CORI BULLETIN
Central Ohioans for Rational Inquiry
Editor: Rev. Art
Mailto:[email protected]
"What you think you know may not be so." [Rev. Art]
ANNOUNCEMENT: We're looking forward to gathering with the intrepid band of skeptics FKA Central Ohioans for Rational Inquiry this Saturday, Nov. 5
@ Hank & Milene's home in Columbus.
(Click on any image to ENLARGE)
QUOTE / UNQUOTE
Reason is not an innate faculty. It requires hard work and discipline to maintain, and it is very easy to lapse from it. It can be easily suppressed. People find it comfortable to fall back on tradition and easy answers, and are especially attracted to reassuring myths that, contrary to reason, tell them that they are special and protected and valued by invisible, super-powerful guardians. [P.Z. Myers]
"To study and not think is a waste. To think and not study is dangerous." [Confucius]
POEM: "The Bleeding Mind" by James Tate
from Return to the City of White Donkeys: Poems.© Ecco Press.
Reprinted with permission @ Writer's Almanac
THE BLEEDING MIND
A great man was giving a lecture in a town
about thirty miles from here. The lecture was called
"Modern and Contemporary Documented Cases of Stigmata,
or, The Bleeding Mind." Cheryl and I were excited
about going, We managed to make several wrong turns
at poorly marked junctures, and arrived at the church
just in time. There were hundreds of cars parked
up and down Main Street, and a line of people
greater than anything we could have imaged. "Who
would have thought this many people would have been
interested in stigmata?" I said. "It's the whole
crucifixion thing," Cheryl said. "You know, people
say they don't want to be crucified, but then they
go around being obsessed with it. Look at this line,
they all want to know if they're candidates for the
stigmata." "That's crazy," I said, "that's not why
we're here, is it?" "Speak for yourself," she said.
"And, besides, this man, Ian Wilson, is supposed to
be very sexy. He's eighty years old, but with this
long white hair that he whips back and forth as he
speaks. At the end he goes out into the audience
actually weeping as he touches the two or three
people he believes may become stigmatic in their
lifetimes." "Cheryl," I said, "I don't think we're
going to get in. It's a very long line. And, besides,
the looks on some of these peoples' faces are beginning
to scare me." "My god, Aaron, I don't know what you
thought we were going to, a lecture on flatboats of
the Mississippi? This is all or nothing at all. Of
course people are terrified out of their minds,"
she said. "Flatboats of the Mississippi sounds
good to me," I said.
MASSIMO PIGLIUCCI'S BLOG - RATIONALLY SPEAKING
SHALL WE START A WAR ON THE WEATHER?
Ah, of course somebody was going to suggest that we simply stop hurricanes dead in their tracks; after all, there is always a technological solution to everything, right? Wrong. In fact, the US government conducted research from the 1960s through the '80s on how to stop or at least decrease the intensity of hurricanes, through a project called Stormfury, which cost several hundred million dollars. The idea was to drop silver iodide into clouds to facilitate the formation of ice nuclei, forming a new eyewall within the hurricane, which would collapse the original one and make the storm less dangerous. It didn't work. Hurricanes are simply too complex and powerful. Ludicrously enough, at several points during the past decades, the suggestion has seriously been made to drop an atomic bomb inside a hurricane to wipe it away, an idea that not only smacks of environmental disaster, but is also absurdly naive once one compares the energy released by a human made bomb with that of a hurricane (according to the article referenced here, the heat energy released by a hurricane equals 50 to 200 trillion watts, or about the same amount of energy released by exploding a 10-megaton nuclear bomb every 20 minutes! Note: energy is actually measured in watt/second, as a reader of this blog pointed out). Nope, we just have to live with nature, at least within certain limits, and it would be so much better if we didn't insist in building cities on coastal areas that are actually below water level. Sorry, New Orleans, but you really ought to go...
As expected Italian emigre' Massimo received a comment to the effect that it would be better to see Venice sink than N'Awlins. His reply:
But there are some crucial differences: first, Venezia was not originally built below water level, the problem is part of the more general geological and land changes affecting that part of the Mediterranean coast; second, the Mediterranean doesn't have hurricanes, and so far people haven't lost lives and huge amounts of property because of the (slow) sinking of Venezia. But of course, Venezia will sink, and eventually half of the Netherlands (including Amsterdam) will be below water too. So be it, what are we going to do, start a war on geophysics? :-)
At the blogsite, another contributor wondered if there is indeed a feasible way to avert hurricanes and the like, should we do it?
What would be the consequences for climate? he asked.
He offered, "We can't predict that, climate is a complex system, not by accident a very cited text book example for chaos theory. But seems like hurricanes bring an enormous amount of water and heat to the continental US, I guess everyone would agree. What would happen if we somehow stopped this flow of energy and water? I would think the consequences of NOT having the hurricanes might be much worse than the destruction they cause..."
"The power to command frequently causes failure to think." [Barbara Tuchman]
BIRD FLU: THREAT OR MENACE?
Why avian sniffles need not ruffle our feathers... too much
by Ronald Bailey
(Reason mag's science correspondent)
An avian flu pandemic could kill 2 million Americans and 150 million people worldwide.
Claims like that certainly do get your attention. At any rate, they have certainly gotten people's attention in Washington, D.C., where our solons are posturing and bloviating about what the Feds should to do to protect us. Earlier this month, the Senate passed legislation authorizing $3.9 billion to purchase antiviral drugs; President Bush met with and basically hectored all five remaining U.S. vaccine manufacturers; Bush also suggested that he would use the military to enforce quarantines in the event of an outbreak; and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is once again trying to suspend a pharmaceutical company's patent, allegedly to protect the public's health.
The advent of this new bird influenza virus, the H5N1 strain, is what's provoking these alarms. But the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic haunts these discussions. The 1918 outbreak killed between 20 million and 50 million people worldwide including some 500,000 to 675,000 Americans. Since 1918 there have been other flu pandemics. The Asian flu killed 70,000 Americans in 1957-58 and the Hong Kong flu killed 34,000 in 1968. Today, around 36,000 Americans die of influenza and its complications annually.
So far, while the H5N1 strain of avian flu has killed tens of millions of birds, it has infected only 116 people, killing 60 of them. Nearly all of the infected people got the disease from intimate exposure to poultry.
The fear among virologists and epidemiologists is that the H5N1 strain will mutate into a form that can be transmitted from person to person.
Throughout history the more virulent forms of influenza derived from birds. Flu viruses constantly mutate and change, which is why a new shot of vaccine is needed each year to immunize people against that year's dominant strains. The genes that code for the surface molecules that help flu viruses enter and infect host cells mutate in ways that keep the flu virus ahead of human immune systems. The two chief surface molecules involved with infections are hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, the "H" and the "N" that define different flu strains.
Fifteen different types of hemagglutinin genes and 9 different neuraminidase genes are found in the flu viruses that infect animals.
The 1918 pandemic strain was an H1N1 virus; the 1957 pandemic was caused by a H2N2 virus; and the 1968 pandemic virus was a H3N2 version. Since H2N2 viruses no longer circulate among humans, the annual flu vaccine is made by combining the new versions of H1N1 and H3N2 viruses that nature produces each year. Basically, whenever a new hemagglutinin gene managed to make the transition from animals to people, a pandemic occurred. The concern is that while people have developed some immunity to H1, H2, and H3 flu viruses, we are wide open to the H5 strain.
Earlier this month, researchers announced that they had resurrected the flu virus that caused the 1918 pandemic. They hope that their research will shed light on how a bird virus becomes a human virus.
The genome of the 1918 virus is now publicly available, a fact that dismayed technologists Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, who argue that we should "treat the genetic sequences of pathological biological viruses with no less care than designs for nuclear weapons."
However, the new National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity reviewed the research and unanimously agreed that alerting other scientists to the findings outweighed the risk that the research might be misused. Besides, Julie Gerberding, head of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, GA noted that the 1918 virus could be less dangerous today since most people have some immunity to H1 flu viruses and because effective anti-virals are now available.
Reacting to the wildly escalating estimates of pandemic flu deaths, the World Health Organization suggested on October 1 that the most likely scenario would result in a
death toll of between 2 million and 7.4 million people. That's not
nothing, but keep in mind that 2 million people around the world died
in the 1957 pandemic. Are the crash programs, the billions spent on
stockpiling medicines, the plans for military quarantines really
necessary?
The swine flu crisis in 1976 is instructive. In February 1976, a serviceman at Fort Dix in New Jersey fell ill and died of a H1N1 flu virus that seemed related to the 1918 Spanish flu virus. In March, President Gerald Ford announced a crash program to vaccinate every single American against the swine flu. By November some 40 million Americans had been vaccinated before the campaign was called off because several people had died after being vaccinated. The swine flu never appeared. As far as we know, only the soldier at Fort Dix died of it.
The Federal government's recent record at handling emergencies suggests that we should not be very confident that it can protect us against a pandemic flu.
Encouragingly, however, the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity got it right. At the moment we may still be vulnerable to nature and would-be bioterrorists. But our future security lies with the open and rapid diffusion of scientific knowledge that will enable us to build defenses faster than nature or would-be bioterrorists can devise ways to harm us.
JEOPARDY FAN?
"The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers." [James Baldwin (1924-1987) American Novelist, Essayist]
OPINION
I THOUGHT WE DREW THE LINE AT HUMAN SACRIFICE IN THIS COUNTRY
By PZ Myers
@ PHARYNGULA
Unbelievable. We have a vaccine that is almost 100% effective, and conservative kooks don't want us to use it.
A new vaccine that protects against cervical cancer has set up a clash between health advocates who want to use the shots aggressively to prevent thousands of malignancies and social conservatives who say immunizing teen-agers could encourage sexual activity.
Although the vaccine will not become available until next year at the earliest, activists on both sides have begun maneuvering to influence how widely the immunizations will be employed.
Groups working to reduce the toll of the cancer are eagerly awaiting the vaccine and want it to become part of the standard roster of shots that children, especially girls, receive just before puberty.
Here's a disease that kills about a third of the women who get it. It turns their reproductive tract into a nest of tumors that can spread and shut down the kidneys, metastasize to the lungs, the gut, everywhere, that sterilizes them and can cause horrible agony. The treatment involves radical hysterectomy, bilateral adnexectomy and lymphadenectomy, words I'd rather my family never even have to learn.
And it's preventable.
Yet these sick, evil people want to be able to hold this horrible disease as a threat to their daughters, their friends' daughters, their neighbors' daughters—they want to be able to say to their kids, "If you don't obey my rules, your womb will rot and dribble out your private parts, and you'll thrash in pain for a while before you die and go to hell."
They like the idea of a disease that they can say is not prevented by condoms, so they can continue to preach abstinence with threats.
How would it feel to have an opportunity to protect a child from this affliction, to turn it away out of some sanctimonious sense of misplaced propriety, and then to have her die in front of you of this preventable disease years later? Would it feel like vindication? Or a senseless waste?
"Culture of life," my ass. These people are barbarians. Can we please just agree that the Family Research Council and Focus on the Family are the equivalent of the old women taking bits of broken glass to their daughters' vulvae and get these monsters out of civilized public discourse?
ALSO rom the legendary PZ Meyers of Pharyngula comes the question: What kind of designer would route the sewer pipes right through the center of the entertainment center? The dilemma of the mammalian vagina.
"Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them." [Edward R. Murrow]
WHO ARE THE BRIGHTS?
WHAT DO THEY SAY ABOUT INTELLIGENT DESIGN?
The Brights include among their number enthusiastic intellectuals such as Richard Dawson and Stephen Pinker, James Randi and Daniel Dennett, along with Massimo Pigliucci, Penn & Teller and the award-winning, hilarious and psychologically sound, syndicated ADVICE GODDESS Amy Alkon (PHOTO) and your editor. MORE Enthusiastic Brights
These individuals are part of an international Internet constituency of individuals with a naturalistic worldview (free of supernatural beliefs). Brights stand on the side of the fruits of reason and science as first presented to the world during the Enlightenment. The Brights' Net was formed on the Internet a little over two years ago and quickly gained international participation. It is a nonprofit educational organization working to develop a society that offers a level playing field for acceptance and civic participation by individuals of all worldviews, supernaturalistic and naturalistic.
INTELLIGENT DESIGN STATEMENT ENDORSED BY 3,769 BRIGHTS
The issue of teaching Intelligent Design in science classes is at the forefront of an important legal case taking place right now in the United States. A recent "Brighten Opportunity" invited Bulletin subscribers to "speak" on the concept. Thanks to all who responded. We are pleased that 3857 participated in the poll. Various school boards and communities in the United States are trying to introduce Intelligent Design (ID) into public school science classes. ID advocates may, by and large, believe ID to be scientifically credible. Then again, perhaps some of the proponents are trying by essentially surreptitious means to introduce religious beliefs into science programs. Whatever the impetus, the ID endeavor disregards the definition of science and must be rejected. Intelligent Design has no valid place in a science curriculum. It is not science. Science deals empirically with reality. In fact, central to scientific method is that its ideas about the natural world can be tested, replicated, and verified. Unlike science's account of the evolution of life on earth, the ID explanation postulates ideas that can not be observed or confirmed. By looking upon a designer as necessary to account for the origin and development of life, ID breaches science as a discipline. The scientific process, with its rigorous methods of confirmation, is the best means to understanding our world, and no nation can expect to fare well if its citizens are confused about or misinformed in science. The Intelligent Design movement presents an impediment to educating students for our scientifically-oriented world. It is a grievous threat to the academic integrity of education.
Good fortune. Please spread the meme. COMMENT!! Don't smoke in bed...
