Listics

When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.
– Ben Stein

Thanks to the friend who sent this my way. It’s titled “Ben Stein Meets Darwin.” It’s originally from the photo by Kelly Engstrom illustrating the Scientific American article Six Things in Expelled That Ben Stein Doesn’t Want You to Know…

Here’s a pointer to Ben Paynter’s brief article in Wired 16.07 about using high tech to forecast seasonal crop production.

…the company sorts 100 gigs of intel every day, adding to a database of 50 terabytes and counting. It’s also moving into world production-prediction — wheat fields in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine are already in the data set, as are corn and soy plots in Brazil and Argentina. The firm expects to reach petabyte scale in five years.

Technorati Tags: ben paynter, Lanworth

Those who knew him were saddened by the death yesterday of former Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory Director Harlyn O. Halvorson.

In the Journal “Biology of the Cell” in 2007, Professor Halvorson reported on the development of the molecular biology program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, under his direction. He was at the University of Wisconsin at a critical time, and, in addition to his own research, he helped pull together the laboratory facilities and academic talent that assured UW’s distinction in the field for decades to come. Later in his career he performed a similar service for Brandeis University and again for the MBL.

Professor Halvorson was 83 years old. My sympathy to his friends and family.

Technorati Tags: Harlyn Halvorson, MBL

(A post in which we discover that the title has nothing to do with the content, even though there may have been a dim connection at some conceptual stage.)
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I hate to disagree with Rage Boy, but I don’t get it. I don’t get why Jill Bolte Taylor’s schtick is so egregious. I saw the TED talk and I shared it with a psychologist. He referred me to the case of Kim Peek, the savant who was born with a corpus callosum similarly shorted out, and on whom Dustin Hoffman’s “Rain Man” character was based. Peek never experienced what we think of as normalcy, and he had other congenital brain problems too. But he does have the corpus callosum problem in common with Taylor.

Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a shut-down of her corpus callosum severing communication between the right and left hemispheres of her brain as an effect of a stroke. Anecdotally, she shares her experience of the right brain as a massive parallel processor and the left brain as an orderly serial processor. She carries with her the memory of the powerful feeling of happiness and enlightenment she had when her corpus callosum crashed, and she calls it Nirvana.

She was Oprah Winfrey’s guest. Oprah and Eckhart Tolle have been flogging Tolle’s books, and they’ve associated that cosmic integral feeling of everything in the present moment that Taylor describes, with Tolle’s chicanery. RB claims that he simply finds “Jill Bolte Taylor incredibly tedious and annoying…,” but I wonder if he isn’t ginning up some guilt by association. Lie down with Eckhart Tolle, get up with spiritual fleas?

In her presentation she does have an aura of unreconstructed hippie, but as a scientist she is only describing what happened to her. She isn’t making claims about anything more metaphysical than the subjective experience of an acid trip. Personally, I like the idea that she had a brain-fault that tickled her God Spot, that she is able to associate what others might have described as a profound metaphysical experience in neuroanatomical terms.

I like her nerdiness. I think she and Kim Peek should go the road together, a double billing featuring prodigious feats of memory and self stimulated spirituality, and the neuroanatomical explanations for them.

Thanks NASA

Technorati Tags: Lockheed Martin, NASA, if we wreck up the earth maybe we can all move to mars and eat red dirt

“…the Vatican’s verification process for miracles is very strict and scientifically-investigated.”

I read it in the Wikipedia.

(With a little hat-tip and a hey nonni-nonni.)

Zo links to Taylor’s talk at TED.  Amazing stuff!  Shakes some positive reality into the discussion of the bicameral mind of the individual.  Not at all like the cultural anthropology of Jaynes’ pop-science that provided a hook on which to hang the classic, “Sects and Death.”

Had a bout of tachycardia today, but I didn’t know what it was when it came on. Seemed pretty obvious I was having heart trouble though. Beth drove me to the University Hospital Emergency Room. I presented as a 63 old, overweight, male, lightheaded, experiencing dizziness, shortness of breath, clamminess, chest discomfort.

They were kind enough to skip most of the intake paperwork and take me down to the examining room, shove an IV in my arm, and take my vitals: Pulse rate about 170, blood pressure way high. They hooked me up to the EKG machine and ran a few tests. The doc came back and prescribed an adenosine treatment. They shoved a dose of that down the IV efectively shutting down the electrical activity in my heart.

Within maybe ten seconds, my heart picked up with a normal heart beat, all the ER staff let out the breath they were holding, my blood pressure started down, and over the next few hours lying about watching the Disney channel, my heartbeat returned to my normal 68, and my blood pressure returned to the usual 120/78 or so.

Didn’t see any white light, but felt an uncomfortable pressure, first in the carotid arteries, then in the femoral, and my whole body felt flushed. Felt somehow cheated to have remained conscious while my heart was re-booted. But, the worst discomfort I experienced was the removal of all the tape and electrodes. Carla, the ER nurse, was quick, but enough hair came off with each tug that I was more than glad when it was over.

Technorati Tags: heart stopping excitement, benign rapid heart rate, I’m okay really I am, more bananas, less coffee