10.7

1) Essential Jazz: "Quiet" - John Scofield



Track: After The Fact

Nylon string guitar, with Wayne Shorter on tenor sax. Great stuff.




2) Does God Play dice?



3) Quantum Astronomy: The Double Slit Experiment

"So light is both a particle and a wave. OK, kind of unexpected (like Jell-O) but perhaps not totally weird. But the double slit experiment had another trick up its sleeve. One could send one photon (or “quantum” of energy) through a single slit at a time, with a sufficiently long interval in between, and eventually a spot builds up that looks just like the one produced when a very intense (many photons) light was sent through the slit.
But then a strange thing happened. When one sends a single photon at a time (waiting between each laser pulse, for example) toward the screen when both slits are open, rather than two spots eventually building up opposite the two slit openings, what eventually builds up is the interference pattern of alternating bright and dark lines! Hmm… how can this be, if only one photon was sent through the apparatus at a time?
The answer is that each individual photon must – in order to have produced an interference pattern -- have gone through both slits! This, the simplest of quantum weirdness experiments, has been the basis of many of the unintuitive interpretations of quantum physics. We can see, perhaps, how physicists might conclude, for example, that a particle of light is not a particle until it is measured at the screen. It turns out that the particle of light is rather a wave before it is measured. But it is not a wave in the ocean-wave sense. It is not a wave of matter but rather, it turns out that it is apparently a wave of probability. That is, the elementary
particles making up the trees, people, and planets -- what we see around us -- are apparently just distributions of likelihood until they are measured (that is, measured or observed). So much for the Victorian view of solid matter!"

4) Study finds coffee reduces liver risk

"The study of nearly 10,000 people showed that those who drank more than two cups of coffee or tea per day developed chronic liver disease at half the rate of those who drank less than one cup each day."

5) Bullfights? Your Club or Mine?

"You don't want to get into the arguments - it's silly," Mr. Weldon said, before wearily stating the stock rejoinders: fighting bulls live more than twice as long as beef cattle; they are pampered until fighting day; the meat is always consumed; and seeing a bull die gives one a better appreciation of what it means to eat beef.
"In the modern world the bovine destiny is the plate," said Mr. Weldon, an aficionado práctico who has killed three bulls.
"It's not fair, and it's not supposed to be fair," he said. "It's not a sport, it's an art because the bull dies."

Remember: It's not "bullfighting", folks - it's "bullkilling".





6) What Men Want: Neanderthal TV



7) GM pea causes allergic damage in mice



8) Sapling thrives from 2,000-year-old seed



9) Sprouting Keyboard (who's on top, baby?!)







10) Richard Pryor Dies 12.10.2005

10.6

1) Essential Jazz: "I Remember Miles" - Shirley Horn



Track: Blue In Green


This is now my favorite jazz piece after Wayne Shorter's "Dance Cadaverous" (Miles' "So What" at third...). Horn essentially teaches how to approach and play with changes in B.I.G., and the effect is super-mellow.

Yowsa.




2) Research: Expectations Can Help Healing

"Doctors have long thought the placebo effect was psychological. Now scientists are amassing the first direct evidence that the placebo effect actually is physical, and that expecting benefit can trigger the same neurological pathways of healing as real medication does.
'Your expectations can have profound impacts on your brain and your health,' says Columbia University neuroscientist Tor Wager."

2a) Is There a Link Between Stress and Cancer?

"...it now appears that cancer cells make proteins that actually tell the immune system to let them alone and even to help them grow."

3) Evolution, creationism both right, renowned scholar says

"His theory: Intelligent force used natural selection to make world"

You, sir, are correct!



4) Madigan says state overpaid hospital; Suit alleges U. of C. `double bunked' babies

"The treatment of newborn babies has sparked an $8 million billing dispute between the University of Chicago Hospitals and Illinois Atty. Gen. Lisa Madigan, who alleges that the hospital improperly 'double bunked' infants in beds meant for only one baby.
The practice at Wyler's Children's Hospital put infants at risk for infection and led the hospitals to overcharge the state's Medicaid program from 1997 to June, Madigan said in a federal lawsuit unsealed Nov. 1.
The double bunking forced babies to share 'set-ups,' which include oxygen and other bedside supplies, and violated state rules that require infants to be 4 to 6 feet apart, Madigan contends. But the hospitals billed the state full price for those services, she alleges.
Because of their close proximity, nurses and doctors moved from one baby to the next without stopping to wash their hands," the complaint said."

(see: Ten To Go / 10.4 / 3))



5) The Universe As A Hologram

Penn Teller on God (see also Buckley, etc at the end of article)

God's Debris by Scott Adams
(eBook)

"The rain made everything sound different—the engine of my delivery van, the traffic as it rolled by on a film of fallen clouds, the occasional dull honk. I didn’t have a great job, but it wasn’t bad, either. I knew the city so well that I could lose myself in thought and still do the work, still get paid, still have plenty of time for myself.
When you’re inside your own head, the travel time between buildings evaporates. It’s as if I could vanish from one stop and reappear at the next."

That's a _very_ interesting opening hook if you're a UPS driver living the life I'm living...

“They say that they believe because pretending to believe is necessary to get the benefits of religion. They tell other people that they believe and they do believer-like things, like praying and reading holy books. But they don’t do the things that a true believer would do, the things a true believer would have to do.
“If you believe a truck is coming toward you, you will jump out of the way. That is belief in the reality of the truck. If you tell people you fear the truck but do nothing to get out of the way, that is not belief in the truck. Likewise, it is not belief to say God exists and then continue sinning and hoarding your wealth while innocent people die of starvation. When belief does not control your most important decisions, it is not belief in the underlying reality, it is belief in the usefulness of believing.”

Nice call. But overall flawed treatise; needs direct experience as background. :))


Adams' blog



6) Vonnegut on suicide bombers



7) This Is Your Brain Under Hypnosis

"...For example, photons bouncing off a flower first reach the eye, where they are turned into a pattern that is sent to the primary visual cortex. There, the rough shape of the flower is recognized.
The pattern is next sent to a higher - in terms of function - region, where color is recognized, and then to a higher region, where the flower's identity is encoded along with other knowledge about the particular bloom.
The same processing stream, from lower to higher regions, exists for sounds, touch and other sensory information. Researchers call this direction of flow feedforward. As raw sensory data is carried to a part of the brain that creates a comprehensible, conscious impression, the data is moving from bottom to top. Bundles of nerve cells dedicated to each sense carry sensory information.
The surprise is the amount of traffic the other way, from top to bottom, called feedback. There are 10 times as many nerve fibers carrying information down as there are carrying it up. These extensive feedback circuits mean that consciousness, what people see, hear, feel and believe, is based on what neuroscientists call "top down processing." What you see is not always what you get, because what you see depends on a framework built by experience that stands ready to interpret the raw information - as a flower or a hammer or a face.
The top-down structure explains a lot. If the construction of reality has so much top-down processing, that would make sense of the powers of placebos (a sugar pill will make you feel better), nocebos (a witch doctor will make you ill), talk therapy and meditation. If the top is convinced, the bottom level of data will be overruled."

8) Sapling thrives from 2,000-year-old seed



9) McDonald’s plans to switch to catfish and tilapia for its Filet-O-Fish sandwich.


10) Herring Break Wind to Communicate, Study Suggests

"The study's findings, now published online in the U.K. science journal Biology Letters, reveal that Atlantic and Pacific herring create high-frequency sounds by releasing air from their anuses.
"We know [herring] have excellent hearing but little about what they actually use it for," said research team leader Ben Wilson, a marine biologist at the Bamfield Marine Science Centre, British Columbia, Canada. "It turns out that herring make unusual farting sounds at night." Wilson and his colleagues named the phenomenon Fast Repetitive Tick, which makes for the rather mischievous acronym, FRT. But unlike the human version, these FRTs are thought to bring the fish closer together."