While Pullman certainly has a point (my own kids do most of their playing outside, and are only allowed to play XBox on the weekends), he's also fearing the loss of a relatively recent concept - extended childhood.
Up until widespread schooling began in the 17th and 18th centuries, the modern concept of childhoood, as a time of play and learning lasting well into your teens, didn't really exist. "Real" childhood, that period where you are more of a burden than a help to your agrarian family, only lasted until you were old enough to start doing chores around the farm. By the time you were in your teens, you were probably starting to think about starting a family of your own.
While there is some controversy about whether modern childhood was "invented" in the 18th century, it certainly changed quite a lot. The changing standard of childhood is a little better understood in Japan, where the concept of modern childhood was largely introduced by globalization in the 19th century, and was thus studied a little more rigorously than in Europe and America, where it was a more organic process.
What many of us now consider "childhood" (school and play, with hardly any work until late teens) is really a 20th century phenomenon - once the West de-ruralized and mechanized, the amount of work needed to be performed on a daily basis dwindled to the point where child labor, at home or away, wasn't really needed or desired. The Western 1950s-70s were the absolute high-water mark for a childhood of outdoor leisure - not surprisingly, exactly the time when Pullman (and I, and a large chunk of Slashdot) grew up.
As with any nostalgia trip, Pullman (mis)remembers all the highlights of these times, but not the downsides like the often crushing boredom of having absolutely nothing to do on a rainy weekend (unless, like us, your were a geek and read a lot).
Maybe playing Madden 2007 on a rainy day leads to less creative thought than reading "The Mad Scientists Club" for the fifth time, but I don't think Pullman convincingly makes that case.
I agree that the "millions of embryos" scenario is unlikely, as I tend to believe that we will be able to dedifferentiate adult cells relatively soon. I would also doubt that in any event American women would feel the full effect of that "frightening future" - much more likely that millions of women in less-free societies would bear that burden. I would much rather pour a whole lot of research money into that and adult pluripotent research than ESCR - neither has nearly the kind of ethical issues and level of political heat that ESCR has.
I think, longterm, that ESCR is a dead end - the most that will come out of it is a whole lot of knowledge about how totipotent cells work and, probably, how to activate the proper genes or supply the right chemical signals to revert adult cells into them. Workable therapies will likely be only in the most experimental of stages when adult totipotent therapy starts coming online.
Regardless of how one feels about the ethics of ESCR, I think most people would rather use less controversial methods of obtaining stem cells if available. Again, TFA is the first step toward getting rid of the controversy and going forward on the needed therapy.
"Farming" embryos? Have you seen something that makes you think this is likely to happen? When a couple chooses to pursue in vitro fertilization, literally dozens of embryos are created. Not all of them are used in the process. The surplus embryos are either discarded or cryogenically stored. Believe me, there's no shortage of embryos to work with, even without "farming" them.
It depends on which part of the development lifecycle you're talking about. If you're only talking about the "research" phase, and even then only that part of the research that's primarily interested in how to coax embryonic stem cells to exhibit specific behaviours (such as differentiating into specific tissues and only those tissues, how to prevent stem cells from becoming cancerous, etc.), then, sure, spare IVF embryos would likely be enough to support that research.
However, there is a whole other side to the research that isn't amenable to just using spares - therapeutic cloning. There're plenty of good reasons to suspect that embryonic stem cells that come from a foreign donor will not create good therapies. Tissue rejection, cancerous growth and a lot of other factors make the use of such "foreign" cells problematic. Cloned stem cells, on the other hand, potentially have fewer problems in this area.
Until the latest research, the only way to make cloned cells was by creating (aka "farming") embryos by fusing nuclear DNA from the donor with an egg. See the Wikipedia article on Hwang Woo-Suk under "Laboratory Technique" to see how that process has been used in the past. While that was an extreme case, egg donation was a major problem, causing Hwang to coerce his female colleagues to be able to procure the necessary volume of eggs, and thus embryos, needed just for research.
If someone succeeds in making therapeutic cloning a success using a variant of the Dolly the Sheep method, you will need to be able to create millions of embryos on an industrial scale. Women will be pressured to donate eggs so that loved ones can be cured of terrible diseases, and millions of embryos would be created for the sole purpose of being disassembled for their therapeutic value.
Sounds a whole lot like "farming" to me. A technique that allows us to dedifferentiate adult cells back into a pluripotent or totipotent state would be much preferrable, so I'm very excited by the research in TFA.
Nah, everyone knows dark matter is just a bunch of hydrinos.
Come on, when has Randell Mills every led us wrong? He and those Steorn folks will have us swimming in free energy, but everything will get a lot darker and heavier. I apparently have some of that dark matter hiding around my torso these days...
While the technique for creating the covert channel is novel, as you say, the workarounds are trivially simple (adding random jitter, enabling the Nagle algorithm, etc.)
The hype about this study is really ridiculous, and I've named it the Duh!scovery of the day over on my blog.
Now, maybe we're just too blasé, but if someone has physical access to your keyboard and can sniff all of your network packets, your security is so hosed that the use of a JitterBugTM is the least of your worries.
Again, if a spy has your user name, access to your computer and hooks into your network... you are, as the geeks would say, pwnd.
(A duh!scovery is a study or research paper that either states the obvious, is designed purely to get opinions into the news section, or wildly overstates its own case.)
It doesn't appear that the technology in question would do that (the FA talks about spermatogonial stem cells, so presumably it requires biologically male embryos).
An interesting meta-question is what might that (female-only reproduction) do to evolution? If we don't move into directed evolution (via DNA tinkering or selective abortion), how would having only female gametes change the rate of evolution? The reason that I ask is that male gametes are created at a fantastic rate, creating trillions of possible chromosomal mutations over the lifespan of a male. Female gametes, in contrast, are created at a very deliberate pace (either early on in the development of the ovaries, or, according to some more recent research, on-demand once a month from ovarian stem cells) - far fewer opportunities to screw up the copying and create a mutation.
Look at the one chromosome that is male-only - the Y chromosome, the most stunted, bizarrely mutated one of the bunch. Lots and lots of changes occurred on that branch, and without female evolutionary "brakes", it nearly mutated itself out of existence.
Would female-only reproduction cause a slowdown in genetic drift and mutation? Combined with the technological ability to modify our environment to minimize evolutionary pressures, this could keep humanity percolating at the homo sapiens sapiens level for a long time. An interesting point to ponder...
Any time someone brings up the greenhouse effect as an arguement for alternative energy, the debate over anthropic global warming re-erupts and the issues are forgotten about amidst the flames and political bullshit. Better to simply avoid that debate, leave it for the environmentalists and the neocons to fight it out, and focus on the other issues so that people understand why we need to quit fossil fuels.
I don't have much of a beef with what you're saying, but I find it funny that whenever someone wants to say "evil Republicans", they use the word "neocon", even when it doesn't fit.
Many (if not most) neocons are actually very strongly in favor of alternative energy. They even drive Priuses.
Now, they generally become boosters of alternative energy for geopolitical reasons rather than environmental ones (they don't want to subsidize Middle Eastern kleptocracies), but most of them are happy that there are other, pro-environment reasons to do so as well.
The original neocons were generally are ex-Trotskyites (I'm thinking of Irving Kristol here). The second wave were also ex-liberals or leftists (William Bennett, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, James Q. Wilson - members of the anti-communist left that turned rightward). The primary failings of the neocons are the primary failing of the left in general - they think that the world is perfectable, given enough (love/power/use of force/crystal energy).
That leads them to do things you may not like (topple bad regimes in a [misguided?] attempt to liberalize them), and others that you may like (push for alternative energy, campaign to eliminate third-world debt). But they're very different from the corporate Republicanism that has historically been most resistant to new energy.
Now, of course, that they're starting to figure out the angles to make money off alternative energy, you can bet that the corporate Republicans will rapidly become "green". That may not be ideologically "pure", but it sure beats the alternative...
On top of that, there is the annoying habit of the mass media's description of any type of medical research as having the potential to treat "cancer or Alzheimer's" (or AIDS or Parkinson's).
These types of bioassays are the ultimate in crap shoots - there is no specific reason to suspect that brain coral just happens to secrete a substance that treats brain cancer. We're just looking for all sorts of oddly shaped proteins and hoping that one of them fits a receptor somewhere. It's just as likely that we'd find a substance that reduces flatulence, but we'd probably miss that one because no one is looking for it.
If I read one more article claiming that stem cells will cure everything from cancer to acne, I think I'm gonna scream...
I think both Jason and Peter have done an excellent job.
Peter's design is the most consistent and well thought out, but it has a bit of a "corporate" feel to it. That said, I really like the reworked "vote" button (everyone else's "vote" button sticks out like the sore thumb it is) and the easy to find search box. The banner is a little drab, though.
Jason's design looks exactly how I would envision an updated "Taco" design would look. It really doesn't change things all that much, but it's a much more refined look. I like the subtle drop shadows and boxing, the improved banner and the (again) easy to find search box. It's a design that refreshes the Slashdot look.
I really don't like Michael's design at all. It just looks like Slashdot got accidentally bleached. It's not even the best of the "white" designs. That distinction goes to Lukasz Lukasiewicz, whose design is subtle and drop-dead gorgeous, but because it uses blue, Taco will never pick it. If you're going with a white design, blue is really the better contrast color - dark aqua doesn't blend as well. My big nit to pick with the design is how it hides the search box - move it up to the banner like the Jason/Peter designs and it would be a winner.
Among the others mentioned, Poul Anderson's Tau Zero deals with the idea of one universe's Big Crunch influencing another universe's Big Bang. Both humans and post-humans make an appearance in the story, along with the requisite aliens.
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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I never said the organization is nice. Individual JWs are generally friendly and honest, as it's a requirement of the religion. You aren't going to be very successful at door-to-door proselytization and enticing people to join a fairly restrictive religion if you aren't pretty friendly.
Like many authoritarian religions, fear of being ejected from the organization is a great motivational tool. In fact, the JW organization makes a big deal out of "righteous fear" - fear of making God (and by proxy, his organization on earth) angry or disappointed keeps you on the straight and narrow. They drum in over and over the need to be scrupulously honest in all dealings with other people - and if you're ever caught being less than honest, out the door you go.
I don't agree with the tactics, but the results are nice and friendly people. That they then do things (like letting children die due to their religious prohibition on blood transfusions) shows just how big the disconnect between "nice" and "good" can be. (Also remember that 99% of JWs believe that Armageddon and the resurrection of the dead are right around the corner. Death is often thought of as a sort of extended vacation - that dead baby will be reunited with his folks "any day now". Sad and delusional, but it's the reality of the situation.)
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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I understand where you're coming from, but rationality and religion are not necessarily diametrically opposed.
The fact that we live in modern civilizations that largely (if imperfectly) manage to support six billion plus people is at least somewhat due to the rational use of religion as a force for unifying diverse people in geographic proximity to each other. The rise of organized religion, the concept of a "people", the beginnings of nations and the ability to organize and rule large populations all came about around the same time and are interconnected. It's what allowed us to move from our long term (25,000+ years) rut of hunter/gatherer societies into the more complex societies that allowed the explosion of ideas and technologies that gave us the world we live in today.
Someone who lived in a time when tribes routinely starved, killed and raided neightboring tribes and where everyone, regardless of skill level, had to spend the majority of their day in pursuit of their next meal might very rationally decide that joining up with that proto-nation of religious whackos over the hill that nonetheless ate three square meals a day, and where you had real choices about what you did day to day, was a very good idea. In the building of civilization, religion worked.
Unfortunately, it also brought a whole lot of baggage with it as well. Especially in the faiths that were closely intertwined with the ruling class, it segregated the world between "us and them" in a way that was much more damaging than the older tribal rivalries.
Someone looking at religion these days could rationally decide that religion still works, that the people who belong to churches and regularly attend services tend to be happier, live longer, have fewer run-ins with the law and are more resilient in adversity. That the underlying creed may have its mystic or non-rational aspects might be ignored or even enjoyed (I know Wiccans who absolutely know that the whole enterprise is nutty, but get a kick out of all the trappings of the faith).
Others of us (like myself) will never be able to square that circle. I can recognize that religion is in many ways a societal good, but I can't get around the internal contradictions of any of the major faiths to have a personal faith. Religion simply doesn't "speak to me" on anything but an intellectual level. My rationality interferes with (or supercedes or allows me to see beyond - take your pick) the ability to believe in Big Sky Father. Yours obviously leads you there as well. Where we differ is that I'm not so completely self-sure that what I think of as reason is necessarily the "truth".
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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I completely agree with you, and sympathize with the anger and frustration you must feel. While much of my immediate family are Jehovah's Witnesses, I am not. Because of this fact, they have not spoken to me for 14 years.
I'm not overly fond of many of teachings of the church, but I'm also cognizant that most every religion has its nutty aspects. JWs also tend to be very nice and honest people, and live lives of moderation that tend to reduce their need for medical assistance, all of which are also a requirements of the church. It's a very mixed bag.
Unfortunately, rationally looking at your own religion is not a strength that many possess.
Re:JW's must be happy with this one
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Argh! Only 8,524 are still alive. Most of the 144,000 (if you believe such things) are dead (but alive in heaven).
Re:JW's must be happy with this one
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This is all very inside-baseball, but considering that all but a maximum of 8,524 of the 144,000 are supposedly dead, and those are all well into their 80s, I don't think much jumping is going on...:)
For those of you who are curious, Witnesses split themselves into two groups - a ruling class of 144,000 that will die and rule with Christ in heaven, and the rest, who will live forever in perfect bodies on Earth. The generally accepted cutoff date for getting into the ruling class was 1935, although they have left themselves some wiggle room for "replacement candidates" if one of the pre-1935ers renounced the faith before they died. In the chart linked above, "Memorial Partakers Worldwide" is code for members of the ruling class that are still alive. During their one and only yearly holiday (the Memorial of the Last Supper - a sort of JW eucharist), members of the ruling class partake in the unleavened bread and wine, while everyone else just passes the stuff around. It's also generally accepted that a large number of the partakers are self-deluded (being a member of the ruling class is not centrally organized - you are supposed to find out yourself via the Holy Spirit), so the exact number is a little fuzzy. The reported number for each congregation is the best guess of the local elders - they figure out who partook, and subtract out the obvious nutters.
Re:Transfusion != Transplant
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The official position of the church is that you cannot use any of the major blood fractions (red or white blood cells, plasma or platelets), but the use of certain blood fractions (animal hemoglobin, interferon, interleukin, etc.) is left up to personal conscience.
A handy chart for the various blood related things JWs may or may not use can be found here.
I agree, but this is mostly due to the fact that the transfused blood cells quickly die off and are discarded by the body, replaced by the host's own blood cells. The implanted organs are supposed to survive for years, and thus are a constant source of irritation to the body's immune system.
Re:Driving force for bloodless surgery
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Speaking as someone who has family members who are Jehovah's Witnesses, they really are the driving force for bloodless surgery.
As such, they advocate the use of blood transfer alternatives.
There are various groups of Witnesses that advocate changing the doctrine, but, however odd it may seem to the rest of us, it's one of core teachings of the church and has survived even when other once-rejected medical technologies (organ transplants, certain immunizations) have now been accepted.
This doctrine has caused the Witnesses to push the medical community to come up with many alternatives to transfusion. These alternatives include Erythropoietin Therapy, Hemopure, a bovine-hemoglobin based blood substitute (this was quite a surprise, as previously even animal blood was considered taboo), perfluorocarbon based blood substitutes (back when I was young, I knew Witnesses who had been guinea pigs for this stuff), and a host of others.
There are also specific surgical guidelines published in dealing with Witnesses.
All in all, the Witnesses are one of the main driving forces for research into lessening the need for blood transfusions. There are others to be sure (type matching, blood shortages, infectious diseases carried by tainted blood, etc.), but nothing beats having a large pool of otherwise healthy patients who are highly motivated to be test subjects.
Keep digging down in that research, as the Carver is just a clone of the GM Lean Machine.
They used to have one on display at DisneyWorld in the late 70s-early 80s, along with a GM-produced video that showed how it worked. Pretty nifty tech - I definitely wanted one when I was a kid. To this day, I can remember the scene in the video where the guy in the Lean Machine (which was enclosed) is looking up at the motorcyclist who is getting drenched in the rainstorm. The look on the cyclist's face as the dry guy in the Lean Machine zooms off was priceless.
But the thing is, it does not matter what the cause is. If the cycle continues it will certainly, without a doubt, lead to the death of us as a civilization, whether we were the cause or not.
This is the part of the climate change (a better term than global warming) hysteria that I simply don't understand.
I am fairly certain, given the existing data, that there has been and will continue to be some level of anthropogenic climate change in the past 150 years. The amount and direction of the change, and its root causes, are still far from clear (does recent warming have more to do with decreased particulate matter [soot] than with increased carbon dioxide? why have there been notable periods of cooling or stasis during this period?).
The problem I have is why this change (even if you take the higher estimates of a 4-6 degrees Celsius increase from 1950-2100) inevitably leads to the death of our civilization. It would undoubtedly be disruptive (especially in coastal areas and oceanic islands), but why would civilization collapse? Civilization blossomed during the Little Ice Age of 1550-1850, where some estimates place the global cooling at 3-6 degrees Celsius - a similarly disruptive and sudden climate change.
Higher global carbon dioxide and temperatures will likely increase crop yields. Lands lost to desertification will likely be offset by increasingly fertile areas of former tundra in Canada and Asia. Technology will undoubted advance (and at an ever increasing rate) - with 22nd century technology, power production surely be much more environmentally benign and, if needed, we'll probably have tech that will allow us to reverse the carbon trends (given real fusion power, carbon sequestration and environmental cleanup become a lot cheaper and easier).
I have no worries that climate change will wipe out our civilization. An escalating clash of civilizations, increasingly simple biotech that can be used for bad ends as well as good and nuclear proliferation are what keep me up at night. Climate change just requires some technology and willpower - once (if) it hurts enough, the willpower will be there, and I'm sure the tech will be. The important thing to do is to mitigate the damage that occurs between then and now - especially on various fragile ecosystems. We need massive biological assays (start gathering a LOT of DNA and seeds now and store them safely), protected eco-preserves and a host of other things are some things you can help do right now. I personally donate to The Nature Conservancy because they put money directly into those kinds of projects rather than activism, but there are plenty of other outlets. You could buy personal carbon offsets, invest in wind power, or buy sustainable electricity.
Stop waiting for politicians to do the right thing - do it yourself!
A stiring defense of science, sir. Although I am trying to wrap my head around the cognitive dissonance of your stated need for rationalist integrity:
Assertions receive increased attempts at falsification; this quickly weeds out assertions that are not falsifiable. Weeding out non-falsifiable ideas is essential to maintaining rationalist integrity.
and your sig:
Conservatism is a provable error in logic. -- me
Sounds like someone who's trying to wrap a political disagreement within a veneer of "science". Which was precisely what the parent poster was complaining about.
Unless of course a scientist is fudging his results to maintain a desired result. Science as a community product isn't faith based, but only a fool would extend that to mean that anyone in a lab coat is an impartial participant.
I hold no truck with any particular political philosophy (I tend end up on the squishy libertarian side of most arguments, but I find worthwhile ideas in progressivism and conservatism as well). Conservatism is such a large and diverse philosophy (with nearly as many sects and subsects as any religion) that claiming it to be a "provable logic error" is either ignorant or simply polemical.
I expected much better from God Almighty. I may have to look for a new god...
Slashdot Mirror
Alternatively, I might just be a huge Iron Maiden fan...
Up until widespread schooling began in the 17th and 18th centuries, the modern concept of childhoood, as a time of play and learning lasting well into your teens, didn't really exist. "Real" childhood, that period where you are more of a burden than a help to your agrarian family, only lasted until you were old enough to start doing chores around the farm. By the time you were in your teens, you were probably starting to think about starting a family of your own.
While there is some controversy about whether modern childhood was "invented" in the 18th century, it certainly changed quite a lot. The changing standard of childhood is a little better understood in Japan, where the concept of modern childhood was largely introduced by globalization in the 19th century, and was thus studied a little more rigorously than in Europe and America, where it was a more organic process.
What many of us now consider "childhood" (school and play, with hardly any work until late teens) is really a 20th century phenomenon - once the West de-ruralized and mechanized, the amount of work needed to be performed on a daily basis dwindled to the point where child labor, at home or away, wasn't really needed or desired. The Western 1950s-70s were the absolute high-water mark for a childhood of outdoor leisure - not surprisingly, exactly the time when Pullman (and I, and a large chunk of Slashdot) grew up.
As with any nostalgia trip, Pullman (mis)remembers all the highlights of these times, but not the downsides like the often crushing boredom of having absolutely nothing to do on a rainy weekend (unless, like us, your were a geek and read a lot).
Maybe playing Madden 2007 on a rainy day leads to less creative thought than reading "The Mad Scientists Club" for the fifth time, but I don't think Pullman convincingly makes that case.
I think, longterm, that ESCR is a dead end - the most that will come out of it is a whole lot of knowledge about how totipotent cells work and, probably, how to activate the proper genes or supply the right chemical signals to revert adult cells into them. Workable therapies will likely be only in the most experimental of stages when adult totipotent therapy starts coming online.
Regardless of how one feels about the ethics of ESCR, I think most people would rather use less controversial methods of obtaining stem cells if available. Again, TFA is the first step toward getting rid of the controversy and going forward on the needed therapy.
However, there is a whole other side to the research that isn't amenable to just using spares - therapeutic cloning. There're plenty of good reasons to suspect that embryonic stem cells that come from a foreign donor will not create good therapies. Tissue rejection, cancerous growth and a lot of other factors make the use of such "foreign" cells problematic. Cloned stem cells, on the other hand, potentially have fewer problems in this area.
Until the latest research, the only way to make cloned cells was by creating (aka "farming") embryos by fusing nuclear DNA from the donor with an egg. See the Wikipedia article on Hwang Woo-Suk under "Laboratory Technique" to see how that process has been used in the past. While that was an extreme case, egg donation was a major problem, causing Hwang to coerce his female colleagues to be able to procure the necessary volume of eggs, and thus embryos, needed just for research.
If someone succeeds in making therapeutic cloning a success using a variant of the Dolly the Sheep method, you will need to be able to create millions of embryos on an industrial scale. Women will be pressured to donate eggs so that loved ones can be cured of terrible diseases, and millions of embryos would be created for the sole purpose of being disassembled for their therapeutic value.
Sounds a whole lot like "farming" to me. A technique that allows us to dedifferentiate adult cells back into a pluripotent or totipotent state would be much preferrable, so I'm very excited by the research in TFA.
Archimedes Pluton - after all, he probably discovered it first.
Come on, when has Randell Mills every led us wrong? He and those Steorn folks will have us swimming in free energy, but everything will get a lot darker and heavier. I apparently have some of that dark matter hiding around my torso these days...
The hype about this study is really ridiculous, and I've named it the Duh!scovery of the day over on my blog.
(A duh!scovery is a study or research paper that either states the obvious, is designed purely to get opinions into the news section, or wildly overstates its own case.)An interesting meta-question is what might that (female-only reproduction) do to evolution? If we don't move into directed evolution (via DNA tinkering or selective abortion), how would having only female gametes change the rate of evolution? The reason that I ask is that male gametes are created at a fantastic rate, creating trillions of possible chromosomal mutations over the lifespan of a male. Female gametes, in contrast, are created at a very deliberate pace (either early on in the development of the ovaries, or, according to some more recent research, on-demand once a month from ovarian stem cells) - far fewer opportunities to screw up the copying and create a mutation.
Look at the one chromosome that is male-only - the Y chromosome, the most stunted, bizarrely mutated one of the bunch. Lots and lots of changes occurred on that branch, and without female evolutionary "brakes", it nearly mutated itself out of existence.
Would female-only reproduction cause a slowdown in genetic drift and mutation? Combined with the technological ability to modify our environment to minimize evolutionary pressures, this could keep humanity percolating at the homo sapiens sapiens level for a long time. An interesting point to ponder...
Many (if not most) neocons are actually very strongly in favor of alternative energy. They even drive Priuses.
Now, they generally become boosters of alternative energy for geopolitical reasons rather than environmental ones (they don't want to subsidize Middle Eastern kleptocracies), but most of them are happy that there are other, pro-environment reasons to do so as well.
The original neocons were generally are ex-Trotskyites (I'm thinking of Irving Kristol here). The second wave were also ex-liberals or leftists (William Bennett, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, James Q. Wilson - members of the anti-communist left that turned rightward). The primary failings of the neocons are the primary failing of the left in general - they think that the world is perfectable, given enough (love/power/use of force/crystal energy).
That leads them to do things you may not like (topple bad regimes in a [misguided?] attempt to liberalize them), and others that you may like (push for alternative energy, campaign to eliminate third-world debt). But they're very different from the corporate Republicanism that has historically been most resistant to new energy.
Now, of course, that they're starting to figure out the angles to make money off alternative energy, you can bet that the corporate Republicans will rapidly become "green". That may not be ideologically "pure", but it sure beats the alternative...
These types of bioassays are the ultimate in crap shoots - there is no specific reason to suspect that brain coral just happens to secrete a substance that treats brain cancer. We're just looking for all sorts of oddly shaped proteins and hoping that one of them fits a receptor somewhere. It's just as likely that we'd find a substance that reduces flatulence, but we'd probably miss that one because no one is looking for it.
If I read one more article claiming that stem cells will cure everything from cancer to acne, I think I'm gonna scream...
Peter's design is the most consistent and well thought out, but it has a bit of a "corporate" feel to it. That said, I really like the reworked "vote" button (everyone else's "vote" button sticks out like the sore thumb it is) and the easy to find search box. The banner is a little drab, though.
Jason's design looks exactly how I would envision an updated "Taco" design would look. It really doesn't change things all that much, but it's a much more refined look. I like the subtle drop shadows and boxing, the improved banner and the (again) easy to find search box. It's a design that refreshes the Slashdot look.
I really don't like Michael's design at all. It just looks like Slashdot got accidentally bleached. It's not even the best of the "white" designs. That distinction goes to Lukasz Lukasiewicz, whose design is subtle and drop-dead gorgeous, but because it uses blue, Taco will never pick it. If you're going with a white design, blue is really the better contrast color - dark aqua doesn't blend as well. My big nit to pick with the design is how it hides the search box - move it up to the banner like the Jason/Peter designs and it would be a winner.
Among the others mentioned, Poul Anderson's Tau Zero deals with the idea of one universe's Big Crunch influencing another universe's Big Bang. Both humans and post-humans make an appearance in the story, along with the requisite aliens.
Like many authoritarian religions, fear of being ejected from the organization is a great motivational tool. In fact, the JW organization makes a big deal out of "righteous fear" - fear of making God (and by proxy, his organization on earth) angry or disappointed keeps you on the straight and narrow. They drum in over and over the need to be scrupulously honest in all dealings with other people - and if you're ever caught being less than honest, out the door you go.
I don't agree with the tactics, but the results are nice and friendly people. That they then do things (like letting children die due to their religious prohibition on blood transfusions) shows just how big the disconnect between "nice" and "good" can be. (Also remember that 99% of JWs believe that Armageddon and the resurrection of the dead are right around the corner. Death is often thought of as a sort of extended vacation - that dead baby will be reunited with his folks "any day now". Sad and delusional, but it's the reality of the situation.)
The fact that we live in modern civilizations that largely (if imperfectly) manage to support six billion plus people is at least somewhat due to the rational use of religion as a force for unifying diverse people in geographic proximity to each other. The rise of organized religion, the concept of a "people", the beginnings of nations and the ability to organize and rule large populations all came about around the same time and are interconnected. It's what allowed us to move from our long term (25,000+ years) rut of hunter/gatherer societies into the more complex societies that allowed the explosion of ideas and technologies that gave us the world we live in today.
Someone who lived in a time when tribes routinely starved, killed and raided neightboring tribes and where everyone, regardless of skill level, had to spend the majority of their day in pursuit of their next meal might very rationally decide that joining up with that proto-nation of religious whackos over the hill that nonetheless ate three square meals a day, and where you had real choices about what you did day to day, was a very good idea. In the building of civilization, religion worked.
Unfortunately, it also brought a whole lot of baggage with it as well. Especially in the faiths that were closely intertwined with the ruling class, it segregated the world between "us and them" in a way that was much more damaging than the older tribal rivalries.
Someone looking at religion these days could rationally decide that religion still works, that the people who belong to churches and regularly attend services tend to be happier, live longer, have fewer run-ins with the law and are more resilient in adversity. That the underlying creed may have its mystic or non-rational aspects might be ignored or even enjoyed (I know Wiccans who absolutely know that the whole enterprise is nutty, but get a kick out of all the trappings of the faith).
Others of us (like myself) will never be able to square that circle. I can recognize that religion is in many ways a societal good, but I can't get around the internal contradictions of any of the major faiths to have a personal faith. Religion simply doesn't "speak to me" on anything but an intellectual level. My rationality interferes with (or supercedes or allows me to see beyond - take your pick) the ability to believe in Big Sky Father. Yours obviously leads you there as well. Where we differ is that I'm not so completely self-sure that what I think of as reason is necessarily the "truth".
I'm not overly fond of many of teachings of the church, but I'm also cognizant that most every religion has its nutty aspects. JWs also tend to be very nice and honest people, and live lives of moderation that tend to reduce their need for medical assistance, all of which are also a requirements of the church. It's a very mixed bag.
Unfortunately, rationally looking at your own religion is not a strength that many possess.
Argh! Only 8,524 are still alive. Most of the 144,000 (if you believe such things) are dead (but alive in heaven).
For those of you who are curious, Witnesses split themselves into two groups - a ruling class of 144,000 that will die and rule with Christ in heaven, and the rest, who will live forever in perfect bodies on Earth. The generally accepted cutoff date for getting into the ruling class was 1935, although they have left themselves some wiggle room for "replacement candidates" if one of the pre-1935ers renounced the faith before they died. In the chart linked above, "Memorial Partakers Worldwide" is code for members of the ruling class that are still alive. During their one and only yearly holiday (the Memorial of the Last Supper - a sort of JW eucharist), members of the ruling class partake in the unleavened bread and wine, while everyone else just passes the stuff around. It's also generally accepted that a large number of the partakers are self-deluded (being a member of the ruling class is not centrally organized - you are supposed to find out yourself via the Holy Spirit), so the exact number is a little fuzzy. The reported number for each congregation is the best guess of the local elders - they figure out who partook, and subtract out the obvious nutters.
A handy chart for the various blood related things JWs may or may not use can be found here.
I agree, but this is mostly due to the fact that the transfused blood cells quickly die off and are discarded by the body, replaced by the host's own blood cells. The implanted organs are supposed to survive for years, and thus are a constant source of irritation to the body's immune system.
Jehovah's Witness have a theological objection to blood transfusions, but unlike Christian Scientists, not to medical treatment in general. In fact, they are quite insistent on high quality healthcare.
As such, they advocate the use of blood transfer alternatives.
There are various groups of Witnesses that advocate changing the doctrine, but, however odd it may seem to the rest of us, it's one of core teachings of the church and has survived even when other once-rejected medical technologies (organ transplants, certain immunizations) have now been accepted.
This doctrine has caused the Witnesses to push the medical community to come up with many alternatives to transfusion. These alternatives include Erythropoietin Therapy, Hemopure, a bovine-hemoglobin based blood substitute (this was quite a surprise, as previously even animal blood was considered taboo), perfluorocarbon based blood substitutes (back when I was young, I knew Witnesses who had been guinea pigs for this stuff), and a host of others. There are also specific surgical guidelines published in dealing with Witnesses.
All in all, the Witnesses are one of the main driving forces for research into lessening the need for blood transfusions. There are others to be sure (type matching, blood shortages, infectious diseases carried by tainted blood, etc.), but nothing beats having a large pool of otherwise healthy patients who are highly motivated to be test subjects.
They used to have one on display at DisneyWorld in the late 70s-early 80s, along with a GM-produced video that showed how it worked. Pretty nifty tech - I definitely wanted one when I was a kid. To this day, I can remember the scene in the video where the guy in the Lean Machine (which was enclosed) is looking up at the motorcyclist who is getting drenched in the rainstorm. The look on the cyclist's face as the dry guy in the Lean Machine zooms off was priceless.
I am fairly certain, given the existing data, that there has been and will continue to be some level of anthropogenic climate change in the past 150 years. The amount and direction of the change, and its root causes, are still far from clear (does recent warming have more to do with decreased particulate matter [soot] than with increased carbon dioxide? why have there been notable periods of cooling or stasis during this period?).
The problem I have is why this change (even if you take the higher estimates of a 4-6 degrees Celsius increase from 1950-2100) inevitably leads to the death of our civilization. It would undoubtedly be disruptive (especially in coastal areas and oceanic islands), but why would civilization collapse? Civilization blossomed during the Little Ice Age of 1550-1850, where some estimates place the global cooling at 3-6 degrees Celsius - a similarly disruptive and sudden climate change.
Higher global carbon dioxide and temperatures will likely increase crop yields. Lands lost to desertification will likely be offset by increasingly fertile areas of former tundra in Canada and Asia. Technology will undoubted advance (and at an ever increasing rate) - with 22nd century technology, power production surely be much more environmentally benign and, if needed, we'll probably have tech that will allow us to reverse the carbon trends (given real fusion power, carbon sequestration and environmental cleanup become a lot cheaper and easier).
I have no worries that climate change will wipe out our civilization. An escalating clash of civilizations, increasingly simple biotech that can be used for bad ends as well as good and nuclear proliferation are what keep me up at night. Climate change just requires some technology and willpower - once (if) it hurts enough, the willpower will be there, and I'm sure the tech will be. The important thing to do is to mitigate the damage that occurs between then and now - especially on various fragile ecosystems. We need massive biological assays (start gathering a LOT of DNA and seeds now and store them safely), protected eco-preserves and a host of other things are some things you can help do right now. I personally donate to The Nature Conservancy because they put money directly into those kinds of projects rather than activism, but there are plenty of other outlets. You could buy personal carbon offsets, invest in wind power, or buy sustainable electricity.
Stop waiting for politicians to do the right thing - do it yourself!
I expected much better from God Almighty. I may have to look for a new god...
Afraid it's all mine. Just seemed apropos.