A month or so ago, I talked a little bit about this new element. Well, they’ve finally settled on a name for it. I must say I’m a little disappointed in Professor Hofmann. I know as well as the next guy the contribution that Copernicus made to science and, more importantly, the importance of questioning everything, but this is ridiculous.

I made a perfectly reasonable suggestion that they name the new element after David Carradine–which is well within the rules of the naming these things since he’s, well, dead–and did they listen? Of course not.

I guess that’s just how it goes. You win some, you lose some. But as far as I’m concerned, mainstream chemistry is on notice until they come up with some really cool shit for my brain to absorb.

Welcome to the periodic table copernicium. Don’t pay any attention to Iron. He’s just irritable. If you need any advice, go talk to Hydrogen. He’s been around for a long, long time.

traurig genannt.

Some years ago, I wrote a post on my old blog about Harry Potter and certain moral issues pertaining to it. At the time, I had primarily been lamenting the fact that these kids at Hogwarts never take an English class. I mean, they’re growing up to be illiterate wackos with the power of the cosmos at their fingertips. Dangerous to say the least. But at the time I was also taking issue with the fact that they never learn science. It’s not like it doesn’t exist. There’s the muggle world, where tons of people are doing science every day, but the wizarding world is totally ignorant of this fact to their own detriment. Finally, I figured that the existence of magic ought to be utilized for humanity as a whole, and not just for the people who could wield it.

I was, essentially, being deliberately obtuse. Obviously I understand that nature of the narrative. I am a huge fan of the Harry Potter books and enjoy the films as a visualization of the stories that were so carefully told in the novels. Rowling is a wizard of a sort herself. A wizard of words, if that isn’t too cheesy for you. But it’s more than that. Her prose itself is not really that sophisticated. It’s more her ability to build a universe that doesn’t fall apart two days later. The world in Harry Potter is actually quite stellar. It’s an entire mythos that’s very fun and engaging.

In some fictions, we get pretty generic settings. Take for instance, one of my favorite sci-fi television shows: Firefly. It’s an incredibly generic sci-fi setting that is only held together by the strength of its characters and the writing. I mean, a sci-fi western is a really cheesy idea that has been literally done to death. And yet, a stellar cast with great chemistry, great acting, and helluva decent script make the show what it is.

But in Harry Potter, we have a setting that carries its characters. Let’s face it, most of the characters are cardboard cutout archetypes, Harry Potter being the worst, most boring offender. He’s an utterly one-dimensional character who, despite this fact, we actually manage to cheer for. Who is he really? In a high-school drama, he’s the jock. Think about it. If it weren’t for that British accent, you’d have exactly the character in the above image.

I watched the new film last night and it did not disappoint. I’ll spare you the details, because they’re not relevant. Suffice to say, it is and does exactly what it’s supposed to be and do. It is satisfying in that you can watch it once and never have any pressing desire or need to ever watch it again. In a sense, it was a blessing to get it over and done with at the midnight showing.

It was fun, but the films, moreso than the book, have this thing called set dressing that highlights some of the holes in the world that Harry Potter inhabits. A lot of crazy stuff is happening left and right. Terrorist activities by the Death Eaters, right? Just what in the hell is the British government doing about it? I’m talking about the government that governs sixty million beer swilling britons, not the Ministry of Magic that oversees a few thousand (?) magic-slinging ones.

I mean, isn’t there a public outcry to, oh, I don’t know, do something? All I want to know is, how they’re spinning it. I think it’s perfectly possible for the right spin to be spun and still manage to maintain the same narrative, but there’s just this part of me that is absolutely dying to know what’s going on in the muggle world!

Is that because I’m a muggle and, thus, sympathize with them? Is it because I’m a compulsive critic who’s always looking for flaws and problems? Who knows? I invite anyone and everyone to think up headlines that might appear on TV and in muggle newspapers to explain these catastrophes and post them in the comments section.

verbotene Künste.

A while back researchers located some dinosaur burrows in Montana. Of course, this proved that dinosaurs exhibited a burrowing behavior when the need arose. Just recently, further burrows were discovered in Victoria, Australia. The important thing to take away from this is that it shows a similar survival behavior from different species from different hemispheres. 110 million years ago, the Earth was a warmer place, but when Australia used to be situated at the south pole, it still got pretty cold in the winter. And apparently this was how they kept warm.

They were small dinosaurs, which makes sense. Comical as the image of a T-Rex burrowing into the soft sand of a riverbank is, it probably didn’t work that way.

The above cartoon is, as usual, my way of trying to be funny. Whether it’s successful or not, is not my call, but what I like is the idea that dinosaurs might compare survival adaptations, defenses, weaponry, in a civilized tone. It’s an anthropomorphism, which is the main point here. A similar discussion most certainly did occur between dinosaurs, but it probably would have been much more violent and probably involved the T-Rex trying to eat the Triceratops (though there is some debate over whether T-Rex was a hunter or a scavenger or both).

The thing is humans have three or so key survival adaptations: opposable thumbs, upright stature, gigantic brain. Each of these things is a tremendous liability in other ways, however. For instance, our upright stature makes us slow runners. Our huge brains mean our head are big which makes human childbirth a harrowing and very dangerous activity.

So basically, when one is trying to make the argument that humans are the pinnacle, the zenith, the ultimate, in biological evolution (or creation), they have to acknowledge the fact that humans have problems. We really have no natural weaponry, no defense against cold, our immune systems suck, we’re not strong, fast, or agile. All we have is our brains and our ability to use tools.

Dinosaurs were the most successful animals to ever walk the planet. They lived for millions of years. Bipedal man has been here for about five hundred thousand years and homo sapiens for only about a hundred thousand. We have a long way to go before we are even in the same league as dinosaurs. If anything insects (cockroaches, for instance) are the most successful animals currently creeping across this world. Crocodiles, sharks, and other similar species are far older than humans. Turtles live longer.

I mean, if your standard is simply “ability to survive,” then humans suck. We have a very high opinion of ourselves and it’s utterly undeserved. That’s the funny thing.

Again, this is from a survival-ability standpoint. Obviously we’ve made more art. We have language. We have “civilization,” whatever that means. And I think a pat on the back is well deserved. Maybe a polite, quiet round of applause.

Good work people. Keep it up for a few million more years and we’ll really be something. Just don’t screw it up in the meantime, alright?

Glück.

I always sort of assumed that the galaxy far, far away (though, to be fair, all galaxies except the Milky Way are “far, far away”) was one of those theoretical galaxies made primarily out of anti-matter. Of course, if you lived in an anti-matter galaxy, you’d simply think of it as matter. To think that the Star Wars galaxy is made out of anti-matter doesn’t explain anything about the Force or anything. It just conjures up some interesting “what if?” scenarios.

Like what if Captain Picard met Luke Skywalker? It just seems to me that a messiah meeting a man of science would definitely be awkward. Though in this case, not for the obvious reasons.

So it’s often the case in science that you have two hypotheses that explain the same phenomenon. This is a good thing in most cases, because it means that there are multiple avenues in which research and experimentation can be conducted. Take, for example, the fact that there are a lot of unexplained gamma rays buzzing around the galaxy in an unexpected and unexplained distribution. It’s a mystery that’s been plaguing astronomers and physicists for some time.

You have two possible explanations for it: it’s either evidence of dark matter (matter that is undetectable and yet makes up the vast majority of the mass in the universe and has only been observed via its gravitational effects) or it’s not. In this case, it’s not. I am not altogether certain if it was an unexpected discovery or if the researchers were specifically testing this positron hypothesis.

I find it interesting because, by itself, the fact that these positrons are being generated in supernovae, flying for millions of years only to annihilate the first time they come into contact with normal matter, is not that significant–though very cool. It solves a nagging mystery that had, up until now, been considered possible evidence for dark matter. But one thing it does do, in the search for dark matter, is narrow the search down.

I’m not sure if this rules out the possibility that Dark Matter is made of Weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs)–focusing the search on other possible forms that dark matter might take–or if WIMPs are still on the table.

In the end, it’s what you make of it. But dark matter, along with string theory and the Higgs boson, is one of those scientific enigmas that, if solved, would change our understanding of everything. And speaking of string theory, one of its predictions was confirmed and published. Totally sweet.

Singen Sie süße Lieder.

It’s a difficult world that we live in. It’s a world of expectations and everyone seems to expect different things from it. As some would have it, we are to submit to the pseudo-random flux that is evolution. A biologist might define evolution as: the change in allele frequencies in a population over time.

Humans have the unique ability in all the animals on Earth to sort of transcend their instincts. We can act in ways that are contrary to the way we have evolved to act, in other words. I’m not trying to get into a free will debate here, but the fact remains that our ability to perceive evolution for what it is allows us to make reasoned judgments about it. It allows us the unique ability to consciously manipulate it.

Creationists often argue that evolution has never been observed in a lab. Apparently they have never heard of the Westminster Kennel Club.

As the technology for gene manipulation becomes every more sophisticated, a debate is growing about the ethical implications of so-called designer babies. I have very clear objections for eugenics, but as long as gene-screening of embryos is freely available to everybody who wants a child–and not available exclusively to the filthy rich–then what’s the harm? Everyone has a different idea of what beautiful is. What can possibly be wrong with giving your children a little extra edge in the uphill battle for survival?

What I wanted to talk about today is a little different than designer babies, however. I’m almost thirty years old. I’m past the point where my genes could be screened and I could be selected out of a pot of possible embryos. My Adonis-like beauty and Einsteinian intelligence were the result of good old fashioned chance. But that’s it. There’s no way I can improve myself further at the genetic level.

But are there other options? I came across this article today on Science Daily and it got me thinking. There’s a lot of technology being developed for people who lose limbs. This particular new technology is promising because it involves laying microelectrodes on the surface of the brain, rather than embedding them within the neural tissue as a way of detecting neural impulses, translating them, and using them as a computer interface or as a method of controlling a bionic limb. I actually really like that the article uses the words “bionic limb,” terminology that used to be the playground of science fiction writers.

So far, the technology is able to improve the lives of crippled individuals. It is not, however, capable of bringing them back to full power, so to speak. The question that we must entertain at this point is: what happens when it is?

What happens when bionic limbs meet–or exceed–the capabilities of our natural limbs?

Bionics and cybernetics are pretty science fictiony, but this article shows that dramatic progress has been made in the field, and perhaps in ten or twenty years viable, lifelike appendages can be attached with all the articulation of a real hand. But maybe they’re better and stronger than before! A wounded soldier with his purple heart proudly pinned on his cybernetic chest stands tall and proud among a crowd of normal people. He smiles benignly upon them, only dimly remembering the day when he was a mere mortal. He holds his metallic fist above his head, a salute to his great-great-grandfather who had nothing but a leather-wrapped stick to bite down on when the field medic went at his gangrenous leg with a rusty hacksaw.

It’s not that far-fetched!

And even if it were, what are the ethical implications? It’s called “transhumanism.” One could call it forced human evolution. It is a movement that supports the use of biotechnology to augment the human body, not just in the case of injury, but as a voluntary act. A purposeful denial of the limitations of our naturally selected man-bodies. The idea that injury, aging, disease, and death are involuntary and undesirable carries a lot of merit.

Buddhists spend their entire lives attempting to overcome suffering, but their approach is holistic. It emphasizes acceptance of things that can’t be changed. Transhumanism, as a philosophy, urges people to reject the notion that their body is a temple that should not be altered. Body-modification as art is one thing. Body-modification in the name of utility, physical improvement, and life affirmation is another matter entirely.

Robocop spent three films trying to regain his lost humanity, and this is one of the possible perils of transhumanism (also called “posthumanism”). Nietzsche’s description of the Overman is one who has surpassed humankind, but still cares for the transience and vitality that humankind represents.

Bear in mind that evolution short-changes us. Humans are not the pinnacle of evolution. We are merely the product of a natural mechanism that allows animals that are “fit” to survive. As any biologist will tell you, an accurate description of it would be “survival of the sufficiently fit.” In other words, that which survives, survives. All a human needs to do is survive to reproduce. That’s it. In fact, that’s easy. All sorts of terrible maladies and suffering can crop up after that deed is done. Cancer. Osteoporosis. Heart disease. Love handles. And what’s worse? We pass those tendencies on to our children because it’s easy to reproduce.

The question is whether or not we want to accept the qualities that natural selection has, somewhat arbitrarily, assigned to us, or do we wish to strive for something greater? Do we make ourselves something new and distinct? Do we push the limits of human potential?

Some extra reading is important. I highly recommend anything by Nick Bostrom. He’s a professor at Oxford and a noted transhumanist philosopher. Specifically, look at:

• A History of Transhumanist Thought(pdf)
• The Transhumanist FAQ(pdf)
• In Defense of Posthuman Dignity(html)
• Why I Want to be a Posthuman When I Grow Up(pdf).

In the end, it’s not about whether or not you value human life. Everyone except the most staunch sociopaths value human life. It’s about whether you value human life enough to go beyond it.

do svidania