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Thursday, May 22, 2003
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Timothy Wilken, MD writes: We can never know all there is to know about anything — this is a fundamental ‘law’ of Nature. This is in fact is the only cause of mistakes. Ignorance is the word that best describes the human condition. Alfred Korzybski explained this condition scientifically as the Principle of Non-Allness. By this he meant that we humans make all of our decisions with incomplete and imperfect knowing. We make every choice without all the information. All humans live and act in state of ignorance. Korzybski felt that developing an awareness of this ‘law’ of Nature was so fundamentally important to all humans. Incomplete and imperfect knowing means that every human belief is an assumption. We can never know for sure. We can never know ALL. As you sit in your chair reading these words, you assumed the chair would hold you. You did not check under the chair to see if it had broken since its last use. When you ate lunch at your favorite restaurant last week, you assumed the waitress had washed her hands. You assumed the cook did not have hepatitis. If you had assumed otherwise, you would not have walked into that restaurant. You would not have eaten your lunch. We humans assume. Herein lies our uncertainty — that’s all we humans can do. There is nothing wrong in our assuming, we are simply obeying a fundamental ‘law’ of Nature. (05/22/03) | |
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New York Times: Science -- A bout a year ago a large group of astronomers began to assemble what some of them were calling "the world's best telescope." Their ambitious instrument is still far from complete, but they recently took it for a test run. Within minutes, to their joy and astonishment, they had discovered three or four brown dwarfs, objects that occupy the niche between planet and star. ... The telescope that Dr. Szalay and his colleagues have constructed is not built of glass and metal. It is a virtual observatory, consisting of terabytes of data collected by dozens of telescopes on Earth and in space, and the software necessary to mine these data for scientific gems. ... The problem is how to mine this vast store of data for the riches it almost certainly contains. Astronomers have been busy over the past couple of decades compiling complete surveys of the sky, encyclopedic catalogs of millions of astronomical objects viewed at many different wavelengths. These surveys exist in about 10 different spectral bands, from X-rays to the infrared, with each survey giving a different view of the universe. The surveys contain about 100 terabytes (one terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes) of data, roughly five times as much as the Library of Congress holds. Unlike the Library of Congress, however, this information does not reside in a single place. (05/22/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- The FedEx Corporation announced today that it planned to replace 30,000 of its delivery trucks with energy-saving, environmentally friendly hybrid-powered vehicles. The company said that it had already purchased 20 such trucks to begin building what would be one of the first big commercial fleets of hybrid vehicles. The new trucks — powered by both diesel engines and electric motors in a mix controlled by onboard computers — will be introduced over the next several months in four American cities. Though the company has committed to only purchasing the first 20 trucks, "I can't envision any reason why we wouldn't roll this out over the whole fleet," said David J. Bronczek, president of the company's FedEx Express unit. The Eaton Corporation, based in Cleveland, will provide the hybrid electric technology for the trucks. Along with United Parcel Service Inc. and the Postal Service, FedEx has one of the three largest fleets in the country — 42,000 delivery vans and trucks, which log two million miles each day. The company plans to use the hybrids to replace its medium-size delivery trucks, the ones commonly seen on city streets. (05/22/03) | |
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VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It's a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We're not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters. We don't carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing. Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of the Earth's ecology. As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us. Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom. When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Mother Nature's "experiments" have done throughout the eons. Good health will be restored to the Earth's ecology... to the "life form" known by many as Gaia. (05/22/03) | |
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Human Kindness Foundation -- The cause of all our personal problems and nearly all the problems of the world can be summed up in a single sentence: Human life is very deep, and our modern dominant lifestyle is not. ... The Human Kindness Foundation is a non-profit organization which stresses a way of life based upon three common principles taught by the great sages of all religions: Simple living, a dedication to service, and a commitment to personal spiritual practice. (05/22/03) | |
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New York Times: Environment -- Just as the threats of a boycott against American soft drinks because of the war in Iraq appear to have petered out, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are caught in a whole new controversy here over the water consumed by their bottling plants in southern India. The village government of Pudussery, a rural community in the Palghat district of Kerala state, said last week that it had revoked the water-use license of the Pepsi bottling plant there because the plant had depleted the community's groundwater to the point of causing a shortage. The license was not due to expire until 2005. A plant belonging to Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages in nearby Perumatty was denied a license renewal last month on similar grounds. The company appealed to the Kerala High Court, which reversed the village's decision. Coke and Pepsi, two of the most visible American brands in India, dominate the country's $1.2 billion market for soft drinks, one of the world's fastest growing. They compete fiercely to sell carbonated drinks and, increasingly, bottled water. The two companies have been targets of protests against the Bush administration's policies in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Armed rebel groups, shouting anti-American slogans, on several occasions seized and looted soda warehouses. But village leaders say that global political tensions have nothing to do with the water-license matter. "Because of the recent drought, water is already scarce in our area," said K. G. Jayanthy, president of the village council in Pudussery, which is controlled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist). "The local people are agitating that Pepsi is overutilizing water resources, making the shortage very acute." (05/22/03) | |
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New Scientist -- The strongest mothers are much more likely to bear sons in times of food shortages than weaker women, suggest a new study in Ethiopia. Animals have long been known to manipulate the sex of their offspring in response to food availability. But such a phenomenon has never before been shown in humans, says study leader Ruth Mace, an evolutionary anthropologist at University College London, UK. Mace suspected that this lack of evidence resulted from confounding factors in developed societies. "It gets hidden in modern human populations - other things mask it like obesity and pollution," she told New Scientist. Going to rural Ethiopia, where these factors were not present, revealed the "pronounced" sex bias. In 2000, the researchers interviewed and examined over 300 married women in southern Ethiopia shortly after widespread crop failure had left 20 per cent of them suffering from chronic energy deficiency. Overall, the ratio of boys to girls born dropped to 0.88. Sons require more reproductive effort than daughters. "They grow a bit faster, they're bigger when they're born," Mace says. Males are also less likely to survive if malnourished as children, and stunted males are less attractive as potential mates. (05/22/03) | |
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CNN Health -- Avastin, an experimental drug that had essentially been written off as a failure, dramatically extended the lives of some of the sickest colon cancer patients, its maker, Genentech Inc., said Monday. The news surprised Wall Street, sent the biotechnology company's stock soaring and boosted the spirits of researchers working with similar drugs in a field plagued by recent setbacks. Genentech's Avastin is the most advanced drug in this new class of medicines, which are intended to choke off the blood supply to cancer tumors. The work was pioneered by Dr. Judah Folkman some 30 years ago. "The fact that this extended life is a very major medical breakthrough," said Folkman, a researcher at Boston's Children's Hospital. "You can't do any better than that. This will set the standard." (05/22/03) | |
8:43:23 AM 
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© TrustMark
2003
Timothy Wilken.
Last update:
6/3/2003; 5:44:59 AM.
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