bodhi tree swaying

The notion of in vitro meat — flesh harvested from a vat rather than a living animal — seems straight from science fiction, which is perhaps not surprising given that NASA, the US space organization, originated the idea as a way to provide better-quality food for astronauts in space.

While the notion may seem far-fetched, some people are taking it very seriously indeed. PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, announced in 2008 a $1 million prize for the “first person to come up with a method to produce commercially viable quantities of in vitro meat at competitive prices by 2012.”

New Harvest, a nonprofit organization formed to promote the adoption of alternatives to meat, points out on its Web site, “Because meat substitutes are produced under controlled conditions impossible to maintain in traditional animal farms, they can be safer, more nutritious, less …

Natalie Angier is my favorite science writer. Often I’ll be a couple of paragraphs into a science story, notice how well written it is, and realize it must be one of hers.

Her latest is a preview of a new book by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, “Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding,” which will be published by Harvard University Press in April.

The thesis of the book is that we evolved cooperation and social intelligence through learning to love babies. As Angier puts it:

…human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for such a long time that humanity would never have made it without a break from the great ape model of child-rearing. Chimpanzee and gorilla mothers are capable of rearing their offspring pretty much through their own powers, but human mothers are not.

Unlike chimps, our closest relatives, we spend …

I have a long-standing interest in science, and in fact I came perilously close at one point to getting into veterinary research after completing my vet degree, and I also have a passionate interest in the relationship between science and religion. So that — combined with the 200th anniversary Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of “The Origins of Species” gave me the perfect opportunity to post an article entitled, “Four reasons Buddhists can love evolution.”

I caught up on the inaugural speech almost 24 hours late due to a hospital appointment and a lack of television. I’d heard some of it on the radio but missed a chunk in the middle, and so it was only thanks to Bittorrent that I was able to download the video and see, if not the surrounding events, at least the botched swearing-in and the inaugural speech that followed.

I found the event itself very moving — the visuals definitely added to the sense of this being a momentous occasion — but wasn’t much impressed with Obama’s speech. Paul Krugman hits the spot in today’s NYT in describing one of the things I noticed as I was listening:

…in his speech Mr. Obama attributed the economic crisis in part to “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age” — but I have no

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Marc Randazza, A First Amendment attorney based in Florida, has a pertinent comment about Roberts flubbing the oath of office:

The news outlets are buzzing with criticism of Chief Justice John Roberts for flubbing Obama’s Oath of Office — but the critiques seem to be all about him nervously reversing a few words. These critiques miss the issue.

After he painfully, and tortuously, slogged his way through the Oath of Office, Roberts appeared to add his own little bit to it as he asked the President, “So help you God?”

Article II, Section I of the US Constitution reads, in pertinent part (with “he” referring to the President-elect):

Before he enter on the Execution of his Office, he shall take the following Oath or Affirmation:

“I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States,

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At first sight I was a bit perplexed to see that a state law in Illinois requiring a moment of silence in public schools had been nullified by a judge’s ruling. After all, children are so bombarded with stimuli these days that some silence seems just what they need.

But continuing to read the article it turns out that the law is another poorly-disguised attempt to get prayer into schools. According to the judge, the “teacher is required to instruct her pupils, especially in the lower grades, about prayer and its meaning as well as the limitations on their ‘reflection’.”

A state senator commented, “I strongly feel and I still believe that children should have a moment of silence at the beginning of the school day.” The answer then is easy — remove the language requiring teachers to give instruction in prayer, and ensure that …

A conversation on Twitter about spurious “Buddha” quotes (“The Buddha said…” followed by something the Buddha probably never said) reminded me of coming across a quote attributed to the Buddha that was apparently something that Elvis Presley said.

And that reminded me of an interesting page which has all but vanished from the internet, but which was thankfully preserved by Archive.org. The original page vanished in 2002. Actually, I exaggerate: the page merely moved. I dunno, the whole thing could be made up, as far as I know. Maybe there is no “Larry Geller.” Maybe he never wrote a biography of Elvis.

Anyway, it’s delightfully wacky.

Enjoy:

In perusing Elvis’ biography “If I Can Dream” by his hairdresser-cum-spiritual adviser Larry Geller, I stumbled across the following conversation:

Elvis begins: “Think back when I had that experience in the desert. I didn’t only see Jesus’ picture in the clouds — Jesus Christ

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I believe that the state I live in — New Hampshire — is currently debating once again whether to make it illegal to use a cellphone or to text while driving. From what I understand it’s unlikely they’ll being a ban into effect, and in fact I think it’s legal to use a laptop while driving here. They say this is the “Live Free Or Die” state but I think it would be better known as the “Live Free And Die” state.

Anyway, there’s plenty of ammunition in this NYT article supporting a ban, not just on hand-helds but on hands-free devices. I appreciated the following quote: “It’s not that your hands aren’t on the wheel, it’s that your mind is not on the road.”

In half a dozen states and many cities and counties, it is illegal to use a hand-held cellphone while driving — but perfectly all right to

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A U.S. researcher suggests people, despite cultural background or religion, experience the same neuropsychological functions during spiritual experiences.

Brick Johnstone, a neuropsychologist at the University of Missouri, said that transcendence — feelings of universal unity and decreased sense of self — is a core tenet of all major religions. Meditation and prayer are the primary vehicles by which such spiritual transcendence is achieved.

“The brain functions in a certain way during spiritual experiences,” Johnstone said in a statement. “We studied people with brain injury and found that people with injuries to the right parietal lobe of the brain reported higher levels of spiritual experiences, such as transcendence.”

Johnstone explained that the link is important because it means selflessness can be learned by decreasing activity in that part of the brain. He suggests this can be done through conscious effort, such as meditation or prayer. People with these selfless …

Integral Options Cafe reposted an interesting article from The Guardian, titled “Love thy neighbour: why have we become so suspicious of kindness.”

I think the “death of kindness” argument is overstated, but there’s a lot of interesting food for thought provided. Here’s the start of the article. I’d recommend reading the whole thing.

Kindness was mankind’s “greatest delight”, the Roman philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius declared, and thinkers and writers have echoed him down the centuries. But today many people find these pleasures literally incredible, or at least highly suspect. An image of the self has been created that is utterly lacking in natural generosity. Most people appear to believe that deep down they (and other people) are mad, bad and dangerous to know; that as a species – apparently unlike other species of animal – we are deeply and fundamentally antagonistic to each

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Charles M. Blow has a short but interesting column explaining that the vast majority of Americans believe that good people who are not Christians can go to heaven. The sub-plot of the article is the disbelief that some people experienced when they learned this finding. That suggests to me that the tenets of hard-right evangelicalism have come to be seen as normative, when in fact they are a minority position that happens to have a lot of political traction and a direct channel to the media.

In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.

This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved

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Eating meat causes global warming:

The trillions of farm animals around the world generate 18 percent of the emissions that are raising global temperatures, according to United Nations estimates, more even than from cars, buses and airplanes.

There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times about people’s relationship to their frozen embryos. Because IVF treatment is so expensive and success is so hit-or-miss, couples generally create more embryos than they need. Those remaining after conception are stored in deep freezes. But couples become attached to those embryos — blastocysts, really — and can have trouble letting go of them.

The article gives an overview of different relationships with these embryos. Some people are willing to let them be used for research. Some are willing to donate them to other couples. But others are unwilling to have them donated, even though it would help another family get through the painful situation they themselves have experienced, because they regard these as “their” embryos and are unsure of what kind of life they wold have with a new family.

Some people are simply so …

A rather disturbing article by Robert Barnett, the director of the Modern Tibetan Studies Program at Columbia, and author of “Lhasa: Streets With Memories.”:

THE financial crisis is going to do more than increase unemployment, bankruptcy and homelessness. It is also likely to reshape international alignments, sometimes in ways that we would not expect.

As Western powers struggle with the huge scale of the measures needed to revive their economies, they have turned increasingly to China. Last month, for example, Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, asked China to give money to the International Monetary Fund, in return for which Beijing would expect an increase in its voting share.

Now there is speculation that a trade-off for this arrangement involved a major shift in the British position on Tibet, whose leading representatives in exile this weekend called on their leader, the Dalai Lama, to stop sending envoys

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Cognitive Daily reports that boys who watch violent children’s programming while toddlers (and we’re talking Disney here, not Texas Chainsaw Massacre) are four times as likely at age 7-9 to be in the top 10% of boys with behavioral problems.

…toddlers who are allowed to watch entertainment shows (as opposed to educational TV, and including violent shows) are significantly more likely to develop attention problems when they’re older.

But does violent TV have other impacts? In a separate study, the same researchers — Dimitri Christakis and Frederick Zimmerman — took a look at the same 1997 survey results and a 2002 follow up of families with small children (330 kids in all). The kids were age 18 months to 5 years old in 1997. This time in addition to TV-watching, the researchers looked at parents’ reports of antisocial behavior of their kids when they were older. The parents rated their kids

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Georgia Representative George Broun is apparently worried that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,”

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The Times (the Times, not the New York upstart) has a fantastic photo gallery of the Bhutanese coronation, as well as an accompanying story.

What with Obama’s victory and a large group of Muslim clerics taking a very public and vocal stand against terrorism, I can’t help but feel optimistic about the possibility of positive change.

From UPI:

About 6,000 Muslim clerics from around India approved a fatwa against terrorism Saturday at a conference in Hyderabad.

Maulana Qari Mohammad Usman Mansoorpuri, president of the Jamaiat-Ulama-i-Hind, called terrorism the most serious problem facing Islam, The Hindu reported. He blamed Islamic radicals for their actions and the news media for failing to distinguish between the radicals and the majority of Muslims.

“We have no love for offenders whichever religion they might belong to,” he said. “Our concern is that innocents should not be targeted and the career of educated youth not ruined. The government should ensure transparency in investigation.”

India has the world’s second-largest Muslim population after Indonesia, although Hindus outnumber Muslims. The meeting

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Judith Warner:

Two images will forever stay in my mind to mark this epoch-breaking Election Day. One is that of Jesse Jackson’s face, drenched in tears, in Chicago’s Grant Park on Tuesday evening.

And the other is a photo that ran in The Times on Wednesday. In it, a black mother and daughter sit on the floor of a church in Harlem. The mother, Latrice Barnes, having heard of Obama’s victory, is doubled up in tears; her daughter, Jasmine, is reaching a tentative hand up to soothe her. To me, she looks like the future, reaching out to heal the past.

Tears to Remember – Judith Warner Blog – NYTimes.com