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Archive for August, 2007

Aug 29

Help the Iraq and the Asian Countries

“I personally believe that, U.S. Americans are unable to do so, because some people out there in our nation that don’t have maps, and I believe that our education, like such, as in South Africa and Iraq, everywhere like such as, and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S., should help the U.S., er, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future.., for our” – Miss South Carolina

Aug 20

Sheldrake at the Temple in Thanjavur

Not that I am trying to establish any spiritual or epistemological ancestry in my view of the world … but here is another hero/friend of mine at the Shiva Temple in Thanjavur. You may not know that from 1974 to 1985 Dr. Sheldrake worked at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) in Hyderabad, India. While in India, he also lived for a year and a half at the ashram of Fr Bede Griffiths in Tamil Nadu, where he wrote his first book, A New Science of Life. Interesting how the ley lines of our life intersect at the most unusual spaces.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/v/7EQk1ATt6Yk[/youtube]

Aug 18

Podcast: Can Dogs Know?

Great podcast from the website Skeptiko by Alex Tsakiris. Alex’s guests are Dr. Rupert Sheldrake and Dr. Richard Wiseman on whether dogs can “know” when their owners are coming home.

Take a listen.

Aug 17

4 Comments

Carl Sagan on Hinduism

I’ve written before about how influential Carl Sagan was in my childhood. Not only his views of science and philosophy but also his views on religion. My interest in Hinduism goes far back into my elementary school years when I discovered that there was a religion that had such a enormous vision of cosmos.

I had to find out more. Rather than the universe being only a few thousand years old (as I had learned in church), Hindus believed that the universe was billions and billions of years old – and that there were an infinite number of universes previous to this one! That was a view of the world that truly encompassed the scale of a divine creator; not a small god that had only been around for a few years, interested only in the affairs of a few, special people on one small planet. I had discovered that there was another way of thinking.

It was Carl Sagan that helped me first awaken that sense of complete awe at the scale of universe. Though Sagan was an agnostic, I get the feeling if he were to have chosen a religion, Hinduism would have been it. Here is the clip from Cosmos that I saw when I was a kid. His sense of child-like wonder and fascination is as infectious today as it was then. Enjoy!

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

Aug 17

6 Comments

CMS Review: Bricolage

Moving a great story from concept to content requires inspiration, a little creativity, a lot of proofreading, and publication – or as they say in the newsroom, “Copy!” A good web content management system (WCMS) makes this happen seamlessly for the content creator. In the newspaper business where a quick content turnaround equals revenue, the last thing software should do is stand in the way.
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Aug 17

The Need for Heretics

The radical, brilliant theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson has just written a interesting essay on the the need for heretics in science. Since Rupert Sheldrake has been battling this kind of stereotype for his entire career, it’s interesting to see that being a maverick is somehow coming back in fashion. Almost daily I’m reading about “new” theories and ideas about 1) how the laws of physics are not fixed and immutable, 2) biological inheritance and morphology may not be determined by genes, 3) our perceptions may not be limited to three dimensions, etc.

Bit by bit, modern science is catching up to where Sheldrake was in the early 1980′s. It’s remarkable to me that more credit is not attributed to Rupert as one of the key founders of this recent movement within science. Nevertheless, things are changing within science and that … is a very good a thing. Check out Dyson’s essay at the Edge, here.

Aug 17

Photons Flout the Light Speed Limit

From the New Scientist magazine, “It’s a speed record that is supposed to be impossible to break. Yet two physicists are now claiming they have propelled photons faster than the speed of light. This would be in direct violation of a key tenet of Einstein’s special theory of relativity that states that nothing, under any circumstance, can exceed…” read more

Aug 16

Turtles Never Finish the Race

I was flipping through the latest New Scientist magazine last week when I stumbled across yet another article claiming that a final theory of everything was just around the corner. Each time I see one of these articles I’m reminded of the endless stream of biology and physics professors lined up for their chance to begin talking about how they’ve gotten it all figured out – just a few more years.

Since the distant ancestors of those same ambitiously naive scientists proclaimed the very same prediction in previous centuries, I’m guessing that they are still wrong. In fact, if knowledge really is infinite, then we’re exactly as close to the truth as we were when the first humans hit two rocks together to make fire.

The latest entry into the absurd is a ‘new’ claim that free will is an illusion and we are all just stuck in a galactic computer program. Hmmm. Do people actually mistake this nonsense as profound because it appears in a scientific journal? I’m sure that in the days of Zeno and Parmenides there was great debate over whether a tortoise could ever actually finish a race. I can imagine the self-assured intellectuals of the day walking down the street while arguing that Zeno is brilliant; motion is impossible. Thankfully, Newton cleared it all up for us in the Principia. What do you know? Motion is possible! Who woulda thunk? Not much has changed in two thousand years. We still choose to ignore the most obvious while contemplating the supposedly profound.

Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, thinks we have a 20% chance of living in a big computer. Wow. Now we’ve been thrown into the latest pretend profound idea – that we are living in a computer simulation that is controlled by some supreme beings born a zillion years ago. This same strange argument has been used by those whose wishful fantasies include being the progeny of aliens that left the Earth long, long ago. Why? Why do human always have to be the product of some other form of life? I’ve never understood it. Since we can’t figure out how life came to be, we’ll just invent aliens or computer simulations to explain it away. Of course, we’re confronted by the very same problem: where did life come from? Whether galaxy size computer simulations or aliens from Zineble Genube, we are still no closer to discovering how life originated. These pontificating professors are certainly the children of Zeno. Really, everyone knows that motion is impossible. Turtles never finish the race.

Next week I will explain how humans have no free will because the latest theory of physics says so. Nana-nana boo boo!

Aug 16

Darwin Award: Zionist Time

This is from the website, Darwin Awards: In most parts of the world, the switch away from Daylight Saving Time proceeds smoothly. But the time change raised havoc with Palestinian terrorists this year. Israel insisted on a premature switch from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time to accommodate a week of pre-sunrise prayers. Palestinians refused to live on “Zionist Time.” Two weeks of scheduling havoc ensued. Nobody knew the “correct” time.

At precisely 5:30pm on Sunday, two coordinated car bombs exploded in different cities, killing three terrorists who were transporting the bombs. It was initially believed that the devices had been detonated prematurely by klutzy amateurs. A closer look revealed the truth behind the explosions.
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Aug 15

1 Comment

The Mahabharata

Here is an episode from the popular Dutch series, Myths of Mankind. When the British ruled India, experienced colonial administrators would advise newcomers to read one book if they wanted to grasp the essence of the place: the Mahabharata. The longest known poem in any language, this 90,000-verse Sanskrit epic remains a favorite of millions to this day, inspiring stage productions, TV programs and comic books. Its account of the epochal conflict between two sets of cousins is both a richly entertaining saga and an expression of Indian religious thought.

While Indian scholars place its origins thousands of years before recorded history, their Western counterparts disagree. New studies, however, suggest that the Mahabharata may indeed have originated as far back as the fourth millennium BC – or even earlier. How can a work so ancient maintain such a powerful hold on contemporary imaginations? This episode is hosted by Canadian author Paul William Roberts, author of Empire of the Soul: Some Journeys in India, and features clips from director Peter Brook’s critically acclaimed 1989 television adaptation of the Mahabharata.

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