To complement my series of posts on facing death, here is surgeon Atul Gawande talking with Jon Stewart about his new book Being Mortal about how to talk and deal with end-of-life issues.
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The proton has never been observed to decay into other particles. So it is possible that it is an absolutely stable particle and will never decay. However, there are some grand unified theories that argue that the proton does decay and physicists have been carrying out experiments to detect them decaying. The catch is that these theories predict an extremely long lifetime for the proton, greater that 1031 years! How does one do such an experiment?
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Last Thursday, a federal judge in Texas threw out that state’s new voting ID requirements enshrined in the law SB 14, the strictest in the nation, on the grounds that it imposed undue hardship on voters, was discriminatory, and the costs involved amounted to a poll tax. It was a sweeping judgment that Texas immediately appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. This is one of the most conservative of the Appeals Courts and on Tuesday, they reversed the judge’s ruling, allowing the rules to remain in place.
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Closely following the decision of Sweden’s new government that they will recognize the state of Palestine, the British parliament in a 274-12 vote yesterday has urged the British government to do the same. Although the vote is not binding on the government, it brings formal recognition that much closer.
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It used to be that when it came to stories that may or may not be hoaxes, one would look to see if it had been published by a real news operation, under the assumption that they would check it out for accuracy of at least the basic facts before running with it. That is no longer a guarantee. With the proliferation of fake news sites that seek to fool mainstream news sources into passing on hoaxes as the real thing, it is becoming harder to make out what news stories are real and what are fake.
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Ernest Angley is one of the TV evangelists who seem to have been around forever, raking in the money from the gullible while preaching against homosexuality and other ‘sins’. Now the Akron Beacon Journal has come out with an explosive series of stories about what he has been up to. He has been accused of touching other men ‘inappropriately’ and having them undress in front of him so that he could explain to them about the vasectomies that he strongly encourages them to have. He also apparently urged women in his congregations to have abortions.
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The renowned biologist and environmentalist E. O. Wilson wrote a book Consilience in which he argued for the unity of all knowledge. There is a chapter towards the end where he compares the transcendental view of morals and ethics and compares it with his own view, that of an empiricist. In describing his own view, he says (p. 246-247)
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Sometimes I think that by not watching TV, I am missing a lot of unintentional humor. I then think that maybe I should watch TV more, but fortunately the fever quickly passes. Luckily, The Daily Show keeps me up to date on the silliness, like the recent ad campaign that the GOP is releasing targeting women voters.
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