Posted by
Rob on Friday, March 14, 2008 5:21:28 PM
* This may be Gov. Eliot Spitzer's last day in office. Much has been said about the irony and divine justice of it all. But not too many people have commented that he
cancelled a meeting with the Catholic bishops on the Tuesday when the news broke. Apparently, he was
going after Catholic hospitals, declaring them illegal for not providing abortion services. While the outcome of the meeting wasn't certain, it was certain that assets would be transferred from the RCC to the state, as was usual for Spitzer targets. Apparently he hadn't read Solomon's words, "
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom."
* FoxNews
carried a story from NASA/Glenn about the impossibility of getting to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, within the lifetime of an astronaut. Evidently they hadn't read
my paper on nuclear rockets. With 208 tons of U-235, and a 240GW reactor, it can be explored in <50 years. (If all you want is pictures as you flash by, then it can be done in 25 years. If you want to do a stellar slingshot and come right back, then we're talking somewhere between those numbers.) And all the technology is presently available, no "breakthroughs" required, though Iran might have to build a few more centrifuges to meet the demand...
* While we're browsing FoxNews, it seems that the perennial rediscovery of
amino acids in meteorites keeps coming up. This was extensively documented in the 1960's, and a
whole book written on it, so it isn't exactly breaking news. However, much of the science has been ignored, mostly because it didn't fit into a Darwinian paradigm. The
really significant finding from the 60's, however, is that the source of these amino acids is "organized elements", aka unicellular life. Now NASA researcher Richard Hoover is
documenting the various species of unicellular life found on these meteorites, and it looks like the community is slowly retracing the steps they took in the 60's. (Never, ever trust those Hollywood flicks where a scientist makes a discovery and the next day the entire world believes him.)
* Since we're at FoxNews, there was
this article about viruses moving genes around in bacteria. It turns out that all the different micro-organisms in a particular niche, say, a saline pond,
share similar genes for handling the salt. And if you move next door to a acidic pond, there are some acid-loving genes being swapped like pie recipes. The swapper turns out to be a
bacteriophage, a virus designed like a hypodermic syringe whose only purpose in life is to find a bacteria and inject it with DNA. What this says is that Darwin's tree of life based on "descent by modification" is hooey, but rather evolution is horizontal, at least at the microbial level. "Evolution" is a group effort to adapt, and this business about Darwin's "red in tooth and claw" is just so much communist propaganda about a highly efficient capitalist economic system of genes. Now combine this news item with the previous item, bacteria from space, and suddenly we have a transport system making
the entire galaxy a "warm pond". I'll let that sink in a bit, before I write a post on the evolving post-Darwinian paradigm.
* Of course, everyone
doesn't have the memo yet. Sort of like homeschooling, there's a lot of vested interest in preventing any paradigm shifts. We're in this for the long haul, ten or twenty years at least, but if you like science, this is the time to make a name for yourself in a new field! Last Saturday I was at an organ concert, one of those things that looks like a mutated piano from Star Trek, which used to be found in any church bigger than a storefront, with an audience all about the age of William Shatner, and I was introduced to a spunky white-haired gentleman. He had emigrated from Germany on the invitation of NASA-icon, Werner von Braun, and helped initiate the Earth Sciences dept at UAH. "They told me not to lecture about plate tectonics", he said in a strongly accented voice, "because it wasn't accepted by Americans!" As geologists will know, it was well-accepted in Germany many years before, demonstrating that American science, like Japanese, is consensus-driven. (Isn't that what global warming advocates are chanting? So why does Hollywood portray scientists as all "rugged individualists"? )
Well, I've got to change into my white lab coat and uncomb my hair before I head back to my unique scientific experiments that will change the scientific world...