PORTLAND, JESUS AND WORK SLACKS

We had a fine weekend, my wife and I. We spent a part of Saturday in Portland, walking around, shopping at the Loyd Center at Ann Taylor, where my wife found some size 2 slacks for work, finally, after much disappointment at regular stores in Vancouver, our new hometown. Then we took in a movie, "Bloodline", which expands on and furthers the Holy Grail story found in Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Jesus Papers. In the end, director Bruce Burgess presents some striking evidence that will leave you agape. So watch it if you can before the Vatican burns the film at the stake. Later we ate Indian food which Mertie liked and which I hated. Not that I haven't had good Indian food, but this was so bad that I gagged when I followed one taste with the taste of a cucumber gruel. Really... I gagged. On a Sunday of love, we later walked along the river hand in hand and watched a horribly bad movie about sixteen wheelers gone astray on the Fear Network in the evening. We have yet to find a really good movie on that channel.

NOT NECESSARILY A CREATIONIST THOUGHT

"Whatever befalls the earth befalls the sons of earth. Man did not weave the web of life; he is merely a strand in it, whatever he does to the web, he does to himself." —Chief Seattle

AND WHY IS SHE IMPORTANT?

In complete disagreement, I imagine, with Ray Kurzweil is Baroness Greenfield. We came across this passage in Top 75 Questions of Science

“Changing a gene will change a protein that is made in the brain, and it will have lots of widespread and varied effects. Anyone gene participates in many functions, and many functions have the participation of many genes. Those genes in turn will be active or not according to what happens in your individual lifestyle. Gene therapy and genetic screening will be helpful, but we have to be very cautious about getting people all excited about these genes.” —Susan Greenfield (a baroness and member of the British House of Lords, researches neurological diseases)

IF YOU THINK HUMANS ARE ROTTEN, WHAT WOULD THEY TELL ROBOTS?

Also in 75 Questions, we came across these fascinating thoughts about robots and humans by Marvin Minsky.

“We don't make most appliances look like people. The new point to me is the idea that we don't want people to learn to order around servants that look like people, because that's catching. If you tell a household robot to do unspeakable, disgusting, or just boring things, you'll get the hang of telling other people to. And most human interactions are rotten already. People lie, cheat, do all sorts of awful things.” —Marvin Minsky (computer and robotics pioneer)

WHAT IF THEY ARE LIKE THREE YEAR OLD CHILDREN?

Steven Wise is an animal-rights lawyer, and this is what he has to say about animal consciousness in that same magazine, 75 Questions.

“At least two basic legal rights should be granted immediately. The first is bodily integrity. We may not eat chimpanzees; we may not use them in invasive biomedical research; we may not do anything to their bodies that we may not do to the bodies of our 3-year old children. The second right to which they are immediately entitled is bodily liberty. We may not kidnap them from Africa. We may not enslave them in steel and concrete cages. In countries in which they reside but are not native, we may place them in sanctuaries for their own benefit. In Western law, autonomy is a sufficient condition for basic legal rights. Autonomy requires that individuals be conscious, able to desire and act intentionally to achieve those desires, and have a sense of self sufficiently developed to allow them to understand that the life they're leading is their life, that what happens to them matters to them. Strong cases for the attribution of these two basic legal rights can be made for all the great apes, including chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans; for cetaceans, such as dolphins; and for elephants and African gray parrots.”

That magazine, Top 75 Questions of Science, which I bought for my flights to and from Ohio has been an interesting brief on many matters which science is causing us to consider. It worked exactly as I meant it to. I did not have to give complete and deep attention to the reading, yet it filled some of my otherwise boring hours on planes and in airports.

WHAT THE CRAP IS THIS?

In Sharon Begley’s science column for Newsweek this week, “Praise The Humble Dung Beetle” (June 9, 2008), she was giving us some of the arguments why more than our mammalian cousins need to be saved and put on endangered species lists. Beings like the dung beetle are often neglected because the powers that be think them beneath respect. So Sharon lists a few ways that crawly, creepy things are worth saving:

“Since the lesser beasts of the field can't just muscle their way to survival, they tend to have talents that higher ones—with more brains as well as brawn to draw on—don't. As a result, they're loaded with gizmos that human engineers are tapping for inspiration. The Namibian beetle, for instance, has tips on the bumpy scales of its wings that pull water from fog, a design that has inspired a fog-harvesting net (it's used in cooling towers, industrial condensers and dry farming regions). The spiral in mollusk shells, which fluids flow through especially smoothly and efficiently, has inspired a rotor that draws up to 85 percent less energy than standard fans and is finding its way into computers and air conditioners. Biologists are cloning mussel proteins to produce an epoxy, mimicking the bivalves' ability to stick to rocks, that is expected to rival any superglue on the market. . . .

“. . . as freshwater mussels have declined (70 percent of their species are threatened or endangered), taking with them their filtration services, water quality in streams, rivers and lakes has deteriorated badly. In the Chesapeake Bay, each adult oyster once filtered 60 gallons of water a day, packaging sediment and pollutants into blobs that fell harmlessly to the bay floor. Before the population crashed in the 1990s, oysters filtered 19 trillion gallons—an entire bay's worth—once a week. The survivors struggle to do that in a year. The result is cloudy, more polluted water, and a loss of fisheries and baymen's livelihoods."

Thank you, Sharon.

And here’s my haiku for this time at bat
based on a recent haiku hotel topic, SCENT:

Silly dung beetle —
he fails to understand
why I love pears.

Please to understand that scent and taste buds are intimately connected in humans. Think about—when one is chewing, what is she smelling?

OF MONKEYS AND MEN









If a monkey can use pure synaptical power to move an artificial arm, so can men and women, and that ability is also a part of Kurzweils' futuristic view of humankind's robotic future. You know the other day, I was watching TV, and I wanted to know just how unconsciously I can move my arm, so I started extending and retracting my arm in front of me, repetitiously, then I stopped thinking about my arm and resumed my conscious attention to the TV program while my arm kept extending out and back without any conscious command by myself except my noticing that my arm was still moving as if being controlled by a robot rather than myself. I recall saying to myself, "Well, see that arm is moving and I'm certainly no longer telling it to move," and I wasn't either. Now. . . I do acknowledge that I had to give my arm its initial command, yet it did keep working without any conscious attention after that, and I could observe and mentally comment on my arm's behavior without acknowledging the original movement command. What can I make of that. . . okay—so I'm crazy—but other than that, what can I make of the whole exercise in unconscious, robot-like control of an arm movement?

DO YOU FEEL YOUR HEART GROWING?

I am always disturbed when a modern poet still uses the heart as the organ from which love emanates, as a metaphor for love. It shows me that the poet knows nothing about neuroscience and probably wants to remain ignorant of it. All feeling issues from the brain. A long time ago, however, when I was a graduate student in English at Southern Illinois University, I was mightily troubled when some nameless critic pointed out that the arts were in decline because the real area of poetic inspiration was now science, and all genius had gone the way of science, leaving only clods like me, I concluded, to hold up poetry and fiction.

An article in Newsweek this week (May 19, 2008) by Anne Underwood, dips into some interesting medical advancements that tell me that we are drawing ever closer to Ray Kurzweil's world (The Singularity Is Near) when humans may not be humans as we now understand humans. What can we make of the idea that Anthony Atala is growing organs for animals already? Doesn’t that sort of medical project sound like what Kurzweil is talking about in his book? And what about the poor poet in his study? As for myself, the battle between art and science is dead. I’m thoroughly inspired by evolutionary psychology, and when I do try to put together one of my itsy-bitsy haiku or senryu, I do try to remember that nothing goes on in the heart but a lot of pumping of blood. Thus. . . my haiku which I entered into this blog not too many weeks ago:

If someone tells you
I love you with all my heart,
they hold back a lot.

The following are three longish snippets from Anne’s article. Thank you, Anne. My heart goes out to you!

[SNIP]
Dr. Jorg Gerlach at the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine is isolating patients' own skin stem cells from a small patch of healthy skin. Then, using a specially, developed skin-cell gun, he sprays them onto the wounded area in a fine mist. Over a period of two to six weeks, the cells grow into functional skin, including dermis, epidermis and blood vessels. There is little scarring, and because Gerlach includes the patient's own pigment cells in the mix, the new skin looks natural. In one pilot study, he treated eight patients in Germany with good results….

To build a nose, they [Robert Langer at MIT and Joseph Vacanti at Harvard] will create a nose-shaped scaffold, made of biocompatible, biodegradable materials, then seed it with the patient's own cells and nurture it in a chamber called a bioreactor that mimics conditions in the body. Weeks later, when cells have multiplied to form tissues, the nose will be surgically implanted; over the ensuing months, the scaffold will dissolve and be resorbed into the body. Using these same basic techniques, Atala [Anthony Atala at Wake Forest University] has created organs, including small kidneys that filter liquid and produce urine in the lab. When implanted in animals, the kidneys grow to full size and continue to work. “We start, and the body takes over,” he says….

Newall Washburn at Carnegie Mellon University is working on special gels to help tamp down inflammation at the site of a deep wound, allowing skin to regenerate without scarring. Dr. Charles Sfeir at the McGowan Institute is developing a powder containing bone proteins, growth factors and biodegradable cement that can be mixed with water in the operating room and molded to the shape of missing bone. Atala has created nerves that conduct impulses—at least in mice….
[PASTE

Happy Belated New Year!!!!!!!!!! or RETURNING AFTER AWHILE

I finally finished The Singularity Is Near. If even one-hundredth-thousandth of what Kurzweil imagines happens, the future, not too distant, will be quite a place to live in for hundreds of years each.

I've begun reading, writing and having fun with haiku. I just hope I don't get too serious about it and ruin it for myself. My biggest mistake was going onto Craigslist and finding the forum, haiku hotel where people enter, read and judge each other's haiku (haiku is both singular and plural).

Here's a science haiku which few people appreciated at haiku hotel:

DNA computes
on off on off on off on
switch hitting the rose

These are two more normal ones:

for sale or for trade
one serviceable haiku—
missing a foot

snow turns to rain
my umbrella opens to
syncopated rhythms

My next science read is The Stuff Of Thought by Steven Pinker which I just shoved into my backpack to tote around Clark County with me. Today, I'll go over to the Luepke Center to play cribbage for a couple of hours. Also in my backpack is Walt Whitman's America, a book I've been carrying around for months, trying to finish. It's almost too intellectually detailed to be a fun read, but it was meant to be studied more than read for enjoyment. A man called Reynolds wrote it.

It's been awhile since I've made an entry here, but I'm not dead yet, so my mind keeps turning over these eternal [infernal] problems that mortal men have. Mark Twain knew well enough, as the following words show us.

A FEW INCONSISTENCIES

"...a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell—mouths mercy, and invented hell—mouths Golden Rules and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!" —Mark Twain

THE RICH GET RICHER AND…

The following, below, is from the London Telegraph. All I can see is that this proposed exclusive golf camp for millionaires just goes to demonstrate how, as they used to say, “filthy rich” the filthy rich are getting. This would be a place only the very very very, yes, very, rich could afford to go as they trot about the world, living high off the labor of the laboring folk. The laboring people of the world create all this wealth for these people whose only contribution is the capital. All the real creative work is done by the hourly wage earners. These displays of wealth are disgusting in a time when much of the world’s population lives in poverty, without potable water, in conditions unfitting for a pig. Read it and gnash your teeth!

[SNIP]
Donald Trump's Controversial $2.1B Scottish Golf Resort Proposal Is Rejected

London Telegraph | Auslan Cramb | November 29, 2007 11:17 PM

Donald Trump's controversial plans to build a £1billion golf resort along a stretch of unspoilt coastline have been dealt a fatal blow.

Councillors have rejected the proposals for two links courses, a five-star hotel, a golf academy, nearly 1,000 holiday homes and 500 private houses in one of the biggest single property developments seen in Scotland.
[PASTIE]

CURRENT READING

Nine Stories by Salinger, The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil, and some Marvin Bell poetry. It occurred to me recently that all I want to do in the near future is read popular science and the world's best literature while working algebra problems to exercise my logical brain. Keep my nose out of politics and pop culture. I'll bet my resolve lasts until, maybe, a minute from now.

SMIRKY AND SON


Doesn't that smirk just say it all. It says, I'm a rich, connected SOB, and you fools that support me as I grow rich at your expense are truly fools and idiots, and don't I know it. All the way to the bank, I laugh.
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