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Medicine

Brain Surgery Linked To Sensation of Spirituality 380

the3stars writes "'Removing part of the brain can induce inner peace, according to researchers from Italy. Their study provides the strongest evidence to date that spiritual thinking arises in, or is limited by, specific brain areas. This raises a number of interesting issues about spirituality, among them whether or not people can be born with a strong propensity towards spirituality and also whether it can be acquired through head trauma." One critic's quoted response: "It's important to recognize that the whole study is based on changes in one self-report measure, which is a coarse measure that includes some strange items."

Comment Re:Recharge time? (Score 1) 240

That's really not all that bad. At a typical rate of 10 cents/KWh that's only about $1.5 per hour to run. Since it only runs when hot water is in use, I suspect most household would use well under 1 hour of hot water a day (10-30 minutes for showers, another < 5 minutes for a laundry, < 5 minutes for a dishwasher,+ misc use).

You don't have any teen-aged daughters, do you?

Comment Re:Home schooling vs. school duty (Score 1) 1324

This is the one branch of fascist thinking that hasn't been officially eradicated or possibly even seriously challenged in Germany. The attitude is that children belong to the state and it goes back a long way - at least to the Kulturkampf in Bismark's time and the origin of Kindergarten as a means to pry children's allegiance away from parents and local culture (especially Catholic).

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 1324

The essential question is who is really responsible for the children? My answer is the parents - the state makes a lousy surrogate. The kids need to be loved and guided - if the guidance is a bit off, then they can think for themselves later. Parents are often lousy at it, but somehow most parents fumble their way to reasonably well-adjusted kids. Nobody should be empowered to subvert the parent-child bond, except in extreme cases of neglect.
Space

Space Photos Taken From Shed Stun Astronomers 149

krou writes "Amateur astronomer Peter Shah has stunned astronomers around the world with amazing photos of the universe taken from his garden shed. Shah spent £20,000 on the equipment, hooking up a telescope in his shed to his home computer, and the results are being compared to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. 'Most men like to putter about in their garden shed,' said Shah, 'but mine is a bit more high tech than most. I have fitted it with a sliding roof so I can sit in comfort and look at the heavens. I have a very modest set up, but it just goes to show that a window to the universe is there for all of us – even with the smallest budgets. I had to be patient and take the images over a period of several months because the skies in Britain are often clouded over and you need clear conditions.' His images include the Monkey's head nebula, M33 Pinwheel Galaxy, Andromeda Galaxy and the Flaming Star Nebula, and are being put together for a book."

Comment Re:Teachers Colleges are not teaching technology (Score 2, Interesting) 290

I really don't mean this as a troll, but, really, do Teacher's colleges (or Education departments) really teach anything significant at all? I was an undergraduate 40 years ago and education majors were not exactly considered the brightest on campus then and, as far as I can tell, still aren't (from my kids in college).

Personally, I believe that when women with intelligence could become anything they wanted, the teaching profession lost its most reliable source of decent practitioners. I hasten to add that I don't think we should turn the clock back on that, but it would be nice if teaching attracted more of the highly competent women that now go into business or other professions. How to do that is another issue and there are serious cultural as well as financial problems to overcome here.

And yes, I will plead guilty to holding the probably sexist notion that intelligent women are better at handling younger children (say before middle school, at least) than equally intelligent men, on average. That's just the way it is (in my not so humble opinion).

Comment Re:a game that tells the truth about religion (Score 1) 523

Hitler claimed to be a christian. Mao and Stalin killed people for 'the greater good' or something like that. I'm actually hard pressed to find any incidents where a bunch of atheists killed people for being religious.

If anything Hitler was against Christianity, but felt that the time to deal with Christians was to be left to a time well after the other "lesser races" were dealt with. There clearly was anti-Christian bias in some of the letters and writings of Hitler, and a sort of psuedo-religious cult that came up in the form of Nazism that transcended Christianity.

Certainly the anti-Jewish sentiment in Nazism was not grounded in Christianity, but rather in something far more profound and a sort of religion in its own right.

As for being hard-pressed to look for any incident where a bunch of avowed atheists have explicitly killed those harboring religious beliefs as their only "crime"? I don't think you have looked hard enough. Millions have died at the hands of atheists, or at least governments that have sought explicitly to purge religious thought. Both Mao and Stalin were involved in that killing, and both professed official atheism. It wasn't merely "the greater good", but that was indeed the rationale. It also involved more than just these two men.

Even today in China, if you tried to open a church or express your religious beliefs in a public manner without formal state approval you will get arrested and possibly even killed on the spot for what in most "western" nations would be considered a non-violent protest. I'm not talking twenty or forty years ago, I'm talking today. People are still being killed today in the name of atheism, or because they don't disavow their religious beliefs.

Comment Re:Combination of Factors (Score 1) 552

What educational system are you talking about? Rote memorization was the mainstay of the educational system up until the 60s when we started getting all warm and fuzzy and stopped caring about facts. Rote learning provides the basis for critical thinking (which is best done at the college level) by grounding the individual in facts. I'm afraid what we've been producing for the past 30 years are students who mostly avoid the hard work of thinking that the hard sciences require and instead go for MBAs to make money as painlessly as possible. That probably has a lot to do with the decline in basic science work, as well.

Comment Re:Success relies on our tendency to get well or d (Score 1) 713

Yes, and Medicine has long relied on this. I've read (sorry, no citation) that it wasn't until sometime in mid-19th century that you were statistically better off consulting a physician than not. Of course, that depended greatly on whether the problem was in that limited subset of illnesses they could actually do something about. But people went to doctors anyway and were regularly bled, purged and given near-poisonous drugs and thanked the good doctor for his attention. Some even survived..
Wireless Networking

Submission + - Infrared radiation: The other wireless technology

StonyandCher writes: Although the recent auctioning of the 700MHz wireless spectrum bands have garnered great interest in the media (not to mention the billions of dollars being thrown around to own some of this), it's not the be-all and end-all answer to our wireless hunger.

New research is starting to be conducted in the area of infrared radiation. Cheap to develop infrastructure for, super fast and with huge amounts of spectrum available (literally many terahertz), is this the unlicensed answer to the dearth of wireless spectrum? This article delves deeper into the world of IR and looks at its pros and foibles.

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