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POPSNo Sex Tonight! I walked around with her while she tried on several different very expensive outfits. She couldn't decide which one to take so I told her we'd just buy them all. She wanted new shoes to compliment her new clothes, so I said lets get a pair for each outfit. We went onto the jewelry department where she picked out a pair of diamond earrings. Let me tell you...she was so excited. She must have thought I was one wave short of a shipwreck. I started to think she was testing me because she asked for a tennis bracelet when she doesn't even know how to play tennis. I think I threw her for a loop when I said, "That's fine, honey." She was almost nearing sexual satisfaction from all of the excitement. Smiling with excited anticipation she finally said, "I think this is all dear, let's go to the cashier." I could hardly contain myself when I blurted out, "No honey, I don't feel like it." Her face just went completely blank as her jaw dropped with a baffled WHAT?"
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POPSWho Will Cry For Innocent Iraqis? Half of Iraq's population are children. Children! Who can condone dropping bombs on babies and tormenting children, no matter how "noble" they may think the cause? Who can know of Iraq's suffering and still proudly wave the flag, droning off hollow words of security, democracy and freedom? How can anyone, anyone keep supporting this terrible murderous war? How??
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POPSThe Biggest Threat to the West Lies Within Itself, Not with Islam Simon Jenkins on threats to peace and democracy. This defeatism led the American Congress to allow its president to authorise torture and detention without trial in what Senator Robert Byrd called “the slow unravelling of the people’s liberties”. It enabled a British Home Office to curb free speech and habeas corpus. It arms police, fortifies buildings and impedes the free movement of citizens. It makes every Christian suspicious of every Muslim.
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POPSWhy Are We So Bad at Spotting Lies? By nature, we are a rather trustful species and (unless you lie or detect lies for a living) chances are good that you harbor false assumptions of what deceitful behavior looks like. So says famous psychologist Richard Wiseman in this summary of his research into the universal, cross-cultural trait of human deception. Among other things, Wiseman shows that by the time they are five, even our own kids can fool us with ease and abandon! The simple fact is that the real clues to deceit are in the words that people use, not the body language.
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POPSDoes the Full Moon Really Make People Crazy? "So if you're feeling a little mischievous tonight, it might be the full moon. Or it might just be the fact that you read some sensationalistic articles about how the full moon affects people's behavior." ;-)
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POPSGenetics Show How Prehistoric Cultures Migrated & Shared Knowledge The researchers tracked genetic variation on the Y chromosome, the sex chromosome passed from father to son that encodes maleness, using a technique now widely used that was developed in the early 1990s by Underhill and colleagues in the lab of Luigi Cavalli-Sforza, professor emeritus of genetics. The method has given scientists a powerful window into ancient human migrations and prehistoric cultural shifts. The technique has also been adopted by some commercial genealogy services that offer Y-chromosome testing to the public.
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POPSThe Mind-Altering Role of Incense in Religion Under the influence of a good snoot full of incense, mice in scary situations, such as being put in a swimming pool, remain calm, anxiety-free. At the alter, too, people feel the same sense of peace that comes from either the comforting words of the clergy, or from the intoxicating, brain altering, smell of incense. In an age of endless anxiety, no wonder religion works; it is both cultural and biological. Karl Marx claimed that organized religion was the "opiate of the people," meaning it dulls us into complacency, but that might not be such a bad thing.
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POPSHow did the Universe Begin ? The no-boundary wave function also states that space-time was not what we see today at the outset of universal expansion. “When the universe started out,” Hartle explains, “there wasn’t ordinary space-time. Instead of three space directions, as we have now, there were four space directions. At some point, a transition was made to ordinary space-time.”
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POPSPain as an art form Mr. Collen wrote to pain doctors around the world to solicit examples of art from pain patients. Working with San Francisco college student James Gregory, 21, who suffers from chronic pain as the result of a car accident, the two created the Pain Exhibit, an online gallery of art from pain sufferers. The images are evocative and troubling.“Some of them are painful even to look at,'’ Dr. Basbaum said. Finding ways to communicate pain is essential to patients who are suffering, many of whom don’t receive adequate treatment from doctors.Mr. Collen said the main goal of the exhibit is to raise awareness about the problem of chronic pain.“People don’t believe what they can’t see,'’ Mr. Collen said. “But they see a piece of art an individual created about their pain and everything changes.'’
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POPSI believe "I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." Neil Gaiman
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POPSTime to test time “If it's true, it's Nobel-prize-winning stuff” Karsten Danzmann Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics
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POPSDark, Perhaps Forever - Clueless about the universe Whatever proposal is eventually selected, the dark energy satellite will return a tidal wave of data about the universe and its weird denizens, both visible and invisible. This data is likely to transform astronomy in unpredictable ways, but there is no guarantee that it will nail the mystery of dark energy. “We really need new theory, and we have none,” Dr. Krauss said.
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POPSStunning Science! Science is SO beautiful! Go to the site and enjoy more of these fantastic visualisations of wave functions, quantum resonances, classical collisions etc. It's absolutely breathtaking.
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POPSHumans are endangered while ignorant of truth and reality. There are a number of links,which are to different fields. Some information be fact, some can be philosophical, or speculative, but it will modify any opinion. Any fact doubted should be verified but these days people are learning to do that as a matter of course. If we're going to get out of this hole, we n eed a bigger ladder.
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POPSUS war on the Future: From Alvin Toffler to Sarah Palin This is a must read commentary by Adam Greenfield. "What you get when you swallow too much change too quickly isn’t a mass outbreak of twitching, hebephrenic breakdown, nor some neo-Amish wave of technological renunciation. You wanna know what it looks like? A hockey mom and former beauty queen with an upswept ‘do and a pregnant daughter in high school. Sarah Palin is future shock personified."