faith & science
The European: Do you think it is conceivable that we will eventually learn something about before the Big Bang?
Heuer: I doubt it.
The European: How do you make sense of that paradox? You want to expand the realm of knowledge but at some point, there is a definite boundary that you cannot cross. Do you simply have to accept the fact that nothing was prior to the Big Bang?
Heuer: I wasn’t saying there was nothing, I am saying that we don’t know anything about what was before – if there was a before. But here we are crossing the boundary between knowledge and belief. I think many famous scientists have struggled with this question and people today also struggle with it.
The European: So at the very borders of human knowledge, science and belief tend to converge?
Heuer: In the scientific community we don’t tend to discuss such things too often. But the more we investigate the early universe, the more people are trying to connect science to philosophy. That is a good thing. Since we are struggling with the limits of knowledge, maybe philosophy or theology struggle also with our research. I think it is important that we open a constructive dialogue. We are currently planning seminars and workshops to do exactly that. My hope is that we can reach a common understanding of what we are talking about.
right longing, wrong reading
With no sign his forecast of Judgment Day arriving on Saturday has come true, the 89-year-old California evangelical broadcaster and former civil engineer behind the pronouncement seemed to have gone silent. Family Radio, the Christian stations network headed by Harold Camping which had spread his message of an approaching doomsday, was on Saturday playing recorded church music and devotional messages unrelated to the apocalypse.
via Reuters
In New York, at least one of Camping's followers continued to hold out hope that Judgment Day would come.
Retired Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker Robert Fitzpatrick, 60, said he spent more than $140,000 of his savings on subway posters and bus shelter advertisements warning of the May 21 Judgment Day.
"God's people are commanded to sound the warning, to sound the trumpet so to speak so people know," Fitzpatrick said of his advertising blitz.
Fitzpatrick said Camping led him to believe Judgment Day would be May 21, but added that he disagreed with the broadcaster's prediction it would begin in Asia.
In Fitzpatrick's view, from his reading of the Bible, Judgment Day would begin around 6 p.m. Eastern Time. He said on Saturday that he still had no doubts Judgment Day would come this day.
All of this makes me so very sad for Harold Camping and so many of his followers who confused a deeply right longing of their hearts (Μαρανα θα) with a seriously wrong reading of the text.
bobby fischer
The tortured genius and the celebrity recluse are two archetypes by which the popular imagination appears incurably enthralled. They occupy extreme but ambiguous positions in the social firmament, simultaneously familiar and unknowable, often winning our sympathy even as they fail our understanding. Working as Mephistophelean morality tales, they reassuringly remind us that exceptional talent can be an affliction as well as a gift and that sometimes the price of success is one that we – the average, the normal, the unchosen – would not wish to pay. No one in recent times has combined these two roles with more tragedy or pathos than Fischer.His descent into wild and irrational behaviour is far from a unique narrative, particularly in chess. The history of the game contains many similar trajectories. As GK Chesterton noted in arguing that reason bred insanity: "Poets do not go mad, but chess players do." Akiba Rubinstein, the early 20th-century Polish grandmaster, would hide in the corner of the competition hall between moves, owing to his anthropophobia (fear of people), retiring from the game when schizophrenia got the better of him. William Steinitz, the Austrian who was the world's first undisputed chess champion, died in an asylum. Then there was Paul Morphy, the American who was said to be the 19th-century's finest player and to whom Fischer has frequently been compared: he quit the game, having beaten all his rivals, and began a decline into paranoid delusion. Aged 47, he was found dead in his bath, surrounded by women's shoes.
via The Observer.
"The thing that strikes me about Fischer's chess," Short says, "is that it's very clear. There are no mysterious rook moves or obscure manoeuvrings. He's very direct. There's a great deal of logic to the chess. It's not as though it's not incredibly difficult – it is incredibly difficult. It's just that when you look at it you can understand it – afterwards. He just makes chess look very easy, which it isn't."
snake oil
In the 1860s, Chinese laborers immigrated to the United States to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. At night, they would rub their sore, tired muscles with ointment made from Chinese water snake (Enhydris chinensis), an ancient Chinese remedy they shared with their American co-workers.A 2007 story in Scientific American explains that California neurophysiology researcher Richard Kunin made the connection between Chinese water snakes and omega-3 fatty acids in the 1980s.
“Kunin visited San Francisco’s Chinatown to buy such snake oil and analyze it. According to his 1989 analysis published in the Western Journal of Medicine, Chinese water-snake oil contains 20 percent eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA), one of the two types of omega-3 fatty acids most readily used by our bodies. Salmon, one of the most popular food sources of omega-3s, contains a maximum of 18 percent EPA, lower than that of snake oil.”
However, it wasn’t until several years after Kunin’s research that American scientists discovered that omega-3s are vital for human metabolism. Not only do they sooth inflammation in muscles and joints, but also, they can help “cognitive function and reduce blood pressure, cholesterol, and even depression.”
via Collectors Weekly.
@mattbartley sent me there.
