Dangerous Intersection is under construction, always

Recently, it occurred to me that we should have a mobile version of Dangerous Intersection, but I learned that the plugins allowing mobile versions required upgrading my WordPress Platform version. My past two attempts to upgrade to 2.9x hadn’t gone well (I twice tried and twice reverted to version 2.7 over the past few months). This week’s upgrade to 3.0 worked without any snags, however. I truly love the WordPress system and the fact that it's open-source software. To take full advantage of the 3.0 features, I also decided to upgrade the design of this website, making use of Solostream’s newest WordPress design theme, called “Prosper.” BTW, I’m extremely happy with Solostream’s products, forums and customer service. In case you’re wondering, this single use version of “Prosper” cost $79, which I consider a great price, given the loads of feature options, most of which require no knowledge of html. There's no way I could have afforded a custom design this sophisticated. Coming soon, I hope, will be a mobile version of Dangerous Intersection. Until I started using an iPhone (my workplace offered them to employees this year), it didn’t occur to me that I would actually spend significant amounts of time reading from a mobile device, especially while waiting in lines or riding mass transit. Well, that’s how the world is moving, it seems. I hope you enjoy the new design of DI, which I worked to make more “open” than my previous designs. You'll notice that it is a two-column site now (more or less). I also took the liberty of reworking the title artwork and moving in some new navigation features. For instance, if you search categories or key words, the results will now show up in three columns, making it easier to scan your results. I’m still making quite a few tweaks, and some of the previously existing features are not yet back in. Thus, you are looking at a design-work-in-progress to go along with the contemplative-work-in-progress. If this website continues to be successful, that is how it should be—one of our main goals should always be to avoid ossification. That is essentially what philosopher Bertrand Russell once told someone who had accused him of having changed his mind on a topic. Russell pointed out that the option to changing is stagnating. Update: We now seem to have the mobile version of Dangerous Intersection working. I've been testing it on an iPhone, while Josh Timmons, who aptly hosts the site and provides technical consultations, indicates that DI also looks good on Android.

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U.K. Guardian skewers the “war on drugs”

It's clearly time to rethink the U.S. War on Drugs. For many good reasons, consider this Editorial by the U.K.Guardian:

If the purpose of drug policy is to make toxic substances available to anyone who wants them in a flourishing market economy controlled by murderous criminal gangs, the current arrangements are working well. If, however, the goal is to reduce the amount of drugs being consumed and limit the harm associated with addiction, it is surely time to tear up the current policy. It has failed.

This is not a partial failure. For as long as courts and jails have been the tools for controlling drugs, their use has increased. Police are powerless to control the flow. One recent estimate calculated that around 1% of the total supply to the UK is intercepted. Attempts to crack down have little impact, except perhaps in siphoning vulnerable young people into jails where they can mature into hardened villains.

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Putting our close genetic relationship to chimpanzees into perspective

Genomics Professor Katherine Pollard explored the genetic basis for being human in a video presentation titled "What Makes Us Human. Here a rather dramatic announcement from her talk:

Mouse and rat actually have a common ancestor longer ago than human and chimp, and some people will be surprised by that. They will say, "We are so much more different than a chimp . . . mouse and rat must be pretty similar." Actually mouse and rat on average are much more different from each other than we are from a chimp, and that's sort of a humbling fact to keep in mind.
We're not exactly like chimpanzees, of course, but there are quite a few overlaps (as well as differences), which Pollard explores beginning at the 4-minute mark. Surprisingly, young chimpanzees have a better competency in counting and numbers than young humans. At the 11-minute mark, you can see that the human genome is 95% similar to that of a chimp (or 99%, depending on how you define similarity), and that it is 28% similar (or 89%, depending on definition of similarity) to the genome of a mouse. [More . . . ]

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The real life differences between Christians and non-Christians

Other than attendance at church, how can one tell whether someone is a Christian? In this L.A. Times article, William Lobdell argues that Christian rhetoric often doesn't match up with the actions of those who claim to be Christians.

But judging by the behavior of most Christians, they've become secularists. And the sea of hypocrisy between Christian beliefs and actions is driving Americans away from the institutional church in record numbers.

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Near death experiences as purported evidence of a soul

At AlterNet, Greta Christina has written an article titled, "Why Near-Death Experiences Are a Flimsy Justification for the Idea That We Have Immortal Souls." She argues that the evidence supporting the independent soul is "unfalsifiable."

[It] is flimsy at best. It is unsubstantiated. It comes largely from personal anecdotes. It is internally inconsistent. . . . The evidence supporting the "independent soul" explanation is flimsy at best. It is unsubstantiated. It comes largely from personal anecdotes. It is internally inconsistent. It is shot through with discrepancies. It is loaded with biases and cognitive errors -- especially confirmation bias, the tendency to exaggerate evidence that confirms what we already believe, and to ignore evidence that contradicts it. It has methodological errors that a sixth-grade science project winner could spot in 10 seconds. And that includes the evidence of near-death experiences. There is not a single account of an immaterial soul leaving the body in a near-death experience that meets the gold standard of scientific evidence. Not even close.
Christina bristles at the believer argument that scientists are "biased." Yes, they are, but not in the way that many believers argue:
Scientists are human, too: they don't want to die, and they'd be just as happy as anyone to learn that they were going to live forever.
Christina also points out that the trauma of near death is an altered brain state that can account for any altered perception:
Weird things often happen to people's minds during altered states of consciousness. Exhaustion, stress, distraction, trance-like repetition, optical illusion, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, sensory overload... any of these physical changes to the brain, and more, can create vivid "perceptions" that are entirely disconnected from reality. It's been extensively demonstrated. And being near death is an altered state of consciousness, a physical change to the brain.
I agree with Christina's arguments. I would extend them to those who suggest that they can give accurate accounts of what it is like to have a stroke, relying solely on introspection.

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