Tag Archives: News

On the science of near-death experiences…

Posted on April 12, 2010 | Leave a comment
Rosa Celeste: Dante and Beatrice gaze upon the...
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The unexplained phenomenon of the near-death experience is the source of many cliches about death and the afterlife. The term near-death experience (NDE) was coined by Dr. Raymond Moody in his 1975 book, Life After Life. However, reports of such experiences have occurred throughout history. For example, Plato’s Republic describes an NDE.

In a typical NDE, a person who is pronounced dead or is very close to death leaves their body and floats toward the ceiling. The person typically reports seeing a bright light or moving down a tunnel toward a light. Sometimes the person sees angels or dead loved ones. Sometimes their life flashes before their eyes, or a spiritual being tells them it is not their time yet and sends them back to their bodies.

Just as we can never know for sure what happens to us after death, we will probably never know whether the NDE is real, hallucination or some combination of both. However, a recent study has posited that excess carbon dioxide may cause typical NDE hallucinations. In a study of 52 heart attack victims, 11 reported NDEs, and their carbon dioxide levels were all significantly higher than those who didn’t have NDEs. Other people who have inhaled excess carbon dioxide have reported similar experiences as the typical NDE. But this study is the first to find a direct link between carbon dioxide in the blood and NDEs.

A person having an NDE often feels calm and at peace or experiences a feeling of unconditional love. These feelings may correspond to the sense of detachment, lack of emotion and calm that many people feel during traumatic events. In a defense mechanism, the brain releases large amounts of endorphins, which can produce these sensations.

Still, many people who have NDEs afterward feel a renewed appreciation for life, a sense of compassion toward others and a lack of fear about death. I just wish more of us could experience these things without having to almost die first. Well, perhaps we can. A stiff dose of ketamine, a horse tranquilizer, can produce remarkably similar hallucinations. Maybe when we start feeling depressed about life or our fellow human beings, the prescription should be a dose of ketamine and its accompanying NDE.

As always, when we want to understand anything, it is a good idea to turn to writers for insight. Here are some novels on the subject:

  • The Matt Zander Journals by Gary Denne
  • Passage by Connie Willis
  • Fearless by Rafael Yglesias

For more…

Near-Death Experiences Explained? (National Geographic)
How Near-Death Experiences Work (How Stuff Works)
Can Science Explain Heaven (Newsweek)
Patients Draw Life-After-Death Experiences (Newsweek)
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How the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition

Posted on February 23, 2010 | 1 Comment
January 16: Prohibition in the United States b...

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Prohibition, the so-called “Noble Experiment,” was enacted in 1920 with the ratification of the 18th Amendment of the Constitution. Its aim was to enforce total abstention from alcohol by making its manufacture, sale and transportation illegal, and thus create overnight a teetotaling, morally upright nation. Its actual outcome was to boost organized crime, smuggling and, perversely, alcoholism. The 18th Amendment was repealed in 1933, and Prohibition is now generally considered an utter failure.

What I did not know about Prohibition, until I read this article in Slate, was that making alcohol illegal was only part of the experiment. The U.S. Government, seeing that alcohol use did not decrease as expected, also experimented with poisoning alcohol to enforce abstention. At the time, bootleggers were purchasing industrial alcohol and renaturing it to make it drinkable. The government, knowing that this was happening, required that toxic chemicals be added to industrial alcohol. They reasoned that if people knew the alcohol could kill them, they would stop drinking it. That didn’t happen, and an estimated 10,000 people died from drinking the poisoned spirits.

Prohibition — and the poisoning of alcohol by the federal government as a part of it — demonstrates what can happen when ideals turn into fanaticism. Prohibition was intended to protect the moral fiber and health of citizens by getting them to stop drinking alcohol. That goal was seen as so critical that law enforcement was willing to actually kill citizens in order to protect them.

Given our 30-year-long “War on Drugs,” which has resulted in over-crowded prisons, an epidemic of violent crime in some cities and Mexico, and no sign of drug use decreasing, perhaps its time to take the lessons we should have learned from Prohibition to heart.

The Chemist’s War (Slate)
Prohibition in the United States (Wikipedia)
Prohibition: How Dry We Ain’t (Life Magazine)

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Google introduces social search

Posted on October 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

It seems like something cool comes out of Google (our new overlords, all hail teh Google) every day. This time, it’s a concept called “social search.”

Social search is a big step forward in personalizing search, and thus making it much more relevant to the searcher. With social search enabled, when you search Google, along with the top results, you will see any relevant information from your social network’s public web postings. For instance, I search for “New York City.” Following the New York Google Maps, official homepages, Wikipedia entry on NYC, etc., I might also see my husband’s review of a hotel he recently stayed at in the city or my friend’s New York photos on Picasa or my colleague’s post about a professional conference there. Which is all stuff I’m very likely to be interested in, because it’s coming from people I actually know.

How does Google know? It all goes back to your Google Profile — and you should go set one up immediately, if you haven’t already. Tell Google what your public blogs, Flickr page, YouTube channel, et al are, and Google will mine those sources for search results for your social network. Tell Google what your Twitter and FriendFeed names are, and it will add your followers to your social network for searching, along with your contacts in your Friends, Family and Coworkers groups and the blogs you subscribe to on Google Reader.

Read more about Social Search from Google’s official blog. Join the Google Social Search experiment. Once you join, you can see the Social results by:

  1. clicking “Show options…” next to Web at the top of the Google Search Results, and
  2. clicking “Social” in the left nav bar under “All Results”.

You can then burrow down to individual people. Google will show their matches, as well as how you’re connected to them.

Social search is currently in the experimental phase on Google Labs, but it is a really exciting development, with a lot of potential to make Googling even more relevant, personal and timely. And of course, it is yet one more step in Google’s inevitable takeover of the world and future status as the employer/benefactor of all humans. You’ve got to admit, though, it’s still very cool.

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The endless quest to live forever

Posted on August 21, 2009 | 4 Comments
The Alchymist, In Search of the Philosopher’s ...

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There was a story in the New York Times Science section this week about testing beginning on drugs that may slow aging. (Please read the article for all the science stuff — I’ll wait.)

Obviously, this is the Holy Grail of medical science — literally. Since humans first comprehended their own mortality, they have been searching for the Fountain of Youth, the Philosopher’s Stone, the secret to eternal life. I don’t think I’ll see it in my lifetime, but I don’t think it’s too far-fetched to imagine a time when the effects of aging can be slowed or reversed so as to extend human lifetimes to hundreds of years.

But is that what we really want? Science fiction writers have tackled the issue many times. Virtual immortality would certainly help the human race advance technologically, as we would have plenty of time to amass knowledge and innovate based on that knowledge. But what about human relationships — wouldn’t we feel a profound disconnect from one another over time? How would we address the pesky overpopulation problems that are bound to arise? And perhaps more funadmentally, maybe we need the ultimate stakes of mortality to make life really worth living.

Of course, I fantasize about having a prolonged life — with excellent mental and physical health, it goes without saying. But might there come a point when you just get tired of the repetition, the sameness of it all? I don’t know, but if we are seriously hoping to extend life, then shouldn’t we also allow people who want it to choose death?

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Watch those viral videos disappear: Some thoughts on copyright paranoia

Posted on July 30, 2009 | 5 Comments
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If there is any right more misunderstood and more abused than the right to free speech, I believe it is copyright. It doesn’t help that copyright law is insanely complicated and has become conflated over time into a grotesque overprotection for big corporations’ stranglehold on intellectual property, rather than what Thomas Jefferson originally intended it to be: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” What Jefferson actually intended was to provide an incentive to creative persons to make their work public by enabling them to earn something from their work for a time, after which it time it would enter the public domain and thus enrich all of human knowledge. I know, crazy, right? This is America and there’s money to be made, so screw human knowledge.

Of course the corporate world quakes in their underpants at all of the flagrant copyright violating occurring in the Wild West that is the Interwebs. I mean, people are posting videos of their toddlers dancing to Prince songs. However will Prince earn a decent living with that going on? In many cases, it seems that these exuberant pursuits of copyright violating are way too exuberant. Take, for example, my current favorite Keyboard Cat video, which has had the soundtrack removed due to copyright violation. Leaving alone the notion that the sound violates copyright while the accompanying video is perfectly okay (scratching head at the logic behind that one), Keyboard Cat is clearly parody, which falls under fair use. And I’m not just saying that. There is such a thing as fair use — you can look it up.

Besides, videos like this one could actually help some flagging careers. (When was the last time you even heard of Hall & Oates?) Take that wedding dance video that has recently gone viral. Chris Brown was struggling with some minor publicity troubles, but now all is forgiven and his song is getting record downloads because of some cutesy home video that got posted on YouTube. Copyright, shmopyright — he’s raking in some dollars now.

Even when there are legitimate copyright violations, such as when the clip of the brilliant William Shatner reading Sarah Palin’s resignation speech on Conan O’Brien was reposted everywhere, it doesn’t make much sense to have it taken down (which NBC very quickly did). It’s a 6-minute clip from a television show — it’s not going to keep anyone from watching Conan or his advertisers. In fact, it may just help get viewers for the show. Publicity agencies bend over backwards to come up with dumb tricks that they hope will result in a viral video that will promote their movie or TV show, and often it lamely backfires. When you’ve got a genuine viral phenomenon on your hands, don’t look it in the mouth, is my advice.

The Interwebs is officially out of your control, corporate America. You can’t stop all those crazed fans from loving on your content and wanting to share it with their mailmen and former kindergarten teachers on Facebook. So why fight it? Surely you can figure out a way to make money off of it instead. Isn’t that what you do best?

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Twittering away

Posted on March 4, 2008 | 5 Comments

I have been playing with Twitter lately. You’re welcome to follow me, although I can’t promise that it will be scintillating. I have had some fun with it, but I am still thinking about how it might be useful, especially for work.

The most fun I had was on Oscar night, when I joined in with fellow Twitterers to dish about the clothes, celebrities, jokes and awards. It felt like I was attending a gigantic Oscar party. I was able to track the relevant tweets using a special hashtag (#aa08), so that all related tweets showed up on one page, such as over at twemes.com. I also enjoyed watching the tweets about Super Tuesday pop up on a Google map, although that wasn’t as highly participatory for me.

Here are a few things I’ve learned from twittering:

  • I like to follow people I know or to whom I have some kind of personal connection. It’s OK if I only know them from online. Consequently, I don’t follow a lot of people.
  • I don’t like to follow people who tweet frequently. I only check Twitter a few times a day, and I prefer a good signal-to-noise ratio.
  • I have noticed that just by following BreakingNewsOn, I am actually seeing news first on Twitter before I see it anywhere else.

For me, Twitter is a good way to stay in touch with just a few people whom I am particularly interested in and as a news/information source, but if I follow too many people (or people who are too verbose), it rapidly loses its value. I have particularly enjoyed seeing tweets from my colleagues who are working in Rwanda right now; I feel much more in touch with them than I would have otherwise. And I have struck up one new acquaintance through Twitter, who reads my tweets and replies directly to me — that was unexpected, but very nice.

As for work, I think that Twitter will be most effective for distributed groups of people working on a project together, especially if everyone actively participates. It will be most useful for keeping up with members of the group who are traveling and helping everyone stay in the loop on what we’re working on. This doesn’t only have to apply to work projects, but volunteer projects, friend and family circles, temporary groups such as people attending a conference together and the like.

The trick is to get people in the habit of using Twitter. They will have to find value in it, just as I have — but it took me a few weeks of using it and figuring out how it worked best for me before I saw that value. It helps if there are multiple groups they can plug into beyond just the primary group. SmartMobs has a nice article, “Why I’m Hooked on Twitter,” that describes the value add and can be used to sell Twitter to friends and colleagues.

Here are some more useful resources for Twitterers:

  • Twitter Pack Project is a wiki that lets people self-identify by area of interest, location, company, etc. and connect with others to follow.
  • TwitterWho lets you batch search for names or email addresses to find people easier on Twitter.
  • TweetWhatYouEat is an interesting application that lets you set up a food diary using Twitter.
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