Lets Get Dirty
May 15, 2007
There is no right way of saying this, so I’ll say it the wrong way: in order to stay healthy we must stay dirty. Now, that didn’t sound right, did it? Put it this way: if we all lived in sealed apartments where only the purest air was pumped in and every trace of bacteria were eliminated from our food we probably wouldn’t last long when we stepped outside.
We all need a few germs and a bit of dirt to give us the resistance we need to fight off more serious germs when they come along. This is an irony of life, isn’t it? We need some of the "bad" in order to have the "good".
And so it is with germs. Washing regularly is surely a good thing, but washing 5 times a day may be going too far. However, washing your hands 5 times a day (or more) is very important when preparing food, especially when preparing it for others. Although it is surely ok to have a few germs lying around in order to keep up our immunity it is not acceptable to knowingly pass germs on to others, especially if you work in a food factory of public kitchen. In these places it is not just desirable to keep out germs, it is a duty.
How Albert Einstein Saw Things A Little Differently
May 14, 2007
Albert Einstein had just administered an examination to an advanced class of Physics students.
As he left the building, he was followed out by one of his teaching assistants.
"Excuse me, sir," said the shy assistant, not quite sure how to tell the great man about his blunder.
"Yes?" said Einstein.
"Um, eh, it’s about the test you just handed out."
Einstein waited patiently.
"I’m not sure that you realize it, but this is the same test you gave out last year. In fact, it’s identical."
Einstein paused to think for a moment, then said, "Hmm, yes, it is the same test."
The teaching assistant was now very agitated. "What should we do, sir?"
A slow smile spread over Einstein’s face. "I don’t think we need do anything. The answers have changed."
And just as the answers in Physics change, so, too, do the answers to your problems change.
While to all appearances you may have the same tests given to you by life, the same recurring problem, consider the possibility that the person contemplating the problem has changed.
Time has passed; you’ve learned many things along the way.
Paper - More than Meets the Eye
May 13, 2007
We are surrounded by so much paper and card that it is easy to forget just how complex it is. There are many varieties and grades of paper materials, and whilst it is fairly easy to spot the varieties, it is far more difficult to spot the grades.
It needs to be understood that most paper and card is manufactured for a specific purpose, so that whilst the corn-flake packet may look smart it is clearly not something destined for the archives. It is made to look good, but only needs a limited life span. It is also much cheaper to manufacture than high grade card.
Paper can be made from an almost endless variety of cellulose based material which will include many woods, cottons and grasses or which papyrus is an example and from where we get the word ‘paper’. Many of these are very specialized, but the preponderance of paper making has been from soft wood and cotton or rags, with the bulk being wood based.
Paper from Wood.
The Ecology of Environmentalism
May 12, 2007
The concept of “nature” is a romantic invention. It was spun by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century as a confabulated utopian contrast to the dystopia of urbanization and materialism. The traces of this dewy-eyed conception of the “savage” and his unmolested, unadulterated surroundings can be found in the more malignant forms of fundamentalist environmentalism.
At the other extreme are religious literalists who regard Man as the crown of creation with complete dominion over nature and the right to exploit its resources unreservedly. Similar, veiled, sentiments can be found among scientists. The Anthropic Principle, for instance, promoted by many outstanding physicists, claims that the nature of the Universe is preordained to accommodate sentient beings - namely, us humans.
Industrialists, politicians and economists have only recently begun paying lip service to sustainable development and to the environmental costs of their policies. Thus, in a way, they bridge the abyss - at least verbally - between these two diametrically opposed forms of fundamentalism. Still, essential dissimilarities between the schools notwithstanding, the dualism of Man vs. Nature is universally acknowledged.
The Wages of Science
May 11, 2007
In the United States, Congress approved, last month, increases in the 2003 budgets of both the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation. America is not alone in - vainly - trying to compensate for imploding capital markets and risk-averse financiers.
In 1999, chancellor Gordon Brown inaugurated a $1.6 billion program of “upgrading British science” and commercializing its products. This was on top of $1 billion invested between 1998-2002. The budgets of the Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council were quadrupled overnight.
The University Challenge Fund was set to provide $100 million in seed money to cover costs related to the hiring of managerial skills, securing intellectual property, constructing a prototype or preparing a business plan. Another $30 million went to start-up funding of high-tech, high-risk companies in the UK.
According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the top 29 industrialized nations invest in R&D more than $600 billion a year. The bulk of this capital is provided by the private sector. In the United Kingdom, for instance, government funds are dwarfed by private financing, according to the British Venture Capital Association. More than $80 billion have been ploughed into 23,000 companies since 1983, about half of them in the hi-tech sector. Three million people are employed in these firms. Investments surged by 36 percent in 2001 to $18 billion.
Paternity Testing - Are You Raising Someone Elses Child?
May 10, 2007
The dawn of the DNA test
Back in the 1700s, the best way to determine paternity was by a good hard look and the child, followed by a good hard look at the father. Enough coincidences and maybe a relationship could be proposed. A hundred years later, eye color was discovered to be a paternity identifier. This theory has had its flaws exposed because of recent DNA advances. We now know that eye color is determined by at least six alleles, or genetic markers. Paternity testing has become a lot easier and affordable over the past few years due to advances in DNA science. Although an estimated 200,000 DNA tests are conducted each year by states needing to sort child-support and welfare issues, few people are willing to conduct their own at-home paternity test. They don’t realize the simplicity and convenience of an at-home paternity test.
How does a home DNA test work?
Paternity testing requires a painless sample from both the child and possible father. Even without a sample from the mother, DNA paternity test results are up to 99.9999% accurate?that’s one-in-a-million odds your results are incorrect. Most companies provide a free home kit for you to provide the samples and require you to send the kit back to the laboratory with the accompanying fee.
Feb. 12 is Darwin Day — Secular Americans Celebrate Bday of Evolution Champ
May 10, 2007
This Feb. 12 marks the 196th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth!
The day has special significance for America’s nearly 30 million nonreligious people. In the humanist community, Feb. 12 is “Darwin Day.”
“Darwin has become an all-purpose icon for humanists, who champion reason and science while rejecting superstition and dogma,” said Matt Cherry, executive director of the Institute for Humanist Studies in Albany, N.Y. “Darwin is the definitive rebuff to fundamentalism.”
In 2004, a Gallup poll found that only one-third of Americans believe Darwin’s 19th century theory of evolution is a credible scientific theory. The same poll found that 45 percent of Americans believe God created humans in their present form roughly 10,000 years ago.
Massimo Pigliucci, Ph.D., a professor of evolutionary biology at SUNY-Stony Brook and author of the Web column “Rationally Speaking”, is shocked by how few Americans have a basic understanding of evolutionary biology and the nature of science in general. “If people had a better understanding of both we wouldn’t be embarrassed in front of the rest of the world by cases such as the one currently going on in Dover, Pa., where administrators are walking around local classrooms talking about ‘intelligent design’ and other nonsense,” he said.
Why Dont Moths Fly to the Moon?
May 9, 2007
Surely, in the days before man invented artificial light, moths would have been attracted to the only light source at night - the moon. Wouldn’t they have just kept on flying until they dropped from exhaustion? In fact does this not happen today in sparsely populated areas, where the moon is still the only night-light available?
A Wake Up Call To The Scientific Community
May 8, 2007
Nature has millions of intervowen interrelationships among the numerous flora and fauna. Such relationships are the basis for the food webs and food pyramids. These food webs and pyramids can give us a broad idea that organisms interact with each other for their food, shelter and mating. Each specific interrelationship if studied in depth can be very interesting and brings to light significant facts of our sorroundings and the importance of each and every living being on this earth and its function in sustaining the ecological processes. In fact if the entire nature is considered one machine, each and every living being has its own role in smooth running of this machine. But knowingly and unknowingly, we have not taken care or forced to destroy such interrelationships in the path of ‘development’.
While we talk of big things like "Global warming," "Green House Gases" and such other impending disasters, we are doing little precious either in understanding these interrelationships or our scientific community has not been able to keep pace with the enormity and complexity of ecological relationships.
Alchemy: Turning Rocks to Gold Since the Middle Ages!
May 7, 2007
Alchemy. Such a misunderstood science. I hope this article can help set things straight for whomever reads it.
Alchemy is an ancient art, first practiced in the Middle Ages. It was devoted to finding a substance that would transmute, (or turn) common metals in to gold, silver or other precious metals, and also to cause immortality in humans. Alchemy was most likely the first time people dipped their toes into chemistry.
Alchemy began in Ancient Egypt, and was especially prevalent in Alexandria in the Hellenistic period. At the same time, China had been tinkering with the ideas as well. Early writings about alchemy by greek philosiphers are sometimes thought of as the first chemical theories. Empedocles (im-ped-oh-klees) formed the all too famous theory that all things in existence were made of air, fire, earth and water. Later, the emperor Diocletian (die-oh-klee-shun) ordered all of the Egyptian texts on the chemistry of gold and silver to be burned and for all expirements to stop.
