Reading gibberish – can you read this?

fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too

Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it whotuit a pboerlm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Azanmig huh? yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

Manpower to empower man

Vatican must make use of temps to solve their priest shortage.  How experience in the fast-food industry helps:

Randy Nelson, a recently hired temp priest at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Miami, said he was initially nervous about celebrating mass in front of a large congregation, but soon got the hang of it.

“I was a little intimidated on my first day because I had no idea what I was supposed to do during communion,” said Nelson, referring to the transubstantiation of the Holy Eucharist, a miracle he is expected to perform at each mass in order to transform earthly bread and wine into the Most Precious Body and Blood of Christ. “But basically I just have to pour some watered-down cabernet into the gold cup, wave my arms around, say some stuff about God, and give each person in line one of those wafer things.”

“It’s really not all that different from a fast food gig,” Nelson added. “Except maybe the uniforms here are a bit more humiliating.”

via Priest Shortage Forces Vatican To Hire Temps To Deliver Sacred Rites

Or the sacred sacrement of penance:

Ben Rosenthal, 23, who is a newcomer to Catholicism, said the most interesting part of his job is administering the Sacrament of Penance, because while sitting in the confessional he hears “all kinds of shit you wouldn’t believe.”

“My friends were totally cracking up when I told them how Doug Merchant confessed to having impure thoughts about his next-door neighbor’s daughter and was almost caught masturbating in the bushes outside her window,” Rosenthal said. “I feel like I should probably call the cops on some of these people, but during orientation they told us we would get fired if we broke the Seal of Confession. So I just make them say a lot of Hail Marys.”

But once again, it’s the court jester that gets to the deep truth:

Despite receiving numerous applications from qualified women with extensive knowledge of Church doctrine and advanced degrees in theology, the Vatican continues to oppose female ordination.

Rush’s solution to climate change? Go kill yourself!

This is something I’ve been posting about lately, and that is the impact of population growth on climate change.  Luckily I’m not famous enough for Rush to care about me.  But check this out.  Revkin writes for the NY Times, and has been exploring this connection also, and, well…

I’d like to think that Rush Limbaugh was floating a thought experiment, and not seriously proposing something, when he told millions of listeners the following: “Mr. Revkin, why don’t you just go kill yourself, and help the planet by dying.”

via Thought Experiments on Birth and Death – Dot Earth Blog – NYTimes.com.

You can find a link to the NPR story on it above.

Giffords wants to escalate Afghanistan war. What do you think?

From Tuesday’s Arizona Daily Star, a response to my congresswoman Giffords’ argument for escalating the Afghanistan war.

Justifying war

Re: the Oct. 12 guest opinion “Afghanistan war was worth fighting in 2001, still is today” by Gabrielle Giffords.

When we talk about a war being worth fighting, very rarely is it mentioned what exactly it will cost. It will cost American troops’ lives. It will cost many injuries. It will cost many soldiers their mental health or other recurring physical issues from injuries sustained while fighting.

Is it really worth so many American lives and so much money during our recession? If so, then how many American lives, how many wounded and how many trillions of dollars? This should be clearly stated before any escalation.

Abie Morales

UA grad student, Tucson

via Letters to the editor | www.azstarnet.com ®.

Meet future woman

The future evolution of women (10 generations): Women will be shorter, plumper, and more fertile.

The team studied 2238 women who had passed menopause and so completed their reproductive lives. For this group, Stearns’s team tested whether a woman’s height, weight, blood pressure, cholesterol or other traits correlated with the number of children she had borne. They controlled for changes due to social and cultural factors to calculate how strongly natural selection is shaping these traits.

Quite a lot, it turns out. Shorter, heavier women tended to have more children, on average, than taller, lighter ones. Women with lower blood pressure and lower cholesterol levels likewise reared more children, and – not surprisingly – so did women who had their first child at a younger age or who entered menopause later. Strikingly, these traits were passed on to their daughters, who in turn also had more children.

If these trends continue for 10 generations, Stearns calculates, the average woman in 2409 will be 2 centimetres shorter and 1 kilogram heavier than she is today. She will bear her first child about 5 months earlier and enter menopause 10 months later (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906199106).

via Meet future woman: shorter, plumper, more fertile – health – 19 October 2009 – New Scientist.

The Catholic Church wants YOU!

Calling all anti-feminists and homophobes!  The Catholic Church wants YOU!  If you are a male priest or bishop and married, no problem, you can become a Catholic priest or bishop now… as long as you don’t have a vagina you’re okay!!!

The number of Anglicans wishing to join the Catholic Church has increased in recent years as the Anglican church has welcomed the ordination of women and openly gay clergy and blessed homosexual partnerships, said Cardinal William Joseph Levada, the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

via Vatican welcomes Anglicans into Catholic church – CNN.com.

This will blow your mind… and blow up the Large Hadron Collider

I have recently become addicted to the show Lost… this article from the NY Times sounds eerily like it could be part of the show.  Apparently, keep in mind these are smart Ph.D. string theory founding people here, the reason the Large Hadron Collider keeps breaking is because…

…the Higgs boson is so abhorrent a creature, one that even God himself hates so much, that if the LHC was successful enough to create one, its creation would ripple back in time and stop the collider before it made it, thus destroying its own creation… WOW

Seriously… great article!

Then it will be time to test one of the most bizarre and revolutionary theories in science. I’m not talking about extra dimensions of space-time, dark matter or even black holes that eat the Earth. No, I’m talking about the notion that the troubled collider is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

via The Collider, the Particle and a Theory About Fate – NYTimes.com.

My solution to the soda tax

It’s almost too simple.

Don’t raise taxes on soda.  Just simply get rid of the corn subsidies.

For those who don’t know, almost all the profits the farmers get from growing corn comes from the government.  An acre of corn you can sell for about $1000.  That is surely not worth it.  The rest of their profit comes from federal money (your tax dollars).

One of the problems is that the corn they grow is not edible by humans anymore. It’s a special type of corn that is optimized for high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).  So here is the conflict.

Why on earth would you work so hard to convert corn into syrup (it is a complex process) when you could just use natural sugar?  Because the corn, and the type made for HFCS, is subsidized by the government!

And this is why HFCS is much cheaper than sugar, and this is why soda is so cheap now.  Have you ever tried buying a coke with sugar in it?  Costs a lot more.

So the solution is to end the subsidies for corn grown for HFCS.  If they want to continue using HFCS, the companies can continue growing it on their own, except now THEY pay for it… this is capitalism after all!

The immediate effect is this:  Now HFCS is not cheap anymore.  The prices of soda and candy go up.  This has the same effect as a tax, but now our own government is not subsidizing our obesity and diabetes.

There is an excellent documentary called King Corn that deals with our corn business.  Definitely worth checking out.

Why would the Navajo leaders ban Navajos from protesting Big Coal?

The environmental groups were recently kicked out after asking the EPA to study the impact of the Navajo Generating Station. This may have led to an economic loss for the coal industry, especially if unexceptable polluting is found. The leaders of the Hopi and Navajo tribes even banned their own citizens from protesting the coal company on the reservation.

via Conflict between Navajo, Hopi, and Big Coal: environmentalists banned.

The Nocebo Effect

From placebo making you feel better, to the nocebo which can actually cause DEATH… the mind is indeed powerful!

Is Green the new Red: Mining

Navajo Generating Station

The following article discusses how dependent Tucson is on something we never really think about.

Mining.

It also addresses the impact on our need for mining on the people who live near the mines, such as the Navajo and Hopi in northern Arizona, who continue to live impoverished lives while coal companies extract their resources, use the water in the aquifer, and leave environmental damage behind.  Higher incidences of cancer are also occuring.

Is Green the new Red: Mining

‘The Simpsons’ Mock ‘The Secret’ (VIDEO)

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about "‘The Simpsons’ Mock ‘The Secret’ (VIDEO)", posted with vodpod

Scientists create Shroud of Truth

It’s all about origins, which the UA has a lot of researchers in. In this case it’s the Shroud of Turin, claimed to have been the burial cloth of Jesus that bears his image.

A use of math models to save lives in Chicago’s bad neighborhoods

Another non-traditional use of mathematics to keep people safe… in this case a probability model was built using past data to try to predict which children are most at risk… and when.

Why nerds are a crucial part of the revolution

Nerds have been changing the culture, be it from creating the actual technology (FB, Twitter, blogs,… the Internet itself) to what is shared via that new medium.