Learn From It

You are a tube.

Don't be offended. I'm a tube, too. All individuals of most animal Kingdoms are.

The inside of the tube is your GI tract. Sphincters stand sentinel at each end. And from a certain perspective, the rest of your body is just the outside of the tube as well as the machinery which helps supply quality matter to keep the tube doing its job.

This notion isn't just a specific or esoteric view of anatomy, it's something that goes back to organismal development, when the invagination of the blastula (also called gastrulation) results in three major layers of the organism: ectodoerm, endoderm and mesoderm. The blastula is the stage at which all the cleavages (cell divisions) of the original fertilized cell (apparently the christian/catholic soul arrives at the same time that the successful sperm gets into the ovum) result in a hollow ball of cells. The blastula forms about eight days after ensoulment fertilization.

Why the little science lesson here? Because the larger facts of the above lesson crossed my mind a few days ago when I was in my physical therapy (PT) session as my therapist was teaching me the relaxation technique of The Three Melting Smiles. It was the three that, in the context of gross anatomy, caught my attention.

Three is a magic number everywhere.

My “hippie-dippie” physical therapist (who was as gorgeous and fabulous as she was soft-spoken) taught me the technique of The Three Melting Smiles: picture a smile that begins at the back of your head and melts down the back of your body...down the back, the buttocks..down the back of your legs, down to your heels and the bottoms of your feet, down your triceps past the elbow, down to the top of your wrists and the backs of your hands and to your finger names. A second smile starts similarly at your face and down your front and a third begins in your mind and moves down your insides all the way down your trunk, through your pelvis and down through your knees to the bottoms of your feet.

Even as I was laying there my more literal sensibility wondered what kind of propulsion a smile might use if it “melted” horizontally. That made me laugh and, eyes still closed, my physical therapist must have wondered why I'd chuckled in the midst of my supposed relaxation.

But that same, more materialist and objective mind remapped the three smiles into endo-, meso- and ecto- counterparts and suddenly I had something that worked for me. Tissue induction was the propulsion and of course the smiles would travel that way. Also, it was a way that suited the most fundamental anatomical model I could think of. Bonus!

All of this had me recalling something that my rather hippie-dippie therapist (the normal kind of therapist), Ronald, once said: he'd just said something quite Northern Californian to me and, knowing my tendencies towards more analytical thought, said, “that's my language for it and I know you're going to find your own terms for it, so bear with me.”

That qualification turned out to be a kind of Rosetta Stone for me in so many ways. He was telling me to discover the pattern of a thing instead of embracing the literal terms of the thing. Not only that, he was giving me a sort of permission to take the puzzle apart and put it back together for myself. Now, this is something that everyone does, to some extent, when learning anything, but like most, I am hesitant to do anything other than rote absorption of facts in any milieu in which I'm not already somewhat familiar. Clinical psychology being one of those things, Ronald opened up to me the idea of setting aside the idea of authority (or rather, a lack thereof) whatsoever in a subject and just let it play itself out for you.

Very Zen, of course, this Beginner's Mind stuff, but the Buddhists don't have a corner on the idea, nor would they claim so.

Three is, as I said, a magic number. This is both for how often it naturally and emergently appears in all sorts of places, but also because it's the first, best step out of the polarized, unmagical, uninteresting world of Two, of the Either-Or (Good vs Bad, Black vs White, Yes vs No, ad nauseum).

I walked away from PT department at Davies Medical Center with an abstract sense of the pain which comes from very concrete causes (fractured ribs, contused spleen & lung, hairline fracture down the length of the clavicle).

In particular, I'm there doing PT for the shoulder/nerve problems. Referred pain from nerve damage in my shoulder and around the fractures and bruises has me feeling pain in the strangest of places. Like a pinball inside of me bouncing from one place only to arise in some other place a couple of hours or days or even weeks later.

It's a powerful reminder than none of our brains experience the objective world directly. Our brains sit in solemn sequestration and far and away from the actual matter around us, depending solely upon what our senses report to it. And if there is an objective reality out there that is ponderable, the pondering can only happen far from it.

And isn't that ironic, Al-Ayn-is?

All that said, I don't like pain. Pain is a warning that something bad is happening and that the body should get itself away from it or should carefully cradle those parts in pain to protect them from any further damage. Pain is a real and concrete thing that gets to take the bypass around consciousness and make its case to those mechanisms which are there to help ensure bodily survival and nothing more.

Living in the Valley of Pain isn't something I would wish on anyone, even if they might wish it on themselves. Pain Lies on the Riverside, so there's no choice but to keep swimming.

Pain is birthmother of nihilism and existentialism, methinks, and if so, I am quite Pro Choice.

Good thing for me there's no pain involved in beating a dead horse, eh?

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Posted by Jeff at 02:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The sheer blatancy of Rick Santorum's recent disassociation with the Thomas More Law Center, a “Christian-rights” organization, speaks volumes about the hubris of the American Right Wing. They've always been in a state of denial about the world, but until recently, they've fooled enough people that they could get away with it: there were things that no one would call them on, a space where no foes would enter: the Conservative Sanctum Sanctorum.

On the surface, Rick Santorum's move is inexplicably stupid. He gives every appearance of being a fair weather friend, of changing his mind because he backed the losing whores horse.

What he actually is doing is attempting to set up further support for so-called “Intelligent Design” by distancing himself and ID from the “religious argument”: Santorum told the Philadelphia Inquirer that he was troubled by testimony indicating religion motivated some board members to adopt the policy.

Religion and ID overlapping?!? Why, The Honorable Mr. Santorum seems to be surprised by the notion that they're not separate things! What a fellow.

Apparently Santorum will hook up with just anyone without checking out their background. He had an association with the Thomas More Law Center, whose website contains their mission statement, quite easily discoverable. An excerpt:

The Thomas More Law Center affirms the right of Christians to publicly practice their religion and freely express their religious beliefs. Our Founding Fathers fought for a nation built on a foundation of religion and morality. Our lawyers are committed to restoring and preserving that foundation.

These are the folks who were defending the Dover schoolboard's decision to require teaching of ID in science classrooms. So you can see how Santorum would be surprised to find out that people choose ID over evolution for religious reasons.

Personally, I think ID should be mentioned in Science classrooms in its due proportion of scientific merit. If I were a science teacher, I would mention the existence of groups of people who believe origins to be based on Intelligent Design and then offer a summary of their position: God Did It.

And then I'd spend the rest of the school year providing examples and theories and research all supporting evolution.

ID isn't Science. It isn't even anti-Science. It's ridiculous posturing and lying by Christians who should be following their own Commandments.

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Posted by Jeff at 05:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

So. Intelligent Design. I wonder if its proponents are starting to wish that their grand plan to redefine science wasn't also the work of at least one Intelligent Designer.

There's an irony to the pomposity and pride that accompanied the Christian/Fundamentalist push to corrupt Science in order to serve themselves. Last time I checked, Humility was a big deal with the Christians. That's not ironic, tho, that's just hypocritical. What's ironic is that Humility has a profound role in the scientific approach to discovery, and that it was Science's absence of ego that thwarted the Christian attempt at corrupting it.

I'm not saying that every scientist is humble; far from it. What this is about, in fact, is that there is no hubris behind something arrived at by proper scientific method. Assertions generally require believability; and believing generally requires a strong persona (human or mythic) in which the masses can have faith. Science uses assertions, of course, but only tentatively or temporarily, meaning that there's a willingness to drop an assertion when it's demostrated to be untrue or impossible, or to drop an assertion when the truth of it changes.

Christian “truth” mongers abound, hiking up and down Main Street America with their big sacs of capital-T's, asserting various truths to be Truths, immediately ossifying each into Timelessness (see? those capital-T's come in handy!). Trouble is, many truths don't become Timeless Truths, they just become Dated.

I can assert here that this is a plausible mechanism by which every myth moves into History: it becomes incompatible with the Present because it refuses to adapt to the times.

The Discovery Institute—which seems hell bent on doing everything to prevent actual discovery of anything, calls the recent Dover ruling a “triumph”, stating: “Anyone who thinks a court ruling is going to kill off interest in intelligent design is living in another world...”

Remember, folks, these are the same types of people who brought you the Scopes Monkey Trial, who saw fit to find John Scopes “guilty” of teaching evolution. Again. Not irony. Hypocrisy.

Fact of the matter is, the rest of us are living in another world, the world of material explanations which humbly acknowledge the limits and limitations of learning and set to painstakingly carve out those niches of knowledge that are discoverable. We don't live in the world they live in, where Zeus came down from Olympia to create the world, the world where interpretation of the Christian bible contemporarily paints Jesus of Nazareth as a neocon.

These are the people who deny the mutability of truth even as they seek to change it.

Click on the document icon to download the full PDF of the Dover judge's summary of Monkey Trial II. Below is an excerpt that I find extraordinary for its directness:

Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court. Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources.

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Posted by Jeff at 01:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

This year, World AIDS Day is a tough one for me. I usually don't try to suss out why, but the personal reasons this year are obvious, sometimes nearly orthogonal and exceedingly multiple.

Hope is a tricky thing. When there's a lot of hopefulness (quantity), it lacks specificity (quality), and when it's quite specific, it is small and personal in its solicitude. I don't like to think that this is simply the nature of Hope itself, but instead some too-obvious pattern of human economy, where one thing always has to take from another, when jealousy or morality steps in to question the value of certain kinds of Hope when those things Wished For cast too long a shadow on other forms.

I have had the extraordinary experience of rediscovering a friend from High School who blessedly and thankfully has ended up with an M.D./Ph.D. and works so industriously and brilliantly to combat the human suffering caused by infectious agents—including HIV. Her work, her person is a powerful and pointed example of why Hope has merit in this world and why pessimism serves nothing but its own unimaginative purpose. Her staggering brilliance and admirable use of it humbles me.

Then there's the synergistic timing of reading a futurist book, including talk of the wonders of the future of medical advances and technological advances—or, more to the point, the flipside of all that: those who didn't quite make it to the next level of available palliatives and curatives. Of course I speak about Allen Howland and what he lost by not being here to experience the wonders of the world and what the world has lost by losing the million things that were alive in that marvelous memory and intellect of his and what the immediate constellation of friends and family have personally missed out on as we all continue to miss him.

This applies to anyone who's lost anyone special to them, naturally, and for the time being, death is something we have no preventatives for—though I think one day that will change, perhaps in time for those of us alive today to exploit. So why specify AIDS as any more or less a cause of death than cancer or accident or murder? Why have a day for it?

To this I answer a question with a question: why must the assumption be made that World AIDS Day detracts or somehow competes at all?

To this I answer a question with solid science laced with Hope:

• HIV is infectious: awareness and diligence have an effect on slowing or stopping HIV.
• Scientific knowledge learned here can be applied to a vast array of other maladies: viral mechanics, cellular communications mechanisms, protein synthesis, gene activation and molecular pathways and epidemiology and morality and ethics and social phenomenon all play a part and knowledge about each has increased dramatically, directly, from AIDS-related research.
• The Past must be preserved: “out of sight, out of mind” applies. And “out of mind” leads to “out of consideration” which leads to behaviors that favor the continued transmission of HIV and other socially- and sexually-transmitted diseases.
• AIDS affects 40 million people around the world: imagine if all 40 million were Americans: then every seventh person you walked by in a typical day could be assumed to be HIV+.
• Three million people became HIV+ in 2005 alone, and eight thousand people die from HIV-disease-related causes every day. Five people every second. That means by the time you got to these words in this entry, another 150 to 300 people have died.

And Yet? Hope.

Hope, in spite of a staggering loss worldwide and individually. Hope, in spite of moralists who'd rather see people die than live the “wrong” way. Hope, in spite of missing Allen and Bob and Kelly and George. Hope, in spite of worrying about J. and M. and V. and B. and S. and M. and J. and high percentage of gay male San Franciscans getting sick and leaving us too soon, far, far too soon.

And finally, Hope. Hope that keeping present the staggering loss and the ongoing pain and the simple remembrance of the bad things, the hurtful things, the things we were taught to feel shame over will lead to more and more Hope of a healed future.

Perhaps I feel so downtrodden and debilitated in the present because I feel so full of the future and that takes me away from the Now.

And that's why we—that's why I—need a World AIDS Day: as a reminder that the only chance of making a difference is to be in the Now and DO SOMETHING, even if that's reaffirming that you won't negligently or intentionally become HIV+ or if you already are HIV+, that it ends with you.

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Posted by Jeff at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (53) | TrackBacks (0)

The Intelligent Design approach to the scientific proof of God.

In other words, you know what happens when you assert: you make an ass out of er and t.

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Posted by Jeff at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

Ray Kurzweil is a very interesting man. He's one of those scientists who is also incredibly accomplished; the intellectual rubber hits the practical road. Essence shapes Accident.

Some may look at his books as the pie-in-the-sky-ish or over the top, or cartoonish, but they miss the point: there's always value in blue-skying. And even more value in faith. Yes, faith. Not Faith like I'm sure the literalists will insist you accept, but the kind of faith that's based on prior accomplishments. The kind of faith that tells you the road will continue past where you can see, or the sun will rise tomorrow, or that the process of learning increases the rate at which you can learn. In other words, faith is the entropy, the free energy from which we humans can direct our own destinies.

A synopsis of Ray's new book, from one of his websites:

The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.

Tall order. But that's the beauty of exponential growth. I'm sure you've heard of the term, “exponential growth”. Most people, I think, have. But there's a difference in understanding it and really feeling it—that is, getting it on a visceral level.

Humans tend to think in linear ways. Velocity is an easier concept than acceleration. We know a thing. We can know things about that thing. But beyond that, we start to lose our own traction: consider what you might know about the things about the things about a thing? Meta-meta-meta. Meh-meh-meh. M-E-H-meh.

And see? I've introduced a new concept, gone and switched gears on you. I'm now talking about metadata. What does that have to do with exponential curves? Well, I'll leave that to you to think about (and after? try thinking about how you thought about it. And then, in having thought about how you thought about it, will understanding how you went about understanding help you understand more quickly in the future?).

Anyhoo. The Singularity is Near is the book I'm reading now. Kurzweil has some crazy-ass ideas, ones that fuck with my sense of the relationship between matter and energy and information. It makes me think of protein folding and IC fabrication and how some cafes will stack glasses or mugs between plastic trays. It makes me think of sub-atomic goings-on and the Egyptian pyramids and genetically-engineered square watermelons and a little brain game my 4th Grade teacher did with us involving a glass jar, marbles and sand. Yeah, it's one of those kinds of books.

I don't think it's going to sit well in my noggin. In fact, I know it won't. But I have faith in my own abilities to adapt to new and even radical ways of thinking, ways of looking at the universe. It'll stew for a good long time, and I'll reconcile it eventually with things that happen on our human time- and activity-scales, even if it means acknowledging that even those scales aren't fixed, and are, in fact, accelerating, and are relative—to their own prior iteration.

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Posted by Jeff at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It's a strange tack to take, not only pigeonholing the infinite, but then having the audacity to speak on behalf of His Holy Infinity, but Pat Roberts has managed to do just that. Again.

Now, before I launch into this, I should put Pat in some perspective. He's not the only Christian who does this sort of thing. Many other Christians climb their bully pulpits every Sunday and remind their fellow Christians that heathens and the profane should fear the Christians. Not only fear the Wrath of God, but fear, in earthly and malevolent ways, Christians.

And to also be fair, there are an enormous number of Christians, who, despite the hubris and pomposity of claiming to know their Creator's wishes in the first place, are really rather decent, mild, meek, helpful people.

But these days, those people remain silent. Perhaps they've bought into being afraid of not toeing the Christian party line, too?

So Pat Robertson, the sore loser (at least ideologically) in Dover, PA, not only tells the fine, smart folks of Dover, PA—who rightly punished those who wanted to suborn science by removing them from power—that they've turned from God (hey, I thought “Intelligent Design” wasn't about God!), but that God has turned from them:

I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God, you just rejected Him from your city...And don't wonder why He hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. I'm not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just voted God out of your city. And if that's the case, don't ask for His help because he might not be there.

Well! How about that, Dover? You're up shit's creek without a Deity.

<sarcasm>And then there's my good buddy, Bill O'Reilly</sarcasm>.

So miffed was he over Prop I, or rather, miffed over the fact that we San Franciscans approved Prop I, that he's handing us over to the terrorists. It takes him just a little bit of time to get there. First he leads with what each and every one of us who voted in favor of Prop I knew could be the consequences:

You know, if I'm the president of the United States, I walk right into Union Square, I set up my little presidential podium and I say, “Listen, citizens of San Francisco, if you vote against military recruiting, you're not going to get another nickel in federal funds.”

That's how our government forces schools to permit military recruiters: by paying them to do so, or at least threatening to starve them of funding if they don't. I suppose patriotism and sense of duty should be the driving factors, but, whatever.

But then he becomes his usual insane self. You can almost hear the wheels fall off the wagon of his sanity:

Fine. You want to be your own country? Go right ahead...And if al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we're not going to do anything about it. We're going to say, look, every other place in America is off limits to you except San Francisco. You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.

Didn't he just commit an act of treason? And more to the point, isn't he going to get stretchmarks? All this from the man who wants his values pushed in schools and will do anything, no matter how unsavory, to make that happen, ranting at a bunch of people who want their values reflected in schools and actually go through a constitutionally-approved, let-the-voters-decide procedure to make that happen? Why, Bill, one might think you're a hypocrite, if you're not careful.

So Pat Robertson hands Dover, PA over to the forces of Hell, and Bill O'Reilly encourages terrorists to blow up San Francisco.

Where are the hoody's and the Vigilante Papists and the Aquinas-brown-nosers and the teen-age martinet-marionettes railing about God's love and how these people should be punished for their moral relativism? Probably we'll hear apologies, excuses, rationalizations, because clearly sacrificing people for their own agenda is more important than the pro-life agenda itself.

Watch, world. Watch how the theocrats decry nothing.

You didn't hear it here first.

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Posted by Jeff at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (33) | TrackBacks (0)

Whew!

Some of those nasty state Props were close to passing (although the couple of what I thought were good ones also failed to pass).

Politics is a funny business, where often one is called to speak other than they think (and dare to call that “diplomacy”!). And these days, add to that that one is called to speak and proselytize other than what they believe (when I was growing up as a good Catholic boy, we were taught that that was called “lying”, though today it's just called “doing God's work”).

And what is God's work these days? Well, that depends on who you ask. There are plenty of absolutists about, daring to claim theirs the One True _____, daring to insult, desultorily or otherwise, the beliefs of others as inferior. Their Truth is Everyone's Truth, and to challenge that Notion, well, makes you a moral relativist and Not To Be Trusted!

The strange thing is, when it comes to the domain of opinion, or belief, or supposition, observable fact has very little to do with anything. Which means that Science has no entry point, nowhere to gain traction. So it goes where it will, it does what it does and leaves the opining-believing-supposing to those who need someone else to define their own places in the world for them.

You'd think religion would do the decent thing and return the favor: leave observation, analysis, empiricism, theory and fact to the scientists. But then again, many of these are people who so desperately need to believe in something that they'll go to great lengths to attach their cosmologies to things which cannot and must not ever be proven-observed-experimented! Certainty is the enemy of Faith. Those who talk to God are prayerful. Those to whom God talks back are crazy.

Crises of Faith come from within. Crises in science come from without. That is to say, the only “crisis” science can honestly admit to is the onslaught of outsiders who feel threatened by findings, or by prima donna individuals who place their own ascendancy before the ethic (and hell, the god-ridden have those, too!).

Being wrong, or being not-entirely-correct is not a bad thing in science. Often it's a good thing. Often it's the pudding which supplies the proof that the Scientific Method, the ethic of reproduceability, the mechanism of peer review and the rigors of scientific publication actually work. It makes for better scientists and that makes for better science.

The crises that faith suffers are from those who question openly, and from those who question in their own minds and hearts the veracity of what parents and other people of religious authority have asserted. And get it right, these are assertions. Not fact. Not Truth. They're not even evidentiary, much less proof.

When Science meets the Unknown, there is elation: more to discover!

When the Faithful meet the Unknown, there is one-note: God did it.

Thus armed with the weaponry of Christ go they into the world, a seed crystal of regimented (at least publicly) thought and behavior attempting to fix the world into a conformity that is nothing but replicative of themselves. More of the same, larger crystal. Pretty! Smooth facets and hard vertices. The only self-organization in the world they're willing to admit to.

Never mind the Brownian motion outside their own keeps. The 'theory' goes like this: give up your freedom of thought and belief and think how we do and believe how we do—or die. They'll clench so tight as to force an entire world down the long narrow path of their own neediness-based religion, and to hell with what horrors it creates along the way, to hell with the strife and the difficulty. To hell with fact and observation and rationalization.

Chaos and disorganization and rioting and mobs are useful tools when they happen to someone else. In fact, it's what the faithful have prayed for: praos.

It's the 11th Commandment, the “Godenfreude Amendment” if you will: though shalt delight in the misfortune of the profane and the heretical.

It's the only commandment they enjoy keeping.

Proposition 73, which sought to moralize young women through heavy-handed use of the government (remember when Republicans wanted the government to stay out of people's lives?) machinery, is a terrific illustration of Praos Theory. Make their bodies not their own and let the state have them: yes, dear, we know it's your uterus, but we're going to make our own use of it because we know better.

Praos Theory is the tactic of the Religious Right. Suborn human nature by praying. And show the godless that you mean it by hoisting whatever weaponry you can find as your praying to god makes a big spectacle of it. Offer them a choice: brandish the weapon or be at the business end of it.

Kansas school board fired that weapon because the heretics just wouldn't listen. Science is in crisis there because it's being silenced, or at least being led away from unobstructed search for the truths of our reality.

I hope some Kansas teachers who will be forced to teach the utterly debunked (from a science perspective) “theory” of Intelligent Design, who have been utterly reassured that it's NOT Creationism and it's NOT about God “per se” will remember that the world was created by Zeus and the other Olympians, and that the Hebrew god, like the platypus, was created by Apollo much by accident when he burnt his ass on the Sun as he pulled it across the sky and exclaimed “God Dammit! Jesus Christ on a Cross!”

I know I'll be praying they do.

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Posted by Jeff at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Never mind Iraq my low approval numbers Scooter Libby KKKarl Rove Scalito Harriet “Quag” Miers that I'm a moron Fitzmas day the man behind the curtain [ibid. Rove], says our feckless leader, George W. (where dubya is the long form of 'duh') Bush, we have a freakin' pandemic! to worry about!

Well, ok, we don't actually have a pandemic yet, but gull durn it, we will! And after all, the Republicans have an amazing track record on paying attention to the science of epidemiology, population mechanics and the like. Right? Riiiiiight? (is this thing on?)

The idea of being ready for a flu outbreak is a terrific idea, don't get me wrong. But I have trouble believing President Bush on this one, because he's being alarmist at the same time. I mean, it makes a certain amount of sense that if the smoking gun of a viral outbreak is found, then in some sense it's already “too late”. Wait. No. Mushroom cloud. Too Late. Smoking Gun. Prettybirdprettybird!

Ahem.

So he keeps using the word “pandemic”, which actually means:

pan•dem•ic
adjective
(of a disease) prevalent over a whole country or the world.
noun
an outbreak of such a disease.

Whereas “epidemic” means:

ep•i•dem•ic
noun
a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time : a flu epidemic.
• a disease occurring in such a way.
• a sudden, widespread occurrence of a particular undesirable phenomenon : an epidemic of violent crime.

The built-in Dictionary.app in Mac OS X Tiger (10.4)—which I believe uses these sources, even goes so far, in notes for the definition of “epidemic”, to make the distinction among “pandemic”, “epidemic” and “endemic”:

USAGE A disease that quickly and severely affects a large number of people and then subsides is an epidemic: throughout the Middle Ages, successive epidemics of the plague killed millions. Epidemic is also used as an adjective: | she studied the causes of epidemic cholera. A disease that is continually present in an area and affects a relatively small number of people is endemic: malaria is endemic in (or | to ) | hot, moist climates. A pandemic is a widespread epidemic that may affect entire continents or even the world: | the pandemic of 1918 ushered in a period of frequent epidemics of gradually diminishing severity. Thus, from an epidemiologist’s point of view, the Black Death in Europe and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are pandemics rather than epidemics.

And so I have to wonder why the President would use pandemic when clearly it isn't even an epidemic yet? Did he feel the need to politically elevate a potential epidemic to a full epidemic to a full pandemic?

From cnn.com:

“A pandemic is a lot like a forest fire,” Bush said. “If caught early, it might be extinguished with limited damage; if allowed to smolder undetected, it can grow to an inferno that spreads quickly beyond our ability to control it.”

WHAT?

Forgiving for a moment the alarmist misuse of the word, why aren't the Reagan asskissers out there taking Bush to task for insulting the former President's public health policies?

It all reminds me of a Peanuts cartoon, where Linus overhears Lucy telling someone that “Indian Summer” was a ruse created by Native Americans to lull the pilgrims into a false sense of complacency. Linus, tongue out, can only say, “I think I'm going to be sick.”

Is that what you're doing to the pilgrims, Mr. Bush?

Don't get me wrong, I think something like this should be in place. But I also think it should be motivated by people wanting to protect other people, gunning for the ounce of prevention instead of the pound of cure. But this isn't that. This is grandstanding and panic-inducing. This is the same tactic he used to get us into a war. This is motivating by Bush imploding.

When are the pilgrims going to realize he just doesn't care about anything but himself? More to the point, that he can and will climb over the backs of any American to get the brass ring for himself?

When?

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Posted by Jeff at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Some people enjoy the footfalls of syllables and sounds of symbols thrown down the metered hallway of prose; others prefer the lyrical poesy of too many rules applied to too few utterances.

Some escape the swoon of the siren's call of their own voices or the voices of the author or the poet and find meaning. Or at least for value.

Yes, escape from the swoon, a sobering up from the narcotic bliss of Truth! by attaching one's self to the speaker, the writer, the lyricist. He speaks Truth! one may say, falling all over herself to get the sweet misery just right. And up on a pedestal the sayer goes, a ceremonious removal from regular society, from merely mortal minds. A tall and a narrow pedestal, so easy for others to knock over.

The words of the speaker wither whither? To thither, of course, shuttled off to an out-of-earshot echo chamber on a wave of irony, cleaved from the speaker by the sycophants.

It's the thing that probably kept Flaubert up at night for, the reason he was so hell-bent on the separation of Church of personality and State of art.

Today we are asked to accept the writer, the poet, the philosopher, the mathematician, the priest, the saint, the martyr, not on merit but on Tradition. We humans have produced a great many great thinkers, or at least we have noted them. Noted them and whisked them away from Time and Refutability of Person.

Aquinas did not have the option of feeling in his bones the possibility of absence of a god; Gödel did not have supercomputers available to him; Peirce did not have Watson & Crick to rely upon. We do have all those; we are future Kant's and Nietzche's and Tutu's and Ghandi's. I do not puff myself up and suppose I am such a great thinker as Gödel or Russell or Kant or Peirce or Hegel, but neither do I accept that I am ill-equipped to challenge what I think are their shortcomings.

And after all, the Greats did not stand in the shadows of the giants who preceded them, they instead climbed upon the shoulders of such, saw what others priorly did not have available to them, and expounded on the view with their vision.

Shouldn't we all be doing the same?

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Posted by Jeff at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

fudge fac•tor
noun informal
a figure included in a calculation to account for error or unanticipated circumstances, or to ensure a desired result.

That's what Free Will and Entropy have in common: they're both fudge factors in the domains in which they operate.

Neither is very easy to describe and they certainly require more than a dictionary definition. Let's take Entropy first. It's Science's Big Fudge Factor. Entropy is real, and yet not real, in that way that science and its symbols maintain a sort of duality. Entropy is a concept and a quantity. As a quantity, it steers into thermodynamics territory (and hey, let's leave that to the Creationists Intelligent Design Advocates Religious Right, who always seem to understand thermodynamics better than the rest of us); as a concept, it refers to the degree of disorder (oh, hey! religious again!) and randomness in a system.

Free Will works just the same way. It's a concept and a quantity. As a concept, it's introduced as the reason for suffering in the world, that quantity outside of the omniscience and omnipotence of god that lets him off the hook for all the conceptual suffering.

Talk to Aquinas about what might lay outside of omnipotence; I have no use for it.

There are good thinkers out there who didn't limit themselves to certain suppositions like Aquinas did. Charles Peirce is one. I was pointed at Peirce by Ted. I haven't had much of a chance to read Peirce, but I did find a quote by him that made me like him instantly: “DO NOT BLOCK THE ROAD TO INQUIRY!” Oh, I'm sure he's the bane of tyrannical absolutists everywhere. And I know I shouldn't derive such pleasure from something so easily accomplished, but I do get a little happy every time they get their panties in a bunch over all of us Evil Falliblists.

Hegel is another goodie: “Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.” He dares apply a phenomenology to the spirit, and, like Peirce, seems to sit on that bit of the Venn Diagram of the Ages where Science and Religion overlap. Two Rights? No Wrong? Heresy! Profanity! Relativism!

And if that isn't bad enough, Hegel is French. That means the Righties can hate him without having to think a single thought about him.

Sometimes I think “chippin' away” is the only thing that separates science from religion. Science has faith that it can keep the fudge factor as small as possible by inquiring, by learning, by doing, by understanding. Religion, on the other hand, turns assertion into Fact and calls it an objective day, dismissing the entropic-unknown and calling it Intelligent Design.

But, oh, all this stuff will bake anyone's noodle. And so I don't blame the more fearful and timorous for skulking in the long, dark shadow of god instead of remaining exposed and vulnerable to the unpredictable winds of entropy or the undeniably self-responsible exercise of Free Will.

But for me? Free Will is where God Isn't, by their definition, and that is where God has directed me to be (well, you prove He didn't!).

So Free Will gets on the treadmill and the mechanism spins order out of chaos. That's the right place to be. Another good place to be? In a room with him and him, not just for the sheer physical beauty that would surround me (hubba hubba), but to expound on all of this, attempt to understand—and perhaps advance—all of this, and because it'd be rarified air, up high and in the bright, bright sun, where you can bake your noodle and maybe, just maybe, end up with a casserole.

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Posted by Jeff at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

We live in a time of Fear. Not because the world is inherently scary or bad—or good or joyous, for that matter—but because the prevailing politickers are solving for their own gain by subtracting from others. And the only way to rob emotionally is to play the vampire, using fear to snare, fear to compel, threat to swoon and then, prey immobilized, take from them all that you need to survive without ever putting something back into the system.

Multi-color alerts (bad guys are bad and imminent!), rainbow alerts (gay are bad!), amber alerts (the world is bad! we must protect the children as they are our main fund-raising, fear-raising mechanism!), soul alerts (we don't hate you, but we know you're going to hell!) all remind us that you can never be too frightened.

The be-afraiders want you to read books that spell out a future of gloom and doom. They've become parasitic to an End of Days kind of future because only that kind of future supports their current raison d'être.

Paint the future as a Wonder of the Possible, though, and you're a hippie or a communist or a—gasp!—liberal. Paint humanity as something that can achieve, that can find a balance and have respect and all that good stuff all on its own without the Republican Party's help or God's Help, and you're Evil. And they'll call you worse things as time goes on, make you lesser and lesser all the time, make themselves more and more superior all the time—for who isn't superior with god almighty on their side?—and eventually, they'll find a reason to call you soulless. Not human anymore.

That's why Utopian literature is so subversive. Isn't is so sad that things are so bad that utopian dreams are undermining to the establishment?

So, onward, christian lurkers and get thee to a bookstore to get

“The Fifth Sacred Thing” (Starhawk)

If you're not afraid of having your worldview disrupted.

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Posted by Jeff at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

It's oddly comforting to know that even a Pope gets treated, in death, no differently than anyone else. First they make you a Saint (or a Devil) and take away your humanity. Nuance goes to black or to white. And then they pile portent and pith on what you've spoken, or they resuscitate what's settled in order to change the nature of the Truth that was Your Life.

When Allen died—it will have been ten years ago next Wednesday—he was canonized by friends and family. It pissed me off that all those subtleties, the thousand things he thought about, the million little nuances that annoyed and delighted me, were all gone with the absolute stamp of a monoclonal remembrance.

And so the Roman Catholic Church herself turns what I'm sure at one point was a somewhat nuanced and quite human creature and manufactures a new Saint. And on a more personal note, Cardinal Poopyhead Schönhorn reverses a clear statement by Pope John Paul II and attempts to refute clarify it in more triumphal formalist fideist politically-expedient hardline terms. Yes, folks, John Paul II, the Pope of the Papists Worldwide, was not hardline enough for today's Romans—and he just died a few months ago!

Evolution is what is at stake. Again. Good, strong Science is at stake. Again. God blessed Kansas with Holy Ignorance and the Church wants a piece of that Blessing for Herself. By drawing such a fine point on the entire matter, Schönhorn undoes what JP2 ostensibly infallibly set out to do—while preserving the ex cathedra infallability of the Office Itself. Pope Panzer must be proud, the Pernicious turned Perspicacious on his watch.

That's a lot of alliteration by a bald Barbose blogging by blathering balefully!

No matter. If I sound bitter, it is perhaps that I have been arguing the wrong side of science, assigning the absolutist moniker to the wrong team: look at the Catholics, the Conservative Christians! They are the real relativists, redefining Science Itself to mean what they want, stealing fact and shwagging it up as ideology, and taking ideology and peddling it as Truth. Except when it doesn't suit. Then they change the nature of Truth itself and call it Absolute while absolving themselves of their own arrogance—all in the name of Jesus.

Life is funny; there oughta be a two-drink minimum.

You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal - except my life, except my life.

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Posted by Jeff at 05:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Go help. Click on the badge.

Posted by Jeff at 10:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I fucking hate dogmatists.

Absolutism carries the burden—no, the requirement!—of Being Right all the time. Every time. No exceptions. That's the rule.

And when you actually are Wrong, what do you do? You hedge, you change the nature of truth, and you claim Truth Once Again.

Bill Frist is on record and on tape as having watched a video of Terri Schiavo and concluding that there was no evidence that she was in a persistent vegetative state. Yesterday, after this,

An autopsy released Wednesday concluded that she had been in a persistent vegetative state and revealed no evidence that she was strangled or otherwise abused before she collapsed.

Bill Frist now says he never made any determination one way or another as to her persistent vegetative state.

He and he and they held on, held tight to the notion that she was not in a persistent vegetative state, that she clearly was alive and on the mend, and that everyone else was Wrong Wrong Wrong. All this, despite their being a martinet, an apologist and a bunch of Calvinist Catholic teens, respectively, with no evidence—much less authority—to claim truth.

They, like most of the rest of the Right Wing Machinery, came down on the side of literal life instead of quality of life. Let's call them Quantity of Life advocates, shall we? When Science failed them—as it usually does in their more strident campaigns—they turned to blame. Blame the husband. Blame his “lifestyle”. Call him names. Call him immoral. Those are easy to do, because it's all subject to interpretation, even as they call every last thing as black or white. Black or White.

Never mind that Schiavo rearranged his life to care for his wife. Never mind that he turned down $1M so that he could stay with her and make the decisions. Never mind all of that. He dared move on with his life after it was clear that his wife was gone in all but carcass. That's unforgiveable, right?

As someone who has had a partner die, as someone who never wanted to move on and yet one day, admitted defeat and finally did move on, I think I have at least some personal authority to speak on the matter. Do these people?

Regardless, they speak. And speak and speak and speak.

They were drop-dead wrong about Terri Schiavo, so what do you do when you Must Be Right And Never Wrong? Easy, you go after the husband. Ol' Jeb is investigating the husband, claiming that he waited too long before calling 911.

What total bastards!

They're going to continue to ruin this guy. Why? Because they were made fools of. Because they were wrong and they lack the humility, candor and honesty to admit that they were wrong.

You were wrong, folks. Move on. And leave that poor bastard alone.

Posted by Jeff at 11:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

The surface where philosophy meets science has always been amicable turf. Both Science and Philosophy tend to approach their respective subject matters with investment not in the outcome but rather the process; rigor over results; the soft, expansive space of better questions rather than a cold, hard slab where concrete answers are laid out like so many corpses.

Both Disciplines start with unknowing and the Unknown, with Zen's Beginner's Mind, and begin by populating the void with what is known, or what can be provisionally known. Both continue with drawing apparent connections, clear relationships between and among the sparse population of objects and ideas and notions, thus creating new objects and ideas and notions: something arises from nothing!

Built on the partially provisional, the Something New holds provisionally as well: a theory is born.

Philosophers may speak of the birth of new meaning; scientists may test the predictive power and the external consistency of the theorem. But both come from the same place: professional humility and an eye on the relative value of the new truth statement. Both groups have learned that with new knowledge comes change; with new thought comes new review; with new evidence may come the need to alter the truth statement to suit: mutability is an honest admission.

Honest admission? More like a necessity: life is change, existence is change. The nature of Truth changes daily. Creationism/Intelligent Design is a theory which works if you start with the axiom: the world is flat and at the center of the universe. Scientists are flipfloppers on the whip-tail knowledge, discovery and the need to make sense of disruptive technology and even more disruptive information.

Philosophers must swim in thought-liquid, afloat on strange tides and even stranger seas compassing drift as part of truth.

Both Science and Philosophy count on process, experimentation, constructive critique and the avoidance of absolutes to go where they must, do what they do, build what they must build and above all, discover what is there to be discovered.

Beginning with the void isn't just necessary, it simply is (and that's a strange thing to say of a void!). Science isn't science with presumption and Absolutes. Philosophy isn't philosophy without free rein of moral, ethical and cosmological territory.

Science with an investment in the outcome is merely Politics.

Philosophy with an investment in its own conclusions has devolved into Religion.

Setting aside Politics and Religion—as I've provisionally defined them—and limiting discussion to Science and Philosophy, the discussion of the origins of life—and the origins of a life—today takes the form of Stem Cell Research.

From a strictly and exclusively genetics standpoint, a new individual emerges when a sexual recombination of chromosomes comes together: fertilization. In humans this means a full single-set of chromosomes from the sperm matches up to a full single-set of chromosomes in the ovum, resulting in a genetically unique new individual.

From a strictly and exclusively developmental biology standpoint, a new organism is instantiated at the same time the genetics folks would state, but fertilization is just a trigger that leads to the construction of an organism eventually capable of doing the only thing it biologically can do: participate in sex. A single individual—in humans and in all species which sexually reproduce—is not driven to reproduce so much as to participate in the mechanics that lead to reproduction This is a fine point that gets lost when answers are all that is sought.

From a philosophical point of view, often the individual is of less interest than the greater picture of collections of individuals: families, groups, towns, societies, nations.

The South Koreans have successfully performed what is known as a “somatic cell nuclear transplantation”. A somatic cell is an cell that is not a sex-related cell. Meaning that sperm, ova and their progenitors are sex-related cells, but muscle, skin, brain, etc. are somatic. What the Koreans have successfully accomplished is to extract just the nucleus (present only in eukaryotic cells, a structure that contains the organismal DNA and has its own lipid bilayer that separates it from the rest of the cell) from a somatic cell and insert it into an embryonic cell, while destroying the embryonic cell's native nucleus.

If we are to take the geneticist as the sole authority on the beginnings of a new life, then the destruction of the native nucleus was the genetic 'death' of that cell. But the Koreans' success means that the cell remained alive.

Since the embryonic cell is now providing replication, protein synthesis and developmental mechanics to a totally different set of DNA, the developmental-biologist, taken at her exclusive word, would state that the organism continued to live, continued to be directed towards adulthood.

The resulting tissues that formed as a result of continued development would be genetically compatible, obviously, with the donor of that implanted nucleus. The not-yet-differentiated tissues could then be implanted into the donor's body, into a specific chemical and physical environment (say, the brain), and that chemical and physical environment would then direct the differentiation of those tissues towards the appropriate end.

Philosophers might argue or discuss the personhood of the donor, but neither the embryo nor the donated nucleus, since those would ever reach cognitive or autonomous personhood.

“Life begins at conception,” say some religious. But they count on the genetic uniqueness of the DNA of the nucleus as the basis for that statement. If the DNA—but not the organismal embryo itself—is destroyed and the religious still have a problem with it, are we to assume that Life Exists in the Nucleus? Now they're starting to sound like strict geneticists, when the world knows they're anything but.

And the so-called Soul? Did it exit and go to its reward when the native nucleus was disrupted and destroyed? Did the Soul transfer to what would genetically and essentially be the donor's twin, born decades after? Or is the modified organism without a Soul? And if so, does that make it the purview of Satan? Or just Soulless? And if Soulless, then how can a religious type call it human? And if it's not human, then why do they treat it as anything more than a cheek-scraping of cells from the inside of someone's mouth or a wasted bolus of sperm from a masturbating man?

The crime, the sin, in their minds is, of course, the destruction of that native nucleus.

The philosophers will consider individual uniqueness and the respect thereof as it applies to the greater human condition; the geneticist has it easy and delineates cleanly and without hesitation; the developmental biologist might applaud the superior technique that resulted in a successful nuclear transplantation.

Will the religious retreat once again from its current, relative stake in the ground of the Sacred Embryo and move ever more precisely into the Numinous Nucleus as the Momentous Miraculousness of Life?

For my part, part geneticist, part developmental biologist, part philosopher, part thaumaturge, I will enjoy watching the experts react to change, watch the religious pull up stakes and leave Absolutetown only to settle into Absoluteville just down the road apiece. I will enjoy the calm grace of philosophers as they note the beautiful shifts of reality as we stake claim to more knowledge, and I will watch the true scientists continue to revel in their work, settling one question and moving onto the new questions that they themselves created.

Posted by Jeff at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it is demonstrated that the nose knows.

The studies found that gay men's and straight women's brains react similarly to any one (or more) of a number of candidate compounds known as pheromones.

• Score one for science and genetics.
• Score one against the silly notions of Intelligent Design.
• Especially score any number of points against all those religious types who call homosexuality a sin, a choice or Against God's Plan.

Now, maybe President Bush's appointee to the FDA's Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs can find a pheromone to blame for the abuses (including anal rape!) he perpetrated on his wife and the mother of this children, so that he can have a clear conscience the next time he writes a book about Stress and the Woman's Body or his care of women As Jesus Cared for Women. Will the hypocrisy ever end?

That wasn't rhetorical. You know it's not going to end. You know that the Christians will start searching for their own excuses for extraordinary behavior because this whole god-thing can't last forever.

Speaking of...maybe there are pheromones or other biological triggers that lead us biological individuals to obsess on Invisibles, Unattainables and Absolutes?

Maybe the Supreme Designer will come down and become visible, make himself accessible, and hang the universe off his Giant Ego?

Naah, that has a certain bad stink to it.

Posted by Jeff at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Yeah, I'm still on this kick. Only the oddball rodents aren't the ID-ers themselves but rather a new species entirely of mammal that was just discovered.

The good people of Laos call them kha-nyou (pronounced “ga-nyou”) and were discovered at market by scientists visiting Laos. After much deliberation and experimentation—all evidence gathering, something the IDer's refuse to do—they concluded:

Scientists found that differences in the skull and bone structure and in the animal's DNA revealed it to be a member of a distinct family that diverged from others of the rodent order millions of years ago. “To find something so distinct in this day and age is just extraordinary,” said Dr. Robert J. Timmins of the Wildlife Conservation Society, one of the discoverers. “For all we know, this could be the last remaining mammal family left to be discovered.”

I wouldn't personally go that far, but I'm also never been that kind of scientist. Still, it's totally fascinating that something so new was discovered in such a common place. A marketplace! One of man's most ancient cultural creations. There's something about this discovery that situates humanity in very satisfying ways.

I wonder if this means that the IDers will shrug at such wonderment, denying wonderment, and blame just credit god the Supreme Designer with a well-placed lie.

Posted by Jeff at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)