 |
| Universe Today |
BBC: Mars Maven mission set for arrival, Jonathan Amos
NASA: Maven Mission Page
All Posts (6442)
Sort by
Dark God's Gift short story anthology season 2 jumps off in 1 week!
Read dark tales by some of the BSFS most prolific authors and contributors; K. Ceres Wright (COG), Ronald T. Jones (Warriors of the Four Worlds), H. Wolfgang Porter (Book of Dragon's Teeth) and William Hayashi (The Darkside Trilogy.)
Be transported to dark exotic streets teeming with techno-gangsters, battles amongst the gods, deep inside a dark matter cloud and to the desert during the atomic age! All coming September 29th. Woe unto those who possess the Dark God's Gift!
 |
| SellosMundo.com |
Narciso Monturiol was a Catalonian physicist and inventor who researched underwater navigation and designed an early submarine. In 1856, Narciso Monturiol built a submarine called the "Ictineo".
Despite popular folklore, Narciso Monturiol did not build the very first submarine. (Our "Timeline of Submarine History" illustrates that submarines were being built as early as 1620.) However, Narciso Monturiol did build one of the most advanced submarines available at the time.
Narciso Monturiol was inspired to invent a device to aid the Spainish coral divers who fished off the coast of Cadaques. His submarine was intended to save the divers manual labor and reduce their exposure to diving risks. In 1859, Narciso Monturiol's Ictineo submarine was first launched from Barcelona and proved to be submergable for up to two hours. The Ictineo was manually powered by sixteen men turning the propeller. By 1864, Narciso Monturiol had redesigned the Ictineo adding a steam generator for power. The Ictineo could then reach depths of up to thirty meters, and stay submerged for up to seven hours.
 |
| Poster Lounge |
One interesting fact about the Ictineo submarine is that Jules Verne, the famous writer of "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea" based his fictional Nautilus submarine after the Ictineo.
Hispanic Inventors: Narciso Monturiol
Every now and again, I watch "Encounter at Farpoint," the inaugural two-part episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and marvel at how well the story line was written, specifically the back story was fleshed-out; the acting mature and impeccable. I, like a lot of Trekkie fans at the time gave the series a broad brush of disappointment, especially at seeing a 137-year-old cranky Admiral Leonard "Bones" McCoy - we were lamenting our old Trek and not being fair to the then "new" one. It makes me miss good television.
The above somewhat "Nazi-like" banner hung in the kangaroo court the entity Q conjured Captain Picard and crew into. Q stood as judge, jury and presumably executioner, but also witness and soothsayer: who but the Q-continuum knew the Federation would eventually make contact with The Borg? Captain Picard's defense in a nutshell: yes humanity was once quite barbarous; we were guilty of discrimination and inequality, but we were in that fictional "then" as far from the depiction of a 21st century court post WWIII as he and his crew was far from Earth.
The Optimum Movement was a political movement that came about during the mid-21st century on Earth, and spread to a number of nations—including Great Britain and the United States of America. They are believed to be one of the instigators behind the Third World War, and the following post atomic horror. Memory Beta (please forgive the annoying embed commercials). The story was further "made flesh" in the novel Federation by Judith-Reeves Stevens, which I've read - an excellent Kindle read.
En route to Farpoint, Captain Picard and his crew first meet "Q." The mysterious and powerful being denounces the human race as barbarians and challenges the crew of the Enterprise to disprove his belief. If Picard and his crew are not persuasive in their arguments, they will be sentenced to death.
It's interesting in the 21st century, another author I've read - Naomi Klein - has written "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate." (I'd also recommend her book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.")
Star Trek in the mind of Gene Roddenberry was born on the back of the Cold War with the former Soviet Union possibly becoming a hot nuclear one, and on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement, thus projecting forward a positive, more accepting of science, less xenophobic, survivable future.
Nuclear war would be a fool's errand - whether as in Federation we established colonies on off worlds, the conflagration would leave swaths of Earth clearly uninhabitable for thousands of years. Corpses would have no care who actually "won" such an insane engagement. The Trek universe alludes to the discontinued existence of Washington, Moscow and other global capitals, hence the location of the fictional United Federation of Planets in San Francisco.
Ms. Klein's treatise seems to share a similar concern (book description):
In "This Changes Everything" Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn't just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism.
In Escape From Freedom, Eric Fromm makes an excellent case that the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation cooperated in strange, significant ways: The Renaissance came after the fall of European hierarchies/caste systems, i.e. if your father was a carpenter, you were likely to be as well as your sons, etc. This gave rise to the individual and capitalism, but isolated the individual from the familiar; the safe. Luther and Calvin appealed to the poor and middle class respectively: the former for a better hereafter life, but disdain for opposing the status quo; the latter a fatalism of being born predestined to either going to heaven or hell - saved or condemned. The mental gymnastic escape is if you were "doing good work," you were probably going to heaven, and thus part of the "chosen." This mentality coupled with the rise of wealth in the hands of a moneyed few that ultimately primed the populace for rule by a single Fuhrer and totalitarian, authoritarian rule. He spoke of the rise of inequality, concentration of wealth with [that then] 1%; their influence on politics, religion, education - I could swear I was reading current headlines.
We may or may never, even with great research - achieve warp drive. Nor possibly not ever encounter omnipotent watcher beings like the Q-continuum. But we could - here - make mature decisions as a species, to reduce inequality - thus the crime and terrorism it inspires - and avoid our own failings without going through painful lessons and casualties - caused by, climate, inequality, nuclear or otherwise.
We don't have to go far from home to do that.
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana (16 December 1863 in Madrid, Spain – 26 September 1952 in Rome, Italy) was a philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist.
Cuban born, Clatonia Joaquin Dorticus of Newton, New Jersey invented an improved photographic print and negative wash machine (see patent drawing). During the process of developing a photographic print or negative, the product is soaked in several chemical baths. The print wash neutralizes the chemicals in each bath process, so that the time the chemicals effect a print can be exactly controlled. Clatonia Joaquin Dorticus believed his method would eliminate over washing that could soften the photograph too much.
Clatonia Joaquin Dorticus also invented an improved machine for embossing photographs (see patent drawing left). His machine was designed to both/either mount or emboss a photographic print. Embossing is a method or raising parts of a photograph for a relief or 3D look.
Clatonia Joaquin Dorticus's other inventions included an applicator for applying color liquid dyes to shoes and heels, and a hose leek stop.
List of patents:
#535,820, 3/19/1895, Device for applying coloring liquids to sides of soles or heels of shoes
#537,442, 4/16/1895, Machine for embossing photographs
#537,968, 4/23/1895, Photographic print washer
#629,315, 7/18/1899, Hose leak stop
Clatonia Joaquin Dorticus - invented an improved photographic print wash machine and method,
Mary Bellis
 |
| Know Your Meme |
noun
the action of withdrawing formally from membership of a federation or body, especially a political state.
"the republics want secession from the union"
historical
the withdrawal of eleven southern states from the Union in 1860, leading to the Civil War.
singular proper noun: Secession; noun: the Secession
Scotland almost seceded from the UK. 1 in 4 Americans want to, or are at least open to seceding from the US. Kind of goes hand-in-hand with the paint job of the current Chief Executive in the "White House."
In Europe, particularly Scotland and Barcelona, the secession desire is born primarily from the recent economics of the Great Recession. There is a romanticism about secession without a clear appreciation of its history - at least in the US - and the logistics required to pull it off is daunting, if not quite simply impossible:
- The South developed their own currency;
- They had products to trade - agriculture, cotton, import/export, shipbuilding;
- They had slavery, i.e. free labor to leverage based on inhumane, brutish psychopathy longed for as "southern tradition."
Since the election and reelection of the country's 1st black president, I've heard wild Utopian fantasies about southern states forming "independent nations," yet asking them what their main product to trade on the global market, the answer amounts to...crickets. Scotland wanted "out" of the UK, yet wanted the luxury of continued usage of the British pound - see "bullet one" above.
"Some of the secessionists in these movements are charmingly idealistic do-it-yourselfers in a long American Utopian tradition. Others are disturbing-sounding provincials hostile to the diversity of large societies. Some are community-minded folks who think smaller polities do better at serving their own needs. Others are ornery individualists who don't want the community butting into their affairs at all. Under normal circumstances, these interesting assortments of free-thinkers don't attract much support." The Economist
Politicians have fostered a tribalism and partisanship that only functions to ensure they keep their seats. The British Prime Minister David Cameron is relieved he still has a job. Rick Perry really was pandering to his crowd as he suggested secession, coincided with running for president in a red state. It helps to dumb down the population - eliminating AP history; fostering creationism in science classes - so constituents are so confused, so bewildered they can't question what you're doing. Any real technological advances are funded - endowments and think tanks to make the rich richer still.
For the rest: scraps from the opulent table...for Lazarus.
Tomorrow: Farpoint
 |
| Source: NASA.gov, Image Credit: NASA/GSFC |
NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution (MAVEN) spacecraft is nearing its scheduled Sept. 21 insertion (this Sunday) into Martian orbit after completing a 10-month interplanetary journey of 442 million miles.
Flight Controllers at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Littleton, Colorado, will be responsible for the health and safety of the spacecraft throughout the process. The spacecraft’s mission timeline will place the spacecraft in orbit at approximately 9:50 p.m. EDT.
“So far, so good with the performance of the spacecraft and payloads on the cruise to Mars,” said David Mitchell, MAVEN project manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “The team, the flight system, and all ground assets are ready for Mars orbit insertion.”
The orbit-insertion maneuver will begin with the brief firing of six small thruster engines to steady the spacecraft. The engines will ignite and burn for 33 minutes to slow the craft, allowing it to be pulled into an elliptical orbit with a period of 35 hours.
Following orbit insertion, MAVEN will begin a six-week commissioning phase that includes maneuvering the spacecraft into its final orbit and testing its instruments and science-mapping commands. Thereafter, MAVEN will begin its one-Earth-year primary mission to take measurements of the composition, structure and escape of gases in Mars’ upper atmosphere and its interaction with the sun and solar wind.
NASA.gov: NASA Mars Spacecraft Ready for Sept. 21 Orbit Insertion
Dwayne Brown
 |
| Official NASA photo |
NASA ASTRONAUT (FORMER)
PERSONAL DATA: Born April 5, 1950, in San José, Costa Rica, to the late Mr. Ramón A. Chang-Morales and Mrs. María Eugenia Díaz De Chang. Married to the former Peggy Marguerite Doncaster of Alexandria, Louisiana. Four children. He enjoys music, glider planes, soccer, scuba diving and hiking. His mother, brothers and sisters still reside in Costa Rica.
EDUCATION: Graduated from Colegio De La Salle in San José, Costa Rica, in November 1967 and from Hartford High School in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1969; received a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Connecticut in 1973 and a Doctorate in Applied Plasma Physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1977.
SPECIAL HONORS: Recipient of the University of Connecticut’s Outstanding Alumni Award (1980); seven NASA Space Flight Medals (1986, 1989, 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2002); two NASA Distinguished Service Medals (1995, 1997) and three NASA Exceptional Service Medals (1988, 1990, 1993). He is honorary faculty at the College of Engineering, University of Costa Rica. In April 1995, the government of Costa Rica conferred on him the title of “Honorary Citizen.” This is the highest honor Costa Rica confers to a foreign citizen, making him the first such honoree who was actually born there. Recipient of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics 2001 Wyld Propulsion Award for his 21 years of research on the Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket (VASIMR) engine.
NASA bio: Franklin Ramón Chang Díaz, PhD
Personal Page: Franklin Ramón Chang Diaz
 |
| See description * |
A new design for a cavity-free nanolaser has been proposed by physicists at Imperial College London. The design builds on a proposal from the same team earlier this year to reduce the group velocity of light of a particular frequency to exactly zero in a metal–dielectric–metal waveguide. The laser, which has yet to be built, makes use of two such zero-velocity regions, and would achieve population inversion and create a laser beam without the need for an optical cavity. The researchers suggest that the design could have important applications in optical telecommunications and computing, as well as theoretical implications in reconciling the physics of lasers with plasmonics.
* Diagram of how the nanolaser would work: light is trapped in the stopped-light region (curved gold arrows) and this leads to the stimulated emission of light (upward-pointing arrows). The system is pumped by slow light (the large gold arrow) and the laser is confined to a region denoted by h and w, where the group velocity of the light (Vg) is zero. (Courtesy: A Freddie Page and O Hess/Imperial College)
Physics World: New plasmonic nanolaser is cavity-free, Tim Wogan
 |
| Image source: Yo-Yo.net (link below) |
The word yo-yo is a Tagalog word, the native language of the Philippines, and means 'come back.' In the Philippines, the yo-yo was a weapon for over 400 hundred years. Their version was large with sharp edges and studs and attached to thick twenty-foot ropes for flinging at enemies or prey. People in the United States started playing with the British bandalore or yo-yo in the 1860s.
It was not until the 1920s that Americans first heard the word yo-yo. Pedro Flores, a Philippine immigrant, began manufacturing a toy labeled with that name. Flores became the first person to mass-produce yo-yos, at his small toy factory located in California.
The Philippines was a Spanish colony for over 300 years, leaving what can now be called Filipino culture and people semi-Hispanicized. Under Spanish rule, most of the Filipino populace embraced Roman Catholicism, yet revolted many times to its hierarchy. Due to a colonial program, almost all inhabitants adopted Spanish surnames from the Catálogo alfabético de apellidos published in 1849 by the Spanish colonial government.
Wikipedia
Inventors: Pedro Flores, Hispanic Inventors by Mary Bellis
Yo-Yo.net: History of the Yo-Yo
Aura is an exciting introduction to my work. Featuring spectacular full color sections in
each chapter of this book. I personally have invited you to my world and the selected images
from the archives of Blakelyworks Studio.
Shown here is Sh'tange the wife of Pozitron.
She is also the mother of Scorpia aka Little Miss Strange.
Sh'tange is a lone survivor from a distant universe in which she
was a High Priestess with the ability to control the souls of
her people called The Nagaye into a massive swarm of warriors
for protective purposes.
All of this and more in Aura- The art of Winston Blakely
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas, 1914 - 1953
The central theme of November's "Interstellar" and space exploration in particular...
If we even get 1/10 c (say, via a fusion or antimatter drive - more conceptual for physicists. I suspect the "exotic matter" as the star ship would require is possibly dark matter, and for now hard to define, find or manufacture). That technological leap will be for society energy-liberating, and we'd owe that to Dr. Miguel Alcubierre Moya (see link below).
Images sourced from: Daily Mail Online
Caption:
Pictured is an illustration of Dr White's IXS Enterprise, an interstellar ship drawn by artist Mark Rademaker that could be an accurate representation of what the first mission beyond the solar system will look like. The IXS Enterprise is a theory-fitting concept for a faster than light (FTL) ship.
 |
| Source: Gotta Love Science, Dr. Scott B. Goldscher |
The University of Washington’s Biology 220 course serves hundreds of students in a massive lecture-hall setting, but a related science-writing course—enhanced by Science in the Classroom resources—helped a subset of those participants better understand core concepts, educator Greg Crowther reported.
By analyzing, annotating, and reviewing two Science papers as part of a Science in the Classroom (SiTC) exercise, Crowther’s students also improved their scientific vocabulary and critical-thinking skills. For their contributions to the growing SiTC stockpile of study materials, they will all get bylines on the Science website, too.
“Working on the Science in the Classroom project was a great opportunity for meta-cognition by the students in my science-writing course,” said Crowther, a faculty member at UW as well as South Seattle College. “It encouraged them to think about how they learn most effectively. With their homework, they had to answer questions like, `How did this aid your understanding of the paper, or not?’ They were prompted to think about how they approach learning, and going forward, that will help them in all of their courses.”
AAAS: Science Offers New Tools for Educators and Students, Ginger Pinholster
 |
| Entering a closed timelike curve tomorrow means you could end up at today. Credit: Dmitry Schidlovsky |
Applies works pretty well if your "grandfather" is a photon like yourself...
Closed timelike curves
The source of time travel speculation lies in the fact that our best physical theories seem to contain no prohibitions on traveling backward through time. The feat should be possible based on Einstein's theory of general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of spacetime by energy and matter. An extremely powerful gravitational field, such as that produced by a spinning black hole, could in principle profoundly warp the fabric of existence so that spacetime bends back on itself. This would create a "closed timelike curve," or CTC, a loop that could be traversed to travel back in time.
Experimenting with a curve
Recently Ralph and his PhD student Martin Ringbauer led a team that experimentally simulated Deutsch's model of CTCs for the very first time, testing and confirming many aspects of the two-decades-old theory. Their findings are published in Nature Communications. Much of their simulation revolved around investigating how Deutsch's model deals with the “grandfather paradox,” a hypothetical scenario in which someone uses a CTC to travel back through time to murder her own grandfather, thus preventing her own later birth. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)
Deutsch's quantum solution to the grandfather paradox works something like this:
Instead of a human being traversing a CTC to kill her ancestor, imagine that a fundamental particle goes back in time to flip a switch on the particle-generating machine that created it. If the particle flips the switch, the machine emits a particle—the particle—back into the CTC; if the switch isn't flipped, the machine emits nothing. In this scenario there is no a priori deterministic certainty to the particle's emission, only a distribution of probabilities. Deutsch's insight was to postulate self-consistency in the quantum realm, to insist that any particle entering one end of a CTC must emerge at the other end with identical properties. Therefore, a particle emitted by the machine with a probability of one half would enter the CTC and come out the other end to flip the switch with a probability of one half, imbuing itself at birth with a probability of one half of going back to flip the switch. If the particle were a person, she would be born with a one-half probability of killing her grandfather, giving her grandfather a one-half probability of escaping death at her hands—good enough in probabilistic terms to close the causative loop and escape the paradox. Strange though it may be, this solution is in keeping with the known laws of quantum mechanics.
Scientific American: Time Travel Simulation Resolves “Grandfather Paradox”, Lee Billings
 |
| Mural, 24th. Street, Chicago. (Seth Anderson via Flickr) |
What is diversity?
One challenge to conversations about diversity is a lack of precision in language. The word “diversity” is used in many contexts to mean many different things. Often, and unfortunately, diversity is used as the antonym of heterosexual, able-bodied, middle-class-to-wealthy white male. This is not what diversity is about. The New Oxford American Dictionary gives us this definition:
diversity |diˈvərsitē, dī-| noun: (a) the state of being diverse; variety: there was considerable diversity in the style of the reports. (b) a range of different things: newspapers were obliged to allow a diversity of views to be printed.
Why does diversity matters in science?
1. Diversity is critical to excellence.
2. Lack of diversity represents a loss of talent.
3. Enhancing diversity is key to long-term economic growth and global competitiveness.
Scientific American: Diversity in STEM, Kenneth (Kenny) Gibbs, Jr., PhD
Cancer Prevention Fellow, National Cancer Institute.
From the lyrics to the beat loops, Raashan Ahmad of the Crown City Rockers is an inspiring artist to listen to.
link https://soundcloud.com/raashan-ahmad/blue-skies Link https://soundcloud.com/raashan-ahmad/the-coolness link https://soundcloud.com/raashan-ahmad/lighters
The irony: in a country of immigrants, we're becoming "tribal"; somehow E pluribus unum: out of many, one - has lost its original Latin origins and just become a slogan printed on our money - if we ever bother to look at it.
"Self-deportation" and repatriation as some have suggested would be a logistical and political nightmare that the global economy would immediately reject us as incompetent and unstable. Diversity has to be our strength, we have no other choice for continued existence as a nation state. If not, other countries that had neither a "remember the Alamo" nor Civil War will make us look like a byword, an anachronism...a joke on the pages of history.
That devolution does not have to take long...
During National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 to October 15) we recognize the contributions made and the important presence of Hispanic and Latino Americans to the United States and celebrate their heritage and culture.
 |
| PBS "bucket list" |
Hispanics have had a profound and positive influence on our country through their strong commitment to family, faith, hard work, and service. They have enhanced and shaped our national character with centuries-old traditions that reflect the multiethnic and multicultural customs of their community. *
 |
| From 2013 |
 |
| US President George H.W. Bush (41) and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher |
"Peace dividend" is a political slogan popularized by US President George H.W. Bush (41) and UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the early 1990s, purporting to describe the economic benefit of a decrease in defense spending. It is used primarily in discussions relating to the guns versus butter theory. The term was frequently used at the end of the Cold War, when many Western nations significantly cut military spending. Wikipedia
Just how did that turn out?
Find more statistics at Statista
“By some latent intuition, Fleming was able to peer beyond the Cold War limitations of mere spy fiction and to anticipate the emerging milieu of the Colombian cartels, Osama Bin Laden and indeed the Russian Mafia.”
“It was Fleming who first conjured it and who reached beyond the KGB into our world of the Colombian cartel, the Russian mafia, and other “non-state actors” like al-Qaeda. “SPECTRE,” I noticed recently, is an anagram of “Respect,” the name of a small British party led by a power-drunk micro-megalomaniac called George Galloway, a man with a friendly connection to Saddam Hussein.” Christopher Hitchens
Living here in NY, I got to see the reaction of people who'd lost loved ones on 9-11 in 2011 file in the streets on the announced killing of Bin Laden. Many sang; many cried. For many young people, this was their "Pearl Harbor," the moment int their lives they'll always remember. I would like to think many waited for this political "peace dividend."
I don't know if we really want to know how to do that.
The National Ignition Facility (the "Warp core" on the Star Trek reboot) achieved a milestone last year: "the amount of energy released through the fusion reaction exceeded the amount of energy being absorbed by the fuel." There was no fanfare, no parades, no endless loop on the daily news talk shows. It was ignored with the exception of the Facility and the article I provide from the BBC: the BRITISH Broadcasting Company. Australia - "a country that gets more solar radiation per square foot than anywhere on the planet" - has gone back to coal. MIT Technology Review notes "clean tech's failure" with 2013's surge in Carbon Dioxide. I have to disagree with that. There is a thread here, a cynical, sinister thread. I think "peace dividend" scares the bejesus out of more than a few people invested in the status quo.
War is essentially a struggle over resources in what we now have: a global scarcity economy.
Wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few. It has been that way since the European Renaissance and Protestant Reformation. Those few know how to make their vast incomes in scarcity resources and are not interested in changing that paradigm. Those few in the US and other countries have taken over governments, hijacking democratic republics' political processes to maximize revenue. Armies are now supplied by design firms and defense contractors that only make profits when we have a "boogie man": Russians (Vlad the ex-KGB bare-chested, horseback-riding impaler is making a comeback); Russian Mafia, Colombian cartels - the "War on Drugs"; Saddam Hussein (deceased); Osama Bin Laden (deceased); now ISIL/ISIS emerges, formless, leaderless and in Toyota trucks. Congress is rediscovering its war powers responsibilities, even while publicly insisting they'd rather watch from the safe sidelines to either cheer or criticize if the president acts alone.
"Non-state actors"...and profit: Iraq 4.0: 41, 42, 43 and 44 - dip, lather, rinse and repeat.
Newsflash: there are no major differences in the neoliberalism machinations of "no child's behind left" and "race to the bottom." Middle and high school teachers are tasked to "teach-to-the-test" (and told to lie they are not) if they want continued employment. With that coerced "foundation," it's no wonder today's college graduates are not developing the critical thinking skills and problem-solving acumen necessary for global competitiveness. We are all hostage to the testing-industrial-complex (TIC) that thinks once we've cajoled children in Pavlovian fashion to regurgitate answers, we'll still be the "shining city on a hill" of our own self-deluded mythology and design the next great invention. The faux controversies between evolution, the age of the universe and "intelligent design" only throws gasoline on a glowing funeral pyre that was once our country, and confuses the hell out of a lot of young people. Evidence shows others have moved on and advanced beyond our demented imaginations and fantasies.
Are science and religion doomed to eternal "warfare," or can they just get along? Philosophers, theologians, scientists, and atheists debate this subject endlessly (and often, angrily). We hear a lot less from economists on the matter, however. But in a recent paper, Princeton economist Roland Bénabou and two colleagues unveiled a surprising finding that would at least appear to bolster the "conflict" camp: Both across countries and also across US states, higher levels of religiosity are related to lower levels of scientific innovation.
"Places with higher levels of religiosity have lower rates of scientific and technical innovation, as measured by patents per capita," comments Bénabou. He adds that the pattern persists "when controlling for differences in income per capita, population, and rates of higher education."
That's the most salient finding from the paper by Bénabou and his colleagues, which uses an economic model to explore how scientific innovation, religiosity, and the power of the state interact to form different "regimes." The three kinds of regimes that they identify: a secular, European-style regime in which religion has very little policy influence and science garners great support; a repressive, theocratic regime in which the state and religion merge to suppress science; and a more intermediate, American-style regime in which religion and science both thrive, with the state supporting science and religions (mostly) trying to accommodate themselves to its findings.
Mother Jones: Study: Science and Religion Really Are Enemies After All,
Chris Mooney
Related book links:
Susan Jacoby (see video embed) - The Age of American Unreason:
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." Thomas Jefferson, 1816
The three Great Premises of Idiot America, Charles P. Pierce:
· Any theory is valid if it sells books, soaks up ratings, or otherwise moves units
· Anything can be true if someone says it loudly enough
· Fact is that which enough people believe. Truth is determined by how fervently they believe it
Eric Fromm - Escape From Freedom:
If humanity cannot live with the dangers and responsibilities inherent in freedom, it will probably turn to authoritarianism. This is the central idea of Escape from Freedom, a landmark work by one of the most distinguished thinkers of our time, and a book that is as timely now as when first published in 1941. Few books have thrown such light upon the forces that shape modern society or penetrated so deeply into the causes of authoritarian systems. If the rise of democracy set some people free, at the same time it gave birth to a society in which the individual feels alienated and dehumanized. Using the insights of psychoanalysis as probing agents, Fromm’s work analyzes the illness of contemporary civilization as witnessed by its willingness to submit to totalitarian rule.
Tomorrow: Peace Dividend
 |
| Blog: Her Blueprint |
Today is the 20th anniversary of the Violence Against Women Act in America.
A total of 27 NFL players were arrested in the off season prior to this current fiasco + 2 more (see Aaron Hernandez of the New England Patriots at the first link) + Adrian Peterson. "Video-gate" treated more as a public relations faux pas than anything otherwise. The two-game suspension was a slap on the wrist compared to the league's punitive standards on the evil marijuana weed - an entire season. The previous hand-wringing discussions were on some current and former players committing suicide. Despite the brief shallow introspection of public naval-gazing, we eventually get on with the billion-dollar industry's contemporary gladiator spectacle with a modern Roman shrug.
And make no mistake on the business focus: the NFL made $9 billion dollars last season, and Roger Goodell had a stated public goal of $25 billion by 2027. So, resolving quickly this latest in a string of incidents was simply and cynically in protection of that goal.
The savagery of war and collision sports wreck the same havoc resulting in traumatic brain injury. To be successful at both, a level of aggression must be cultivated, fostered and unleashed at practice, on the field of battle and in the locker room. It is hardly surprising that like war, it is difficult to turn off the testosterone at home, or in elevators.
And make no mistake on the business focus: the NFL made $9 billion dollars last season, and Roger Goodell had a stated public goal of $25 billion by 2027. So, resolving quickly this latest in a string of incidents was simply and cynically in protection of that goal.
The savagery of war and collision sports wreck the same havoc resulting in traumatic brain injury. To be successful at both, a level of aggression must be cultivated, fostered and unleashed at practice, on the field of battle and in the locker room. It is hardly surprising that like war, it is difficult to turn off the testosterone at home, or in elevators.
The World Conference on Human Rights, held in Vienna, Austria, in 1993, and the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women in the same year, concluded that civil society and governments have acknowledged that domestic violence is a public health policy and human rights concern.
The Violence Against Women Act was developed and passed as a result of extensive grassroots efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with advocates and professionals from the battered women's movement, sexual assault advocates, victim services field, law enforcement agencies, prosecutors' offices, the courts, and the private bar urging Congress to adopt significant legislation to address domestic and sexual violence. Since its original passage in 1994, VAWA's focus has expanded from domestic violence and sexual assault to also include dating violence and stalking. It funds services to protect adult and teen victims of these crimes, and supports training on these issues, to ensure consistent responses across the country. One of the greatest successes of VAWA is its emphasis on a coordinated community response to domestic violence, sex dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking; courts, law enforcement, prosecutors, victim services, and the private bar currently work together in a coordinated effort that had not heretofore existed on the state and local levels. VAWA also supports the work of community-based organizations that are engaged in work to end domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking; particularly those groups that provide culturally and linguistically specific services. Additionally, VAWA provides specific support for work with tribes and tribal organizations to end domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, and stalking against Native American women.
Source: Wikipedia
White House Fact Sheet: Violence Against Women Act
Tomorrow: Home to Roost
