Meditate On This

Meditation can be learned. Thus there are different levels of skill. Just like doctors and engineers, there are those who make As and those who make Bs and Cs and some who have to take the course again. But, compassion can be learned through meditation so maybe it's worth it. Well, according to at least one paper anyway. So maybe there will be more studies or new findings from other sources as we go along. Or we could try to be nice to everyone. Or... Oh, just read the paper.

Hmmmmm, This makes me wonder if....

And it's got sex in it too!

Genetic programming (GP) is a systematic, domain-independent method for getting computers to solve problems automatically starting from a high-level statement of what needs to be done. Using ideas from natural evolution, GP starts from an ooze of random computer programs, and progressively refines them through processes of mutation and sexual recombination, until high-fitness solutions emerge. All this without the user having to know or specify the form or structure of solutions in advance. GP has generated a plethora of human-competitive results and applications, including novel scientific discoveries and patentable inventions. More here and here.

GWB Library Design Winner Announced

Remember that back of the envelope design contest for the GW Bush library. Well there's now a winner.

Don McLeroy will make your kids stupid

Don McLeroy is one of those no-nothing, creation spouting evangelicals and has a real problem with real education. He is trying to wreck the Texas education system by substituting his own dogmatic plans for those built over years of research and planning by real educators.

"What good does it do to put a Chinese story in an English book? You learn all these Chinese words, OK. That's not going to help you master ... English. So you really don't want Chinese books with a bunch of crazy Chinese words in them. Why should you take a child's time trying to learn a word that they'll never ever use again?"

--State Board of Education chairman Don McLeroy, attempting to justify why a reading list for the new English language arts curriculum should be almost exclusively restricted to classics of English literature. McLeroy added that some words — such as chow mein — might be useful.

Full story

Bonus Item - Thomas Jefferson to his nephew Peter Carr: "Spanish. Bestow great attention on this, and endeavor to acquire an accurate knowledge of it. Our future connections with Spain and Spanish America, will render that language a valuable acquisition. The ancient history of that part of America, too, is written in that language. I send you a dictionary."

Frog Zitts

Via: Pharyngula - When the Surinam toad mates the male fertilizes the eggs and rubs them on the back of the female. Her skin responds by swelling and enveloping the eggs. Then when they are done, the little bitty baby frogs pop right out of mom's hide. I'll bet that itches.

Disjointed Inference

Advertising is full of this.

Scrap Booking

I shoot off my keyboard writing letters to editors (not so much anymore) and commenting on letters and columns at some news paper web sites etc.. Somewhere, in one of those lines of comments, I ran across a roundup of the comments by someone on some topic. I thought it would be a cool tool to analyze threads with then I thought about rounding up some stuff I was interested in and slowly my brains got though to me to look at my own comments. During all that I was using Google to do site searches. I discovered that on at least a couple of those web sites their built in Google or Yahoo search thing that offers the radio button to search the site didn't return even one hit when I put in my user label or user name that appears in the "posted by [user]" on the comments I make. So then I started over from the first page but used the "search this site" option from the Google tool bar on my browser. That worked pretty good it seemed. but after looking at the results for a little while I figured out there was something missing. So I went over to dogpile and searched the site again using the same search. Bam, more stuff. So I wonder if there is somewhere that a person could put together a search of several specific domain sites for a few specific terms and actually get everything. Or do search engines now just return enough stuff to make you think they did something and keep you coming back so they can sell their advertising? Someone needs to make a search thingy that will look at search results from different search engines and analyze the sites being searched for evidence to things that trick or block searches and come up with a "Confidence Score" for some kinds of search results.

I decided to scrap book my stuff at a couple of sites by making a link to the search results from dogpile. Maybe I'll get around to looking for other search combiners so if anyone knows of good ways of doing this especially if they have some confidence meter thingy and a way to avoid the links to ads that are included in some returns, let me know. Somebody needs to make program for this that'll run on desktops and phones and can be sold one search at a time. I'm not getting much scrapbooking done but what the hey.

Here and here are results for the San Angelo Standard Times.

Here are the results for the Abilene Reporter News.

Ethanol Hoax

In anywhere close to it's present form, ethanol production makes us all poorer and in danger of loosing a big part of our food supply. William Grimes talks about energy independence and a book on the subject here>>.

Detroit loves ethanol because it can use it to inflate fuel-efficiency ratings on their cars artificially. The mammoth Chevy Suburban, produced as a flex-fuel vehicle capable of burning both ethanol and gasoline, magically boosted its fuel efficiency to 29 miles per gallon from 15, since under federal rules only a vehicle’s gasoline consumption need be factored into the equation. Ethanol, in other words, has allowed American car manufacturers to produce more gas guzzlers and contribute to increased imports of foreign oil.

Happy Good Friday

Breaking The Science Barrier

PZ Myers gets tossed out of a screening for a movie he is in. It is a piece of slop called Expelled. It was hilarious that Richard Dawkins was standing next to PZ and the honchos didn't recognize him.
Below is part one of some stuff from Richard. There are tons more things on his web sites here and here. You can go here and find the links for all of it on Gvideo, Youtube or download it in Qtime or even buy the DVD already done up. Then after you watch it and think about it all for a minute, cruise on over here and confess yourself.

This looks like a good idea to me.

Lotto Money

What to do when I win the Lotto? I usually fantasize about giving it away one way or another. I've been puzzled by Warren Buffet giving money to Bill Gates' foundation to give it away. I guess he just can't figure out how to do anything with it himself. I always figured we would all be better off if more people were better off. That seems like a no brainer to me. Just like we are all better off if everyone else is better educated and smarter. Nearly everyone is smarter than me so finding somewhere to hang out hasn't been much of a search for me but it might be a little drag on the other hangees. It looks to me like people like Gates and Buffet should be able to figure out ways of giving stuff away that would have the best chance of what they give being worth more to the recipients than it cost the giver. That seems like a no brainer too. But my thinkin' that way is probably just a function of not having absorbed enough smarts from my friends. Anyway, TV is crappy today and I saw this while surfin the W^3 and it made me think of all of that again. I guess I'd better remember to get a ticket sometime if I'm gonna get around to showing them how it's done.

History In Our Genome

Which came first, the egg or boobs? Just in time nutrition save a mom from investing more than is needed at any point in time in a progeny. Helping her to survive to produce another if the first fails too young. And other turns of our story. >>

90: A Space Odessey Is Over

The last of the Big Three is gone. Sir Arthur C Clarke has died at age 90 joining Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. What magnificent imaginations they gave us.

Obama

Obama's speech today demands to be read. No matter what you think of him, you will very ill informed about him if you do not read the whole thing. If you take everything Bush has said in his whole life and got it perfectly edited and spun by the best, it would never come come close to this one speech. James Galbraith said of the speech: "This is Lincoln at Cooper Union."

And you thought McCain's and Obama's preacher buddies are nuts.

On 3 March 2008, in a popular TV show, Sanal Edamaruku, the president of Rationalist International, challenged India’s most “powerful” tantrik (black magician) to demonstrate his powers on him. That was the beginning of an unprecedented experiment. After all his chanting of mantra (magic words) and ceremonies of tantra failed, the tantrik decided to kill Sanal Edamaruku with the “ultimate destruction ceremony” on live TV. Sanal Edamaruku agreed and sat in the altar of the black magic ritual. India TV observed skyrocketing viewership rates. More>>

PZ Myers Shreds John Gray On Atheism

This is good!

If there's one thing science is really good at, it is at surprising us and generating unintended consequences — Gray is so far off the mark in his claims about what science is good for that I think that alone is sufficient to throw out his whole argument. The world is not what we want it to be, or what we expect it to be, or what authorities in the supernatural tell us it should be. It is what it is, and science is a tool for probing its nature that tries to get around our presuppositions and our desires, and that when it works well gets us closer and closer to understanding reality. It's not science, but religion, that is all about control: about filtering and shaping our beliefs to a desired outcome, and getting the tribe to work as one towards a goal, whether that goal is reasonable or reachable or not. If you want social control, it's religious pablum you should reach for, not the unpredictable honesty of science.

Go read the rest.>>>

A to B, B to C and C to A

Circular arguments are welcome today. Happy Pi day!

If you can remember the 60's, you were not there.

Here's a review of Arlo Guthrie's "Solo Reunion Tour: Together Again At Last" stop in Ft. Worth's Bass Hall. It got me thinking about the 60's and 70's. I was disguised as normal in those days. I found some Arlo stuff on YouTube. Now & Then

Possibility Junkies

Mark Edmundson talks about no more laptops in his class. Students can check them at the door or leave them at home. Just because we are able to connect a telegraph wire between any two points in the world now does not mean that, say California and Mississippi have anything to say to each other. There's more, like seeing all the pleated skirts in the world at one time.

This is what Immanuel Kant, were he around to see it, might have called the computer sublime (he called something like it mathematical sublimity). The moment when you make the purchase, close the deal, pick a girlfriend, set a date: All those things, the students around the Thoreau table concurred, were a letdown, consummations not really to be wished for. The students were a little surprised by the conclusions they came to about themselves. "It's when I can see it all in front of me," one young woman said, "that's when I'm the happiest."

And I liked thinking on this:

It's not a luxury, this Socratic education whose goal is self-knowledge. Constantly I see my students leaving the university, determined to do not what they want and need to do, but what their parents and their friends believe that they ought to do. And in this they can in some measure succeed. Society has a great span of resources to assist someone in doing what he's not cut out for yet still must be done. Alcohol, drugs, divorce, and buying, buying, buying what you don't need will all help you jam your round peg of a self into this or that square-holed profession.

But those students who, through whatever form of struggle, really have come to an independent sense of who they are and what they want genuinely seem to thrive in the world. Thoreau says that if you advance in the direction of your dreams, you'll find uncommon success, and teaching a few generations of students has persuaded me that he is right. The ones who do what they love without a lot of regard for conventional success tend to turn out happy and strong. As to those willing to advance in the direction of other people's dreams — well, prime the credit cards, crank the porn channel!

There's lots more>>>

Drinkin' Water

I was reading some news about drugs in drinking water supplies. Testing methods and equipment has been sensitive enough to find just about any amount of anything anywhere for a long time now. I noted with interest that Arlington, Texas found a drug in their water but they would not disclose the amount or the drugs they found. They discovered more than one in untreated water and one in treated water supplies. They won't be able to keep that secret for long. I wonder if they tested for Budwiser or gin while they were at it. I don't know about today's technology but more than ten years ago when I supervised a drug and alcohol testing program under FAA rules, the lab we used was able to tell if one of the subjects had had even one drink in the last 80+ hours. I figure those tests are even more sensitive by now. So who is going to do the clean up? I imagine the politicians all have their hands out to the drug and chemical companies already and we should see legislation any day for drug company protection. And the police half of the political machine will be clambering to lockup more folks for drug and alcohol abuse or busting their probations. Get ready to pay for more prisons because they are not going to touch the supply side marketers. It's rare to find folks who don't use the stuff. Non use of that stuff is a point of power and justly so. It always works out to one's advantage in any conceivable circumstance. Better pay and more leverage every time. I'm reminded of the magic fish caught one day by one of a pair of buddies fishing out in the middle of a large lake. The fish could talk and it offered to grant any wish if the guy would release him back into the water. After getting over the shock of the fact that the fish could talk, the guy holding the fish said, "I wish this lake was full of beer." and he dropped the fish back into the water. His buddy immediately yelled, "Why did you do that?" The first guy looked puzzled and as his buddy why he was upset since the lake was now full of beer and they could stay out on the lake forever and wouldn't have to go ashore to get more beer. The other buddy said, "You idiot, now we have to piss in the boat!" I never had to piss in the boat hanging out with folks that don't screw with the stuff. We got a lot more fishing done too.

Degaussing Magneto Man

Aha, Another Creed.

Over at PZ's place I noticed his response to some strange artist's delusion contained an Atheist Creed. It's a pretty good one, but since atheist tend to change stuff as the evidence rolls in, I'll just call it Friday's Creed. This Friday. Who knows what we'll know by next Friday? It'll probably change for the better before the end of the comments. That's a good thing.

Vote

Watch the video on the right of the page then cast your vote. I liked suspended disbelief. It made me laugh.

Cheap Gas

It's pretty exciting to see lots of news about new energy sources and better technologies that will make using it more efficient popping up pretty regularly now. I think one of those that will make things better soonest is cheap solar. Some photo-voltaic solar cells on the market now have broken the dollar per watt price barrier and can be produced fast enough now that they should be major player in short order. A little more distant on that horizon are cells that convert much more of the light spectrum to electricity making them even more cost effective. Still newer solar cell technology for producing hydrogen from sunlight and water will have an important place in the energy spectrum very soon.

Algae that produce oil that can be used as motor fuel will be taking their place at the energy market sooner than most thought possible even a year ago. They may even be great fuel sources for power plants replacing coal. That would get rid of lots of nasty by products from those kind of power stations and take a load off of petroleum reserves at the same time because they would free up natural gas for other uses. Or maybe stationary power plants will be running on hydrogen from solar and producing fresh water as a by product.

Getting more of the carbon emissions out of the exhaust and waste stream and back in the fuel stream would a great idea too and now that looks more than just probable in the near future.

But the best thing is that more people are paying attention to the problems because of the price at the pump for gasoline, the political mileage from climate change and the economic value of doing green stuff. Real green stuff not like the ethanol fiasco brought to us by the corn farmers and Bushco in the last few years.

More folks are going to want to spend our hard earned national resources on funding the research and engineering to put these things in place now that the cost of this past administration is becoming painfully clear. The bunch we've had running the show have done us a huge favor. In just eight years they have exposed vast numbers of bad choices that would otherwise have taken maybe a century to discover using conventional research and experience methods. Now we can clearly see where to put our money and effort on just about every front of human interest. Wanna know if something is a bad idea, just ask yourself - what would Bush do.

I think all of this means more people will be buying far more efficient cars and light bulbs that will have a real and massive affect on the petroleum industry. I think the demand for gas will start back down soon and along with it the price of gas will start to go down. That will be good news for me. That means gas may get to 75 cents a gallon and I can probably drive my old pickup truck till the world runs out of parts for '96 Chevy C fifteen hunnerts. The bonus item will be knowing the Saudis will be as poor as I am.

I've never been to an election like this one.

I've been to the polls quite a few times in my life but I've never seen anything like this. I drove over to the regular polling place for my precinct this morning. I had the cheat sheet I prepared after studying some of the more obscure district judges and dog catcher races over the last couple of weeks. I walked up to the door and paused to fish out voter registration and cheat sheet and get my phone set to stun and noticed signs saying that the place is a Republican polling place and that the Democratic polling place is a couple of miles away in another fire station. A couple of folks came and went while I was there but there didn't seem to be much activity around the place and it didn't seem they were there long enough to mark a ballot, at least not the whole thing. So I walked back to the parking lot and climbed aboard the battle cruiser to head on over to fire station number two.

The story was very different at the next place. I waited for a slot to open and got parked. Several cars were leaving and a couple were arriving at the same time I was docking. I wandered around following the signs through side door to a couple of the fire house bays. Once inside, I found they had the place divided down the middle with the registration tables set up for two lines on the left for Democrats and two lines on the right for Republicans. There were 13 people in line on the left and no one in line on the right. There were two people in voting booths working on ballots. I notices almost everyone took as long to mark their ballot as I did. Most picked up the little ticket for the caucus tonight.

One thing is clear, more people are voting this election than I've ever seen before and they were sure lining up on the left. I think that is going to be good for Hillary around here even if some of that line were Limbots trying to do their little crossover thing. Maybe Rush should go ahead and pick out some dresses to wear in his next career.

Drunks are what they drink.

Much of the culture of drinkin' is built around what people expect they will behave like when they drink. Or maybe what they have been lead to want to expect. But it is an expectation they adopt for whatever reason and has nothing to do with the booze and everything to do with the culture they drink from. So, they just become more of what they already are. To change, they gotta drink something different. And I don't mean switching from Gin to Corona. The booze industry knows this too. They have used that knowledge to dig themselves into every form of cultural activity for their own benefits in the way of massive profits. That no one is holding them up for any accountability in all of this makes me snot-slingin' mad sometimes. But that's another story. Now back to this.

In fact, the dynamics of bingeing may have more to do with personal and cultural expectations than with the number of upside-down margaritas consumed. In their classic 1969 book, “Drunken Comportment,” recently out in paperback, the social scientists Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton wrote that the disconnect between the conventional wisdom on drunken behavior and the available evidence “is even now so scandalous as to exceed the limits of reasonable toleration.”

They detailed the vast differences in the way people from diverse cultures behave after excessive alcohol. In contrast to nearby tribes, for example, the Yuruna Indians in the Xingu region of Brazil would become exceptionally reserved when rendered sideways by large helpings of moonshine. The Camba of eastern Bolivia would drink excessively twice a month. Sitting in a circle, they would toast one another, more lavishly with each pop.

In a Japanese island village, Takashima, people knew a drinking occasion had gone completely off the dials if villagers began to sing or, wilder still, to dance. Aggression, sexual or otherwise, was unheard of during these sessions.

In a series of studies in the 1970s and ’80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study room outfitted like a bar with mirrors, music and a stretch of polished pine. The researchers served alcoholic drinks, most often icy vodka tonics, to some of the students and nonalcoholic ones, usually icy tonic water, to others. The drinks looked and tasted the same, and the students typically drank five in an hour or two.

The studies found that people who thought they were drinking alcohol behaved exactly as aggressively, or as affectionately, or as merrily as they expected to when drunk. “No significant difference between those who got alcohol and those who didn’t,” Alan Marlatt, the senior author, said. “Their behavior was totally determined by their expectations of how they would behave.”

In a repeat of the session performed for a coming documentary, one participant insisted that she could not have been drinking because alcohol always made her flush.

“We told her that, yes, in fact she was drinking it,” Dr. Marlatt said. “She immediately flushed.”

You can read the rest>>

To Hillary

I got one of those messages from the HRC campaign. I am a fan of Barack Obama but I do not think he is the one. He is going to make a fine Senator and televangelist some day.

Hillary's campaign sent a message asking for our stories or questions. I wish these campaigns had better bottom up design so that more of the messages are looked at and responded to at a community level at least as some sort of conversation amongus. I know that we can't all talk at the same time but I sent my stuff anyway and here it is for whatever it is worth to others.

I hope you will stress the difference between oratory and pragmatism in working to lead this country. It is time to stress the power of a united Democratic party and the American people in taking our country back from the failed ideas and corrupted conservatism that has destroyed so many lives and squandered the American influence and reputation in the world and in our own national conscience. I hope you will take the lead now in addressing the job ahead of you and of us as a nation. We the people of this great nation are eager to press on. We are thirsty to take our place on the world stage and lead the way to freedom and success by becoming once again that nation known for liberty and not fear suspicion of our neighbors. We want to take our place as the nation of leaders and as the example of the power of liberty. We want to show that this republic is powered by it's people for not only it's people but for all humanity. We are ready to demonstrate that the people of the United States of America have the character to prove that united we will triumph and lift every citizen of this country out of poverty, out of the despairs of poor health and disease, out of the darkness of bigotry and division and into the light and security of progress, prosperity, leadership, liberty and respect.

My questions are:

Will you be the President of that kind of Nation?

Will you lead us as we eliminate the barriers to having the best health care system in the world?

Will you lead as we remove the crushing burdens our present health care system now imposes on the productivity and spirit of every citizen and business in this country?

Will you lead us in eliminating the stumbling blocks to excellent education for every person in this country?

How long must we wait for every person in this country to have the best tools and full backing of our prosperity so that we can compete and lead the world in market and human prosperity?

You can add you voice by going here>>