Weirdnesses

Hey, wha happened? This place has been inaccessible since last Sunday night. Why? Well, my host, simplehost, finally informed me that it was my .htaccess file. Of course, I hadn’t changed that file for at least six months. But that doesn’t matter. So, I took some stuff out of it and now all is fine. Perhaps soon this place will be back to its 10 or 20 unique visitors it gets per day. Wow!

Discovered him again. I’ve always known about the man, the master theoretical physicist calculator who worked with Hans Bethe, an even more profound mathematical theorist of modern physics. But last night when I couldn’t sleep — yet again — I decided to read Dyson’s article in The New York Review of Books on Questions About Global Warming. Aileni had already certainly cautioned me about accepting Al Gore’s views on Global Warming, so I thought I’d tackle this article before hitting the others Aileni links to in Nexus, especially since I’ve been so in awe of Dyson over the years.

In this NYRB article Dyson reviews two books on global warming and provides his own prologue to the piece. In this prologue he shows that there is a rapid (twelve years) exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and vegetation which is very important for the long range future of global warming. Neither of the two books he reviews mentions it, he says. But he devotes considerable space to the book by Nordhaus who concludes that a “low-cost backstop” might provide the best climate policy. However, Nordhaus is reluctant to discuss this in any detail, partly because, as an economist and not a scientist, he does not wish to question the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which considers the science of climate change to be settled.

Dyson shows that the “low-cost backstop” option of Nordhaus has considerable potential in view of the evidence for rapid exchange of carbon between the atmosphere and plants. He considers it likely that genetically engineered carbon-eating trees could be developed within twenty years. These carbon-eating trees would convert the carbon from the atmosphere into root systems which are then buried underground so that the carbon is not returned to the atmosphere. Here is a great potential solution to the problem of reducing the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

He spends less time on the book by Zedillo which covers a wider range of topics than the Nordhaus book. This book provides the minority opinions of Richard Lindzner of MIT who answers the question of whether the alarm of global warming is founded on fact with a resounding no. The majority opinions, most dogmatically presented by Howard Dalton of Great Britain, state that urgent action is needed now across the world to avert a major threat to the environment and human society. Dyson clearly questions this view.

After reading the NYRB article, I found an even more fascinating article by Dyson on the subject of climate change in which he goes deeper into his views on the subject. It reads very well and I strongly recommend it to any interested parties.

Finally, I was fortunate this morning to find a wonderful interview with Freeman Dyson by Robert Wright. It’s interesting what he says about religion. To him, religion is a way of life and not a matter of belief. He claims he is a Christian without the theology. What is left of Christianity when you take the theology away?, he is asked. Well almost the whole thing, he says, it’s a community of people in a church who are taking care of each other, and also there’s a great deal of beautiful language and there’s a great deal of music; it’s an art form much more than a philosophy. (Sounds a lot like humanistic UUism!) But he does believe there is some instinct of a mind at work in the universe. Not only that, but quantum physics shows that matter at the micro level is clearly not anything we can have experience of. The mathematical theory works just fine, but the reality of it is quite literally out of our world. He has much to say about the macro level as well. His bottom line is that the universe is filled with enormous mysteries of which we know very little indeed. One such mystery is the almost daily bursts of extremely intense gamma rays from completely unknown origins. But there are countless others. The universe is unimaginably amazing and mysterious.

Here’s Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, giving a recent TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talk on her experience with half a brain. Her left brain was erased in a stroke, which she eventually recovered from. (Minds Erased, take note!) What’s amazing is her out-of-body experience of Nirvana when her left brain is shut down and her right brain alone experiences the world. Great and profound talk.

The New York Times has an article on her by Leslie Kaufman, the most popular article today, called A Superhighway to Bliss.

Well, I failed to make a post yesterday mentioning it was the birthday of my grandfather, Homer M. Seavey. He would have been 146 years old yesterday, November 19, 2007. If you remember (ha ha?) last year there was this funny coincidence on his birthday. See here. I lit a candle in church for his 145th birthday, and then, lo and behold, the next hymn happened to be on page 145. That was last year. This year his bday was on a Monday and there was no hymn on page 146 sung on Sunday. Who cares? you might ask?

There are some that don’t like kilts and some that do. Here’s a site that doesn’t and they feature this picture there:

In fact they even say it’s sinful for men to wear kilts. Gad, what party poopers! Any comments??

ps. I found the link on the MadPriest’s blog.

Oliver Sacks has been writing great stuff for popular consumption on the many peculiarities and mysteries of behavior caused by (coming from?) the brain. The latest New Yorker magazine has a fascinating article by him on musicophilia (a suddenly arising musical passion), and also apparently new mysteries of Near Death Experiences. The article is not online but an audio conversation with Oliver Sacks on musicophilia is available here.

These types of things highlight even more profoundly the dichotomy between the physical state of the brain and consciousness. Are we seeing dualism here?? Naw, we must eschew supernaturalism, say the sensible ones, like the Churchlands and many, née most, others in the scientific communities.

A stray all-white cat landed half-starved on a neighbor’s doorstep recently. It was a wild little thing but well house-trained. Must have been dumped by some mean person. I don’t have a photo of it, but here’s a photo that closely resembles it:

…..

Notice that the left eye is yellow and the right eye is blue. Spooky! In fact that’s the name my neighbor gave the cat, Spooky.

Incidentally, I found the picture and a good discussion of odd eyed cats here.