[X] My Assistant

[ljk4-1]

Maybe it shouldn't, but it still gets me how it is almost the year 2006 and there are still plenty of people who think that a supernatural being made everything and punishes people as a group with storms and earthquakes.

If someone or something did create this Universe, which is theoretically possible, it will not be the kind of "god" most people think it is.

Today is Voltaire's birthday. This quote I found sums things up pretty well:

"Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all." - Voltaire, 1762

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire

Like I said about being sadly amazed at the Medieval thinking processes of most people in the almost year of 2006:

Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra has said he will not answer
reporters' questions until next year because the alignment of the planets is
not in his favor.

"Right now Mercury ... is in a corner perfectly aligned with my star.
Mercury is no good, so if it's not good, I am going to request not to speak.
I'll just wait until next year to talk," Thaksin told reporters Sunday after
returning to Bangkok from a trip to South Korea and China.

He added that Mercury moves slowly and will not steer clear of his star
until next year.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/asiapcf/11/2...m.ap/index.html

[mike]

The Thai PM is also corrupt and has avoided the press since the day he was elected. He is just using the 'Mercury in the wrong house' thing as an excuse to not have to talk about his latest money-wasting scandal.

Who knows, maybe in Thailand they'll buy it..

[ljk4-1]

"There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle."

- Albert Einstein

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Nov05/...n.arXiv.ws.html

[ljk4-1]

Paper (*cross-listing*): physics/0510102

replaced with revised version Tue, 6 Dec 2005 06:20:04 GMT (7kb)

Title: Message in the Sky

Authors: S. Hsu and A. Zee

Comments: 3 pages, revtex

Subj-class: Popular Physics

We argue that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a stupendous opportunity for the Creator of universe our (assuming one exists) to have sent a message to its occupants, using known physics. Our work does not support the Intelligent Design movement in any way whatsoever, but asks, and attempts to answer, the entirely scientific question of what the medium and message might be IF there was actually a message. The medium for the message is unique. We elaborate on this observation, noting that it requires only careful adjustment of the fundamental Lagrangian, but no direct intervention in the subsequent evolution of the universe.

\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0510102 , 7kb)

[mike]

Anything can be interpreted any way you want.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Paper (*cross-listing*): physics/0510102

replaced with revised version Tue, 6 Dec 2005 06:20:04 GMT (7kb)

Title: Message in the Sky

Authors: S. Hsu and A. Zee

Comments: 3 pages, revtex

Subj-class: Popular Physics

We argue that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a stupendous opportunity for the Creator of universe our (assuming one exists) to have sent a message to its occupants, using known physics. Our work does not support the Intelligent Design movement in any way whatsoever, but asks, and attempts to answer, the entirely scientific question of what the medium and message might be IF there was actually a message. The medium for the message is unique. We elaborate on this observation, noting that it requires only careful adjustment of the fundamental Lagrangian, but no direct intervention in the subsequent evolution of the universe.

\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0510102 , 7kb)

Interesting speculation.

But would really a spiritual god proceed that way (lefing us a message in the cosmic gravity wave background)? A spiritual god will expect us to reach wisdom, while technology matters little (we could reach wisdom with no technology at all, for example a dolphin civilization, without hands).

If we found such a message, it would rather indicate some kind of super-civ mastering time and space, able to create new universes, and expecting us to do so like our parents expect we have children in turn. Or something much larger.

Anyway such a message implies that we develop a high tech and also a large economic background to detect it. But it poses no prerequisite about our degree of wisdom and no hypothesis about our intentions. A spiritual god, and even any technological creator, would try to check this before checking our tech or economy level.

So for these reasons, I do not expect too much to find such a message from the creator in the cosmic background. But who knows.

How could this message be coded? Difficult to say. Some remarkable non-random feature could appear in it. But it cannot use language, and even not octets, letters, syllabes and the like. A music is more likely, but what makes sound pleasant or evoking such and such emotion have very local causes, linked to our evolution, which could not be foreseen at time of the creation (it would even not be sure that we hear sounds).

Anyway only the frequency info in the signal would be preserved, no phase or waveforms. That strictly reduces the amount of info which can be coded. So the more likely is that we could find some frequency spikes and gaps in the spectrum, having some relation with physical constants and mathematical constants, so that we can recognize them as being artificial.

More than that?

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Paper (*cross-listing*): physics/0510102

replaced with revised version Tue, 6 Dec 2005 06:20:04 GMT (7kb)

Title: Message in the Sky

Authors: S. Hsu and A. Zee

Comments: 3 pages, revtex

Subj-class: Popular Physics

We argue that the cosmic microwave background (CMB) provides a stupendous opportunity for the Creator of universe our (assuming one exists) to have sent a message to its occupants, using known physics. Our work does not support the Intelligent Design movement in any way whatsoever, but asks, and attempts to answer, the entirely scientific question of what the medium and message might be IF there was actually a message. The medium for the message is unique. We elaborate on this observation, noting that it requires only careful adjustment of the fundamental Lagrangian, but no direct intervention in the subsequent evolution of the universe.

\\ ( http://arXiv.org/abs/physics/0510102 , 7kb)

I think it is interesting that scientists are able to envision such hypothesis (even if they are not very likely) of spiritual/metaphysics nature, while keeping a scientific way of thinking. Afteral cosmology of the beginning of the universe opens a door toward metaphysics.

Of course they have to take caution about religious nuts of the ID movements, but everybody have to take such caution, even in a purely spiritual context.

[ljk4-1]

Intelligent design? No smart engineer designed our bodies, Sherman tells premeds in class on Darwinian medicine

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/Dec05/...edicine.kr.html

Dec. 7, 2005

By Krishna Ramanujan
ksr32@cornell.edu

"Unintelligent design." That is how Cornell evolutionary biologist Paul Sherman refers to the architecture of the human body. If an "intelligent designer" engineered the human body, he points out, air and food would not travel through the same pipes, making us vulnerable to choking.

After teaching seminars on Darwinian medicine (Neurobiology and Behavior 420 this semester) for more than a decade, Sherman, professor of neurobiology and behavior and a Weiss Presidential Fellow, has developed such insights into the workings of the human body and why things are the way they are. They are quite counter, he says, to the idea of intelligent design -- the controversial idea that some things in nature are too complex to be explained by natural selection and, therefore, must be the work of a deity -- an intelligent designer.

"As soon as you begin to look at our bodies from an evolutionary perspective you see more and more we are not intelligently designed," said Sherman. For example, he pointed out that no engineer would design our throats with a windpipe that crosses the tube where food passes. "If you were going to design this to eliminate choking you'd probably put your mouth in your forehead or your nasal opening in your throat. It [the human body] is as one would expect from random mutations of previously existing structures and selection over eons."

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Intelligent design? No smart engineer designed our bodies, Sherman tells premeds in class on Darwinian medicine

...

There are many other examples of such "bugs" in the human body design. For instance we can look at the other end of the digestive tube (I give no details from this place) to understand that the most pleasant parts of the body are very close from the dirtiest. From a designer if would be a really filthy joke. What ID proponents think about this?

Anyway, even if we found that the human body was designed, it would not prove that the designer was a god using magical means. The designer could simply be a previous civilization, able for instance to understand the genetic code and write a new code of their own. But the fundamentalists who defend ID cannot envision such an hypothesis of another mankind!!!

So material science proved with enough certainty that the human body was produced by a natural evolution. Materialist scientists will readily accept that in some instances a material fact can constrain a spiritual reflection. But spiritual people should accept it too.

Anyway spirituality is little about studying the history of the universe, it is rather about practicizing mutual help of mending our character defects. What the ID proponents are doing about this?

[mike]

Indeed, when you look around at the apparent evil that exists in the world, it sometimes seems it would be easier to just accept a giant 'god' (or 'gods') that will magically fix everything one way or another. However, if you were to truly accept such an idea, you would never do anything, since god(s) will just sort it out anyway - and no religious person does this.

In summary, religious people are just confused and would be better off fully embracing whatever problems exist in the world. Via this process they would thereby learn how to fix some of them and inevitably discover that some don't really need 'fixed' at all.

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Anyway, even if we found that the human body was designed, it would not prove that the designer was a god using magical means. The designer could simply be a previous civilization, able for instance to understand the genetic code and write a new code of their own. But the fundamentalists who defend ID cannot envision such an hypothesis of another mankind!!!

Right, I do not like this idea much more. If our bodies were designed by a former technlogical civilization, they left many bugs and this explanation is no more satisfying.

Another bug: Pain is useful as a warning signal, but after warning it just becomes a nuisance, which can drive people into doing wrong things such as panicking or commiting suicide.

If the human body was designed, it was by the ancestors of certain big software company... which still not corrected the bugs, even billion years after. We just have to buy the next version...

[mike]

If pain weren't strong enough to warn you of truly dangerous things, you'd ignore it and it wouldn't matter.

The real issue with pain is that we can be trained to react in certain ways to anything. Obviously the fear of physical pain is engrained in us from birth (the vast majority of us), but beyond that you can make anyone fear anything.

A main element of fear does always seem to be the fear of the unknown. We fear pain because it leads to death, which no one understands. We fear terrorists because they cause death. We fear loneliness because if everyone were satisfied being by themselves all the time, no one would ever bother having sexual intercourse, and that would lead to utter death of the species.

So I suppose it all comes down to fear of death. And once you no longer fear death, life becomes rather tedious, and all the silly things people do are alternately faintly amusing and depressing, and maybe you'll try to help people see what you mean, and who knows, maybe you illuminate some people, but maybe you just have to have certain experiences or else it never makes any sense, in which case, you're just fooling yourself that you can make any difference, but that's the most depressing thing of all, so surely it must not be true, because if it were you might as well exit this silly 'life' altogether, but who knows how death works exactly.

Therefore, everyone on Earth is afraid. Either a) fear/pain has some use, or b ) the universe is very cruel. I usually go for a)..

[ljk4-1]

Anti-creationism professor: Resignation was forced

Mirecki recently quit as department head, remains professor

http://www.cnn.com/2005/EDUCATION/12/11/cr...r.ap/index.html

[tuomio]

In fun to have those ID folks around, gives you something to laugh at.

[ljk4-1]

Monkey Business -- For students who doubt the validity of evolution, college science class can be daunting. What happens when beliefs and schoolwork collide?

Current magazine (a publication of Newsweek), Dec. 6

Article on the evolution/intelligent design issue quotes President Rawlings and a Cornell student.

Following University of Idaho President Tim White's statement that only evolution theory should be taught in his school's bio-physical science courses, the interim president of Cornell University, Hunter R. Rawlings III, used his October State of the University address to condemn intelligent design for "put[ting] rational thought under attack." He went on to deride it as "a religious belief masquerading as science."

Hannah Maxson, a junior at Cornell University majoring in chemistry and mathematics, disagrees with her school's policy. "I don't think [intelligent design] belongs in a humanities course. I think it does belong in a science course," she says. Maxson is the founder of Cornell's Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Club, a new student organization dedicated to discussing the "holes" in evolution and researching other theories of origin.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10297809/site/...=EmailThis&CE=1


Students join debate on intelligent design -- Campus clubs set up to defend concept

Chicago Tribune, Nov. 25

Dappled with autumn leaves, the manicured campus of an Ivy League university in upstate New York may seem far from the cornfields of Kansas or the rural towns of central Pennsylvania, but it represents the newest of these battlefields in the growing culture war over the teaching of evolution.

The national spotlight recently has focused on school boards in Kansas, Pennsylvania and elsewhere that are grappling with calls for including intelligent design, a concept critical of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, in science curricula. But a significant new front in this cultural conflict is opening in the halls of American higher education, spearheaded by science students skeptical of evolution and intrigued by intelligent design.

One of them is Hannah Maxson. A math and chemistry major at Cornell University, she founded an Intelligent Design and Evolution Awareness (IDEA) Club here this fall.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationw...ack=1&cset=true