists accuse theists of “god of the gaps” theories. As if “somehow life began, somewhere, somewhen” and “someday we’ll figure it out” is anything other than a “science-of-the-gaps” explanation, what Karl Popper called “promissory materialism.”
Personally, I think life was seeded on Earth, and maybe only on Earth, by an extra-dimensional, super-intelligent being, one not bound by local laws of time and space, one who knew just what amino acids to jiggle and juggle just so, for the purpose of spending 3.8 billion years creating a biosphere and resources for some relatively weak, big-brained primates. I think this creative super-intelligent being continued to “stir the pot” now and then, and every now and then invented a new recipe just for the joy of it. Why would this super-being do such a thing? Maybe for the same reason the amino acids were made in the first place, as well as the conditions in which they stayed amino acids, instead of breaking down to simpler things. Time doesn’t seem to mean much to this being, who was perfectly fine with waiting around for 9 billion years or so after starting the whole thing off, until it was time to start cooking up some life in the first place. A brand new kitchen (solar powered) was designed for this particular production.
Does it make sense that after starting a recipe like this, the creative super-being would stop watching the pot and walk away and just let it happen? Seems more likely to me that this is one of those recipes where ingredients have to be added at just the right times, temperature adjusted, some of the ingredients moved from the broiler, to the oven, to the stove top, and back, maybe even refrigerated over night and then mixed with something else and baked again… sort of like twice-baked potatoes, if you’ve tried those. Instead of running down to the corner supermarket, this particular super-intelligent being just creates what’s necessary, either out of stuff that was already there which had already been made, or completely out of “whole cloth,” or out of nothing…. as necessary. We’re talking cooking from scratch.
It would have been possible, I suppose, to just open a can, or pull something out of the freezer and nuke it, but the joy of cooking is very, very old. And for those of you who like simple answers, it might be wise not to insult the chef by comparing the outcome to fast food, after all this loving care was taken in preparation.
The piece de resistance seems to be…. us.
Perhaps some clues have been left here and there, clues which only people who look in the right way will see.
You can ask, if you ever meet (not that hard to do, surprisingly). I have heard that this particular extra-dimensional, hyper-intelligent, hyper-powerful being is interested in being known, once visited here on an extended missions trip, still hangs out here a lot, and likes to talk, if you’re interested in listening.
That’s my experience, for what it’s worth.
The next post in this series is here.
May 03 2009
In this skeptical world, it seems everyone wants evidence of everything. Fortunately, there are two central facts that intrude:
1) Almost nothing really important can be proved in the way skeptics demand. They can’t even prove that they exist, that there is such a thing as “thought,” or “personality,” or “identity,” or “love,” or even “memory.” Radical skepticism allows only for electro-chemical states in the brain that don’t mean anything in particular except to other electro-chemical states in other brains… if there are really other electro-chemical states. What’s really funny is their touching faith that the universe can be apprehended by “logic” (who revealed THAT to them?), and that the universe somehow developed, all on it’s own, minor extrusions with electro-chemical brain states capable of acting as disinterested observers and evaluators of fact. How did THAT work, again?
2) Even radical skeptics believe that there is some level of evidence that a person should be willing to accept for the facts of history, human psychology, cultural development, scientific knowability of the universe, ethical presuppositions for humans, etc. Without some willingness to accept different kinds of evidence for different kinds of propositions and assertions about the nature of reality, there is no hope of considering both science and history to be sources of “knowledge.” And a corollary: nearly every kind of really important information or concept is “inferential,” meaning we can’t know everything about it, and we only know it because of a confluence of evidence that points to it, but doesn’t (and can’t) directly prove it in the deductive way that simple mathematical propositions can sometimes be proved (actually, less often than many people think — ask a math geek to explain “decidability” to you sometime).
If a person is willing to accept the notion that we all make decisions based on incomplete information, that the most important decisions of our lives are based not on deductive calculation but on inferential response to incomplete evidence (what career to pursue, who to marry, who to trust, how to raise our kids, what matters more than what, what’s right and what’s wrong), then the grounds for radical skepticism are removed, about God, about a Creator who IS Intelligence and so made a Creation that includes the possibility (inevitability?) of it, and who might make provision for His creatures to know something about Him and His plans for them (special and general revelation). If radical skepticism is no longer a rational response (and it isn’t to anything that really matters), then we’re left with sifting evidence, considering what we know and don’t know (or can‘t know), and casting our net very wide for many different kinds of information, to see if, taken together, they point to anything, if there is anything we can infer.
This is the point where just a tiny amount of faith is enough, enough to take that first step. What is that first step? Believing that there may be something to find, so that you don’t stop looking. From that tiny opening, God works, in tiny steps, piece by piece, helping you build your faith a mite at a time, so that as you grow in faith and understanding (and make no mistake, genuine progress in either causes the other to grow), you find more and more ways that seemingly tiny bits of life and information fit together, and all reveal the glory of God.
There are, of course, secular zealots who hate the very idea of God. But the tide of history, contrary to their opinions, is against them, and the greatest minds of history have disagreed with them. What we need now is an infusion of courage in believers, so that they will not only stand their ground, but advance, the only rational response to the complexity of being a human being in this created order:
When that great saint Thomas More, Chancellor of England, was on trial for his life for daring to defy Henry VIII, one of his prosecutors asked him if it did not worry him that he was standing out against all the bishops of England.He replied: ‘My lord, for one bishop of your opinion, I have a hundred saints of mine.’
Now, I think of that exchange and of his bravery in proclaiming his faith. Our bishops and theologians, frightened as they have been by the pounding of secularist guns, need that kind of bravery more than ever.
Sadly, they have all but accepted that only stupid people actually believe in Christianity, and that the few intelligent people left in the churches are there only for the music or believe it all in some symbolic or contorted way which, when examined, turns out not to be belief after all.
As a matter of fact, I am sure the opposite is the case and that materialist atheism is not merely an arid creed, but totally irrational.
Materialist atheism says we are just a collection of chemicals. It has no answer whatsoever to the question of how we should be capable of love or heroism or poetry if we are simply animated pieces of meat.
The Resurrection, which proclaims that matter and spirit are mysteriously conjoined, is the ultimate key to who we are. It confronts us with an extraordinarily haunting story.
It takes faith to overcome doubt, do the right thing, and live the right way, but not blind faith.
The only blind faith on offer is the type it takes to believe in materialist atheism, which is not scientific in the slightest, since it takes a most unscientific position about where science came from.
Apr 16 2009
12 tough questions from Doug Kmiec, with excellent answers from Robert George.
This is a follow up to an excellent interchange between the two that is covered here.
Some of this is definitely college level reading, and requires you to think about the questions and the answers. But it is rewarding, and thoroughly worthy of your time and attention.
The short story: the hard questions do have answers. This material is what you need to read to know what you’re talking about in the embryonic stem cell debate.
