Mar 31
A friend recently asked me, “What’s the next step in human evolution?” As much as I have read on the topic of evolutionary biology and psychology, I had never really considered this. I think there are few reasons for this.
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Mar 30
I’ve just migrated from Drupal to WordPress and have made my previous theme available. It’s a xtemplate theme which isn’t as popular as phptemplate, but it works. The theme is a hybrid of the negen9 theme and Dan Cederholm’s previous version of SimpleBits. It only works for Drupal 4.6. It’s available freely, no credits are necessary. If someone would like to update it for 4.7, please feel free. I can provide limited support. If you have a question, please post it here.
Mar 30
After watching the protests over the past few days, I’ve been stuck by the number of people carrying the flag of Mexico. In a protest for U.S. amnesty and citizenship it seems to me that there would be more American flags that Mexican flags. I think this signals a “divided allegiance” that Theodore Roosevelt spoke of in 1919. Read more
Mar 30
Mar 29
On the turning away from the pale and downtrodden. And the words they say which we won’t understand. Don’t accept that what’s happening is just a case of others’ suffering or you’ll find that you’re joining in the turning away.
It’s a sin that somehow light is changing to shadow and casting it’s shroud over all we have known. Unaware how the ranks have grown. Driven on by a heart of stone. We could find that we’re all alone in the dream of the proud. Read more
Mar 27
Kay Redfield Jamison describes her own suicide attempt in Night Falls Fast:
“I did not consider it a selfish or not-selfish thing to have done. It was simply the end of what I could bear, the last afternoon of having to imagine waking up the next morning only to start all over again with a thick mind and black imaginings. It was the final outcome to a bad disease, a disease it seemed to me I would never get the better of. No amount of love from or for other people — and there was a lot — could help. No advantage of a caring family and fabulous job was enough to overcome the pain and hopelessness I felt; no passionate or romantic love, however strong, could make a difference. Nothing alive and warm could make its way in through my carapace. I knew my life to be a shambles and I believed — incontestably — that my family, friends and patients would be better off without me. There wasn’t much of me left anymore, anyway, and I thought my death would free up the wasted energies and well-meant efforts that were being wasted in my behalf.”
A review of her book, by Andrew Solomon, is available on the New York Times website.
Molecular biology is at a turning point and we have to accept that both nature and nurture—in the traditions of Darwin and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, respectively—coexist in the laws governing life. The weight of the new evidence from prion research is simply too powerful to ignore. Biologists need to get used to the idea that there’s no end in sight when it comes to new insights and scientific breakthroughs—an idea that has long been accepted by physicists who are subject to regular scientific revolutions. I wonder if knowledge is, like the universe, basically endless and in constant expansion, just as the complexity of life itself is also expanding infinitely.
Source: Seed: The Prion Anomaly
Mar 16
Here is the latest round up of books that I’ve read in the past few months:
Mar 11
I was taken to the hospital on Wed (2/23) morning and do not recall anything from that day. I know that I was hooked up to a respirator and a bunch of other machines. When I first woke up I thought that I was dead and I had gone to hell. Seriously. I didn’t have much energy but with the little bit I did have I sat up in bed and ripped off IV tubes, wires, and anything attached to me. Then I looked at my nurse and said, “I’m dead.” She told me that I wasn’t dead. I collapsed back to the bed and don’t remember anything again for a few hours.
The next time I woke up I was in restraints which I was not happy about. Apparently, I also tried to punch a nurse. I couldn’t move and every hour a nurse came by to poke me with a needle – and there was nothing I could do about it. Sartre once said that hell was “other people” – I now know that hell is a personal creation all our own. Read more
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