Wednesday night and I’m having a productive week. I should qualify that: I’m having a productive week personally, but professionally it’s been a complete loss. My head hasn’t been in the game at work, but it’s OK because the environment is currently an unhinged one and I’m not alone.
Let’s do one liners, eh? I know, I know, they’re never really “one line.”
Last night I had a dream that I was trapped in a funhouse hall of mirrors. It was just like all the Scooby Doo and USA Up All Night Horror movies: dim lighting and an endless maze of my own reflection with an evil voice calling out to me from somewhere unseen. Sharaun woke me up because I was making one of those breathy dream-screams in real life (I do that sometimes, I’m a chatty sleeper). What the heck does a dream like that mean?
Noticed that Bush used his presidential veto for the first time this week to shoot down additional funding for stem cell research. I’ll state right up front that I think this is stupid, but rather than try and construct paragraph supporting my opinion I’ll just defer to this outstanding reader comment on the Newsvine coverage of the happening:
Here’s how I view whether an embryo should be considered such a valid life or not:
You are a firefighter, called to the scene of a horrific fire. The fire is in a local in vitro clinic – you put on your mask and rush inside. In the smoke and warmth, you hear a girl crying. You find her, standing next to a refrigerator holding hundreds of frozen embryos. You can only carry one. Which do you take?
The girl of course.
So does this mean that you’ve failed as a firefighter? You have forsaken the lives of potentially hundreds of children for the life of one child.
But when it comes to research, which already has proven more than helpful, suddenly the tables turn, and the embryos at stake are more important than the thousands threatened each year by cancer, Alzheimer’s, spine injuries, and the multitude of other things that stem cell research is working for.
I call BS.
Yeah, and I’ll be right there with you calling BS too.
Found this editorial take on the current Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah thing I’ve been trying to follow pretty interesting. Although it clearly casts Israel as the bigger aggressor, it actually helped me (make sure and read the comments to for some good counter arguments that help round out the thought for those not passionate enough to have picked sides).
Wanna make your brain hurt? Head over to this site and watch the cool Flash animation that explains how to conceptualize a 4th, 5th, 6th, and on up through 10th dimension. Just click on on the zero at the bottom of the twirly numbers on the right of the page. I’m this close to ordering the book, as the Flash teaser is interesting as crap.
Goodnight.
Also written on this day...
- sawmill sprawl - 2011
- hiding from bullets - 2005
- roll your own - 2004
Dang! That must be one strong firefighter to be able to carry a fridge.
Don’t even get me started on Bush vetoing the stem cell bill. According to his logic, he might as well outlaw masturbation because everytime a man does his thing, he is killing thousands of “potential lives”! Even better, Bush might as well outlaw menstration and make every woman take the pill permanently. We can’t have all these women wasting “potential life” on a monthly basis now can we? We are talking about UNFERTILIZED EMBRYOS or as Bush would call it “potential life”!
I hope one day Bush gets hit by a bus and becomes a quadraplegic or gets some form of aggressive cancer and then we’ll see how quickly he will think about wasting “potential life”!
Yeah, I get really pissed off about how stupid out president is and I feel ashamed that he runs our country. Bush is a idiot.
Sorry about the rant Dave. There are my $0.02 for the day.
not sure what side I’m on, but I think embryo implies fertilized Farturo.
I stand corrected… either way, these are embryos that would have been thrown out anyway because they could not develop (according to some of the articles I have been reading).
I feel the need to comment on two of your entries… will post two separate comments instead of one huge one.
On the stem cell issue, I don’t think the firefighter analogy is accurate. It gives a black & white choice (saving girl vs. saving refrigerator of embryos, benefiting from stem cell research vs. preserving embryos). But the issue isn’t necessarily that simple. One of the possibilities not addressed is that of research on adult stem cells. The assumption is that embryonic stem cell research will yield greater results, but we still don’t know what can be obtained via adult stem cell research, w/o the ethical concerns of a lot of people have (including myself) with embryonic stem cell research. My $0.02…
As promised, another comment on an unrelated topic. The site on the 10 dimensions was way cool and very interesting. However, at what point does discussion on this stuff (extra dimensions, multiple universes, string theory, etc.) pass from science into philosophy? A lot of the content on the site sounds far more like philosophy than science to me – using words like “imagine” and “explore”, or my favorite, “mind-expanding exercise”. Not that this automatically makes it bunk – I don’t think science has the answer to everything, and lots of very valid ideas have come from philosophers. But a lot of times this stuff is presented as science, by scientists, when it seems to me that it comes more from peoples’ minds than from what they can actually observe via experimentation. How does someone conduct an experiment on the hypothesis of the existence of a 10th dimension (or even a 5th or 6th)? We may have the technology to do that someday, but I seriously doubt anyone can do that today.
Great link though, sorry to bag on it. 🙂