It is impossible not to love someone who makes toast for you.
—Nigel Slater
///////////////All misery derives from the inability to sit in a quiet room alone.
Posted: 09 Mar 2009 04:00 AM PDT
~ unknown (via Jared Akers)
/////////////////////Everyone loves justice in the affairs of another.
-- Italian Proverb
Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice.
-- H. L. Mencken
/////////////////I WRK ,THEREFORE I AM
////////////////
The future is an unknown, but a somewhat predictable unknown. To look to the future we must first look back upon the past. That is where the seeds of the future were planted. I never think of the future. It comes soon enough.
- Albert Einstein, "Interview, 1930"
//////////////////FERMILAB=
Fermilab collider experiments discover rare single top quark
Batavia, Ill.--Scientists of the CDF and DZero collaborations at the
Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory have observed
particle collisions that produce single top quarks. The discovery of the
single top confirms important parameters of particle physics, including
the total number of quarks, and has significance for the ongoing search
for the Higgs particle at Fermilab's Tevatron, currently the world's most
powerful operating particle accelerator.
Previously, top quarks had only been observed when produced by the strong
nuclear force. That interaction leads to the production of pairs of top
quarks. The production of single top quarks, which involves the weak
nuclear force and is harder to identify experimentally, has now been
observed, almost 14 years to the day of the top quark discovery in 1995.
Searching for single-top production makes finding a needle in a haystack
look easy. Only one in every 20 billion proton-antiproton collisions
produces a single top quark. Even worse, the signal of these rare
occurrences is easily mimicked by other "background" processes that occur
at much higher rates.
"Observation of the single top quark production is an important milestone
for the Tevatron program," said Dr. Dennis Kovar, Associate Director of
the Office of Science for High Energy Physics at the U.S. Department of
Energy. "Furthermore, the highly sensitive and successful analysis is an
important step in the search for the Higgs."
Discovering the single top quark production presents challenges similar to
the Higgs boson search in the need to extract an extremely small signal
from a very large background. Advanced analysis techniques pioneered for
the single top discovery are now in use for the Higgs boson search. In
addition, the single top and the Higgs signals have backgrounds in common,
and the single top is itself a background for the Higgs particle.
To make the single-top discovery, physicists of the CDF and DZero
collaborations spent years combing independently through the results of
proton-antiproton collisions recorded by their experiments, respectively.
Each team identified several thousand collision events that looked the way
experimenters expect single top events to appear. Sophisticated
statistical analysis and detailed background modeling showed that a few
hundred collision events produced the real thing. On March 4, the two
teams submitted their independent results to Physical Review Letters.
The two collaborations earlier had reported preliminary results on the
search for the single top. Since then, experimenters have more than
doubled the amount of data analyzed and sharpened selection and analysis
techniques, making the discovery possible. For each experiment, the
probability that background events have faked the signal is now only one
in nearly four million, allowing both collaborations to claim a bona fide
discovery that paves the way to more discoveries.
"I am thrilled that CDF and DZero achieved this goal," said Fermilab
Director Pier Oddone. "The two collaborations have been searching for this
rare process for the last fifteen years, starting before the discovery of
the top quark in 1995. Investigating these subatomic processes in more
detail may open a window onto physics phenomena beyond the Standard
Model."
////////////////////SELFLESS GENES=For example, the gene or genes that make worker ants devote themselves to helping their queen reproduce rather than reproducing themselves might appear altruistic but really these genes are promoting their own survival: helping a close relative is another way of passing on one's own genes. As this example shows, "selfish genes" do not always favour self-centred, uncooperative behaviour, a common misreading of Dawkins's position.
However, the consensus is that evolution never favours what might be called "selfless" genes - that is, adaptations that benefit a group of organisms or the species as a whole. An example would be a gene that restricts how many offspring a predator has, to avoid wiping out its prey. Such a gene should always lose out to selfish genes that maximise reproduction, the thinking goes, even if reproducing without restraint threatens the survival of the whole species.
Increasingly, though, this consensus is being challenged, and on several fronts. The least controversial of these is the notion that entire species themselves can have traits that, over geological time, make them more likely than others to escape extinction and branch off new daughter species. This can lead to evolutionary change that could not be predicted from individual adaptations alone.
///////////////////Solipsism is the philosophical idea that "My mind is the only thing that I know exists." Solipsism is an epistemological or ontological position that knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified. The external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist. In the history of philosophy, solipsism has served as a skeptical hypothesis.
/////////////////What a strange machine man is! You fill him with bread, wine, fish, and radishes, and out comes sighs, laughter, and dreams." - Nikos Kazantzakis
///////////////CD=Saving heart attack patients in the middle of the night (3/9/2009)
Tags:
heart attack
When Joyce Moss recently arrived at Loyola University Hospital with a life-threatening heart attack, it took just 42 minutes to perform an emergency balloon angioplasty.
The procedure opened up an artery that was 100 percent blocked. "There was no damage to the heart because of how quick they were," said Moss, 56, of Berwyn. "I feel good."
To further improve its emergency angioplasty times, Loyola will become the first hospital in Illinois to staff a Heart Attack Rapid Response Team (HARRT) at the hospital 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The HARRT program includes board-certified and highly-experienced interventional cardiologists, nurses and technicians.
Most hospitals do not have such personnel on site during nights and weekends. Thus, precious time is lost when the team has to be called in from home. This is especially true when staffers are delayed by snow storms or other bad weather.
"The HARRT program will provide the next leap of care for patients," said Loyola interventional cardiologist Dr. Fred Leya. Leya is among a team of interventional cardiologists who will rotate night and weekend shifts at the hospital. Leya is medical director of Loyola's cardiac catheterization lab.
Reducing angioplasty times is a coordinated effort that begins with paramedics who take patients to the hospital. There are 51 west suburban fire departments and ambulance companies in the Loyola Emergency Medical Services System. A growing number of ambulances are being equipped so that paramedics can administer 12-lead EKG exams while en route to the hospital. An EKG can confirm a heart attack, and results are radioed ahead to the hospital, said Dr. Mark Cichon, Loyola's director of emergency medical services.
///////////////////A successful man is one who can earn more money than his wife can possibly spend. A successful woman is one who can find that man.
Anonymous
//////////////////////HRZN-GD ON THE BRAIN-TMPRL LB EPLPSY WITH RELIGS HALLUCN
//////////////////..........The first known reference to the game of cricket that we have at
the moment is from a court case in Guildford in Surrey in 1598, in
which a local man swore that as a child, fifty years before, he had
played "creckett" and other games on a disputed piece of land. The
similarity of that word with the one in the poem is intriguing, but
hardly firm evidence of anything.
///////////////////////Action without study is fatal. Study without action is futile."
– Mary Ritter Beard
////////////////////////NABC OF DIVINE REVELATION
?SUPERSTITION AND SOCIAL CONDITIONING
OR JUST LK EAT,SLEEP,SX
schizoactive brain events enriched mental lf
///////////////////RAMACHANDRAN-SX-GD SWEAT TEST -NORMAL VS TLE PTS
//////////////////TMPRL LB FOR RELIGS AND SPRTUAL BLF
//////////////////NEUROTHEOLOGY
////////////////////////1999=This Is Your Brain on God
Michael Persinger has a vision - the Almighty isn't dead, he's an energy field. And your mind is an electromagnetic map to your soul.
By Jack Hitt
Over a scratchy speaker, a researcher announces, "Jack, one of your electrodes is loose, we're coming in." The 500-pound steel door of the experimental chamber opens with a heavy whoosh; two technicians wearing white lab coats march in. They remove the Ping-Pong-ball halves taped over my eyes and carefully lift a yellow motorcycle helmet that's been retrofitted with electromagnetic field-emitting solenoids on the sides, aimed directly at my temples. Above the left hemisphere of my 42-year-old male brain, they locate the dangling electrode, needed to measure and track my brain waves. The researchers slather more conducting cream into the graying wisps of my red hair and press the securing tape hard into my scalp.
After restoring everything to its proper working position, the techies exit, and I'm left sitting inside the utterly silent, utterly black vault. A few commands are typed into a computer outside the chamber, and selected electromagnetic fields begin gently thrumming my brain's temporal lobes. The fields are no more intense than what you'd get as by-product from an ordinary blow-dryer, but what's coming is anything but ordinary. My lobes are about to be bathed with precise wavelength patterns that are supposed to affect my mind in a stunning way, artificially inducing the sensation that I am seeing God.
/////////////////SENSED PRESENCE=So, if the language centers are integrated into the neurological bases of the sense of self, and (the homologous portions) of both sides of the brain are involved in each process, and language is usually on the left, then what's going on in the right side of the brain, in the areas directly opposite the language areas? The best answer so far is the offered by the hypothesis that there is a subordinate sense of self there, one which acts to support the normal sense of self, speech and its understanding. It has contributions to make towards aspects of grammar, and it is essential for the maintenance of the normal range of affective tones. Its contributions to the left-hemisphere-dominated, normal sense of self are referred to as intercalations. The operant metaphor is of a calendar. Brain functions are localized to one side or other. However, every function on the left requires a sub-function from the right, something like a ‘shared' file, to use a computer analogy. The calendar functions perfectly well, but leap years require an intercalary month. Each function in one side requires input from the other. The split brain studies showed us that each hemisphere could manifest an almost independent mind. Vectorial Hemisphericity implies that almost isn't good enough to make a truly human being. The sense of self requires the involvement of structures on both sides. These structures have some of the lowest firing thresholds in the brain, and are thus more likely to mismatch their (metabolic) rates of activity. When this happens, a person will experience a change in their ‘self.'
The human sense of self (in normal states of consciousness) is a vector requiring both sides of the brain, but with greater recruitment of the left temporofrontal and, to a lesser extent, limbic regions.
Because the hypothesis is based on a theory that says that concludes that language is an instance of a broader pattern of neural organization, we are forced to conclude that vectorial hemisphericity is one of the overarching principles behind all brain functions. The area in which this hypothesis has been most extensively tested is in studies related to the sense of self, in one of its more unusual manifestations, the experience of the Sensed Presence.
THE SENSED PRESENCE AND THE SENSE OF SELF
A great deal of our understanding of the sense of self is derived from the understanding of an experience called the sensed presence. In its simplest form, it appears as a feeling that there is someone or some conscious ‘ thing', an energy or a presence in the room with you even though you know you're by yourself. It can also manifest as a feeling that you are ‘not alone' or just ‘being watched.'
Our interpretation of this experience relies on the fact that humans have two senses of self. Left hemispheric and right hemispheric. It also relies on the idea that the dominant sense of self in normal individuals is the left hemispheric (linguistic) sense of self. We experience its dominance in our lives every second as we experience our minds generating a constant stream of inner dialog. The subordinate sense of self, on the right in normal individuals, is active during almost all cognitive processes, but it acts to subserve the linguistic, dominant sense of self. The right hemispheric self and phenomenology are only outside our awareness whenever we are thinking in words, They do not stop. The sensed presence happens when the right hemispheric sense of self falls out of phase with the left hemispheric self. The right ‘self' is experienced as an external presence. Although there are reports of partial OBEs in which a person experiences themselves as being in two places at once, it is much more common for a person to feel that the sensed presence is not themselves at all, but an outside, ego-alien, being. The two hemispheres can act independently, as shown in ‘split brain' studies, giving the person a partitioned awareness. The sensed presence might be likened to a temporary split brain, but limited to its senses of self (Persinger, 1993).
‘The Self' emerges in one neurological context as a characteristic readout on an EEG. It's known as the 40 Hz component, and the reason it is associated with the sense of self is that its not there when we're in dreamless sleep. It there when we are awake, and there when we are dreaming. It's only absent during that time when we are in those stages of sleep that we can't remember. The reason we can't remember it is that ‘we' aren't there during dreamless sleep. The pathways that maintain the sense of self are inactive at this time.
The sensed presence is only one example of a whole class of experiences called visitor experiences, or just visitations (Persinger, 1989). It falls at one end of a spectrum. At the lower end we should expect to find the sensed presence, and at the other, we find a very affective being, such as God or Satan in a fully extrapolated environment, complete with heavenly or hellish sounds, smells, bodily sensations, etc. As the experience deepens in intensity, recruiting more and more brain structures, it can include visions, smells, tastes, vestibular feelings of falling or rising, parasthetic feelings of tingles, ‘buzzes,' or more difficult to describe ‘energies' in the body.
//////////////Never Too Late to Get Active
Middle-aged men who increase their physical activity level may see a survival advantage over the long term, BMJ reports.
Swedish researchers surveyed some 2200 men at age 50 and then followed them for about 35 years, during which four additional interviews were conducted.
Overall, mortality was lowest among the most active men. In adjusted analyses, men who increased their activity level from low/moderate to high between the ages of 50 and 60 saw a drop in mortality after 10 years' follow-up, thereby achieving survival similar to that among men were highly active from the start. (Before 10 years, no survival advantage was observed.)
The long-term benefit of increased activity was on par with that of quitting smoking during the same period.
//////////////////////GD OR HAUNT-EM FIELD INTERFERING WTH BRAIN WVS
///////////////////DAWKINS-PERSINGER EXPT
//////////////TEMPORAL LOBE SENSITIVITY SPECTRUM-0 IN DAWKINS TO MAX IN TLE SUFFERER
////////////////AXLEPIN=The Kingdom Within
Ipse Dixit or Alice
through the Looking-Glass said it
“As we shall see, the concept of time has no meaning before the beginning of the universe. This was first pointed by St. Augustine. When asked: What did God do before he created the universe? Augustine didn’t reply: He was preparing Hell for people who asked such questions. Instead, he said that time was a property of the universe that God created, and that time did not exist before the beginning of the universe.”
Stephen Hawking
--A Brief History of TIme
Descartes came bearing a gift of binary classification that had poor Alice speaking to disparate selves wondering which of these distinct substances have precedence over her existence - the kind that her nothingness redefines, but Aristotle before him held both as one: however subsequent views on dualism followed perhaps stemming from as far back as Pre-Socratics and then Plato’s standpoint expressly between the physical world of appearances and essences.
Science is bridging the gap closer today with the mysterians twiddling sore thumbs, which is why all philosophical conundrums of Alice are actually hypothetical so she reads on finding a veritable juncture for answers to philosophical, religious, psychological, sociological questions and getting acquainted with William McDougall whose idea about the dual-aspect theory maintained both psychological and biological data from spirit and matter universe determining thus the spiritual presumptive of physiological processes. Would that the polymath lived to this day to uphold his “hormic psychology.”
Alice peered once again in the looking-glass and found her hair standing on its end, atop the same mantel-piece and exclaimed “Why, I do declare I am beginning to look like Einstein!”
The Greeks invented philosophy. Alice can only hazard a guess as to why. The letters read backwards so the answer is barely discernible. God made men who invented these time-immemorial and interminable questions that had philosophy branching out to religion, psychology, science and politics, the first three of which has Alice reading more on divergent fields that make sapient learning accessible to her as far as the imagination goes, eschewing only politics because the same imagination goes haywire from lack of insight.
The Greeks invented philosophy so back to Alice hazarding a guess. She very soon came to a fancy that the philosophy of psychology, with Dr. Danah Zohar identifying this instinctive “spiritual intelligence” of man, is evident in the ancient Greeks.
Imagine then if you will in the recesses of the brain is the mysterious region that escaped notice in their time because the philosophy of the mind did not as yet entail the study of the human brain.
A brain researcher of the most recent time, Andrew Neuberg noted the increase activity of the temporal lobes of Franciscan nuns and Buddhist monks who were deep in meditation confirming the earlier studies of Dr. Zohar that identified the particular “god spot” in the region of the brain that oscillates 40 megahertz when man explores the significance of life or deliberates on profound questions that may have had the early Greeks’ high-flying erudition inventing philosophy for want of prolific repository i.e., for profundities.
“Man can’t think on an empty stomach.” Alice retorts combing down her electrified coiffure and finding the book on Greek Mythology in the drawing room through the looking-glass.
Greece while divided into distinct territories had self-sufficient economic life, religion, culture, political system and institutions allowing development of earliest arts and sciences. Ancient Greek mythology had two surviving epic poems of Homer: Iliad and Odyssey, both of which dealt with the legend of mortals and gods based on actual events of Trojan war some four centuries before Homer. The apparent synthesis of both his historical and implausible accounts were traced from the oral narratives of it before written literature began so that embellishments were added to glamorize the heroes of the stories that had the Greeks identifying them as progenitors.
Hesiod, contemporary of Homer wrote Theogony, a “pure myth” which has reference to religion and ritual, cataloguing divine family tree that defined and outlined the early relationships between man and gods: and the religious rituals. This “pure myth” contained Greek accounts of the creation of the world, its colossal gods and mortals. Hesiod’s myth “The Ages of Man” illustrated the unfortunate end of “Golden Age” in Greece; man’s downfall was inevitable with the departure of the gods whose favor he eventually lost by greed and war. The educational motive of this myth was to have served as implicit guidelines intended for the royal audience to cause the return to the ways of the “Golden Age”, the same motive evident in the works of succeeding poets. Ancient Greek philosophers could not abide with the religious implications inferred pedagogy instead with open-ended questions that marked the inception of nascent philosophy. Xenophanes (560-478B.C.) was quoted to have said: “It is naïve to worship the gods because they all behave irrationally and immorally.”
So thus began the trend of thinking from religious to scientific with the questions on reality of ancient Greek philosophers exceeding the temporal, tangible and palpable understanding of it.
There are little known facts about early Greek philosophers except for their propensity for predominantly cerebral pursuits. The rest is history so to speak.
Alice has her hair tied now in ribbons and comfortably settled in the armchair with Kitty on her lap and has began to read another treatise on Abraham Maslow’s theory on hierarchy of man’s needs if she is to understand the trend of thoughts of these ancient Greeks who invented philosophy.
Maslow illustrated these needs in a pyramid of five levels starting with the first four levels of what he calls “deficiency needs” from the bottom up: physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem all leading eventually to what he classifies as “being needs.” His theory asserts the notions that humans pursue higher needs on top of the hierarchy when their basic needs are sufficiently met.
If Alice thinks hard enough, she may as yet be able to solve the riddle how Ancient Greeks evolved to sophisticated thinking individuals with high degree of self awareness, vision and unrelenting pursuit of knowledge, who in turn influenced great thinkers after them.
Alice though is not a thinker, so to aspire for greatness is akin to aspiring for sainthood - both being pipe dreams, hers exclusively.
The efforts put into them is one of her many exercises in futility, she has only a healthy heart to show for it.
The body to achieve homeostasis needs: food, drink, air, adequate sleep and comfortable temperature and when unmet takes absolute priority over higher needs. Alice shudders, remembering Tolstoy’s accounts of the Russian inhumanity in his writing - tumultuous history that regrettably repeats itself in other countries of divergent cultures and origins in all preceding and succeeding generations because men never learns from the lesson of Adam and the story of Goethe’s Faustus.
Was the continuous search for satisfaction of physiological needs of the primitive man an instinctive behavior to ensure survival as it is understood pattern of animals? Was this notion entertained in the mind of Herbert Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” which Darwin later employed though they did not specify which specie? Did man evolve from basic physiological needs to seek fulfillment of emotional needs, those contained in Maslow’s succeeding “D” needs? Were selection of similar species grouped instinctively together seeking security in number and in order? Was discrimination apparent then? Were the species paired off first and the union sought eventual convergence in a group after?
If satisfaction of physiological needs of prehistoric man took precedence over emotional needs, would this not somehow replicate the same phase of evolution of animals, difference being man’s ego; and his capacity for introspection and reasoning?
“And humor,” Alice quickly adds.
Humor it is, indeed.
Was this hierarchy of needs evident in Greece where Philosophy had been thought of to have taken roots from Maslow’s “Being Needs” specifically: actualization especially so with his description of it reflecting generally on the ancient Greek philosophers? Were these inadvertent attempts towards self-transcendence repeated in the great thinkers of the succeeding centuries and still evident today? What of the venerable Saints, Martyrs and historical figures?
The study of the Greek mythology brings one to the extraordinary works of the great bard, William Shakespeare whose seemingly masked profundities are cleverly infused in immortal lines of his pulchritudinous plays and sonnets long escaping scrutiny of the monarchy in Tudor London then and literary pundits centuries later. But of course, Alice can only hazard a guess or two again because she has yet to read and understand the turbulent panorama of historical events from the development of Christian society in early England when Druidic religious culture did not preclude its political influence, and to the Elizabethan Age with its religious, cultural, economic and political background surrounding his life and works.
William Shakespeare’s extraordinary skills in the mastery of language are transfused into the creative representations of historical and mythological prodigious events in his plays catapulting the genius to the literary sage he is today, certainly one who has us quoting by heart the enigma of his lines whether they be philosophical, pragmatic or whimsical are all irrefutably phenomenal. Had his genius found him rewriting the earliest Greek literature, the consummate playwright in him would have championed the cause of Prometheus.
Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice “ said “…if you prick us, do we not bleed?If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?”
There was a long pause.
“Is that all?” Alice timidly asked.
“That’s all,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Goodbye”
This was rather sudden, Alice thought: but, after such a very strong hint that she ought to be going, she felt that it would hardly be civil to stay. So she got up, and held out her hand.
“Goodbye, till we meet again!” she said as cheerfully as she could.
“I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet.” Humpty Dumpty replied in a discontented tone, giving her one of his fingers to shake “you’re so exactly like other people.”
“The face is what one goes by, generally.” Alice remarked in a thoughtful tone.
“That’s what I complain of,” said Humpty Dumpty. “Your face is the same as everybody has - the two eyes, so _” (marking their places in the air with his thumb) “nose in the middle, mouth under. It’s always the same. Now if you had the two eyes on the same side of the nose, for instance - or the mouth at the top - that would be some help.”
“It wouldn’t look nice,” Alice objected.
But Humpty Dumpty shut his eyes and said “Wait till you’ve tried.”
“She’s in that state of mind,” said the White Queen, “that she wants to deny something - only she doesn’t know what to deny!”
“Contrariwise,” continues Tweedledee, “if it was so, it would be: but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”
“Thirst quenched, I hope?” said the Queen.
Excerpts from “Through the Looking-Glass”
By Lewis Carroll
//////////////////////MEDITATN-ONENESS WITH UNIVERSE
//////////////////////////PARITAL LOBE-TIME,PLACE,SELF
MEDITATN REDUCE ACTY IN PARIETAL LOBE
/////////////////SEARCH FOR UNIO MYSTICA
///////////////////////unio mystica (mystical union) between the believer and Jesus,
//////////////////////EVOLN EXPLANTN-BELIEVERS ARE HEALTHIER ,LIVE LONGER-
/////////////////OUR BRNS ARE HARDWIRED FR GD
/////////////////IS IT GDS ANTENNA IN OUR BRN-RAMACHANDRAN
///////////////
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