Avdat

Off-label use; unintended consequences; cross-pollination; call it what you will

Buck thinks that Sidney Lowe needs to walk over to Centennial Campus and check out what the good fellows in the Physics Deptartment are up to:

Researchers in New York reported this month that they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made -- about 30 times as dark as the government's current standard for blackest black.

The material, made of hollow fibers, is a Roach Motel for photons -- light checks in, but it never checks out. By voraciously sucking up all surrounding illumination, it can give those who gaze on it a dizzying sensation of nothingness.

But scientists are not satisfied. Using other new materials, some are trying to manufacture rudimentary Harry Potter-like cloaks that make objects inside of them literally invisible under the right conditions -- the pinnacle of stealthy technology.

U.S. military and intelligence agencies have funded the cloaking research "for obvious reasons," said David Schurig, a physicist and electrical engineer at North Carolina State University who recently designed and helped test a cloaking device. In that experiment, a shielded object a little smaller than a hockey puck was made invisible to a detector that uses microwaves to "see."

The first working cloaks will be limited that way, he said -- able to steer just a limited part of the light spectrum around objects -- and it could be years before scientists make cloaks that work for all wavelengths, including the visible spectrum used by the human eye.

But even cloaks that work on just a few key wavelengths could offer huge benefits, making objects invisible to laser beams used for weapons targeting, for example, or rendering an enemy's night goggles useless because objects would be invisible to the infrared rays those devices use.

Buck suggests putting the technology to a more peaceful use:  "Give Gavin Grant a +1 cloak of invisibility in the low post."

Problem is, technologies tend to boomerang on you.  I think Lowe and the scientists have already been collaborating, because Brandon Costner has been invisible for much of this season.

UPDATE:  Pack packs it in versus Noles; Lowe throws team under bus.

Everything ain't what it used to be

Here and here Elliot reports on the myths and facts of witchcraft in medieval and early modern Europe and why the myths are so resistant to hard data:

Every now and then someone tells me the story of the ancient matriarchal religions. They were peaceful, kind, sexually liberated, and ecologically sensitive, and they were smashed and driven underground by the evil patriarchal religions, which have been persecuting women ever since. Ecrasez l'infame, destroy the patriarchy!

I'm not a huge fan of The Patriarchy myself (or at least I try to heed what feminism has to say). And surely there were matriarchial religions somewhere in European prehistory. But I'm doubtful about the strictly historical value of the overarching original-matriarchy story. It's always seemed to me that it was indeed a kind of lapsarian myth, an account of the Fall. It's not about history or science, it's a mythic answer to an existential question, located (of course) in the misty land before history. We all tend to situate our Paradises somewhere in the past or in the future: Ah, things were good once, in the pagan classical era/the Catholic Middle Ages/pre-Columbian Turtle Island/the Enlightenment/the decent, law-abiding 1950s/the Clinton era... Or, just you wait until the Dictatorship of the Proletariat/Jehovah's Earthly Kingdom/the Enlightened Reign of Science/the Rapture/the Singularity. Things were/will be much better then, darn tootin.'

I'm reading Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel which modestly purports to explain everything that's happened in the last 13,000 years or so.  Turns out that white people conquered the world not because they were smarter, or because they had better ideas, but because a variety of environmental factors put the inhabitants of the west end of Eurasia in the catbird's seat. 

In the course of reading this utterly fascinating book, I've learned that hunter gatherers tend to be less warlike and hierarchical than more sedentary peoples.  Farming and ranching creates a surplus of food that affords some in the community to get out of the feeding business and become kings, bureaucrats, priests, professional soldiers or artisans.

The parallels to Genesis 2-4 are uncanny.  In the beginning were Adam and Eve, the archetypal hunter gatherers.  Well, gatherers, at any rate.  But things go downhill.  Patriarchy creeps in.  Then the offspring settle down, raise crops, domesticate livestock, and shortly thereafter you get murder and cities.

So I wonder, does Genesis preserve some sort of collective unconscious memory of our descent from peaceful, egalitarian livin' off the fat o' the land into urban, violent, hierarchical brutes?  Or is that version of the Fall so imprinted on the Western mind that even secular, biologically deterministic folk wind up interpreting the anthropological evidence according to its script?

Astronaut Love Triangle

Yeah.  Truth is stranger than fiction.  Way strange.  Guess it would have gotten even stranger if the three of them had blasted off for Mars: 

"Houston, we have a problem.  The other chick is dead."

Talk about pushing statue of limitations laws and extradition treaties into wholly uncharted territory.  I mean, there's boldly going where no man has gone before, and boldly prosecuting where no man has prosecuted before.

And what's with the bullet-proof diaper?  You'd think that, of all people, astronauts could hold their Tang.

Hagar + Stem Cells=More Tortured Thinking by Marvin

Even better than going to the Orange Bowl!  Researchers at Wake Forest have found that stem cells in amniotic fluid may be even more promising research tools than embryonic stem cells.  The added bonus is that amniotic stem cells come without any of the thorny ethical issues involving the other type.

My thinking on stem cell research is a bit more convoluted than most of my fellow-travelers in the blogosphere.  To me, fertilized eggs frozen in labs with no hope of being implanted in a womb seem to be in the same position that brain-dead but otherwise healthy young adults are.  Just as the latter can donate their organs and make life possible for others, even though it's not possible for them, stem cell research seems like a legitimate life-giving alternative to an endless, artificial, caught between death and life existence for these zygotes.

My problem is with IVF, the reproductive technology that gives us "surplus" embryos.  It's hard to say for sure what Laura and would have done had we been infertile, but the idea of creating scores of fertilized eggs in the hope that one or perhaps two would latch on inside Laura's uterus is, well, creepy.  It seems like I'd be asking on the front end, "What about all those other zygotes?'  rather than belatedly finding "a use for them" on the back end.

Yet there are people walking the streets today who are the result of IVF.  If I'm opposed to IVF, am I not also opposed to these human beings' very existence?

Monday I taught the Circle Bible Study.  The lesson was on Hagar.  Remember her?  Sarai got fed up with waiting for this promised miracle child, so she took matters into her own hands.  She gave her slave, Hagar, to her husband Abram to impregnate.  At birth, Sarai would claim the child as her own.

The story has many twists and turns.  Sarai mistreats her slave/surrogate mother of her son because Hagar got a bit uppity once she conceived.  Hagar ran away, but God ordered her to return to her mistress.  Still later, when Sarai (now Sarah) herself conceived and bore a child, and no longer needed a surrogate, she ran off Hagar and her boy, Ishmael.  God again appeared to Hagar, promising a wealth of offspring to her son Ishmael, and revealing a water source to her in the desert, lest mother and child perish from thirst.

I re-read Hagar's story the same day that the Wake Forest research hit the papers.  I'm struck by how extravagantly God blesses Ishmael even though his existence in the world wasn't originally part of God's plan. 

I think that God does this a lot.  We ministers see this all the time in some of the disastrous first marriages we are asked to preside over.  In retrospect, the marriage should never have happened, but it did, and now there are children, and in-laws, and pets, and houses and whatnot, and a divorce may be in order, but God blesses everyone and everything that's come into being, even though God's plan might have called for things to unfold rather differently.

And I wonder if we cannot say the same thing about IVF.  I'm not sure that God wills people to be born as a result of IVF, but they are, and God blesses them.

Need We Evangelize the Aliens?

Elliot has a good post about why the discovery of intelligent life on other planets wouldn't really be stumbling block for faith, and why some secularists can't seem to get their heads around that.

I'm thinking off the top of my head here, but it seems like both Reformed Theology and Liberation Theology could take our increasingly marginalized galactic status in stride.  Does not the former teach us that God "justifies the ungodly" without regard for their merits?  After all, God called Israel, a rather puny nation, solely on the basis of love, and not on account of their worldly grandeur vis a vis the nations. 

And does not the latter stress the sociological implications of justification by grace, pointing out how God works on the margins to dignify the oppressed?  In the Bible, the second-born son is favored over the eldest.  God becomes incarnate not in Caesar Augustus's palace, but in a barn in a backwater village on the empire's frontier.

It shouldn't surprise anybody that we live on a small planet circling an ordinary star, on the edge of a nondescript galaxy, in a universe that might be teeming with life far more intelligent and civilized than we.  Would the gracious God of the Bible have it any other way?

Thinking Outside the Box

Last night I watched a fascinating episode of NOVA Science Now on PBS.  It was all about this asteroid the size of the Rose Bowl that scientists once feared would hit the earth in about thirty years.  Updated measurements indicate that it will only be a near miss, but if it passes through a certain portion of space near Earth called "the keyhole," it will hit the Earth when it comes around again in seven years.

So the program looked at all the options for preparing for the impact, everything from nuking the thing, to gently nudging it so that it would miss the earth, to evacuating coastal communities that would be pummeled by a series of 50 foot high waves should the asteroid land in the ocean. 

But they concluded that best option was to INVADE IRAN.  Because, you know, you just can't wait around for threats to materialize.

If You Won't Stand for Something You'll Fall for Anything

Matthew Yglesias offers a spirited defense of PLANET Pluto here.

Frank DeFord wonders, "If they can do that to a planet, what'll they do to the Kansas City Royals, the Duke football team, and other organizations with Pluto-sized success?"

DeFord also makes an entirely reasonable suggestion:  If we must demote Pluto, then why not rename "Uranus" "Pluto."  Nobody remembers who Uranus was, and along with "Earth," it's the most unpleasant name in the solar system.

He's right.  Whether it's "Your Anus" or "Urine us," the seventh planet from the sun is afflicted with some truly unfortunate nomenclature.  I'd rather be a boy named Ashley than a planet named Uranus.  And it's not like I've got the coolest name at the cool kids' lunch table.