No Signs Of Highly Advanced Extraterrestrial Life?

Posted: 4/30/2015

Trigger

Just read “Trail runs cold on alien hotspots, for now”. This study was quite popular and was cited several times lately.

Seriously Flawed

I would guess, this study is seriously flawed, because:

1. It is based on only the “NASA's WISE orbiting observatory”
2. It is highly presumptuous to assume that other, extraterrestrial advanced societies would waste energy similar to our society (the above article mentions specifically the works of Freeman Dyson)

A Riot Is The Language Of The Unheard?

Posted: 4/29/2015  Updated: 5/2/2015

Trigger

Just read parts of a New York Times Op Ed article titled “Goodbye to Freddie Gray and Goodbye to Quietly Accepting Injustice” written by Michael Eric Dyson, a professor of sociology at Georgetown University.

Here is prof. Dyson’s brief excerpt from a speech by Martin Luther King Jr.:

“As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. announced in the wake of the Watts riots 50 years ago, “a riot is the language of the unheard.” And judging by the actions in Baltimore, thousands are not being heard.”

Expanded Quote And Source

These are the original words of a self proclaimed preacher of non violence:

“Now I wanted to say something about the fact that we have lived over these last two or three summers with agony and we have seen our cities going up in flames. And I would be the first to say that I am still committed to militant, powerful, massive, non­-violence as the most potent weapon in grappling with the problem from a direct action point of view. I'm absolutely convinced that a riot merely intensifies the fears of the white community while relieving the guilt. And I feel that we must always work with an effective, powerful weapon and method that brings about tangible results. But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard.”

Excerpted from

"The Other America"

Speech by

Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Grosse Pointe High School - March 14, 1968

http://www.gphistorical.org/mlk/mlkspeech/index.htm

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King,_Jr.

The Duplicitous Non Violence Preached By Martin Luther King Jr.

I believe, the above quote illustrates this quite well.

Sure, in the U.S. individuals have no other choice, but to resort to violence in response to perceived conditions. For a true believer in non violence, there are always peaceful alternatives available even under very dire conditions especially in the U.S. One of the simplest alternatives is to move away for better opportunities e.g. from Baltimore.

Violence is never a language! Violence is force! Humans will be injured or die. A violent riot almost always violates the innocent! What an injustice is that?

Martin Luther King Jr. was committed to what: “militant, powerful, massive, non­-violence as the most potent weapon”. Militant, powerful non violence? What a contradiction in terms or what an oxymoron!

Post Script

I have written here a number of blog posts about the many controversial aspects of Martin Luther King Jr.

The Fallacy Of Empathy

Posted: 4/26/2015

Claim Of Moral Superiority

U.S. President Barack Obama argued empathy as a criterion to nominate Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Some opponents of capital punishment claim empathy when arguing against such punishment.

Are these and other examples implicit claims of moral superiority over rationality? It sure looks like it.

Reason Trumps Empathy

Empathy can easily be an expression of regression towards the Dark Ages!

Empathy often commits injustice, because of bias and prejudice.

Empathy can easily lead to preferential treatment of some people over other people in similar circumstances or situations. Empathy is selective!

Empathy can easily make one blind and cloud one’s judgement.

Rationality or reason is not without empathy or compassion, but it is consciousness to strive towards more balance and justice for all. Rationality without empathy is without conscience.

Equanimity comes easier with rationality than with empathy.

Evolution Of Sympathy

Emphatic people are commonly more liked than rational people, because reason is still in short supply.

Human evolution has been slow over the past 2-3 million years. Rationality is perhaps only 3-5 thousand years old, but the evolution or reason has been and continues to be much faster.

Jesse Owens Revisited

Posted: 4/26/2015

Trigger

Just watched for the 2nd time “AMERICAN EXPERIENCE/Jesse Owens”. Unfortunately, this great documentary about this son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave expires very soon (4/30/15) on the PBS website.

I found it quite condescending by American Experience to allude to Jesse Owens as if he was an Uncle Tom American.

There are a number of things many people probably do not remember or do not even know about this extraordinary athlete and the Olympic Games of 1936 in Hitler’s Germany. I bet, a lot of African-Americans would be surprised too.

Highlights

1. There were at least two black American male athletes at the time competing for the world track record in the 100 meter dash, Jesse Owens and Eulace Peacock. Peacock would have qualified for the Olympic Games of 1936 had he not been injured.
2. There were at least two white men who discovered and promoted Jesse Owens talents as an athlete very early on, i.e. Charles Riley and Larry Snyder (?). One of them encouraged or helped Owen to become even the first black man elected captain of an Ohio State varsity team.
3. There were at least two black athletes on the U.S. olympic track team, famous Jesse Owens and lesser known Ralph Metcalf. Both of them won multiple gold medals. The documentary did not mention, but Ralph Metcalf himself almost won the gold medal already at the Olympic Games of 1932 (his loss by not even one second was contested) and later became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives (not mentioned in the PBS documentary).
4. I was not aware that Jesse Owens won a total of four gold medals at the Olympic Games of 1936
5. The documentary specifically points out that all the chosen U.S. athletes for the Olympic Games of 1936 were traveling together on the same luxury ocean liner (S. S. Manhattan) crossing the Atlantic ocean (about 359 athletes). Dozens or so pictures were shown of the social life of the white and black athletes together on the boat. It was described as a life far different from home for the black athletes. Unfortunately, the documentary does not mention how many black athletes were on the boat and whether or how any segregation etc. was maintained. There were apparently a lot more stories about this transatlantic trip (see e.g. the story of Eleanor Holm)
6. Although I grew up in Germany, I did not know that one of Hitler’s favorite Aryan athletes, a tall, blond man (Luz Long), who lost the long jump against Owens would walk around the stadium, arm in arm with Owens. What a scene to behold!
7. Avery Brundage, who later became a well known, because he served 20 years as the president of the International Olympic Committee, saw to it that Jesse Owens would lose his amateur status.
8. Obscurity, financial struggle, and unsuccessful career after the Olympic Games. According to the documentary, he was only discovered again decades later as if was a consequence of racial discrimination.
9. The Wikipedia article about Jesse Owens mentions that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt never invited him to the White House upon his return from the Olympic Games. The PBS documentary made no mention of this, was it because Owens joined the Republican Party? According to this entry in Wikipedia, FDR invited the white athletes to the White House. Owens is quoted in this entry as saying: "Hitler didn't snub me--it was [FDR] who snubbed me. The president didn't even send me a telegram." Unfortunately, these remarks by Owen are not well sourced it appears (here is a repeat of the above quote by History Channel)
10. In 1976, Jesse Owens was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award bestowed upon a civilian, by Gerald R. Ford. I am not sure whether the documentary showed that.
11. I believe, the PBS documentary did not mention that a number of black American athletes won medals at the Olympic Games of 1936:
    Archie Franklin Williams (followed by a remarkable career later), a black athlete, won the Gold medal in the 400 meters of the Olympic Games of 1936. The bronze medal went to James LuValle, another black athlete with a distinguished lifetime career.
    Then, there was John Woodruff, black athlete, who won the 800 meters.
    Fritz Pollard Jr. the son of Fritz Pollard (first black NFL head coach), who won bronze in the 110 meter hurdles.
    Jack Wilson won the silver medal in the bantamweight class
    Unfortunately, I do not have the time to do more research on this.
12. “Owens ran to gold in German-made track shoes handcrafted by the founder of [German] Adidas [Adolf “Adi” Dassler]” according to History Channel, providing him and other athletes with extra long spikes. The PBS documentary is mute on this peculiar fact.
13. “His mother performed makeshift surgery on him with a knife.
    Owens, the 10th and last child of a pair of poor sharecroppers, was a sickly child. The day after his 5th birthday, he developed a large fibrous bump on his chest that began to painfully press against his lungs. Unable to afford a doctor to remove it, his parents decided to perform the surgery on their own. As Owens bit down hard on a leather strap, his mother used a sterilized kitchen knife to carve into her son’s chest and remove a golf-ball sized growth. Owens suffered a great loss of blood but survived.” according to History Channel. This is very remarkable, but entirely missing from the PBS documentary.

Takeaway

PBS American Experience completely missed the opportunity to tell the astonishing story of how many black American athletes competed and won medals at the Olympic Games of 1936 in Hitler’s Germany. Was this simply an oversight or was it deliberately done?

Why are we not more people familiar with those athletes in our days? Is it perhaps it does not fit into the generally repeated, neat narrative that only after Jackie Robinson (1947) or Brown vs. Board of Education (1954) or after the civil rights struggle were black athletes given opportunities. I believe, the story of Jesse Owens and other black athletes significantly contradicts this dominating narrative.

I have written a number blog posts about race relations, American Civil War, Martin Luther King Jr. etc. here. I believe, the story of Jesse Owens and the other, above mentioned athletes supports my argument that the much celebrated Civil Rights Struggle was more like a second, unnecessary American Civil War (see e.g. here). I would further contend that thanks to these two unnecessary Civil Wars, race relations in the U.S. are still so contentious.

Hot Recent Science & Technology Articles (10)

Posted: 4/26/2015

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/04/eagle-versus-porcupine-camera-snaps-painful-face (“Eagle versus porcupine: Camera snaps a painful face-off”; porcupine quills appear to contain antibiotics.)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/telecom/wireless/gigahertz-antenna-on-a-chip (“Now researchers have found a way to reduce the size of GHz antennas by modifying an existing technique, the use of antennas made from a dielectric or insulating material instead of a conductor. … For their experiment the researchers used piezoelectric filters that consist of two interdigitated contacts deposited on a piezoelectric film, devices similar to crystal frequency filters now used in cell phones.”)

http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2015/self-healing-nanogel-drug-delivery-0219#

http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2015/04/14/shape-shifting-molecule-tricks-viruses-mutating-themselves-death

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/military/tactical-laser-weapon-module-can-laserify-almost-anything

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/biomedical/devices/new-clues-how-does-a-brain-pacemaker-control-parkinsons-symptoms (De Hemptinne and colleagues had previously discovered that people with Parkinson’s disease have an abnormal amount of synchronicity between low-frequency beta waves and high-frequency gamma waves. Specifically, the beta waves’ phase correlated with the gamma waves’ amplitude. In this new study, the researchers showed that DBS [deep brain stimulation] reduces this synchronization.)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/aerospace/military/boeing-files-patent-for-electromagnetic-arc-generator-to-protect-against-explosive-shockwaves (“We’re at the point where physical barrier technologies are capable of stopping most projectile weapons, so predictably, weapons that rely on shockwaves (that can pass through physical barriers) are becoming more prevalent. In response to this, Boeing has filed a patent on a system that can mitigate or prevent damage from an incoming shockwave, using electromagnetic arc generators.”)

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/03/graphene-sandwich-turns-water-square-crystals (“Previously, 17 phases of stable ice were known to exist – all with their own characteristic molecular arrangement, packing density and symmetry. Unusually, the newly discovered square ice has a symmetry that's completely alien to water molecules and different from all other known ices.”. The miracle of water)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hair-regrowth-discovery-suggests-skin-cells-communicate-like-bacteria/ (“When a researcher at the University of Southern California and his colleagues plucked 200 hairs from mice in a specific pattern in a confined area—ensuring that many neighboring hairs were pulled—more than 1,000 hairs grew back in their place, including some beyond the plucked region. (... Cell.

…  It appears that hundreds of affected hair follicles released chemical signals relaying distress. Then, once enough neighboring cells sent out similar chemical flares, sensors on the skin detected the messages and took collective action: Incredibly, those messages induced the regeneration of as much as five times the amount of replacement hair.

If quorum sensing was behind this action, as the research team suggests, it would represent some of the first evidence to date that this phenomenon occurs in animal cells.”)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/russian-fireball-s-origins-found/ (Why are humans worrying about the Global Warming hoax? “The Kola fireball was spotted on April 19, 2014, as it lit up the night sky above the Kola Peninsula near the Finnish-Russian border. Its orbit is "disturbingly similar" to the asteroid 2014 UR116, slated to pass by the moon in 2017, the study authors said.”)

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/2015/03/opossum-peptide-antivenom-snake-bites (“An antidote based on a protein found in the blood of opossums could offer an effective low-cost treatment for snake bites, researchers in the US have found.”)

http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2015/04/plaque-busting-nanoparticles-could-help-fight-tooth-decay (“To build their nanoparticles, the researchers assembled spheres of polymers composed of two segments with different characteristics. The outer segments are positively charged, allowing the spheres to attach to negatively charged sites of both the plaque biofilms and tooth enamel. The inner core reacts to high acidity in the mouth, which loosens up the nanospheres and preferentially releases their contents—the antibacterial drug farnesol—in decay-prone regions where it’s needed most.”)

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150407095635.htm (“The new research demonstrates that the spontaneous self-assembly of DNA fragments just a few nanometers in length into ordered liquid crystal phases has the ability to drive the formation of chemical bonds that connect together short DNA chains to form long ones, without the aid of biological mechanisms. Liquid crystals are a form of matter that has properties between those of conventional liquids and those of a solid crystal”)

http://www.nibib.nih.gov/news-events/newsroom/attacking-alzheimer%E2%80%99s-ultrasound (Not so hot since published on 2/112015. “For the first time, researchers have reversed some of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease in mice using magnetic resonance (MR) imaging-guided focused ultrasound.”)

http://news.sciencemag.org/earth/2015/04/evidence-ancient-river-could-rewrite-geological-history-americas (“The existence of a river between Panama and Colombia implies that at least part of the Panama isthmus had formed 10 million years earlier than most scientists thought, the researchers report online today in Science. The new findings are part of a suite of discoveries—including fossils recovered from the expansion of the Panama Canal (pictured)—that point to an earlier closure for the isthmus, potentially rewriting the biogeographical history of the Americas.”)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/materials/graphene-looks-to-lead-the-way-for-spintronics ()

Smoking Bans In The U.S. Are Unconstitutional

Posted: 4/26/2015

Trigger

Just read this “http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/23/us/new-orleans-smoking-ban.html”. New Orleans or the Big Easy just became the latest of the major tourist cities in the U.S. to ban smoking in bars and restaurants.

From this article, I learnt there is such a lobby as the National Nonsmokers Rights Foundation.

As I have written elsewhere on my blog, the majority of nonsmokers persecution of the minority of smokers is a modern witch hunt by big government (see here and here).

Is Las Vegas Next?

It appears that city wide smoking bans in bars started in a town in California in 1990 (source).

“In 2002, Delaware became the first state to adopt what the CDC [Centers for Disease Control And Prevention] considers a comprehensive anti-smoking law—one that bans smoking in private workplaces, restaurants, and bars.” (source)

“As of January 2014, 28 states have enacted statewide bans on smoking in all enclosed public places, including all bars and restaurants” (source)

Blatantly Unconstitutional

For a government entity to prohibit smoking in private businesses is a grave violation of private property rights. Same goes if the majority of voters of a state, county, or municipal endorse such a ban.

Such smoking bans are grave violation of individual liberty imposed by an overzealous majority of nonsmokers.

Further, this assault on the minority of smokers could also be seen as a form of illegitimate discrimination based on the very contestable notion of promoting public health. Second hand smoke exposure is an overblown health scare. Or is it the odor?

What could possibly be considered constitutional is for government entities to completely ban smoking in government office buildings, but even that might go too far.

Moreover:

1. Any business can voluntarily ban smoking entirely or partially in their establishment to attract nonsmokers etc.
2. Businesses can install adequate air filtering systems etc. to minimize exposure
3. Nonsmokers are free to open and/or operate their own bars and restaurants. Nonsmokers are also free to buy any hospitality business and convert it to a nonsmoking environment
4. No employee is forced to work in a smoking environment or they can reduce their exposure by working there only for a period of time if no other alternative is available etc.

Thank The Native Americans

The citizens of the U.S. (smokers and nonsmokers)  should thank their native people for running casinos in many places of the country where smoking indoors is still allowed.

Oh, by the way, I have never smoked in my life! :-)