Skepticum

I always deride the ideas of the Blogobeer beer god on how drinking home brew and not eating can prolong life, but today I happened upon an article that gives 25 anti-aging tips.

The top 3 are:

1. Stay the weight you were at 18

2. Take the dynamic duo of supplements–daily 800 mg of alpha-lipoic acid and 2,000 mg of acetyl-L-carnitine

3. Skip a meal

In fact, if you read the list of 25 you’ll find most tips have to do with how to eat and how to relax and enjoy life. Hail to the beer god!

Larry King Live - UFOs Are They Out There? - CNN - Watch more funny videos here

Here is a transcript of the show.The interesting part of this show is how the well known skeptic Shermer is not allowed to finish a thought. It’s amazing to see how many people wish to believe in UFOs to the point where they will attack someone who says “I don’t know.” Shermer writes his post-show thoughts as well as some funny and sad letters he got after the show on the Skeptic website.

Drugs.com published a list of the Top 200 prescription Drugs for 2006 by US Sales. What would you say this reveals about health (or health care) in the United States?

Here are the top 10:

Discover Magazine just published a well written, if not too-eager-to-be-”fair” article on Islam and science, entitled “Science and Islam” in its printed version and “Science and Islam in Conflict” in its web version (*clears throat*).

Before I go into the highlights of the article, let me touch upon a few facts that the article doesn’t discuss in depth–the Golden Age of Islam. To understand the decline in science in today’s Arab world, one has to understand about it’s Golden Age.

The Golden Age of Islam lasted from around 750 AD to about 1258 AD when the Mongols invaded and destroyed the Abbasid Islamic Empire (with its capital in Baghdad). Historians assign the start of the Golden Age to the ancient city of Samarqand (in modern-day Uzbekistan). Following the Koran edict that “the scholar’s ink is more sacred than the blood of martyrs”, when the locals captured invading Chinese they forced them to build and operate a paper mill. Thus, Samarqand became the book-making capital of the Arab World. Other factors that contributed to the Golden Age were encouragement of scholarship, geographic unity, a unified language, and The House of Wisdom.

So at the source of the Discover article stands the question of what happened to the Muslim scientific tradition?

The Islamic world looms large in the history of science, and there were long periods when Cairo—in Arabic, El Qahira, meaning “the victorious”—was a leading star in the Arabic universe of learning. Islam is in many ways more tolerant of scientific study than is Christian fundamentalism. It does not, for example, argue that the world is only 6,000 years old. Cloning research that does not involve people is becoming more widely accepted. In recent times, though, knowledge in Egypt has waned. And who is accountable for the decline?

The article explores a number of answers:

From blame placed on the Westerners,

El-Naggar has no doubts. “We are not behind because of Islam,” he says. “We are behind because of what the Americans and the British have done to us.”

To politics,

People and the authorities are still grappling with religion’s place in Egyptian society, resulting in a situation similar to one in Europe during the time of Copernicus and Galileo, when scientific knowledge was considered threatening to the prevailing religious power structure. For now, the door on freedom of thought has nearly been shut. As Soltan points out, “Cairo University has not received Western professors since the 1950s, and because of the turmoil in the country, many professors who didn’t like the regime were excluded from the university.”

To dogma,

He [Jordanian Senator Adnan Badran, who has a Ph.D. in molecular biology from Michigan State University] blames a tradition that began with the Ottomans in the 1500s: lowering educational standards and promoting dogma. “We were open. Islam was open, a strong belief with dialogue. It was tolerant, mixing with other civilizations. Then we shifted to being dogmatic. Once you’re dogmatic, you are boxed in,” he says. “If you step outside the box, you’re marginalized—and then you’re out. So you go west.”

The article is beautifully supported by stories of scientists who are striving to change the state of science in the Arab World. A must read.

I just about passed out laughing when I submitted my blog for “MPAA Blog Rating” and it came back with a G!!! The only strike against me was the one-time use of the term “drugs.”

Of course, what can be expected being that the site that published this inane tool is a dating site… They probably give out random ratings with no algorithm behind, instead using a simple word counting tool.

Oh and they’d better fucking excuse me if I take the dating link out of the html needed to display the image below.

I complained that I didn’t get tagged in a while and it resulted in me getting tagged twice for this “Eight Random Facts” thing.

The Rules: “Each person posts the rules before their list, then they list 8 things about themselves. At the end of the post, that person tags and links to 8 other people and then visits those peoples’ sites and comments letting them know that they have been tagged, and to come read the post, so they know what they have to do.”

So here are my 8 very random facts:

1. I’m a geek (and that’s a fact)

2. When I was a kid I wanted to be a fighter jet pilot.

3. I don’t like escalators and elevators so I take the stairs as often as I can.

4. I am incredibly messy at home but perfectly organized on a computer. My co-workers are amazed at how efficiently I organize the massive amounts of info we work with. If clothes, cosmetics, Continue Reading »

I’m subscribed to Science Blog’s RSS, and this hour’s listed post (10-ish PM-ish Central US time, July 6, 2007) had to do with Memes… or rather with John Wilkins being tagged by someone else… Feeling left out, I followed the tag, and I took a trip around the world and through “news and blabbering on evolution and religious-fundamentalism,” “Scientia Natura,” “I’m not the Blog But…,” “Dictionopolis In Digitopolis,” “no smoking in the skullcave,” and my favorite “Monkey Muck” where, unfortunately, the trail ends.

Honestly, all of these are great blogs, the kind I would read, so maybe these “memes” serve the purpose of getting us (those like-minded) connected together.

However, back to my moment of jealousy, I too got tagged numerous times, and now I am counting the days until this one reaches me.

I even have a story ready: “Was born and raised in Transylvania, and loved playing vampire as a child…”

Those who know me know that I am a huge Penn & Teller show fan (my first stop in Vegas this spring was the Penn & Teller Theater), and of the skeptic network, blogosphere, or may-you-call-it-as-you-wish. I just happened today upon a video dialog between Penn and Teller and James Randi where Randi defines the difference between a skeptic and a cynic. Randi says:

To be skeptical is to have a healthy point of view, I would think, is to wonder whether or not “this” is true, but to be cynical is to just dismiss everything….

My job has been boooring lately. M-o-o-n, that spells boring. It’s my fault really because I don’t deal very well with “day to day” things, and I thrive when I can use my intellect (duh!) and let the creative juices flow. I wager to say more and more people find themselves in this situation, because so many business jobs today involve getting to work, turning on laptop, reading and answering emails for an hour, getting on a conference call, more emails and more meetings, maybe lunch break (if we’re lucky) and repeat.

If your company is involved with technology, you’ll have “releases” every quarter or so which is how often something exciting happens, 4 times a year.

There are companies that are very good about breaking monotony, and “hack days” are a new tool employed. It challenges employees to break the mold, invent something new to profit the company and keep employees from getting bored. Yahoo went as far as having open hack days, such as the June 2007, Hack Days London.

Meebo published on their blog today about some Hack Day ideas they’ve employed.

And the winner of “Funniest Hack” and Hack Days London, and my favorite, Web 0.0.