Shermer and Chopra traded articles at Skeptic Magazine, but they really didn’t communicate. 

Shermer got me on board with comments like this:

Here is the reality. It has been estimated that in the last 50,000 years about 106 billion humans were born. Of the 100 billion people born before the six billion living today, every one of them has died and not one has returned to confirm for us beyond a reasonable doubt that there is life after death. This data set does not bode well for promises of immortality and claims for an afterlife. But let’s review them one by one . . .

Shermer proceeds to show us all the skepically-driven scientific homework he’s done.

On the other hand, Deepak Chopra disappoints me immensely, always.  With comments like this:

I cite a University of Virginia study that to date has found over 2,000 children who vividly remember their past lives . . . Even more astonishing, over 200 of these children exhibit birthmarks that resemble the way they remember dying in their most recent lifetime.

Really . . . ?!  Check out this birthmark “study,” (and here)if you have time to waste.  Totally anecdotal and unstructured.  It starts with a group of children who “remember their past lives.”  Good grief!

I don’t know if he is sincere, but it seems to me that Chopra is always hiding behind a thick veil of vagueness.  It just has to be intentional, in my opinion. His response to Shermer was also condescending as well.  For example, Chopra claims that the soul that survives birth is all about “consciousness.” 

I specifically rooted the afterlife in ordinary states of consciousness that no one doubts, such as dream, imagination, projection, myth, metaphor, meditation, and other aspects of awareness that give us clues about the workings of the mind overall. 

If you read on, though, it seems that, for Chopra, he’s referring to a extremely peculiar type of consciousness: an unconscious type of consciousness. 

OK, Chopra’s got a big following, he’s from a faraway land and he’s got an exotic-sounding name.  Sorry, Deepak.  If you’re going to convince me of anything, I need evidence I can believe and theories I can understand.

What I actually did was to pay $199 for a Western Digital “MyBook” 500 Gb external hard drive.  While comparing hard drive prices, however, I stopped a moment to consider how incredibly far hard drive prices have fallen over the years.  I concluded that I was getting a windfall no matter what modern hard drive I bought.  Why?  Because my benchmark is 1990, when I bought my first external hard drive.

In 1988, I was the proud owner of a Mac Plus (Mac Plus is now 20 years old. See here and here) By 1990, I was desperate for more memory. For $400, I purchased a 40 Mb (as in “mega”) external hard drive.  Its storage capacity seemed as massive to me as the big noisy metal box that housed it.

Here’s what’s amazing.  The fast little MyBook drive I just bought has the capacity of 12,500 external drives of the type I bought in 1990.  My new MyBook is also much faster and reliable than my 1990 drive, even though it’s half the size.  If I had purchased the same storage capacity of my new MyBook by buying 12,500 of those 1990 drives, it would have cost me $5,000,000.   Where would I have put them?  They would have completely filled four rooms measuring 10’ x 10’ x 8’.  

What a deal, then, to buy a hard drive nowadays, especially for those of us who had to pay those big prices for slow machines only 17 years ago.

Now, of course, I can be profligate in my use of hard disk space.  For instance, I try to go paperless at home, by scanning everything that enters the house in paper form.  Paper photos are long gone.  More than 16,000 images (many of my two daughters) occupy more than 14 Gb of my hard drive.  How many shoe boxes would all of those photos occupied, I wonder? Too many.  To process that many photos the traditional way would have cost me much more than the cost of developing 16,000 photos chemically (about $3,000 at Walgreens – 19 cents each). That’s because I delete at least half of the photos I take.

The real memory hog is video, of course, where a compressed HD video can eat up memory at a rate of more than 11 Gb per hour of video.  Ergo, the new hard drive.  Anyone who dabbles in digital video quickly discovers this.

While checking around to verify a few things for this article, I encountered these amazing statistics regarding the amount of storage media produced since 1992:

Between 1992 and 2003, roughly 1.5 billon drives shipped, capable of holding 41,400 exabytes, according to the “How Much Information?” study from the University of California at Berkeley. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes. Five exabytes would be enough to store all human speech since the dawn of time through 2002, according to the study. 

These stats are from an article dated September 2006, but I’m sure that the amount of storage capacity has grown immensely, even in the past six months.   The history of hard drives is truly an amazing story.  For more, see here or here or here.

Missouri’s overloaded public defender system is threatening to stop taking new cases, reports the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.  This is “an unprecedented move that could put courts from St. Louis to Kansas City into turmoil.”

With an average workload of 305 cases, the lawyers who represent 80 percent of the state’s criminal defendants say they are buckling as new cases flood in.

Missouri is now ranked Missouri 49th in per capita spending on public defenders. The Post-Dispatch reports that for public defenders statewide, the turnover rate over five years is 100 percent.

Who, then, rationally believes that anyone could get meaningful representation when their case must compete for their attorney’s attention with 300 others every single day?  Assuming that a PD works 10 hours per day (from what I hear, this is conservative estimate), that means that the PD can spend an average of two minutes per day on any individual case.  

If you are a poor person accused of a felony in Missouri, you can only hope that your attorney did an especially good two minutes worth of work for you today.  Don’t worry . . . over the course of a month, your attorney will spend an entire hour zealously defending you.

I’ve previously written about the enormous number of synonyms for poop, speculating on why there are so many synonyms. I don’t know if my suggestions were convincing to others, but the issue still intrigues me.

As an epilogue to that earlier post, I offer this video, one of many elaborate musical numbers comprising a truly extraordinary bit of television comedy, the recently broadcast “Scrubs, the Musical”). Let the synomyms fly!

According to a little noticed change in the Patriot Act, the Bush administration is firing (not promoting or commending) some of its star prosecutors. Why? Because they became inconvenient. Worse, the fired prosecutors have all been replaced with political hacks whose jobs will include NOT prosecuting law-breaking friends of the Administration, among other nefarious duties. This situation is disgraceful.

Here’s what’s going on, according to yesterday’s NYT Op-ed:

In many Justice Departments, her record would have won her awards, and perhaps a promotion to a top post in Washington. In the Bush Justice Department, it got her fired.

Ms. Lam is one of at least seven United States attorneys fired recently under questionable circumstances. The Justice Department is claiming that Ms. Lam and other well-regarded prosecutors like John McKay of Seattle, David Iglesias of New Mexico, Daniel Bogden of Nevada and Paul Charlton of Arizona — who all received strong job evaluations — performed inadequately.

It is hard to call what’s happening anything other than a political purge. And it’s another shameful example of how in the Bush administration, everything — from rebuilding a hurricane-ravaged city to allocating homeland security dollars to invading Iraq — is sacrificed to partisan politics and winning elections.

The net result of these firing is that our government will not be able to prosecute many of the white-collar criminals who have connections with the Administration. Much of what those prosecutions would have found will not ever be learned by the media or U.S. citizens.

This story really hits a nerve for me. It brings up disturbing thoughts and images.

I once served as an Assistance Attorney General for the state of Missouri. I had stellar job evaluations. I was fired, though, after I vigorously investigated the illegal actions of several major contributors to the Missouri Attorney General, William L. Webster. As my superiors postured to fire me, some of my co-workers who saw the same things I saw suddenly got stupid. Some of the people who had previously been cordial to me became distant, because they didn’t want to get sucked into the mess and lose their jobs too. I was thrown out on the street with no redress. I served at the pleasure of the Attorney General, just as the fired federal prosecutors serve at the whim of the Administration.

The epilogue of my story is that federal prosecutors came to the rescue and prosecuted Webster, a Republican. Webster eventually spent time in prison. Had the federal prosecutors failed to step in and investigate Webster, he would have become governor of Missouri (he was 20 points ahead in the polls when they started investigating). It is safe to assume that he would be a U.S. Senator by now.

That’s how important it is to have qualified prosecutors working for the federal government.

The NYT article about these recent firings from the Justice Department should be front page stories. Maybe they will be, thanks to Senator Charles Sdchumer, who is investigating.

What is the name of that organ we use to see?

The brain, of course.

Admittedly, our eyes are critically important for interpreting light rays, at least for those who have eyes that work.

For those whose eyes don’t work, however, hope is on the way. Using a special device consisting of a camera and a sensor that transmits corresponding patterns of stimulation to the tongue, blind people can learn to see surprisingly well with their tongues. This video reminded me of Daniel Dennett’s description (I believe it was in Consciousness Explained) of an earlier version of this same sort of device that consisted of a camera connected to a larger pad containing an array of stimulators that one wore on one’s abdomen. One could thus learn to “see” with one’s skin.

With a bit of thought, it is obvious that one primarily sees with the brain. Even for those with working eyes, light rays stop at the retina. Inside the brain, you certainly won’t find any tiny movie screen where they project shows with a tiny light bulb.

Anyway, here’s the video. Such a testament to the plasticity of the brain and a reminder that we ultimately see with our brains, regardless of how those light rays are initially encountered.

If you want to sleep well and not worry about Bush’s new plans for the Middle East, don’t read this New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh: “The Redirection: Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?” 

Dick Cheney and other conservatives constantly warn us of the “China threat.”  Check out these headlines and articles:

• Chinese bid for Unocal, Pentagon worries over military spending lead to fresh discussion of Chinese ‘threat’. 
• Revving Up the China Threat 
• US exaggerates China defense - report
• Cheney, the Neocons and China 

This belligerent U.S. attitude that insists that China will inevitably ripen into our next big enemy concerns me for two reasons.

First, why can’t the U.S. work toward an upcoming era of cooperation with China, rather than assuming that we must eventually go to war because China is an emerging superpower?  This preference for aggression rather than cooperation is a xenophobic tactic that Neocons have previously used to make “enemies” out of many other countries with whom we should be working to develop strong relationships.  What is China’s sin, by the way?  China is doing the same things the United States does.  For instance, China competing economically with vigor.  China is accruing wealth.  China is testing sophisticated weapons. China is expanding its influence into parts of the world where petroleum can be found in the ground.  Yet the U.S. is paranoid about China.    If our frustration is that the Chinese practically own us (along with Japan), that is our own fault that we can’t control our own profligate government spending.  I’m not advocating being naive. Perhaps China will someday threaten American interests.  I’m suggesting that we should save harsh rhetoric if that happens. 

Second, I have a personal stake in this rhetoric.  I have two Chinese daughters (they are both adopted) and many Chinese friends and acquaintances.  I am concerned that Americans, led by our government and media, will morph into a people who will once again view Chinese people with disdain.  Don’t laugh.  Look how Americans now view people of Middle Eastern descent.  Our dysfunctional government and simplistic mainstream media are quite capable of developing similar derogatory racial attitudes toward Chinese people, including the Chinese people already living in the United States.  I don’t want to live in an America that is any more xenophobic than it already is.

But why do I say “once again,” as though the Chinese have previously been the victims of horrible racism in the U.S.?  Because the Chinese have, indeed, been victims of widespread racism for most of their existence in the United States.  A detailed work on this subject is Iris Chang’s The Chinese in America (2003).  In that work, she showed, among other things, the damage that can be caused when media and government conspire to denigrate people whose only crime was to be of a certain ethnicity or culture. [The quotes in this article are from The Chinese in America].

Chang was a Chinese American freelance historian who died at the age of 36 after a nervous breakdown following an episode of depression.  She was a fascinating person. In addition to The Chinese in America, Chang left another literary gem, The Rape of Nanking.

It was through Chang’s writings that I learned much of what I know about the Chinese in America.  More than 100,000 Chinese laborers came to America to make their fortunes during the gold rush.  They came to America because it was not easy to survive in China, especially in rural China. 

In the typical rural village, people slept on mats on dirt floors, their heads resting on bamboo pillows or wooden stools.  . .. An arm load of fuel warmed and fed a dozen people . . . most lived and died without gaining more than a dim comprehension of the world beyond their own village … the promise of gold electrified the imaginations of the impoverished Chinese.  It ignited hopes among poor people … They borrowed money from their friends and relatives, sold off their water buffalo or jewelry or signed up with a labor agency that would front of them the money for passage in exchange for a share of their future earnings in America.

In America, however, the Chinese faced different sort of challenges.  Nonwhites could not become naturalized US citizens under a 1790 statute.  Many of the Chinese didn’t actually make it to America.  Three quarters of a million Chinese men were decoyed into slavery in what was known as the “coolie” trade.  Many of them were locked into filthy receiving stations.  Chang estimates that between 15 and 45% of the “coolies” died in transit to the final work destinations.  Cuba was one of these destinations, where the coolies were made to work on sugar plantations 21 out of 24 hours each day.  Suicide was common.

But many of the Chinese workers did make it to San Francisco.  Between 1848 and 1850, San Francisco, previously a desolate area of sand dunes and hills, suddenly grew to a population of 30,000.  It was a “roaring frontier town.”  92% of California were men, and “violence was the rule.”  During the 1850s, 85% of the Chinese in California were engaged in mining.  Mark Twain wrote that the Chinese “are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness . . . a disorderly China man is rare, and a lazy one does not exist.”

The Chinese worked so hard (and successfully) at mining that, in 1852, legislators proposed that Chinese migrants be prohibited from mining.  (more…)

You don’t know the word “palter”?  I didn’t either, until I read a recent paper by Frederick Schauer and Richard J. Zeckhauser of Harvard.  The paper’s abstract defines this incredibly useful term, palter:

Abstract:     
A lie involves three elements: deceptive intent, an inaccurate message, and a harmful effect. When only one or two of these elements is present we do not call the activity lying, even when the practice is no less morally questionable or socially detrimental. This essay explores this area of “less-than-lying,” in particular intentionally deceptive practices such as fudging, twisting, shading, bending, stretching, slanting, exaggerating, distorting, whitewashing, and selective reporting. Such deceptive practices are occasionally called “paltering,” which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as acting insincerely or misleadingly.

The authors suggest that paltering “has received little systematic study.” They also suggest that when harmful paltering is established, “the sanctions against it should be at least as stiff as those against lying.”

At this page you can find the link to the entire article.   I’m definitely going to incorporate “palter” into my vocabulary. 

“Paltering” is going to be an extremely useful word, unfortunately.

This is not about math. I just had a pre-somnolent image of a cluster of words that I just have to let out. In less pretentious language: I thought of this as I dozed off last night.

“A mnemonic pneumonic gnu’s knees.”

Nglish is a weird language. Note that of the 4 words that are all pronounced as though they start with en, none actually start with en. They also came from four different root languages to English (Latin, Greek, Khoikhoi, and German).

We are taught spelling in school as a sort of faith: This is how it is because it is. The root of spelling (in non-pictographic languages) is to produce a stream of characters (letters) to represent the series of sounds (phonemes) that make up each word. So why do we use three different letters for the same hard-K sound? Four if you count eks. Let’s knot forget the mental knife we use to silence kay itself in several common words. Why have we lost the letters for hard and soft ch? Greeks still use chi (χ is not x). Can you spontaneously spout the 5 pronunciations of “ough”?

Basically, why are so many words pronounced differently than they are spelled? The simple answer is, teenagers.

(more…)

Such a strange question to ask!  Here’s what brought it on.  Yesterday, I attended a lecture by Sarah Brosnan, a post-doc who works with Frans de Waal at Emory University (I’ve written about de Waal’s work several times).  Brosnan’s lecture, “Fairness and Prosocial Behavior in Non-Human Primates,” was sponsored by the Washington University School of Business, which illustrates the extent to which primate research is no longer just for primatologists.

Brosnan’s task was to measure the extent to which two highly social species (Chimpanzees and Capuchins) recognize and/or deal with inequity.  The experiment was designed to see how pairs of animals react to situations where one animal of the pair received a relatively substantial payment (a grape) for completing a simple task while the other got a less valuable payment (a cucumber) or no payment at all, though accomplishing the same task. 

The videos of the experiments were entertaining, some of slighted animals putting on intense displays of frustration or sulking.  It reminded me of my own young children whenever one of them perceives that I’ve treated the other one even a little better. I’ll always get an earful from the slighted daughter, even (especially!) when the payoff is a relatively worthless trinket.  And it seems that I never learn . . .

What Brosnan and De Waal set out to measure sounds simple, but it became clear that the task was fraught with potential confounding factors.  For example, how do you parse out greed versus envy?  How do you take account of sex differences?  How do the scientists carefully account for potential differences between partners that socialize together outside of the lab versus those who didn’t know each other well?  There’s no way to meaningfully analyze such a series of experiments without the sophisticated use of statistics.

The experiments showed that the animals’ reactions to inequity were affected by several factors: the manner in which the rewards were distributed (various scenarios were tested), the social environment (the extent to which the animals were acquainted) and the behavior of the partners in the lab.  Brosnan mentioned that follow-up experiments are underway; some involve human children and others involve non-human primates.

These inequity experiments reminded me of an issue that puzzled me even when I was a teenager (I took some major abuse from a close relative for even bringing it up). Here’s the issue: To what extent can an individual’s willingness to share be due to pure innocent empathy (“feeling the pain” of the person benefiting) and to what extent is “the good deed” something that inevitably inures (directly or indirectly) to the sharer’s own benefit?  In the experiments described by Brosnan, for example, sharers might have shared simply to shut up the screaming slighted partner.  (more…)

I didn’t know that a sinkhole this size was possible.  But here it is, right in the middle of Guatemala City.  This makes me wonder what you can do to deal with a hole this big.

Anyone familiar with The Onion already knows the publisher of this sad story.  The headlines are often the best part of the story, and that’s not to sleight the stories.

Or check out this story:  ”MLB No Longer Accepting New Players“

I don’t know how those guys do it so well so often . . .

Who’s the best person to lecture China on a recent test that suggests China’s interest in militarizing outer space?  According to James Fallows, it’s not Dick Cheney.

Marty Kaplan comments on a report by Glenn Greenwald from the National Press Club this week.  One panelist, Newsweek’s Richard Wolffe responded to criticism by bloggers that journalists are not doing their job:

Our role is to ask questions and get information. It’s not a chance for the opposition to take on the government and grill them to a point where they throw their hands up and surrender… It’s not a political exercise, it’s a journalistic exercise. And I think often the blogs are looking for us to be political advocates more than journalistic ones.

Greenwald’s response is that journalism is not stenography:

The reality, of course, is that most media-criticizing bloggers do not want journalists to be “political advocates.” They want them to do what journalists are supposed to do — which is not, contrary to Wolffe’s belief, sit around with their good, trustworthy, nice-guy friends in the White House and simply “ask questions” and “get information,” but instead to scrutinize that information, treat it with doubt, investigate it before passing it along to determine whether it’s true. And the reason bloggers want them to do that, the reason that bloggers demand more of journalists like Wolffe, is not because bloggers are enraged, confused, unreasonable partisans. It’s because bloggers are American citizens who are deeply concerned about what has happened to their country over the last six years and criticize the press and demand more of it because Wolffe’s overly-friendly relationships with Bush officials like Tony Snow, and Wolffe’s simplistic and lazy conception of what a reporter does, produces extremely destructive and shoddy “journalism.”

Mary Kaplan is the associate dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication, as well as the founder and director of the Norman Lear Center.  Kaplan has focused his research on the content and regulation of local television news. I previously wrote about Kaplan here.

Carl Sagan’s new article can be found in the March/April 2007 edition of Skeptical Inquirer.  It is titled “Science’s Vast Cosmic Perspective Eludes Religion.”

Well, okay.  As you know, Carl Sagan died of pneumonia in 1996.  This “new” article was actually prepared by Ann Druyan, based on lectures Sagan gave in 1985.

Sagan begins the article by pointing out that there are more galaxies in the universe than there are stars in the Milky Way.  This, he finds, is “a useful calibration of our place in the universe.”  Nonetheless, virtually no religion has taken into account “this vast number of worlds [or] the enormous scale of the universe.”

If, as Sagan argues, life is commonplace throughout the universe, “it must follow that there is massive destruction, obliteration of the whole planets, that routinely occurs, frequently, throughout the universe. . . [T]hat is a different view than the traditional Western sense of a deity carefully taking pains to promote the well-being of intelligent creatures.” 

Sagan concludes by arguing that the God portrayed by traditional religions “is too small.  It is a God of a tiny world and not a God of a galaxy, much less of a universe.”   Sagan suggests that science is, “at least in part, informed worship.”  Further, curiosity and intelligence, to the extent provided by a God, would be gifts, which we must use.  This passage reminds me of a humorous drawing I posted a few days ago.

Even if a traditional God does not exist, “then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time.”  

I found Sagan’s article compelling. God’s own book forgot to tell us that the universe is almost unimaginably large.  In light of well-published findings of modern astronomers and biologists, it would be nonsensical to doubt that life abounds throughout the universe.  Nonetheless, most religions avoid discussion of this possibility of the universe as A) existing and B) constituting a fertile field for large number of sentient life forms.

It’s just much easier to talk about an artificially contained story involving a man, woman and the serpent in an earthly garden.  To the extent that fundamentalists (and even more “liberal” religions) focus only on Earth, however, the rest of the universe is a very big elephant in the room.  If many believers have their way, 99.99999…% of the universe is dispensible frivolous scenary for the only show in town, everything worthwhile allegedly occurring on a single tiny blue speck.  

Sagan’s point might just be the best reason of all for demonstrating the arrogance, ignorance and silliness of the inerrancy crowd. 

Not very well, according to this article from Salon.com.  Here’s an excerpt:

Perhaps most troubling, the Army seems bent on denying that the stress of war has caused the soldiers’ mental trauma in the first place. (There is an economic reason for doing so: Mental problems from combat stress can require the Army to pay disability for years.) Soto-Ramirez’s medical records reveal the economical mindset of an Army doctor who evaluated him. “Adequate care and treatment may prevent a claim against the government for PTSD,” wrote a psychologist in Puerto Rico before sending him to Walter Reed . . .

The high level of satisfaction among inpatients as reported by Walter Reed is completely opposite what I saw and heard while tracking soldiers there over the last year. The soldiers I interviewed invited me to their bedsides in the lockdown ward. They handed over their private medical records. They allowed me to call their buddies, their girlfriends, their mothers. All professed to loving the Army, though some said their trust in the institution had been irrevocably shattered. All said their symptoms either stayed the same or worsened while at Walter Reed; two said they made suicide attempts. While it’s true that patients’ self-reports about treatment are not always objectively based, the repeated, bitter complaints I heard over the course of more than a year, in combination with conversations with civilian experts, cast serious doubts on Walter Reed’s approach to treating PTSD sufferers. It all convinced me that something is seriously amiss at the Army’s top hospital.

Madison Avenue is so clever these days that most commercials are, to some extent, fun to watch.

Adbusters.org is working hard to top Madison Avenue, though, with its own spoof commercials.  Some of these are quite well done.

You’ll find more of Adbuster’s spoof ads here. 

Here’s what Adbusters is about, based on its “About” page: 

Adbusters offers incisive philosophical articles as well as activist commentary from around the world addressing issues ranging from genetically modified foods to media concentration. In addition, our annual social marketing campaigns like Buy Nothing Day and TV Turnoff Week have made us an important activist networking group.

Ultimately, though, Adbusters is an ecological magazine, dedicated to examining the relationship between human beings and their physical and mental environment. We want a world in which the economy and ecology resonate in balance. We try to coax people from spectator to participant in this quest. We want folks to get mad about corporate disinformation, injustices in the global economy, and any industry that pollutes our physical or mental commons.

One year ago, I made my first tentative post to this blog.  It was really a test more than a post, as were the handful of posts for the next two weeks.   We really didn’t get running until mid-March, 2006.  

In that month of March 2006, “Grumpypilgrim” and I were happy to see that, on average, 29 people visited this site every day.  Probably 20 of these daily visits were me. This month (February, 2007), there have been almost 2,000 visits to this site every day.  I guarantee that most of them are not me.   Over the life of this blog, we’ve now published 830 posts and we’ve received more than 3,000 comments.  

I am honored that so many people would take the time to visit this site and to actually stay for awhile.  The average visitor reads three pages, the most commonly read page being the home page, which consists of the ten most recent posts.  

I am truly fortunate to be sharing this space with my co-authors.  Some of them, such as Jason, have been my friends for a long time.  Others are people I’ve met (in person or electronically) more recently.  I carefully read everything each of them posts to this site.  

Many people ask whether I can tell who is visiting the blog.  The answer is no.  My traffic software does not provide me with any meaningful identifying information.  It does show me, though, that most visitors are from the U.S.   Next in line are “unknown,” then Canada, UK, China, European Union, Japan, Netherlands, Germany and Australia.

The traffic stats are fun and exciting, though too-often distracting.   What is even more satisfying are the emails (more…)

Today is the first anniversary of my dad’s death. Yesterday I came home from the crematorium “with me dad took’d under me arm,” to badly paraphrase the children’s song about Ann Boleyn. Death doesn’t frighten me in an abstract way. I grew up with Tom Lehrer music, Charles Addams cartoons, Hitchcock short story books, and other foils to the timid mortal. This package of charred and calcined particles I carry in the crook of my arm is merely a transient monument to the man in whom they once dwelled.

Although my father died a year ago, his ashes just now returned from the medical school circuit. He was first and foremost an educator, and this seems a fitting final use for his corporeal remains. It was also was his expressed wish.

“Ashes to ashes” is a lame phrase to someone whose head was usually far beyond the clouds. I grew up perfectly aware that my body was made up of ashes from the remains of a supernova, as is the rest of our solar system. The even my cell nuclei are literally composed of decayed nuclear waste!

Not all of the mass of these coarse ashes was actually part of his body during his life. Cremation binds oxygen to any atom that will have it, increasing the total mass from the proteins being torn apart and vaporized by the process. Sort of like how 6 lbs (a gallon) of gasoline produces 30 lbs of greenhouse C0₂

It doesn’t bother me that some of the mass of the ash wasn’t him. Atoms come and go from almost every part of your body for as long as you live. They’ve recently found that even some proteins in nerves are busily exchanging ions while maintaining their balanced chemical and molecular properties. I single out nerve cells because it was once thought that grown nerves remain unchanged until you die. Most other cell types are continuously being renewed or replaced. Odds are that if you can read this, the only molecules now in you that were there when you were born are in your nerves. Also a few minority organs like the technically-dead, transparent cells in your eyes.

On that note, statistically speaking the box of ashes (that the paper trail proclaims are indeed the remains of my father’s body) has atoms in it that were once part of pretty much any historical figure you’d care to name.

• Hitler? Maybe, they were both breathing in Berlin at the same time, with my father’s house downwind from downtown. But that was a very narrow window of opportunity for once-in-Hitler atoms to disperse and migrate to my father. Then a much longer time for him to shed those and gain others. By now, Hitler atoms have spread around the world.
• Julius Caesar? Much more likely because it went farther back in time, so Caesar’s volatile atoms are certainly spread all over the world.
• Moses? I’m about as sure of the corporeal reality of Moses as I am of Gilgamesh. Let’s compromise on the much more completely documented Pharaoh Thutmose III, who lived a couple of centuries before the biblical Moses. My dad-box probably contains a bit of him.

(more…)

According to a recent report by the American Psychological Association,

Inescapable media images of sexed-up girls and women posing as adolescents can cause psychological and even physical harm to adolescents and young women.

According to this APA report, the pressure of this “sexualization” can lead to depression, eating disorders, and poor academic performance. See, also, Yahoo’s article on this report.

What are the sources of these images? The report points to these examples:

Advertisements (e.g., the Skechers “naughty and nice” ad that featured Christina Aguilera dressed as a schoolgirl in pigtails, with her shirt unbuttoned, licking a lollipop), dolls (e.g., Bratz dolls dressed in sexualized clothing such as miniskirts, fishnet stockings, and feather boas), clothing (thongs sized for 7– to 10-year-olds, some printed with slogans such as “wink wink”), and television programs (e.g., a televised fashion show in which adult models in lingerie were presented as young girls).

It is difficult to not notice this modern smearing of the boundaries between female childhood and adulthood. Our media is obsessed with presenting images of women acting like little girls and little girls forced to act “sexualized.”

What’s the difference between “sexualization” and healthy sexuality? According to the APA report, “sexualization” occurs when

a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics;

a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy; (more…)

If you’d like to view some compelling photography, take a look at the prize winners of World Press Photo’s annual contest.  The purpose of the contest is to offer “an overview of how press photographers tackle their work worldwide and how the press gives us the news, bringing together pictures from all parts of the globe to reflect trends and developments in photojournalism.”

Warning:  some of these photos are difficult to view based on the subject matters (e.g., the Israeli attack on Lebanon).  Others are delightful.  Most are thought-provoking.  Here are all the winners.

Just imagine if some foreign demagogue had caused the daily slaughter of scores of people in America’s capitol city. I wonder what we would think of him, and of the people who brought him to power.  We gripe, for good reason, about Osama bin Laden, but his act of terrorism pales in comparison to that of George Bush’s, whose ranting and lying has caused the deaths of about 3,000 innocent people every two months for the past forty-eight months.  That’s 24 9/11 attacks, all on a population that was COMPLETELY INNOCENT of terrorism against America.  I wonder what we would think of him and his country when his only response to this continual slaughter of our neighbors is that he will “stay the course,” while his propaganda machine churns out an ongoing stream of lies and disinformation, and his country’s government-friendly media willingly plays along.

Bush says we’re safer today than we were before 9/11.  Somehow, I don’t think so.

No further comment necessary, right?  Except that I’m publishing the above image with the express permission of Pixwit.com.  

Oh, and one other thing.  Don’t overlook your chance to earn $1,000,000 by participating in Pixwit’s “Miracle Challenge.”  If you win, just send me my 10% finders’ fee.   Oh, and there’s that one little thing . . .  To earn your $1,000,000, you need to perform your miracle “in a lab with the smocked, ogling guys and their hard, cold instruments all around you.”

[Thanks to Milard Draudt for permission to reprint this cartoon here.  I noticed this cartoon in Funny Times, which I dutifully read every month]