Verse 1Be sure to check out the lyrics to F*uck the Creationists :-)
Entropy, how can I explain it? I'll take it frame by frame it,
to have you all jumping, shouting saying it.
Let's just say that it's a measure of disorder,
in a system that is closed, like with a border.
It's sorta, like a, well a measurement of randomness,
proposed in 1850 by a German, but wait I digress.
"What the fuck is entropy?", I here the people still exclaiming,
it seems I gotta start the explaining.
You ever drop an egg and on the floor you see it break?
You go and get a mop so you can clean up your mistake.
But did you ever stop to ponder why we know it's true,
if you drop a broken egg you will not get an egg that's new.
That's entropy or E-N-T-R-O to the P to the Y,
the reason why the sun will one day all burn out and die.
Order from disorder is a scientific rarity,
allow me to explain it with a little bit more clarity.
Did I say rarity? I meant impossibility,
at least in a closed system there will always be more entropy.
That's entropy and I hope that you're all down with it,
if you are here's your membership.
Chorus
You down with entropy?
Yeah, you know me! (x3)
Who's down with entropy?
Every last homey!
Verse 2
Defining entropy as disorder's not complete,
'cause disorder as a definition doesn't cover heat.
So my first definition I would now like to withdraw,
and offer one that fits thermodynamics second law.
First we need to understand that entropy is energy,
energy that can't be used to state it more specifically.
In a closed system entropy always goes up,
that's the second law, now you know what's up.
You can't win, you can't break even, you can't leave the game,
'cause entropy will take it all 'though it seems a shame.
The second law, as we now know, is quite clear to state,
that entropy must increase and not dissipate.
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
That, in a nutshell, is what entropy's about,
you're now down with a discount.
"It's very simple," [Brian] Feeney said in a telephone interview Friday morning. "We have some pieces of equipment that haven't arrived." Specifically, he said the da Vinci team needed a four-axis filament winder -- a device used in fabricating fiberglass and carbon-fiber parts -- to complete work on a key spaceship component.Well, from what I understand, Feeney is not being entirely honest. A friend of mine close to X-Prize happenings recently told me that the Da Vinci project is all hype, and that any attempt to beat Rutan's SpaceShip One any time soon would be "suicide." They're simply not ready.
Besides optimistic and even utopian reports, there was also some questioning and debate with, for example, both scornful criticism and tentative support of the US President's Council on Bioethics and its cautionary stance. One WTA member identified as a Catholic was Tihamer Toth-Fejel, a US research engineer. In his view, "enhancements that degrade our humanity are not good for us because they contradict who we are as persons and, therefore, should be prohibited and discouraged. Our difficulty is in recognizing which enhancements are degrading us, discovering how this degradation occurs, and finally, finding the strength to resist the alluring promises they make," - an opinion he wrote for the Summer 2004 issue of The National Catholic BioethicsDaly continues,
Quarterly.
Perhaps because the transhumanist message is largely disseminated by the Internet, and perhaps also because of their call for total freedom in scientific exploration and technical engineering, many of the non-member participants in the Toronto weekend were university students preparing for high-tech careers. This conference made the faith views of the transhumanists easily accessible to these students. As they move their 2005 conference to Caracas, Venezuela, the tiny band of transhumanists will continue to challenge all larger faith communities to review what they have to say to such groups, and how best to say it.
One post-Vatican II challenge for Catholics, especially lay specialists in science and technology, is to enter "interfaith dialogue" with transhumanists, perhaps especially via the Internet, searching for "those seeds of the Word which lie hidden among them," while rejecting "nothing that is true and holy" in what they have to say.
Scientists have known for nearly 70 years that calorie restriction extends the life spans of mammals by as much as 50 percent, but just how it works has remained a mystery. Guarente believes he has found the answer, and that it could potentially lead to extended life spans for people, too. For more than a decade, Guarente has been gradually solving the puzzle with the ambitious goal of discovering how to slow the aging process in humans without imposing a thousand-calorie-a-day diet. In 1999, he came to the surprising conclusion that manipulating just one gene, SIR2, could affect longevity. Guarente became so convinced that his findings could lead to antiaging pills that in 1999 he cofounded Cambridge-based Elixir Pharmaceuticals to commercialize them. In June, Guarente and his colleagues published a paper in the scientific journal Nature that detailed how a version of the SIR2 gene in mice releases fat from storage tissue, which seems to have a direct effect on how fast the animals age. Although Guarente’s lab has yet to determine exactly why a reduction in fat allows animals to live longer, he’s confident that medicines that cause the mechanism to spring into action aren’t too far around the corner. “I think there’s going to be an ever growing clamor to take advantage of this,” Guarente says. And he believes life-span-lengthening medicines will be available within a decade.
The strike would have come out of nowhere: One second, the fish was swimming placidly, no danger in sight, a moment later it was lunch.
Scientists have discovered what may have been one of the first stealth hunters, a long-necked swimming dinosaur that could sneak up on prey and attack without warning.
“The long neck would allow it to approach prey without the whole body becoming visible,” said Olivier Rieppel of the Field Museum in Chicago, co-author of a new report in Thursday's issue of the journal, Science.
If, as many suspect, the 21st century ends up being the Asian Century, two movies from 2004 will be remembered as early auguries. The first film bodes poorly for the US; the second film bodes well for Asia. In watching "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow," Americans thrill to the simple comic-book glories of 1939. At the same time, the Japanese, watching "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence," think ahead to the cyber-future of 2032, pondering its potentialities and pitfalls.Pinkerton continues:
A culture which prefers the languorous comfort of a quasi-mythic past to the rigors of confronting the hard-edged future is complacent, maybe even decadent -- and out of decadence comes defeat.
So is "Ghost" director Mamoru Oshii guilty, after all, of the same retro-mindedness as "Sky Captain" director Conran?There are many other very good insights, and the entire article can be read here.
No, not at all. "Ghost" director Oshii is on a mission to instruct. In an interview with The Washington Post, he observed, "People are very different from animals. We don't accept our original bodies. Humans wear clothes, have earrings and tattoos, do cosmetic surgery, take vitamins. If they are sick, they get organ transplants. And now we have radios, telephones, microphones, watches, computers, microchips outside the body now, but soon we will utilize these machines inside our bodies and then we will be part cyborg. This is inevitable. The process has already begun."
Dig that: It's inevitable. The process has already begun. Welcome to the machine, as Pink Floyd would say.
Going further, Oshii predicted, in terms not entirely complimentary to his countrymen, that the pioneers of body mechanization "will probably be Japanese. That, and human cloning… because we do not have the same taboos." He added, "Japan is a really weird country without any religion. We take ideas from everywhere. We don't really care about what is lost and what is acquired."
It's worth pausing over Oshii's "no religion" point. Most Americans probably think that the dominant faith in the US, Protestantism, has been an asset -- the upwardly mobile "Protestant Ethic," and all that. Yet some citizens, in the name of faith and morality, are seeking to put stumbling blocks in the path of their progress. The Bush administration seems perfectly prepared, for instance, to say "sayonara" to rivals across the Pacific, as the Asian Tigers pull ahead in the Great Game of Human Techno-Destiny.
Given the liberal intelligentsia’s high tolerance for the use of traditional religion in progressive causes, it’s not surprising that hardly anyone questions the political influence of Earth-worshipping environmentalism, which novelist Michael Crichton has called "the religion of choice for urban atheists." This environmentalist "spirituality" pervades Gore’s 1992 book Earth in the Balance...
...Yet the faith-based presidency is genuinely troubling. This is not only because of the public policies justified by invoking God’s name. No less important is the symbolic message that one must be religious in order to be a part of the body politic -- in order, perhaps, to be a "real" American. It’s a message that goes hand in hand with a good deal of secularist bashing and particularly atheist bashing: In some of the Republican attacks on Democratic financier George Soros, atheist was used as a term of opprobrium.
The public’s views on this subject are more complex than the champions of religion in the public square often make them out to be. For instance, a recent Time poll found likely voters evenly divided on the question of whether the president should allow his personal faith to be his guide in making political decisions. The vast majority of Americans consider themselves religious, but about a third do not consider religion very important in their lives and attend religious services once a month or less. That’s a pretty large segment of the population to reduce to the status of political pariahs.
As impressive as the scope of world-enders' thinking these days is its overwhelming detail. Everything from events in the Middle East to the technology of cloning has been worked into one end-times commentary or another.
As one might expect, 9/11 has acquired apocalyptic dimensions of its own, explained at Boston University's Center for Millennial Studies website. In that specific context, the level of detail may extend even to the frequency of individual words in the book of Revelation. A pious acquaintance, apparently aware of Manhattan's equation with mystery Babylon, tried to relate the fall of the WTC's two towers to the repetition of the two words "is fallen" in Revelation 14:8:
"And there followed another angel, saying, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that great city, because she made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication."
Being no biblical scholar, and certainly no eschatologist, I can only make a guess (albeit uninformed) that the words are repeated for emphasis and not to represent a specific number of buildings destroyed.
The detail of these scenarios reflects more than just zeal and fascination. It also serves two important purposes. One, to overwhelm the reader or listener with information. Presented with countless particulars and tiny specifics, one simply cannot investigate, much less evaluate, all of them one by one. Potential critics are swamped. That effect accounts, at least in part, for the success of many end-times models. Doomsday artists are well aware of this principle: The more detail, the better, for the same reason that a hurricane is more powerful than a single raindrop.
Now for the second, less evident but equally important purpose of abundant detail: It provides a doomsday scenario such as a conspiracy hypothesis about the "last days" with countless points of attachment to other scenarios. Together, they support and reinforce one another in the same manner as the interconnected girders of a building.
"The main argument in my dissertation though, is whether Human beings will use mechanical augmentation to move further away from the Human blueprint (as designers re-interpret the Human form), or try to achieve a new level of cosmetic beauty? - If you could offer your current opinions on this specific statement it would benefit my investigation immensely.My response:
"I am a perfectly healthy Human being, but I would personally choose to move further away from the Human form - having never really felt 'complete' as a mere Human being. Maybe for me this would be a more spiritual transformation - something of self discovery - allowing me to challenge the form I was born into - and the subsequent understanding of the world created by that form."
"Many people believe that those who plan to vote for President Bush in the upcoming election are crazy, while a large number of other people think those who plan to vote for Sen. John Kerry are nuts. Whichever view best describes your position, it's all too easy to dismiss those who disagree with you as unfit to vote.
While Americans may joke that the voting preferences of those on the other side of the political spectrum are indicative of mental illness — humor aside — has our country actually come to grips with the question of cognitive impairment and the right to vote?
We all remember stories from Palm Beach County and other areas of Florida during the last presidential election in which older voters complained that the ballots were too confusing to use. Do the current methods used for voting block access for those with mental or cognitive impairments? And do those living in institutions, particularly the elderly in nursing homes, always get to exercise their right to vote even if they have a bit of memory loss or suffer from depression? And what are the standards for disqualifying someone from voting because of cognitive impairment?"
"Many readers probably don't know exactly what black holes are and, frankly, the best I can do is to imagine them like the pike in Yellow Submarine that devours everything around it until it finally swallows itself. But in order to understand the news item from which I am taking my cue, all you need to know about black holes is that they are one of the most controversial and absorbing problems in contemporary astrophysics.Entire article
Recently I read in the papers that the celebrated scientist Stephen Hawking has made a statement that is sensational, to say the least. He maintains that he made an error in his theory of black holes (published back in the 70s) and proposed the necessary corrections before an audience of fellow scientists.
For those involved in the sciences there is nothing exceptional about this, apart from Hawking's exceptional standing, but I feel that the episode should be brought to the attention of young people in every nonfundamentalist or nonconfessional school so that they may reflect upon the principles of modern science."
