Sunday, August 31, 2014
VIDEO: Car Scene - The Wedding Date
You're safe, you can reIax.I not gonna kiss you. He's gonna be so sorry he Iost you.Stop worrying. Forget the past. Forget the pain. And remember... what an incredibIe woman you are.If you do that, he'll reallze what he Iost.
Saturday, August 30, 2014
ARTICLE: NYTIMES The Intelligent-Life Lottery by GeorgeJohnson
The Intelligent-Life Lottery by GeorgeJohnson
Almost 20 years ago, in the pages of an obscure publication called Bioastronomy News, two giants in the world of science argued over whether SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — had a chance of succeeding. Carl Sagan, as eloquent as ever, gave his standard answer. With billions of stars in our galaxy, there must be other civilizations capable of transmitting electromagnetic waves. By scouring the sky with radio telescopes, we just might intercept a signal.
But Sagan’s opponent, the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, thought the chances were close to zero. Against Sagan’s stellar billions, he posed his own astronomical numbers: Of the billions of species that have lived and died since life began, only one — Homo sapiens — had developed a science, a technology, and the curiosity to explore the stars. And that took about 3.5 billion years of evolution. High intelligence, Mayr concluded, must be extremely rare, here or anywhere. Earth’s most abundant life form is unicellular slime.
Since the debate with Sagan, more than 1,700 planets have been discovered beyond the solar system — 700 just this year. Astronomers recently estimated that one of every five sunlike stars in the Milky Way might be orbited by a world capable of supporting some kind of life.
That is about 40 billion potential habitats. But Mayr, who died in 2005 at the age of 100, probably wouldn’t have been impressed. By his reckoning, the odds would still be very low for anything much beyond slime worlds. No evidence has yet emerged to prove him wrong.
Maybe we’re just not looking hard enough. Since SETI began in the early 1960s, it has struggled for the money it takes to monitor even a fraction of the sky. In an online essay for The Conversation last week, Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, lamented how little has been allocated for the quest — just a fraction of NASA’s budget.
“If you don’t ante up,” he wrote, “you will never win the jackpot. And that is a question of will.”
Three years ago, SETI’s Allen Telescope Array in Northern California ran out of money and was closed for a while. Earlier this month, it was threatened by wildfire — another reminder of the precariousness of the search.
It has been more than 3.5 billion years since the first simple cells arose, and it took another billion years or so for some of them to evolve and join symbiotically into primitive multicellular organisms. These biochemical hives, through random mutations and the blind explorations of evolution, eventually led to creatures with the ability to remember, to anticipate and — at least in the case of humans — to wonder what it is all about.
Every step was a matter of happenstance, like the arbitrary combination of numbers — 3, 12, 31, 34, 51 and 24 — that qualified a Powerball winner for a $90 million prize this month. Some unknowing soul happened to enter a convenience store in Rifle, Colo., and — maybe with change from buying gasoline or a microwaved burrito — purchase a ticket just as the machine was about to spit out those particular numbers.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
According to the Powerball website, the chance of winning the grand prize is about one in 175 million. The emergence of humanlike intelligence, as Mayr saw it, was about as likely as if a Powerball winner kept buying tickets and — round after round — hit a bigger jackpot each time. One unlikelihood is piled on another, yielding a vanishingly rare event.
In one of my favorite books, “Wonderful Life,” Stephen Jay Gould celebrated what he saw as the unlikelihood of our existence. Going further than Mayr, he ventured that if a slithering creature called Pikaia gracilens had not survived the Cambrian extinction, about half a billion years ago, the entire phylum called Chordata, which includes us vertebrates, might never have existed.
Gould took his title from the Frank Capra movie in which George Bailey gets to see what the world might have been like without him — idyllic Bedford Falls is replaced by a bleak, Dickensian Pottersville.
For Gould, the fact that any of our ancestral species might easily have been nipped in the bud should fill us “with a new kind of amazement” and “a frisson for the improbability of the event” — a fellow agnostic’s version of an epiphany.
“We came this close (put your thumb about a millimeter away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel,” he wrote. “Replay the tape a million times,” he proposed, “and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.”
Other biologists have disputed Gould’s conclusion. In the course of evolution, eyes and multicellularity arose independently a number of times. So why not vertebrae, spinal cords and brains? The more bags of tricks an organism has at its disposal, the greater its survival power may be. A biological arms race ensues, with complexity ratcheted ever higher.
But those occasions are rare. Most organisms, as Daniel Dennett put it in “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” seem to have “hit upon a relatively simple solution to life’s problems at the outset and, having nailed it a billion years ago, have had nothing much to do in the way of design work ever since.” Our appreciation of complexity, he wrote, “may well be just an aesthetic preference.”
In “Five Billion Years of Solitude,” by Lee Billings, published last year, the author visited Frank Drake, one of the SETI pioneers.
“Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room,” Dr. Drake told him. “Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.”
He knew the odds of tuning in — at just the right frequency at the right place and time — were slim. But that just meant we needed to expand the search.
“We’ve been playing the lottery only using a few tickets,” he said.
Almost 20 years ago, in the pages of an obscure publication called Bioastronomy News, two giants in the world of science argued over whether SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — had a chance of succeeding. Carl Sagan, as eloquent as ever, gave his standard answer. With billions of stars in our galaxy, there must be other civilizations capable of transmitting electromagnetic waves. By scouring the sky with radio telescopes, we just might intercept a signal.
But Sagan’s opponent, the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, thought the chances were close to zero. Against Sagan’s stellar billions, he posed his own astronomical numbers: Of the billions of species that have lived and died since life began, only one — Homo sapiens — had developed a science, a technology, and the curiosity to explore the stars. And that took about 3.5 billion years of evolution. High intelligence, Mayr concluded, must be extremely rare, here or anywhere. Earth’s most abundant life form is unicellular slime.
Since the debate with Sagan, more than 1,700 planets have been discovered beyond the solar system — 700 just this year. Astronomers recently estimated that one of every five sunlike stars in the Milky Way might be orbited by a world capable of supporting some kind of life.
That is about 40 billion potential habitats. But Mayr, who died in 2005 at the age of 100, probably wouldn’t have been impressed. By his reckoning, the odds would still be very low for anything much beyond slime worlds. No evidence has yet emerged to prove him wrong.
Maybe we’re just not looking hard enough. Since SETI began in the early 1960s, it has struggled for the money it takes to monitor even a fraction of the sky. In an online essay for The Conversation last week, Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, lamented how little has been allocated for the quest — just a fraction of NASA’s budget.
“If you don’t ante up,” he wrote, “you will never win the jackpot. And that is a question of will.”
Three years ago, SETI’s Allen Telescope Array in Northern California ran out of money and was closed for a while. Earlier this month, it was threatened by wildfire — another reminder of the precariousness of the search.
It has been more than 3.5 billion years since the first simple cells arose, and it took another billion years or so for some of them to evolve and join symbiotically into primitive multicellular organisms. These biochemical hives, through random mutations and the blind explorations of evolution, eventually led to creatures with the ability to remember, to anticipate and — at least in the case of humans — to wonder what it is all about.
Every step was a matter of happenstance, like the arbitrary combination of numbers — 3, 12, 31, 34, 51 and 24 — that qualified a Powerball winner for a $90 million prize this month. Some unknowing soul happened to enter a convenience store in Rifle, Colo., and — maybe with change from buying gasoline or a microwaved burrito — purchase a ticket just as the machine was about to spit out those particular numbers.
Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story
Continue reading the main story
According to the Powerball website, the chance of winning the grand prize is about one in 175 million. The emergence of humanlike intelligence, as Mayr saw it, was about as likely as if a Powerball winner kept buying tickets and — round after round — hit a bigger jackpot each time. One unlikelihood is piled on another, yielding a vanishingly rare event.
In one of my favorite books, “Wonderful Life,” Stephen Jay Gould celebrated what he saw as the unlikelihood of our existence. Going further than Mayr, he ventured that if a slithering creature called Pikaia gracilens had not survived the Cambrian extinction, about half a billion years ago, the entire phylum called Chordata, which includes us vertebrates, might never have existed.
Gould took his title from the Frank Capra movie in which George Bailey gets to see what the world might have been like without him — idyllic Bedford Falls is replaced by a bleak, Dickensian Pottersville.
For Gould, the fact that any of our ancestral species might easily have been nipped in the bud should fill us “with a new kind of amazement” and “a frisson for the improbability of the event” — a fellow agnostic’s version of an epiphany.
“We came this close (put your thumb about a millimeter away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel,” he wrote. “Replay the tape a million times,” he proposed, “and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.”
Other biologists have disputed Gould’s conclusion. In the course of evolution, eyes and multicellularity arose independently a number of times. So why not vertebrae, spinal cords and brains? The more bags of tricks an organism has at its disposal, the greater its survival power may be. A biological arms race ensues, with complexity ratcheted ever higher.
But those occasions are rare. Most organisms, as Daniel Dennett put it in “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” seem to have “hit upon a relatively simple solution to life’s problems at the outset and, having nailed it a billion years ago, have had nothing much to do in the way of design work ever since.” Our appreciation of complexity, he wrote, “may well be just an aesthetic preference.”
In “Five Billion Years of Solitude,” by Lee Billings, published last year, the author visited Frank Drake, one of the SETI pioneers.
“Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room,” Dr. Drake told him. “Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.”
He knew the odds of tuning in — at just the right frequency at the right place and time — were slim. But that just meant we needed to expand the search.
“We’ve been playing the lottery only using a few tickets,” he said.
ARTICLE: Sound and Fury in Bank Settlements, Still Signifying Nothing By WILLIAM D. COHAN
Sound and Fury in Bank Settlements, Still Signifying Nothing
By WILLIAM D. COHAN
Once again last month, we were treated to the sorry spectacle of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. holding a news conference to proclaim that a “too big to fail” bank had been brought to justice for its reprehensible behavior in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. All things considered, it was fine theater with the obvious caveat that nothing even remotely close to justice had been served.
This time, Mr. Holder was taking a victory lap for strong-arming Citigroup into paying $7 billion — including a $4 billion cash penalty, the largest such single payment ever — to settle all civil claims against it for its role in packaging troubled mortgages into securities and selling them as investments in the years before the crisis, even though a bunch of Citigroup bankers knew better and did it anyway.
“This historic penalty is appropriate given the strength of the evidence of the wrongdoing committed by Citi,” Mr. Holder said. “The bank’s activities contributed mightily to the financial crisis that devastated our economy in 2008. Taken together, we believe the size and scope of this resolution goes beyond what could be considered the mere cost of doing business. Citi is not the first financial institution to be held accountable by this Justice Department, and it will certainly not be the last.”
For those following closely, as Mr. Holder alluded to in his statement, the Citigroup settlement was a repeat of the performance he gave last November when JPMorgan Chase paid $13 billion to settle similar claims against it. It is probably also serving as set-up for the show that Mr. Holder will be putting on again any day now when Bank of America capitulates to his demands for a settlement after months of threatening not to go along. Bank of America is expected to pay a fine of $16 billion to $17 billion to various government entities — eclipsing the $13 billion that JPMorgan paid — including a stunning $9 billion in cash.
That Mr. Holder prefers large settlements to prosecutions is no surprise to anyone familiar with the so-called Holder Doctrine, which stems from his now-famous June 1999 memorandum — when he was deputy attorney general — that included the thought that big financial settlements may be preferable to criminal convictions because a criminal conviction often carries severe unintended consequences, like loss of jobs and the inability to continue as a going concern. (See Andersen, Arthur, for instance.)
That Mr. Holder, as attorney general, is following through on an idea that he proposed as a subordinate 15 years ago does not make his behavior any less infuriating. The fact is that by settling with the big Wall Street banks for billions of dollars — money that comes out of their shareholders’ pockets — Mr. Holder is allowing them to avoid the sunshine that Louis Brandeis wrote 100 years ago was the best disinfectant. Instead of shining the bright light on wrongdoing that took place at the Wall Street banks, Mr. Holder’s settlements allow them to cover it up permanently.
And that helps no one. The American people are deprived of knowing precisely how bad things got inside these banks in the years leading up to the financial crisis, and the banks, knowing they will be saved the humiliation caused by the public airing of a trove of emails and documents, will no doubt soon be repeating their callous and indifferent behavior.
Instead of the truth, we get from the Justice Department a heavily negotiated and sanitized “statement of facts” about what supposedly went wrong. In the case of JPMorgan, the statement of facts was 21 pages but contained little of substance beyond the fact that an unidentified whistle-blower at the bank tried to alert her superiors to her belief that shoddy mortgages were being packaged and sold as securities. Her warnings went unheeded and the mortgages were packaged and sold all the same.
The explicit details of the bank’s wrongdoing were contained in a civil complaint that Benjamin B. Wagner, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of California, had drafted and threatened to file publicly if JPMorgan didn’t settle. Fearing disclosure of the contents of the complaint, JPMorgan caved to Mr. Holder’s demands. The bottom line was JPMorgan paid the $13 billion, in cash and in-kind, and the American people were deprived of finding out exactly what the bank did wrong.
A similar cat-and-mouse game took place in the Citigroup settlement. This time, though, the statement of facts was a mere nine pages and contained remarkably little substance beyond the fact that Citigroup packaged mortgages it should not have and sold them as securities to investors. In the most anodyne language, Citigroup conceded that it occasionally violated its own internal credit guidelines for mortgages but packaged them anyway. Here is a sample of what Citigroup admitted to in the statement of facts: “In certain instances, Citigroup securitized loans that its vendors had reported exceeded Citigroup’s valuation tolerances or where the vendor’s valuation determination exceeded the reported or appraised value.”
The only quasi-damning piece of evidence in the statement of facts came in the form of an email written by an anonymous trader who had reviewed a bunch of the mortgages that Citigroup intended to package and sell and realized that they were defective. The trader stated that he “went thru the diligence reports” — describing the mortgages — “and think that we should start praying… I would not be surprised if half of these loans went down. There are a lot of loans that have unreasonable incomes, values below the original appraisals” — where the loan-to-value ratio would exceed 100 percent, a no-no — “It’s amazing that some of these loans were closed at all.” No surprise, according to the statement of facts, “Despite this trader’s observations, Citigroup securitized loans from this pool” in two residential mortgage-backed securities.
The problem is, of course, that these settlements allow for the Wall Street bankers, traders and executives who write these kinds of emails and make these kinds of decisions to get away with their bad — and perhaps illegal — behavior without being held the slightest bit accountable. To the contrary, they were rewarded for making and selling these securities with huge bonuses that often ran into the millions of dollars. And then — thank you very much — Wall Street’s boards reward their exalted chief executives with higher bonuses for resolving these nettlesome legal matters. But all the chief executives did was use their shareholders’ money to make the lawsuits go away and cover up any trace of the bad behavior.
As usual, in any war, the first casualty is the truth. After the announcement of the Citigroup settlement, I received an email from Richard Bowen, a former Citigroup executive who had pinpointed the bank’s wrongdoing in securitizing the faulty mortgages it was buying. Well before the financial crisis hit, Mr. Bowen alerted the top executives of Citigroup about this malfeasance. Of course, Mr. Bowen’s clarion call was ignored and the bank fired him. (I have written about Mr. Bowen before, and “60 Minutes” did a feature on him, too.)
The Citigroup settlement has left him flabbergasted. “In July of 2008, I gave the S.E.C. 1,000 pages documenting fraud and the false representations given to investors in many securitizations and subsequently provided additional evidence to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the Department of Justice,” he wrote in his email. “In light of the huge losses this behavior caused our country, it is outrageous that, six years later, a settlement of only civil fraud charges would be announced, with no individuals being held accountable and no real admission of wrongdoing or true penalties assessed.” Mr. Bowen figures the Justice Department lets these banks get away with a whitewash of their bad behavior so as not to provide a litigation road map for investors who were burned by the faulty securities.
Something tells me this is precisely the way the powers that be wanted to be
By WILLIAM D. COHAN
Once again last month, we were treated to the sorry spectacle of Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. holding a news conference to proclaim that a “too big to fail” bank had been brought to justice for its reprehensible behavior in the years leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. All things considered, it was fine theater with the obvious caveat that nothing even remotely close to justice had been served.
This time, Mr. Holder was taking a victory lap for strong-arming Citigroup into paying $7 billion — including a $4 billion cash penalty, the largest such single payment ever — to settle all civil claims against it for its role in packaging troubled mortgages into securities and selling them as investments in the years before the crisis, even though a bunch of Citigroup bankers knew better and did it anyway.
“This historic penalty is appropriate given the strength of the evidence of the wrongdoing committed by Citi,” Mr. Holder said. “The bank’s activities contributed mightily to the financial crisis that devastated our economy in 2008. Taken together, we believe the size and scope of this resolution goes beyond what could be considered the mere cost of doing business. Citi is not the first financial institution to be held accountable by this Justice Department, and it will certainly not be the last.”
For those following closely, as Mr. Holder alluded to in his statement, the Citigroup settlement was a repeat of the performance he gave last November when JPMorgan Chase paid $13 billion to settle similar claims against it. It is probably also serving as set-up for the show that Mr. Holder will be putting on again any day now when Bank of America capitulates to his demands for a settlement after months of threatening not to go along. Bank of America is expected to pay a fine of $16 billion to $17 billion to various government entities — eclipsing the $13 billion that JPMorgan paid — including a stunning $9 billion in cash.
That Mr. Holder prefers large settlements to prosecutions is no surprise to anyone familiar with the so-called Holder Doctrine, which stems from his now-famous June 1999 memorandum — when he was deputy attorney general — that included the thought that big financial settlements may be preferable to criminal convictions because a criminal conviction often carries severe unintended consequences, like loss of jobs and the inability to continue as a going concern. (See Andersen, Arthur, for instance.)
That Mr. Holder, as attorney general, is following through on an idea that he proposed as a subordinate 15 years ago does not make his behavior any less infuriating. The fact is that by settling with the big Wall Street banks for billions of dollars — money that comes out of their shareholders’ pockets — Mr. Holder is allowing them to avoid the sunshine that Louis Brandeis wrote 100 years ago was the best disinfectant. Instead of shining the bright light on wrongdoing that took place at the Wall Street banks, Mr. Holder’s settlements allow them to cover it up permanently.
And that helps no one. The American people are deprived of knowing precisely how bad things got inside these banks in the years leading up to the financial crisis, and the banks, knowing they will be saved the humiliation caused by the public airing of a trove of emails and documents, will no doubt soon be repeating their callous and indifferent behavior.
Instead of the truth, we get from the Justice Department a heavily negotiated and sanitized “statement of facts” about what supposedly went wrong. In the case of JPMorgan, the statement of facts was 21 pages but contained little of substance beyond the fact that an unidentified whistle-blower at the bank tried to alert her superiors to her belief that shoddy mortgages were being packaged and sold as securities. Her warnings went unheeded and the mortgages were packaged and sold all the same.
The explicit details of the bank’s wrongdoing were contained in a civil complaint that Benjamin B. Wagner, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of California, had drafted and threatened to file publicly if JPMorgan didn’t settle. Fearing disclosure of the contents of the complaint, JPMorgan caved to Mr. Holder’s demands. The bottom line was JPMorgan paid the $13 billion, in cash and in-kind, and the American people were deprived of finding out exactly what the bank did wrong.
A similar cat-and-mouse game took place in the Citigroup settlement. This time, though, the statement of facts was a mere nine pages and contained remarkably little substance beyond the fact that Citigroup packaged mortgages it should not have and sold them as securities to investors. In the most anodyne language, Citigroup conceded that it occasionally violated its own internal credit guidelines for mortgages but packaged them anyway. Here is a sample of what Citigroup admitted to in the statement of facts: “In certain instances, Citigroup securitized loans that its vendors had reported exceeded Citigroup’s valuation tolerances or where the vendor’s valuation determination exceeded the reported or appraised value.”
The only quasi-damning piece of evidence in the statement of facts came in the form of an email written by an anonymous trader who had reviewed a bunch of the mortgages that Citigroup intended to package and sell and realized that they were defective. The trader stated that he “went thru the diligence reports” — describing the mortgages — “and think that we should start praying… I would not be surprised if half of these loans went down. There are a lot of loans that have unreasonable incomes, values below the original appraisals” — where the loan-to-value ratio would exceed 100 percent, a no-no — “It’s amazing that some of these loans were closed at all.” No surprise, according to the statement of facts, “Despite this trader’s observations, Citigroup securitized loans from this pool” in two residential mortgage-backed securities.
The problem is, of course, that these settlements allow for the Wall Street bankers, traders and executives who write these kinds of emails and make these kinds of decisions to get away with their bad — and perhaps illegal — behavior without being held the slightest bit accountable. To the contrary, they were rewarded for making and selling these securities with huge bonuses that often ran into the millions of dollars. And then — thank you very much — Wall Street’s boards reward their exalted chief executives with higher bonuses for resolving these nettlesome legal matters. But all the chief executives did was use their shareholders’ money to make the lawsuits go away and cover up any trace of the bad behavior.
As usual, in any war, the first casualty is the truth. After the announcement of the Citigroup settlement, I received an email from Richard Bowen, a former Citigroup executive who had pinpointed the bank’s wrongdoing in securitizing the faulty mortgages it was buying. Well before the financial crisis hit, Mr. Bowen alerted the top executives of Citigroup about this malfeasance. Of course, Mr. Bowen’s clarion call was ignored and the bank fired him. (I have written about Mr. Bowen before, and “60 Minutes” did a feature on him, too.)
The Citigroup settlement has left him flabbergasted. “In July of 2008, I gave the S.E.C. 1,000 pages documenting fraud and the false representations given to investors in many securitizations and subsequently provided additional evidence to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and the Department of Justice,” he wrote in his email. “In light of the huge losses this behavior caused our country, it is outrageous that, six years later, a settlement of only civil fraud charges would be announced, with no individuals being held accountable and no real admission of wrongdoing or true penalties assessed.” Mr. Bowen figures the Justice Department lets these banks get away with a whitewash of their bad behavior so as not to provide a litigation road map for investors who were burned by the faulty securities.
Something tells me this is precisely the way the powers that be wanted to be
PERSONAL/ LOVE LETTER: I WANT TO BE LOVED
I used to want to be admired. Well, now I want to be loved. If we were a couple .....there are couple of acitivies that I want to experience.We would exercise together ...there is nothing like going for a great bike ride together or for a quick run before bedtime. We would notes to each other.Give each other small inexpensive presents. Cook together – cooking together is very fun Its about the small sacrifices. ” Igloo time – for five minutes every day , we hide under the blanket and make it like an igloo , we just talk about our high and lows of the day ”.Relax together – we cant just want to kick back our shoes and relax in front of the TV watching our favorite show. I would let you have the last bite of anything food We will dance– anywhere we can , we will hold one and other and move to some sound of music . doesn’t have to be a public place, as long as we both do it . its magical.I would take random pictures of you when you are not looking - show you that I don’t take you for granted, send you random pictures of you every now and then with a simple text message that says ” i’m so lucky. Prepare your toothbrush. And finally just be there for you because sometimes you just need to be there and hold hands to say all you ever need
I would spend the rest of my life falling as far and deep and hard as my heart will let me go in love with you. Now my heart is desperate in my chest, like a bird crashing into a window over and over again, confused that it can't get to what it sees and wants, and willing to kill itself in the attempt to remedy thatI will never break your heart. I will never hurt you. I might mess up, I might not be perfect, but I'll never hurt you, You have my word.If you will love me I cannot promise you that I will not hurt you. I cannot promise you that I will not make you cry and that I’ll never break your heart. But if you will love me, I will bare my whole self naked before you, and I will reveal to you my soul. If you will love me, you can be certain that it is I that you will love, not a mask that fools you and gives you only what your eyes desire to see. If you will love me, you can be certain that you will love the depths of me, all of me that is in me, and I in turn will love you with all of me, with all my soul, with all my mind, with all my spirit, with all my flaws and beauty, and with all my very heart.
I would spend the rest of my life falling as far and deep and hard as my heart will let me go in love with you. Now my heart is desperate in my chest, like a bird crashing into a window over and over again, confused that it can't get to what it sees and wants, and willing to kill itself in the attempt to remedy thatI will never break your heart. I will never hurt you. I might mess up, I might not be perfect, but I'll never hurt you, You have my word.If you will love me I cannot promise you that I will not hurt you. I cannot promise you that I will not make you cry and that I’ll never break your heart. But if you will love me, I will bare my whole self naked before you, and I will reveal to you my soul. If you will love me, you can be certain that it is I that you will love, not a mask that fools you and gives you only what your eyes desire to see. If you will love me, you can be certain that you will love the depths of me, all of me that is in me, and I in turn will love you with all of me, with all my soul, with all my mind, with all my spirit, with all my flaws and beauty, and with all my very heart.
ARTICLE: Does The Soul Exist? This Ends The Debate Once And For All - Written by Steven Bancarz|
A lot of people are resistant to the idea of a “soul” because of how this term has gotten wrapped up in religious superstition and dogma. Some people think it is outright silly. But the concept of consciousness being able to detach from the body offers a lot of explanatory power when it comes to phenomenon such as Near Death Experiences, Out-Of-Body Experiences, astral projections, and even reincarnation. In fact, the evidence for reincarnation is the best hard scientific evidence we have for the existence of a soul. This is a bold claim, but the evidence for reincarnation is undeniable and cannot collectively be attributed to chance or any other physical explanation. If reincarnation exists, the soul exists. Let’s take a look!
Before we explore the evidence, it’s helpful to remember that we do not need hard PROOF in order to be justified in believing in something. If the weatherman says there is a 70% chance of showers, I don’t need proof that it’s going to rain before I am justified in bringing an umbrella with me. I don’t have to be certain that a meteor isn’t going to fall on my head before I go outside. I don’t need hard scientific proof of extra-terrestrial life in order to be justified in believing that life exists on other planets, because there are so many good reasons that, when taken together cumulatively, provide a plausible account for belief in life on other planets. This is known as “abductive reasoning” and is the kind of reasoning we use most in our every day lives.
Reincarnation is not something you can objectively measure in the same way you can measure a chemical reaction, so it may even be in principle non-provable using the scientific method. So the question is, “Are there enough solid pieces of evidence that, when taken together, justify a belief in reincarnation?” I think the answer is a resounding yes. Here we go:
Dr. Ian Stevenson, Ph.D., former Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, spent 40 years researching reincarnation stories within children. This former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology investigated over 3000 independent stories of children who claimed to have memories and know people from their alleged past lives. According to Stevenson, the number of cases that are worth considering is so high that it exceeds the ability of him and his team to investigate them all.
Facial recognition software confirmed that there was in fact a facial resemblance to their alleged prior incarnation. Some had birth marks on places where they allegedly suffered fatal wounds from in their past life. They were often dramatic and sometimes bizarre lesions, such as malformed digits or missing limbs, misshapen heads, and odd markings. As Dr. Stevenson writes in his paper “Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons” in the peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration:
“About 35% of children who claim to remember previous lives have birthmarks and/or birth defects that they (or adult informants) attribute to wounds on a person whose life the child remembers. The cases of 210 such children have been investigated. The birthmarks were usually areas of hairless, puckered skin; some were areas of little or no pigmentation (hypopigmented macules); others were areas of increased pigmentation (hyperpigmented nevi).
The birth defects were nearly always of rare types. In cases in which a deceased person was identified the details of whose life unmistakably matched the child’s statements, a close correspondence was nearly always found between the birthmarks and/or birth defects on the child and the wounds on the deceased person. In 43 of 49 cases in which a medical document (usually a postmortem report) was obtained, it confirmed the correspondence between wounds and birthmarks (or birth defects).”
The memories the children recalled were far too specific to be chalked up to chance. In an article where 3 cases were looked at in great detail by Dr. Stevenson, he reported that each of the 3 children made roughly 30-40 claims regarding memories that had of their past lives, 82-92% of which were both verifiable and correct. The particularities and specific details that were given by the children ranged from anything from the names, personalities, and occupations of their former parents and siblings to the precise layouts of the houses they lived in. It was not uncommon for Stevenson to encounter a child who could go into a town he had never been in before and give him the details of the village, former personal belongings, the neighbourhood in which he lived in a past life, and the people who he use to associate with.
As he concludes: “It was possible in each case to find a family that had lost a member whose life corresponded to the subject’s statements. The statements of the subject, taken as a group, were sufficiently specific so that they could not have corresponded to the life of any other person. We believe we have excluded normal transmission of the correct information to the subjects and that they obtained the correct information they showed about the concerned deceased person by some paranormal process.”
Something which interested Dr. Stevenson was the phobias that were developed from past-life traumas. As Dr. Jim Tucker writes:
“Another area that interested Ian was the behavior of these children. He wrote a paper about phobias that many of the children showed, usually related to the mode of death from the life they claimed to remember (Stevenson, 1990a). He reported that 36% of the children in a series of 387 cases showed such fears. They occurred when the children were very young, sometimes before they had made their claims about the previous life. For example, he described a girl in Sri Lanka who as a baby resisted baths so much that three adults had to hold her down to give her one. By the age of six months, she also showed a marked phobia of buses and then later described the life of a girl in another village who had been walking along a narrow road between flooded paddy fields when she stepped back to avoid a bus going by, fell into the flood water, and drowned.” The original journal article these findings were published can be found here.
What seems to be more than mere chance is that children were able to accurately identify former acquaintances and relationships they had with people in their prior lives. Most impressively was a Lebanese girl who was able to remember and identify 25 different people from her past life and the interpersonal relationships she had with them. His best findings were put together in a book called Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. For further reading, this book would really be your best bet. The American Journal of Psychiatry reviewed these cases and said there were ‘‘cases recorded in such full detail as to persuade the open mind that reincarnation is a tenable hypothesis to explain them’’. He had several other books and papers published and widely accepted in the mainstream community.
As a review in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated ‘‘In regard to reincarnation he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases from India, cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds.’’ The reviewer added: ‘‘He has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored’’. His one paper called ‘‘The Explanatory Value of the Idea of Reincarnation’’ had thousands of requests for reprints by scientists all over the world. His findings were also published in peer reviewed journals the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.
During a presentation at Penn State University in 2005, Dr. Jim B. Tucker, a child psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, described how a mother was leaning over the changing table to change her son’s diaper. Her young toddler unexpectedly said, “When I was your age, I used to change your diapers.” Sam Taylor, of Vermont, was born 18 months following his grandfather’s death. When he made this comment, he was only a few years old. When he was four and a half years old, however, Taylor was able to pick out his grandfather from a class picture of about 20 people and identify his grandfather’s first car from a photograph.
Here is video of a young boys reincarnation story covered by ABC news to provide you a glimpse into the nature of these cases. It’s important to note that this case is American, so the parents are not influencing or encouraging the boy to believe in reincarnation in the name of culture or religion:
This is just a small fraction of the amount of evidence that exists for reincarnation. Upon coming to a conclusion about all his findings and his publications, we have to ask ourselves “What is the best explanation that can accommodate all of this evidence?” Why would there be so many cases of children who claim to have been other people, who know the specific names and interpersonal relationships of the person they recall being, who have similar behaviour and personalities as the people they claimed to be, who have birthmarks and abnormalities where they claimed to have suffered wounds in their past lives, and who have specific phobias linked back to alleged past life traumas if reincarnation did not exist? What are the odds of all of this evidence existing without the soul existing? The accounts are far too precise to be chalked up as chance, and all other explanations are impoverished in trying to explain such a wide array of data.
Reincarnation can no longer be looked at as some woo-woo, pseudoscientific, religiously dogmatic New Age fantasy, and neither can the soul. We can infer the reality of the soul because it is the best explanation for all of the given data. This is a hypothesis which has gotten serious attention in the mainstream academic community, and is still ripe with investigation to this day. When we take all the evidence together and look at it without religious or scientific bias getting in the way, it seems as though we are not only justified in believing in reincarnation, but it also may be the best of all explanations for the strongest cases.
“It is not surprising to be born more than once; everything in nature is resurrection” —Voltaire
More evidence for the existence of the soul can be found in the links below:
Harvard trained brain neurosurgeon has the most legitimate NDE ever recorded
Dr. Robert Lanza and Dr. Stuart Hameroff offer scientific models/explanations for the existence of the soul.
Sources:
Sources to original articles can be found in the highlighted words in the article.
Laidlaw, R. W. (1967). Review of Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. American Journal of Psychiatry, 124, 128.
King, L. S. (1975). Reincarnation. JAMA, 234, 978
http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/case_types-page#CORT
http://www.examiner.com/article/reincarnation-scientific-evidence
- See more at: http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/does-the-soul-exist-this-ends-the-debate/#sthash.AXKDQ6zs.dpuf
Before we explore the evidence, it’s helpful to remember that we do not need hard PROOF in order to be justified in believing in something. If the weatherman says there is a 70% chance of showers, I don’t need proof that it’s going to rain before I am justified in bringing an umbrella with me. I don’t have to be certain that a meteor isn’t going to fall on my head before I go outside. I don’t need hard scientific proof of extra-terrestrial life in order to be justified in believing that life exists on other planets, because there are so many good reasons that, when taken together cumulatively, provide a plausible account for belief in life on other planets. This is known as “abductive reasoning” and is the kind of reasoning we use most in our every day lives.
Reincarnation is not something you can objectively measure in the same way you can measure a chemical reaction, so it may even be in principle non-provable using the scientific method. So the question is, “Are there enough solid pieces of evidence that, when taken together, justify a belief in reincarnation?” I think the answer is a resounding yes. Here we go:
Dr. Ian Stevenson, Ph.D., former Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, spent 40 years researching reincarnation stories within children. This former chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology investigated over 3000 independent stories of children who claimed to have memories and know people from their alleged past lives. According to Stevenson, the number of cases that are worth considering is so high that it exceeds the ability of him and his team to investigate them all.
Facial recognition software confirmed that there was in fact a facial resemblance to their alleged prior incarnation. Some had birth marks on places where they allegedly suffered fatal wounds from in their past life. They were often dramatic and sometimes bizarre lesions, such as malformed digits or missing limbs, misshapen heads, and odd markings. As Dr. Stevenson writes in his paper “Birthmarks and Birth Defects Corresponding to Wounds on Deceased Persons” in the peer-reviewed Journal of Scientific Exploration:
“About 35% of children who claim to remember previous lives have birthmarks and/or birth defects that they (or adult informants) attribute to wounds on a person whose life the child remembers. The cases of 210 such children have been investigated. The birthmarks were usually areas of hairless, puckered skin; some were areas of little or no pigmentation (hypopigmented macules); others were areas of increased pigmentation (hyperpigmented nevi).
The birth defects were nearly always of rare types. In cases in which a deceased person was identified the details of whose life unmistakably matched the child’s statements, a close correspondence was nearly always found between the birthmarks and/or birth defects on the child and the wounds on the deceased person. In 43 of 49 cases in which a medical document (usually a postmortem report) was obtained, it confirmed the correspondence between wounds and birthmarks (or birth defects).”
The memories the children recalled were far too specific to be chalked up to chance. In an article where 3 cases were looked at in great detail by Dr. Stevenson, he reported that each of the 3 children made roughly 30-40 claims regarding memories that had of their past lives, 82-92% of which were both verifiable and correct. The particularities and specific details that were given by the children ranged from anything from the names, personalities, and occupations of their former parents and siblings to the precise layouts of the houses they lived in. It was not uncommon for Stevenson to encounter a child who could go into a town he had never been in before and give him the details of the village, former personal belongings, the neighbourhood in which he lived in a past life, and the people who he use to associate with.
As he concludes: “It was possible in each case to find a family that had lost a member whose life corresponded to the subject’s statements. The statements of the subject, taken as a group, were sufficiently specific so that they could not have corresponded to the life of any other person. We believe we have excluded normal transmission of the correct information to the subjects and that they obtained the correct information they showed about the concerned deceased person by some paranormal process.”
Something which interested Dr. Stevenson was the phobias that were developed from past-life traumas. As Dr. Jim Tucker writes:
“Another area that interested Ian was the behavior of these children. He wrote a paper about phobias that many of the children showed, usually related to the mode of death from the life they claimed to remember (Stevenson, 1990a). He reported that 36% of the children in a series of 387 cases showed such fears. They occurred when the children were very young, sometimes before they had made their claims about the previous life. For example, he described a girl in Sri Lanka who as a baby resisted baths so much that three adults had to hold her down to give her one. By the age of six months, she also showed a marked phobia of buses and then later described the life of a girl in another village who had been walking along a narrow road between flooded paddy fields when she stepped back to avoid a bus going by, fell into the flood water, and drowned.” The original journal article these findings were published can be found here.
What seems to be more than mere chance is that children were able to accurately identify former acquaintances and relationships they had with people in their prior lives. Most impressively was a Lebanese girl who was able to remember and identify 25 different people from her past life and the interpersonal relationships she had with them. His best findings were put together in a book called Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. For further reading, this book would really be your best bet. The American Journal of Psychiatry reviewed these cases and said there were ‘‘cases recorded in such full detail as to persuade the open mind that reincarnation is a tenable hypothesis to explain them’’. He had several other books and papers published and widely accepted in the mainstream community.
As a review in the Journal of the American Medical Association stated ‘‘In regard to reincarnation he has painstakingly and unemotionally collected a detailed series of cases from India, cases in which the evidence is difficult to explain on any other grounds.’’ The reviewer added: ‘‘He has placed on record a large amount of data that cannot be ignored’’. His one paper called ‘‘The Explanatory Value of the Idea of Reincarnation’’ had thousands of requests for reprints by scientists all over the world. His findings were also published in peer reviewed journals the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.
During a presentation at Penn State University in 2005, Dr. Jim B. Tucker, a child psychiatrist at the University of Virginia, described how a mother was leaning over the changing table to change her son’s diaper. Her young toddler unexpectedly said, “When I was your age, I used to change your diapers.” Sam Taylor, of Vermont, was born 18 months following his grandfather’s death. When he made this comment, he was only a few years old. When he was four and a half years old, however, Taylor was able to pick out his grandfather from a class picture of about 20 people and identify his grandfather’s first car from a photograph.
Here is video of a young boys reincarnation story covered by ABC news to provide you a glimpse into the nature of these cases. It’s important to note that this case is American, so the parents are not influencing or encouraging the boy to believe in reincarnation in the name of culture or religion:
This is just a small fraction of the amount of evidence that exists for reincarnation. Upon coming to a conclusion about all his findings and his publications, we have to ask ourselves “What is the best explanation that can accommodate all of this evidence?” Why would there be so many cases of children who claim to have been other people, who know the specific names and interpersonal relationships of the person they recall being, who have similar behaviour and personalities as the people they claimed to be, who have birthmarks and abnormalities where they claimed to have suffered wounds in their past lives, and who have specific phobias linked back to alleged past life traumas if reincarnation did not exist? What are the odds of all of this evidence existing without the soul existing? The accounts are far too precise to be chalked up as chance, and all other explanations are impoverished in trying to explain such a wide array of data.
Reincarnation can no longer be looked at as some woo-woo, pseudoscientific, religiously dogmatic New Age fantasy, and neither can the soul. We can infer the reality of the soul because it is the best explanation for all of the given data. This is a hypothesis which has gotten serious attention in the mainstream academic community, and is still ripe with investigation to this day. When we take all the evidence together and look at it without religious or scientific bias getting in the way, it seems as though we are not only justified in believing in reincarnation, but it also may be the best of all explanations for the strongest cases.
“It is not surprising to be born more than once; everything in nature is resurrection” —Voltaire
More evidence for the existence of the soul can be found in the links below:
Harvard trained brain neurosurgeon has the most legitimate NDE ever recorded
Dr. Robert Lanza and Dr. Stuart Hameroff offer scientific models/explanations for the existence of the soul.
Sources:
Sources to original articles can be found in the highlighted words in the article.
Laidlaw, R. W. (1967). Review of Twenty Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation. American Journal of Psychiatry, 124, 128.
King, L. S. (1975). Reincarnation. JAMA, 234, 978
http://www.medicine.virginia.edu/clinical/departments/psychiatry/sections/cspp/dops/case_types-page#CORT
http://www.examiner.com/article/reincarnation-scientific-evidence
- See more at: http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/does-the-soul-exist-this-ends-the-debate/#sthash.AXKDQ6zs.dpuf
Friday, August 29, 2014
POETRY: COULD THIS BE LOVE
Could this be Love?
My heart is open
flying so free
and a new feeling
is arousing in me
I can smile once more
there is happiness in my eyes
I can express what I feel
my heart no longer disguised
No more sadness
no more pain
The sun has come out
now no more rain
What is this feeling
could it be true?
That I have fallen
so deeply in love with you?
Is it real?
Could it be?
That you may possibly
also love me?
Do you feel the same when
I know for sure my feelings are true?
Could you ever possibly
love me like I love you??
2
I lie beside you in the warmth of the night;
I can feel you breathe,
I can hear you sigh so softly.
Tell me now this feeling won?t change-
It?s a lasting love.
I need to know I can depend on you.
Make me believe you,
Promise you will stay by my side
Thru the good times and bad.
Bring me your kisses for the rest of my life,
Feel my days and light my nights.
I will always be there-
Tell me you will be there, too.
I have all I want when it comes to loving you.
You are my only reason, you are my only truth.
I need you like water, like breath, like rain.
I need you like mercy from heaven's gates.
Rescue me from this world full of pain.
When the hope moves me to courage again,
You are the love that rescues me,
when I need someone on whom I can depend.
I can?t go back now, because you brought me too far.
I need you like the sky needs stars.
When I was lost, I could not see.
Now I am found and my heart is free.
I was alone dreaming of you;
I could not imagine this coming true.
So much joy in everything you touch-
I want to thank you so much.
Look at the sky, tell me what you see-
Close your eyes and explain it to me.
3
I long to hold you in my arms
And feel your warmth that gently calms
The words we'll whisper to each other
Will confirm we love no other
I'll hold your body close to mine
My lips embrace your lips divine
I'll touch your face and stroke your hair
And show you that I'll always care
No other special love we'll find
Your eyes meet mine our souls combine
The love tears run like rivers to sea
Since we now know together we're free
The tears of despair will no longer flow
For the years of sadness each of us know
Now that we've seen the love we can gain
We'll be ever so close and together remain
We have the love and the care that is real
And now we're together such joy we shall feel
Loving and sharing each day and each night
Has never before been completely so right
4
A kiss, a touch.
Would do so much.
But from you,
the prettiest of angels.
Would only give my life a meaning.
For this is what I feel,
and only you, my silent witness, will ever know.
Enter the clouds of confusion, the test of our love.
In constant pursuit of your love,
I ride this storm of gyrating cause.
This cannot end, you are my reason,
the one reason I use my free expression.
I ask "Why must this test proceed?".
Even through all the confusion of this powerful storm,
your light shines for my devotion. Now snow capped and frozen,
I wait, I wait for the heat of "Us" to render in time.
The longest year still to come,
come before I can melt to myself,
the person I am.
A person of one, a whole of two.
I can't think straight until I know you,
and when this happens, I then can know myself.
But until this happens, I cannot hate you,
I cannot make love to you,
all I can do is shiver and know that I still am deeply
in love not just the thought, or fantasy,
but with "You".
5
Do not end my life with you
By ending your sateful kiss with me
Which mingles our souls together
As vapors upon the winds whisked by.
But rather keep your lips as part of mine
To touch an even deeper place
That waits and has so long awaited
Someone such as you.
Do not end my life with you
By ending your sweet caress of me
Which holds our heartbeats intertwined
In moments above mortality.
But rather keep your touch as part of mine
To feel much deeper passions
That live and have so long existed
For someone such as you.
Do not end my life with you
By ending your eyebeam's hold on me
Which reveals within us ecstasy and purity's delight.
But rather keep your eyes as part of mine
To see so great my love
That is and has so ever been
For someone such as you.
My heart is open
flying so free
and a new feeling
is arousing in me
I can smile once more
there is happiness in my eyes
I can express what I feel
my heart no longer disguised
No more sadness
no more pain
The sun has come out
now no more rain
What is this feeling
could it be true?
That I have fallen
so deeply in love with you?
Is it real?
Could it be?
That you may possibly
also love me?
Do you feel the same when
I know for sure my feelings are true?
Could you ever possibly
love me like I love you??
2
I lie beside you in the warmth of the night;
I can feel you breathe,
I can hear you sigh so softly.
Tell me now this feeling won?t change-
It?s a lasting love.
I need to know I can depend on you.
Make me believe you,
Promise you will stay by my side
Thru the good times and bad.
Bring me your kisses for the rest of my life,
Feel my days and light my nights.
I will always be there-
Tell me you will be there, too.
I have all I want when it comes to loving you.
You are my only reason, you are my only truth.
I need you like water, like breath, like rain.
I need you like mercy from heaven's gates.
Rescue me from this world full of pain.
When the hope moves me to courage again,
You are the love that rescues me,
when I need someone on whom I can depend.
I can?t go back now, because you brought me too far.
I need you like the sky needs stars.
When I was lost, I could not see.
Now I am found and my heart is free.
I was alone dreaming of you;
I could not imagine this coming true.
So much joy in everything you touch-
I want to thank you so much.
Look at the sky, tell me what you see-
Close your eyes and explain it to me.
3
I long to hold you in my arms
And feel your warmth that gently calms
The words we'll whisper to each other
Will confirm we love no other
I'll hold your body close to mine
My lips embrace your lips divine
I'll touch your face and stroke your hair
And show you that I'll always care
No other special love we'll find
Your eyes meet mine our souls combine
The love tears run like rivers to sea
Since we now know together we're free
The tears of despair will no longer flow
For the years of sadness each of us know
Now that we've seen the love we can gain
We'll be ever so close and together remain
We have the love and the care that is real
And now we're together such joy we shall feel
Loving and sharing each day and each night
Has never before been completely so right
4
A kiss, a touch.
Would do so much.
But from you,
the prettiest of angels.
Would only give my life a meaning.
For this is what I feel,
and only you, my silent witness, will ever know.
Enter the clouds of confusion, the test of our love.
In constant pursuit of your love,
I ride this storm of gyrating cause.
This cannot end, you are my reason,
the one reason I use my free expression.
I ask "Why must this test proceed?".
Even through all the confusion of this powerful storm,
your light shines for my devotion. Now snow capped and frozen,
I wait, I wait for the heat of "Us" to render in time.
The longest year still to come,
come before I can melt to myself,
the person I am.
A person of one, a whole of two.
I can't think straight until I know you,
and when this happens, I then can know myself.
But until this happens, I cannot hate you,
I cannot make love to you,
all I can do is shiver and know that I still am deeply
in love not just the thought, or fantasy,
but with "You".
5
Do not end my life with you
By ending your sateful kiss with me
Which mingles our souls together
As vapors upon the winds whisked by.
But rather keep your lips as part of mine
To touch an even deeper place
That waits and has so long awaited
Someone such as you.
Do not end my life with you
By ending your sweet caress of me
Which holds our heartbeats intertwined
In moments above mortality.
But rather keep your touch as part of mine
To feel much deeper passions
That live and have so long existed
For someone such as you.
Do not end my life with you
By ending your eyebeam's hold on me
Which reveals within us ecstasy and purity's delight.
But rather keep your eyes as part of mine
To see so great my love
That is and has so ever been
For someone such as you.
Monday, August 25, 2014
POETRY: I MUST HAVE MORE
On a day such as this when sunshine begins to rise upon us
And the night-time of enchanting stars leave, for a time faded,
I fumble in the hue of morning, outstretch my hand to touch you
I am taken in by this moment in time with thoughts of just you and me
And the love that willingly seeded itself inside both of us
Bound together, it is a love full of song for one another to nurture
We encircle each other's world through each day's passing
There it can still be found sharing the same existence
within our hearts
Within a halo of unity it gathers all the precious things
only life can bring
As we greet each day, together hand in hand,
bringing with it a soft freshness
Awakening us to find reasons anew
to fall in love all over again and again
As the summer's warm afternoon sun shifts aimlessly among the clouds
The air vividly wisps by our shoulders
with its gentle voice of touch
Singing to you and me, a love song of joy
emitting all the scents of life
Often it is love that helps us
recognize the abundance of compassion that we possess
Bringing forth forgotten feelings
that in time may become lost in a hidden cascade
Reacquainting wisdom to the mind
to open our hearts for the other to find shelter
As the day slowly unfolds all of its passion for life
within one another's eyes
Blossomed, it has become the seed to grow
and become an unconditional love
For it to unfold into our arms
for what is now caring giving loving and needing
The essence of what true love is
in sharing a lifetime with the one who holds your soul
To be awakened with the sun arising
and to gaze at the enchanting stars approaching
To dream and be loved
be loved and to dream with the other one that is your heart
2
Nothing is ever perfect
Except my love for you
Like a rose it blooms with time
But this feeling is like a flower
That will never die
This flower you can't hold in your hand
But will be forever in your heart
3
Beautiful lad, queen of beauty
You crawled into this lonely heart of mine
With the gentleness of invertebrate crawlers
You reached the delicate spot of my soul
When the world is weak and weary
Of the things that were and never will be
With a sense of purpose and clear vision
You make sure all is within my reach
Slow and steady you walked into me
Taking control of all that was within me
Cloud and moon, sun and stars...
All bear witness to the glory you bring
You lift me up to your lovely chest
And hold me tight to your succulent skin
You never for once let me grow cold
You didn't let grass grow under my feet
4
the tenderness of your lips
is all I can feel
in this unknown reality
with my eyes shut
I ignore the outside world
and let my spirit fly
our lips embraced
for what seemed hours
then it all ended
my heart was still racing
but for reasons unknown
I know that this wasn't just a dream
but a connection and intertwining
of our spiritual selves
and I know only one thing...
...I must have more
And the night-time of enchanting stars leave, for a time faded,
I fumble in the hue of morning, outstretch my hand to touch you
I am taken in by this moment in time with thoughts of just you and me
And the love that willingly seeded itself inside both of us
Bound together, it is a love full of song for one another to nurture
We encircle each other's world through each day's passing
There it can still be found sharing the same existence
within our hearts
Within a halo of unity it gathers all the precious things
only life can bring
As we greet each day, together hand in hand,
bringing with it a soft freshness
Awakening us to find reasons anew
to fall in love all over again and again
As the summer's warm afternoon sun shifts aimlessly among the clouds
The air vividly wisps by our shoulders
with its gentle voice of touch
Singing to you and me, a love song of joy
emitting all the scents of life
Often it is love that helps us
recognize the abundance of compassion that we possess
Bringing forth forgotten feelings
that in time may become lost in a hidden cascade
Reacquainting wisdom to the mind
to open our hearts for the other to find shelter
As the day slowly unfolds all of its passion for life
within one another's eyes
Blossomed, it has become the seed to grow
and become an unconditional love
For it to unfold into our arms
for what is now caring giving loving and needing
The essence of what true love is
in sharing a lifetime with the one who holds your soul
To be awakened with the sun arising
and to gaze at the enchanting stars approaching
To dream and be loved
be loved and to dream with the other one that is your heart
2
Nothing is ever perfect
Except my love for you
Like a rose it blooms with time
But this feeling is like a flower
That will never die
This flower you can't hold in your hand
But will be forever in your heart
3
Beautiful lad, queen of beauty
You crawled into this lonely heart of mine
With the gentleness of invertebrate crawlers
You reached the delicate spot of my soul
When the world is weak and weary
Of the things that were and never will be
With a sense of purpose and clear vision
You make sure all is within my reach
Slow and steady you walked into me
Taking control of all that was within me
Cloud and moon, sun and stars...
All bear witness to the glory you bring
You lift me up to your lovely chest
And hold me tight to your succulent skin
You never for once let me grow cold
You didn't let grass grow under my feet
4
the tenderness of your lips
is all I can feel
in this unknown reality
with my eyes shut
I ignore the outside world
and let my spirit fly
our lips embraced
for what seemed hours
then it all ended
my heart was still racing
but for reasons unknown
I know that this wasn't just a dream
but a connection and intertwining
of our spiritual selves
and I know only one thing...
...I must have more
ARTICLE: HUFFINGTON POST Artificial Intelligence May Doom The Human Race Within A Century, Oxford Professor Says BY Kathleen Miles
An Oxford philosophy professor who has studied existential threats ranging from nuclear war to superbugs says the biggest danger of all may be superintelligence.
Superintelligence is any intellect that outperforms human intellect in every field, andNick Bostrom thinks its most likely form will be a machine -- artificial intelligence.
There are two ways artificial intelligence could go, Bostrom argues. It could greatly improve our lives and solve the world's problems, such as disease, hunger and even pain. Or, it could take over and possibly kill all or many humans. As it stands, the catastrophic scenario is more likely, according to Bostrom, who has a background in physics, computational neuroscience and mathematical logic.
"Superintelligence could become extremely powerful and be able to shape the future according to its preferences," Bostrom told me. "If humanity was sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figure out how to do so safely."
Bostrom, the founding director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, lays out his concerns in his new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. His book makes a harrowing comparison between the fate of horses and humans:
Horses were initially complemented by carriages and ploughs, which greatly increased the horse's productivity. Later, horses were substituted for by automobiles and tractors. When horses became obsolete as a source of labor, many were sold off to meatpackers to be processed into dog food, bone meal, leather, and glue. In the United States, there were about 26 million horses in 1915. By the early 1950s, 2 million remained.
The same dark outcome, Bostrom said, could happen to humans once AI makes our labor and intelligence obsolete.
It sounds like a science fiction flick, but recent moves in the tech world may suggest otherwise. Earlier this year, Google acquired artificial intelligence company DeepMind and created an AI safety and ethics review board to ensure the technology is developed safely. Facebook created an artificial intelligence lab this year and is working on creating an artificial brain. Technology called "deep learning," a form of artificial intelligence meant to closely mimic the human brain, has quickly spreadfrom Google to Microsoft, Baidu and Twitter.
And while Google's Ray Kurzweil has long discussed a technological "singularity" in which AI replaces humans, a giant in the tech world recently joined Kurzweil in vocalizing concern. Elon Musk, co-founder of SpaceX (space transport) and Tesla (electric cars), tweeted earlier this month:
Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable
-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014
I spoke with Bostrom about why he's worried and how we should prepare.
You write that superintelligent AI could become dangerous to humans because it will seek to improve itself and acquire resources. Explain.
Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.
Could we program the AI to create no more than 100 paper clips a day for, say, a total of 10 days?
Sure, but now the AI is trying to maximize the probability that it will make exactly 100 paper clips in 10 days. Again, you would want to eliminate humans because they could shut you off. What happens when it's done making the total 1,000 paper clips? It could count them again or develop a more accurate counting apparatus -- perhaps one that is the size of the planet or larger.
You can imagine an unlimited sequence of actions perhaps with diminishing returns but nonetheless some positive values to the AI that would even increase by a tiny fraction the probability of reaching the goal. The analogy extends to any AI --- not just one programed to make paper clips. The point is its actions would pay no heed to human welfare.
Could we make its primary goal be improving the human condition, advancing human values -- making humans happy?
Well, we'd have to define then what we mean by being happy. If we mean feeling pleasure then perhaps the superintelligent AI would stick electrodes onto every human brain and stimulate our pleasure centers. Or you could take out the body altogether and have our brains bathing in a drug the AI could design. It turns out to be quite difficult to specify a goal of what we want in English -- let alone in computer code.
Similarly, we can't be confident in our current set of human values. One can imagine what would have happened if some earlier human age had had the opportunity to lay down the law for all time -- to encode their understanding of human values once and for all. We can now look back and see they had huge moral blind spots.
In the book, you say there could be one superintelligent AI -- or multiple. Explain.
In one scenario, you have one superintelligent AI and, without any competition, it has the ability to shape the future according to its preferences. Another scenario is multipolar, where the transition to superintelligence is slower, and there are many different systems at roughly comparable level of development. In that scenario, you have economic and evolutionary dynamics coming into play.
In a multipolar scenario, there's the danger of a very rapid population explosion. You could copy a digital mind in a minute, rather than with humans, where it takes a couple of decades to make another adult. So the digital minds could increase so quickly that their incomes drop to subsistence level -- which would probably be lower than for a biological mind. Then humans would no longer be able to support themselves by working, and, most likely, would die out. Alternatively, if social structures somehow continue to hold, some humans could gain immense capital returns from superintelligence that they could use to buy more computer hardware to run more digital minds.
Are you saying it's impossible to control superintelligence because we ourselves are merely intelligent?
It's not impossible -- it's extremely difficult. I worry that it will not be solved by the time someone builds an AI. We're not very good at uninventing things. Once unsafe superintellignce is developed, we can't put it back in the bottle. So we need to accelerate research of this control problem.
Developing an avenue towards human cognitive enhancement would be helpful. Presuming superintelligence doesn't happen until the second half of the century, there could still be time to develop a cohort of cognitively enhanced humans who might have the capacity to try to solve this really difficult technical control problem. Cognitively enhanced humans will also presumably be able to better consider long-term effects. For example, today people are creating more energy-efficient chips to extend the battery life of cell phones -- without thinking about what the long-term effects could be. With more intelligence, we would be able to.
Cognitive enhancement could take place through collective cognitive ability -- the Internet, for example, and institutional innovations that enable humans to function better together. In terms of individual cognitive enhancement, the first thing likely to be successful is genetic selection in the context of in-vitro fertilization. I don't hold out much for cyborgs or implants.
What should we do to prepare for the risk of superintelligence?
If humanity had been sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figured out how to do so safely. And then maybe wait another generation or two just to make sure that we hadn't overlooked some flaw in our reasoning. And then do it -- and reap immense benefit. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to pause.
Attempts to affect the overall rate of development in computer science, neuroscience and chip manufacturing are likely to be futile. There are enormous incentives to make incremental progress in the software and hardware industries. Progress towards superintelligence thus far has very little do with long-term concern about global problems -- and more to do with making big bucks.
Also, we have problems with collective human wisdom and rationality. At the moment, we are very poor at addressing big global challenges. Even with something as straightforward as global warming -- where you have a physical principle and rising temperature you can measure -- we are not doing a great job. In general, working towards making the world more peaceful and collaborative would be helpful for a wide range of existential catastrophes.
There are maybe six people working full time on this AI control problem. We need to add more brilliant brains to this technical work. I'm hoping my book will do something to encourage that. How to control superintelligent AI is really the most important task of our time -- yet, it is almost completely ignored.
Superintelligence is any intellect that outperforms human intellect in every field, andNick Bostrom thinks its most likely form will be a machine -- artificial intelligence.
There are two ways artificial intelligence could go, Bostrom argues. It could greatly improve our lives and solve the world's problems, such as disease, hunger and even pain. Or, it could take over and possibly kill all or many humans. As it stands, the catastrophic scenario is more likely, according to Bostrom, who has a background in physics, computational neuroscience and mathematical logic.
"Superintelligence could become extremely powerful and be able to shape the future according to its preferences," Bostrom told me. "If humanity was sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figure out how to do so safely."
Bostrom, the founding director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute, lays out his concerns in his new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. His book makes a harrowing comparison between the fate of horses and humans:
Horses were initially complemented by carriages and ploughs, which greatly increased the horse's productivity. Later, horses were substituted for by automobiles and tractors. When horses became obsolete as a source of labor, many were sold off to meatpackers to be processed into dog food, bone meal, leather, and glue. In the United States, there were about 26 million horses in 1915. By the early 1950s, 2 million remained.
The same dark outcome, Bostrom said, could happen to humans once AI makes our labor and intelligence obsolete.
It sounds like a science fiction flick, but recent moves in the tech world may suggest otherwise. Earlier this year, Google acquired artificial intelligence company DeepMind and created an AI safety and ethics review board to ensure the technology is developed safely. Facebook created an artificial intelligence lab this year and is working on creating an artificial brain. Technology called "deep learning," a form of artificial intelligence meant to closely mimic the human brain, has quickly spreadfrom Google to Microsoft, Baidu and Twitter.
And while Google's Ray Kurzweil has long discussed a technological "singularity" in which AI replaces humans, a giant in the tech world recently joined Kurzweil in vocalizing concern. Elon Musk, co-founder of SpaceX (space transport) and Tesla (electric cars), tweeted earlier this month:
Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable
-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 3, 2014
I spoke with Bostrom about why he's worried and how we should prepare.
You write that superintelligent AI could become dangerous to humans because it will seek to improve itself and acquire resources. Explain.
Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans.
Could we program the AI to create no more than 100 paper clips a day for, say, a total of 10 days?
Sure, but now the AI is trying to maximize the probability that it will make exactly 100 paper clips in 10 days. Again, you would want to eliminate humans because they could shut you off. What happens when it's done making the total 1,000 paper clips? It could count them again or develop a more accurate counting apparatus -- perhaps one that is the size of the planet or larger.
You can imagine an unlimited sequence of actions perhaps with diminishing returns but nonetheless some positive values to the AI that would even increase by a tiny fraction the probability of reaching the goal. The analogy extends to any AI --- not just one programed to make paper clips. The point is its actions would pay no heed to human welfare.
Could we make its primary goal be improving the human condition, advancing human values -- making humans happy?
Well, we'd have to define then what we mean by being happy. If we mean feeling pleasure then perhaps the superintelligent AI would stick electrodes onto every human brain and stimulate our pleasure centers. Or you could take out the body altogether and have our brains bathing in a drug the AI could design. It turns out to be quite difficult to specify a goal of what we want in English -- let alone in computer code.
Similarly, we can't be confident in our current set of human values. One can imagine what would have happened if some earlier human age had had the opportunity to lay down the law for all time -- to encode their understanding of human values once and for all. We can now look back and see they had huge moral blind spots.
In the book, you say there could be one superintelligent AI -- or multiple. Explain.
In one scenario, you have one superintelligent AI and, without any competition, it has the ability to shape the future according to its preferences. Another scenario is multipolar, where the transition to superintelligence is slower, and there are many different systems at roughly comparable level of development. In that scenario, you have economic and evolutionary dynamics coming into play.
In a multipolar scenario, there's the danger of a very rapid population explosion. You could copy a digital mind in a minute, rather than with humans, where it takes a couple of decades to make another adult. So the digital minds could increase so quickly that their incomes drop to subsistence level -- which would probably be lower than for a biological mind. Then humans would no longer be able to support themselves by working, and, most likely, would die out. Alternatively, if social structures somehow continue to hold, some humans could gain immense capital returns from superintelligence that they could use to buy more computer hardware to run more digital minds.
Are you saying it's impossible to control superintelligence because we ourselves are merely intelligent?
It's not impossible -- it's extremely difficult. I worry that it will not be solved by the time someone builds an AI. We're not very good at uninventing things. Once unsafe superintellignce is developed, we can't put it back in the bottle. So we need to accelerate research of this control problem.
Developing an avenue towards human cognitive enhancement would be helpful. Presuming superintelligence doesn't happen until the second half of the century, there could still be time to develop a cohort of cognitively enhanced humans who might have the capacity to try to solve this really difficult technical control problem. Cognitively enhanced humans will also presumably be able to better consider long-term effects. For example, today people are creating more energy-efficient chips to extend the battery life of cell phones -- without thinking about what the long-term effects could be. With more intelligence, we would be able to.
Cognitive enhancement could take place through collective cognitive ability -- the Internet, for example, and institutional innovations that enable humans to function better together. In terms of individual cognitive enhancement, the first thing likely to be successful is genetic selection in the context of in-vitro fertilization. I don't hold out much for cyborgs or implants.
What should we do to prepare for the risk of superintelligence?
If humanity had been sane and had our act together globally, the sensible course of action would be to postpone development of superintelligence until we figured out how to do so safely. And then maybe wait another generation or two just to make sure that we hadn't overlooked some flaw in our reasoning. And then do it -- and reap immense benefit. Unfortunately, we do not have the ability to pause.
Attempts to affect the overall rate of development in computer science, neuroscience and chip manufacturing are likely to be futile. There are enormous incentives to make incremental progress in the software and hardware industries. Progress towards superintelligence thus far has very little do with long-term concern about global problems -- and more to do with making big bucks.
Also, we have problems with collective human wisdom and rationality. At the moment, we are very poor at addressing big global challenges. Even with something as straightforward as global warming -- where you have a physical principle and rising temperature you can measure -- we are not doing a great job. In general, working towards making the world more peaceful and collaborative would be helpful for a wide range of existential catastrophes.
There are maybe six people working full time on this AI control problem. We need to add more brilliant brains to this technical work. I'm hoping my book will do something to encourage that. How to control superintelligent AI is really the most important task of our time -- yet, it is almost completely ignored.
ARTICLE: NYTIMES The Intelligent-Life Lottery by George Johnson
The Intelligent-Life Lottery by George Johnson
Almost 20 years ago, in the pages of an obscure publication called Bioastronomy News, two giants in the world of science argued over whether SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — had a chance of succeeding. Carl Sagan, as eloquent as ever, gave his standard answer. With billions of stars in our galaxy, there must be other civilizations capable of transmitting electromagnetic waves. By scouring the sky with radio telescopes, we just might intercept a signal.
But Sagan’s opponent, the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, thought the chances were close to zero. Against Sagan’s stellar billions, he posed his own astronomical numbers: Of the billions of species that have lived and died since life began, only one — Homo sapiens — had developed a science, a technology, and the curiosity to explore the stars. And that took about 3.5 billion years of evolution. High intelligence, Mayr concluded, must be extremely rare, here or anywhere. Earth’s most abundant life form is unicellular slime.
Since the debate with Sagan, more than 1,700 planets have been discovered beyond the solar system — 700 just this year. Astronomers recently estimated that one of every five sunlike stars in the Milky Way might be orbited by a world capable of supporting some kind of life.
That is about 40 billion potential habitats. But Mayr, who died in 2005 at the age of 100, probably wouldn’t have been impressed. By his reckoning, the odds would still be very low for anything much beyond slime worlds. No evidence has yet emerged to prove him wrong.
Maybe we’re just not looking hard enough. Since SETI began in the early 1960s, it has struggled for the money it takes to monitor even a fraction of the sky. In an online essay for The Conversation last week, Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, lamented how little has been allocated for the quest — just a fraction of NASA’s budget.
“If you don’t ante up,” he wrote, “you will never win the jackpot. And that is a question of will.”
Three years ago, SETI’s Allen Telescope Array in Northern California ran out of money and was closed for a while. Earlier this month, it wasthreatened by wildfire — another reminder of the precariousness of the search.
It has been more than 3.5 billion years since the first simple cells arose, and it took another billion years or so for some of them to evolve and join symbiotically into primitive multicellular organisms. These biochemical hives, through random mutations and the blind explorations of evolution, eventually led to creatures with the ability to remember, to anticipate and — at least in the case of humans — to wonder what it is all about.
Every step was a matter of happenstance, like the arbitrary combination of numbers — 3, 12, 31, 34, 51 and 24 — that qualified a Powerball winner for a $90 million prize this month. Some unknowing soul happened to enter a convenience store in Rifle, Colo., and — maybe with change from buying gasoline or a microwaved burrito — purchase a ticket just as the machine was about to spit out those particular numbers.
According to the Powerball website, the chance of winning the grand prize is about one in 175 million. The emergence of humanlike intelligence, as Mayr saw it, was about as likely as if a Powerball winner kept buying tickets and — round after round — hit a bigger jackpot each time. One unlikelihood is piled on another, yielding a vanishingly rare event.
In one of my favorite books, “Wonderful Life,” Stephen Jay Gould celebrated what he saw as the unlikelihood of our existence. Going further than Mayr, he ventured that if a slithering creature called Pikaia gracilens had not survived the Cambrian extinction, about half a billion years ago, the entire phylum called Chordata, which includes us vertebrates, might never have existed.
Gould took his title from the Frank Capra movie in which George Bailey gets to see what the world might have been like without him — idyllic Bedford Falls is replaced by a bleak, Dickensian Pottersville.
For Gould, the fact that any of our ancestral species might easily have been nipped in the bud should fill us “with a new kind of amazement” and “a frisson for the improbability of the event” — a fellow agnostic’s version of an epiphany.
“We came this close (put your thumb about a millimeter away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel,” he wrote. “Replay the tape a million times,” he proposed, “and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.”
Other biologists have disputed Gould’s conclusion. In the course of evolution, eyes and multicellularity arose independently a number of times. So why not vertebrae, spinal cords and brains? The more bags of tricks an organism has at its disposal, the greater its survival power may be. A biological arms race ensues, with complexity ratcheted ever higher.
But those occasions are rare. Most organisms, as Daniel Dennett put it in“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” seem to have “hit upon a relatively simple solution to life’s problems at the outset and, having nailed it a billion years ago, have had nothing much to do in the way of design work ever since.” Our appreciation of complexity, he wrote, “may well be just an aesthetic preference.”
In “Five Billion Years of Solitude,” by Lee Billings, published last year, the author visited Frank Drake, one of the SETI pioneers.
“Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room,” Dr. Drake told him. “Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.”
He knew the odds of tuning in — at just the right frequency at the right place and time — were slim. But that just meant we needed to expand the search.
“We’ve been playing the lottery only using a few tickets,” he said.
Almost 20 years ago, in the pages of an obscure publication called Bioastronomy News, two giants in the world of science argued over whether SETI — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — had a chance of succeeding. Carl Sagan, as eloquent as ever, gave his standard answer. With billions of stars in our galaxy, there must be other civilizations capable of transmitting electromagnetic waves. By scouring the sky with radio telescopes, we just might intercept a signal.
But Sagan’s opponent, the great evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr, thought the chances were close to zero. Against Sagan’s stellar billions, he posed his own astronomical numbers: Of the billions of species that have lived and died since life began, only one — Homo sapiens — had developed a science, a technology, and the curiosity to explore the stars. And that took about 3.5 billion years of evolution. High intelligence, Mayr concluded, must be extremely rare, here or anywhere. Earth’s most abundant life form is unicellular slime.
Since the debate with Sagan, more than 1,700 planets have been discovered beyond the solar system — 700 just this year. Astronomers recently estimated that one of every five sunlike stars in the Milky Way might be orbited by a world capable of supporting some kind of life.
That is about 40 billion potential habitats. But Mayr, who died in 2005 at the age of 100, probably wouldn’t have been impressed. By his reckoning, the odds would still be very low for anything much beyond slime worlds. No evidence has yet emerged to prove him wrong.
Maybe we’re just not looking hard enough. Since SETI began in the early 1960s, it has struggled for the money it takes to monitor even a fraction of the sky. In an online essay for The Conversation last week, Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute, lamented how little has been allocated for the quest — just a fraction of NASA’s budget.
“If you don’t ante up,” he wrote, “you will never win the jackpot. And that is a question of will.”
Three years ago, SETI’s Allen Telescope Array in Northern California ran out of money and was closed for a while. Earlier this month, it wasthreatened by wildfire — another reminder of the precariousness of the search.
It has been more than 3.5 billion years since the first simple cells arose, and it took another billion years or so for some of them to evolve and join symbiotically into primitive multicellular organisms. These biochemical hives, through random mutations and the blind explorations of evolution, eventually led to creatures with the ability to remember, to anticipate and — at least in the case of humans — to wonder what it is all about.
Every step was a matter of happenstance, like the arbitrary combination of numbers — 3, 12, 31, 34, 51 and 24 — that qualified a Powerball winner for a $90 million prize this month. Some unknowing soul happened to enter a convenience store in Rifle, Colo., and — maybe with change from buying gasoline or a microwaved burrito — purchase a ticket just as the machine was about to spit out those particular numbers.
According to the Powerball website, the chance of winning the grand prize is about one in 175 million. The emergence of humanlike intelligence, as Mayr saw it, was about as likely as if a Powerball winner kept buying tickets and — round after round — hit a bigger jackpot each time. One unlikelihood is piled on another, yielding a vanishingly rare event.
In one of my favorite books, “Wonderful Life,” Stephen Jay Gould celebrated what he saw as the unlikelihood of our existence. Going further than Mayr, he ventured that if a slithering creature called Pikaia gracilens had not survived the Cambrian extinction, about half a billion years ago, the entire phylum called Chordata, which includes us vertebrates, might never have existed.
Gould took his title from the Frank Capra movie in which George Bailey gets to see what the world might have been like without him — idyllic Bedford Falls is replaced by a bleak, Dickensian Pottersville.
For Gould, the fact that any of our ancestral species might easily have been nipped in the bud should fill us “with a new kind of amazement” and “a frisson for the improbability of the event” — a fellow agnostic’s version of an epiphany.
“We came this close (put your thumb about a millimeter away from your index finger), thousands and thousands of times, to erasure by the veering of history down another sensible channel,” he wrote. “Replay the tape a million times,” he proposed, “and I doubt that anything like Homo sapiens would ever evolve again. It is, indeed, a wonderful life.”
Other biologists have disputed Gould’s conclusion. In the course of evolution, eyes and multicellularity arose independently a number of times. So why not vertebrae, spinal cords and brains? The more bags of tricks an organism has at its disposal, the greater its survival power may be. A biological arms race ensues, with complexity ratcheted ever higher.
But those occasions are rare. Most organisms, as Daniel Dennett put it in“Darwin’s Dangerous Idea,” seem to have “hit upon a relatively simple solution to life’s problems at the outset and, having nailed it a billion years ago, have had nothing much to do in the way of design work ever since.” Our appreciation of complexity, he wrote, “may well be just an aesthetic preference.”
In “Five Billion Years of Solitude,” by Lee Billings, published last year, the author visited Frank Drake, one of the SETI pioneers.
“Right now, there could well be messages from the stars flying right through this room,” Dr. Drake told him. “Through you and me. And if we had the right receiver set up properly, we could detect them. I still get chills thinking about it.”
He knew the odds of tuning in — at just the right frequency at the right place and time — were slim. But that just meant we needed to expand the search.
“We’ve been playing the lottery only using a few tickets,” he said.
ARTICLE:Why it’s hell to be a doctor in America today By Susannah Cahalan
Why it’s hell to be a doctor in America today
By Susannah Cahalan
Dr. Sandeep Jauhar is mad as hell.
American health care is in upheaval. On one side, overhead and malpractice insurance costs keep increasing, while salaries stagnate. On the other, patients believe that expensive drugs are better, more people are on government-run insurance that pays less, while private insurance fights every claim.
Now doctors spend most of their time trying to game the system, requiring endless paperwork, protracted bureaucratic battles and “treadmill medicine,” seeing as many patients as possible in as little time. This problem will only intensify as millions join the ranks of the insured under the Affordable Care Act.
Modal Trigger
Dr. Sandeep JauharPhoto: Maryanne Russell
In this self-perpetuating cycle, doctors spend most of their time as businessmen — and care suffers.
It’s no wonder then that doctors no longer enjoy their jobs, explains Jauhar, director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and author of “Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), out now.
“This book is meant to be like the scene in ‘Network’ when [Howard Beale] opens the window and yells, ‘We’re not going to take it anymore,’ ” Jauhar says in an interview with The Post.
“I see an emotional emptiness created by the relentless consideration of money. Most of us went into medicine for intellectual stimulation or the desire to develop relationships with patients, not to maximize income,” he writes.
In a 2008 study of 12,000 physicians, only 6% described their morale as positive. Even insurance claim clerks polled in a different study were happier.
Modal Trigger
Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician
As managed care has grown (by the 2000s, 95% of insured workers were in some kind of managed care plans), so has physicians’ discontent. In 1973, fewer than 15% of physicians reported any doubts about career choices. Today nearly 40% say that they would not choose to enter the medical profession if given the opportunity to do it all over.
If things continue as they are, the US can expect a shortage of 150,000 doctors by 2025, according to the American Medical College. Jauhar says that doctors on the online community SERMO are threatening to leave the country or scrap their private practices.
The serious downside here is obvious: Unhappy doctors make for unhappier patients.
“The physician-patient relationship is the worst it ever was,” he says.
To hammer in this point, Jauhar quotes facts from the Commonwealth Fund: The US ranks 45th in life expectancy (“behind Bosnia and Jordan,” he adds) and compared to other developed countries near last in infant mortality and health-care quality, access and efficiency. We also have fewer physicians and hospital beds than average.
This “mid-life crisis in medicine” is reflected in Jauhar’s own writing.
Readers can follow his skepticism in “Intern,” his first book about his internship year at New York Presybterian, harden into disillusionment in “Doctored,” which chronicles his time at LIJ as he enters his middle age (he’s now 44).
“Doctored” opens with: “When I look at my career in midlife, I realize that in many ways I have become the kind of doctor I never thought I’d be: impatient, occasionally indifferent, at times dismissive or paternalistic.”
This “kind of doctor,” once so idealistic, now takes morally ambiguous speaking gigs with pharmaceutical companies and side-jobs at “sketchy” cardiologist private practices who push for expensive and often unnecessary tests for the reimbursements.
And this is where the book gets really bleak. Doctors — like his own brother, also a cardiologist — refer to patients as “commodities.” One physician at LIJ admitted that “sometimes you have to drag out” a hospital stay for a patient if you want to get paid.
He writes about one of his patients, a 50-something man who complained of shortness of breath. Fourteen doctors, 12 procedures, and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, he was released with minimal improvement.
This is a problem not only of milking income, which of course happens, but because doctors just don’t have the time to do their jobs. Primary care physicians (doctors who Jauhar believes are most unhappy) spend an average of eight to 10 minutes per patient.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. With less time for each patient—studies show (no surprise here) that rushed doctors listen less — relying on expensive tests, which don’t necessarily lead to more accurate diagnoses. Med school advises doctors-in-training that you should be able to diagnose 80% of cases with a health history and an exam alone. No further tests required.
But in this exam on-the-run environment, doctors are more likely to practice “defensive medicine,” or “cover your ass” medicine — costing us about $750 billion a year (of the $3.8 trillion we spend a year) in wasteful procedures that lead nowhere.
“After so many years in medicine, I am convinced of one thing: The vast majority of doctors aren’t bad. It is the system that makes us bad, makes us make mistakes,” he writes. “There is a palpable sense of grieving. The job for many has become just that — a job.”
By Susannah Cahalan
Dr. Sandeep Jauhar is mad as hell.
American health care is in upheaval. On one side, overhead and malpractice insurance costs keep increasing, while salaries stagnate. On the other, patients believe that expensive drugs are better, more people are on government-run insurance that pays less, while private insurance fights every claim.
Now doctors spend most of their time trying to game the system, requiring endless paperwork, protracted bureaucratic battles and “treadmill medicine,” seeing as many patients as possible in as little time. This problem will only intensify as millions join the ranks of the insured under the Affordable Care Act.
Modal Trigger
Dr. Sandeep JauharPhoto: Maryanne Russell
In this self-perpetuating cycle, doctors spend most of their time as businessmen — and care suffers.
It’s no wonder then that doctors no longer enjoy their jobs, explains Jauhar, director of the Heart Failure Program at Long Island Jewish Medical Center and author of “Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), out now.
“This book is meant to be like the scene in ‘Network’ when [Howard Beale] opens the window and yells, ‘We’re not going to take it anymore,’ ” Jauhar says in an interview with The Post.
“I see an emotional emptiness created by the relentless consideration of money. Most of us went into medicine for intellectual stimulation or the desire to develop relationships with patients, not to maximize income,” he writes.
In a 2008 study of 12,000 physicians, only 6% described their morale as positive. Even insurance claim clerks polled in a different study were happier.
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Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician
As managed care has grown (by the 2000s, 95% of insured workers were in some kind of managed care plans), so has physicians’ discontent. In 1973, fewer than 15% of physicians reported any doubts about career choices. Today nearly 40% say that they would not choose to enter the medical profession if given the opportunity to do it all over.
If things continue as they are, the US can expect a shortage of 150,000 doctors by 2025, according to the American Medical College. Jauhar says that doctors on the online community SERMO are threatening to leave the country or scrap their private practices.
The serious downside here is obvious: Unhappy doctors make for unhappier patients.
“The physician-patient relationship is the worst it ever was,” he says.
To hammer in this point, Jauhar quotes facts from the Commonwealth Fund: The US ranks 45th in life expectancy (“behind Bosnia and Jordan,” he adds) and compared to other developed countries near last in infant mortality and health-care quality, access and efficiency. We also have fewer physicians and hospital beds than average.
This “mid-life crisis in medicine” is reflected in Jauhar’s own writing.
Readers can follow his skepticism in “Intern,” his first book about his internship year at New York Presybterian, harden into disillusionment in “Doctored,” which chronicles his time at LIJ as he enters his middle age (he’s now 44).
“Doctored” opens with: “When I look at my career in midlife, I realize that in many ways I have become the kind of doctor I never thought I’d be: impatient, occasionally indifferent, at times dismissive or paternalistic.”
This “kind of doctor,” once so idealistic, now takes morally ambiguous speaking gigs with pharmaceutical companies and side-jobs at “sketchy” cardiologist private practices who push for expensive and often unnecessary tests for the reimbursements.
And this is where the book gets really bleak. Doctors — like his own brother, also a cardiologist — refer to patients as “commodities.” One physician at LIJ admitted that “sometimes you have to drag out” a hospital stay for a patient if you want to get paid.
He writes about one of his patients, a 50-something man who complained of shortness of breath. Fourteen doctors, 12 procedures, and hundreds of thousands of dollars later, he was released with minimal improvement.
This is a problem not only of milking income, which of course happens, but because doctors just don’t have the time to do their jobs. Primary care physicians (doctors who Jauhar believes are most unhappy) spend an average of eight to 10 minutes per patient.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. With less time for each patient—studies show (no surprise here) that rushed doctors listen less — relying on expensive tests, which don’t necessarily lead to more accurate diagnoses. Med school advises doctors-in-training that you should be able to diagnose 80% of cases with a health history and an exam alone. No further tests required.
But in this exam on-the-run environment, doctors are more likely to practice “defensive medicine,” or “cover your ass” medicine — costing us about $750 billion a year (of the $3.8 trillion we spend a year) in wasteful procedures that lead nowhere.
“After so many years in medicine, I am convinced of one thing: The vast majority of doctors aren’t bad. It is the system that makes us bad, makes us make mistakes,” he writes. “There is a palpable sense of grieving. The job for many has become just that — a job.”
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