Near-death neurologist: Dreams on the border of life →
Neurologist Kevin Nelson explains how the brain slips into a strange state of hybrid consciousness during a near-death experience
Neurologist Kevin Nelson explains how the brain slips into a strange state of hybrid consciousness during a near-death experience
Brilliant Newfoundlander invents a heating solution by converting pop cans into a powerful solar heating panel.
In a single day, a 10-year-old child in Europe may be exposed throughfood to 128 chemical residues of 81 different substances. Forty-two of these substances are classified as “possibly or probably carcinogens”, and five as “certainly carcinogens”. No fewer than 37 substances are endocrine disruptors (ED).
What is harmful is not the intensity of the dose but the repetition of small doses, and consequently the period of exposure,” explains Professor Dominique Belpomme of Paris University.
“Governments must find ways of substantially reducing the population’s exposure to chemical substances, in particular through food,” Veillerette says. There are alternatives, he points out, in particular low-input or organic farming
On the contrary side -
Some commentators are nevertheless advocating a more measured response to the study. “We are bound to find chemical substances in our food, but what matters is the amount. Humans can metabolise the xenobiotics [present in food, medicine, indoor air, etc.] to which they are constantly exposed,”
Concerning the contrary side, are there are cumulative effects when xenobiotics are combined and administered in constant, low-dose exposure?
Excerpted from a commencement address delivered May 11, 1996 by Carl Sagan
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
An inspiring and mind-blowing video. We came from the stars.
This is arguably a better use of distributed computing when compared to harvesting virtual turnips.
We call this project Phylo - A Human Computing Framework for Comparative Genomics, but don’t let the fancy name scare you; really, it’s just an interactive game that lets you contribute to science.
All you need is a keen eye and some spare time.
Physicist and consciousness researcher, Thomas Campbell, Discusses the nature of reality in terms of consciousness — this video logically and scientifically explains the normal and the paranormal, mind and matter, physics and metaphysics, philosophy and theology.
The nurture side gets a boost in credibility from examining the effects of Royal Jelly on honeybees -
In the bees, more than 550 genes are differentially marked between the brain of the queen and the brain of the worker, which contributes to their profound divergence in behaviour. This study provides the first documentation of extensive molecular differences that may allow honey bees to generate different reproductive and behavioural outcomes as a result of differential feeding with royal jelly.
How is this relevant to humans?
the enzymes that mark DNA in the bee are also the enzymes that mark DNA in human brains
The important part -
it shows how the outside world is linked to DNA via diet, and how environmental inputs can transiently modify our genetic hardware
Technologies’ success will be measured by how well it can mimic systems (the ultimate one being consciousness) that have been evolving since the dawn of the universe. This is our goal, figure out how nature works, and use those principles. For example, scientists have discovered quantum entanglement is behind photosynthesis and eventually will be able to replicate this in a laboratory. Untangling the Quantum Entanglement Behind Photosynthesis
What about the economy? Does the economy follow nature’s principles, should it? I would argue that it does not, but we should allow it to. Although technically a natural system (ourselves being a product of nature, our systems would surely be considered natural), the economy does not follow the rules. We tend to force and attempt to control the economy, while nature allows things to happen.
Going against nature is not advised.
To cut through the metaphysical, here’s a concrete example—the analogy between forest fires in nature and creative destruction in the economy. Forest fires in nature, although destructive, have in many cases, increased biodiversity and adaptation.
“Results from biodiversity analyses present an astonishing picture. One year after the fire there was, at a first glance, hardly any vegetation in existence. However, within 2500m^2 plots scientists counted, on average, fifty species of plants. Just as many species were growing in the same areas in the forest before the fire. Two years after the fire the biodiversity literally exploded and in many places, even in small areas, exceeded, the diversity of the former forest.”
New life after a forest fire
Forest fires in nature cause growth, resilience, and adaptation, thus strengthening the system against future shocks. The forest fire analog in the economy is creative destruction. Creative destruction is a necessity in any economic system, but it is being stifled by policy. Cheap credit (ZIRP), removing mark-to-market accounting, bailouts, and subsidies are political mechanisms that allow the status quo to perpetuate itself; they weaken the overall framework by increasing interdependency and decreasing competitive forces.
In the wake of the financial crisis, banks should have been allowed to emerge in a different, more resilient form. Instead, we are back where we started, because the banks had no incentive to change—they had the implicit (and in some cases explicit) backing of the government. The only real solution to the crises was to allow asset prices to deflate to equilibrium, let the weak be bought by the strong, and let the entrepreneurial class seize the gaps left in the wake of destruction. Instead, asset prices were propped up through liquidity, the weak were bailed out, and entrepreneurs became weary to enter such a politically charged arena.
How can we apply the principles of nature to the economy?
Essentially, we should be looking to transform the economy into a distributed system with more emphasis on resiliency and less emphasis on efficiency by utilizing an ecosystemic approach that values bottom-up creation instead of top-down management.
Nassim Taleb would agree with me, as would many others (George Dyson and Buckminster Fuller come to mind here).
Here are two of Nassim’s more important points in his essay On Robustness and Fragility —
Mother Nature likes redundancies—redundancy is insurance, the type of insurance that allow you to survive under adversity. The human body has two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys but an economist would find it inefficient to maintain these adaptive mechanisms.
Mother Nature does not like anything too big— Charles Tapiero and Nassium have shown mathematically that a certain class of unforeseen errors and random shocks hurts large organisms vastly more than smaller ones. Large companies get government support and become progressively larger and more fragile, and, in a way, run government, another prophetic view of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Hairdressers and small businesses on the other hand, fail without anyone caring about them; they need to be efficient and to obey the laws of nature.
Contrast what nature likes and what nature doesn’t like with how the economy operates.
In a scientifically planned economy, redundancies are eliminated by labeling them as inefficiencies and forced industry consolidation (in the banking industry more specifically) has lead to an even more frail system thus going against two prime movers in nature.
To end—
“The idea is not to correct mistakes and eliminate randomness from social and economic life through monetary policy, subsidies, and so on. The idea is simply to let human mistakes and miscalculations remain confined, and to prevent their spreading through the system, as Mother Nature does. Reducing volatility and ordinary randomness increases exposure to Black Swans—it creates an artificial quiet.”
“…anything you take into your body should be considered a drug, whether it’s obviously nutritious or not. As you will see, even molecules that are clearly nutritious (such as essential amino acids like lysine and tryptophan—available in bulk at your nearest grocery store) exhibit properties that many of us would attribute to a drug.”
