There Is No Dark Side Of The Moon Really

The Hubble Telescope has been expanding our horizons for 15 years now.
Here are its latest images: Eagle Nebula and M51 Galaxy.

Absolutely amazing!

Take a gander at the Best Of Hubble. Can you imagine trying to explain 13 billion light years to Galileo? Perhaps he'd understand better than we imagine.

The plan now is to send a robot up to extend Hubble's life. That would be better than a manned mission.

Our technology at this point in history outweighs the risk of space development by manned missions. Certainly there will be times when humans are needed out there, but never before the robotic method is exhausted. It is just the safe and cost-effective way to do things. Bush's proposal of a manned Moon/Mars mission was an ill-advised political card.

The private sector may have a better grip on manned space travel anyway.

Oh, what-the-hell. Sign me up!




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Population Reference Bureau

Within You Without You

It is interesting how many believe in Heaven as an actual place "up there", and Hell "down there". If you suggest that perhaps Heaven is a state of bliss within one's self and that Jesus taught us to realize our holiness, our Jesus-ness, many Christians look at you in wide-eyed horror and call you a blasphemer.
If you suggest the same thing to a Hindu using comparable terms, many will bow and bless you.

To recognize gods and demons as important actors in one's own head and then to move beyond them to fulfill the role of their director is the goal. It is the process sometimes called Metanoia--reorientation of self to a state beyond (but not separate from) good and evil. It is an attitude gained by self-knowledge. It won't kill God, it just removes blind subjectivity (metaphorically challenged thought) and breathes God in where He can teach most effectively: to an objective student.

Why do so many borrow whatever form of God that satisfies their needs at the moment, instead of doing the work of incarnating that God within themselves? Or to put it another way: religions seem to be read too literally and their rich transformative symbols unfortunately crack in dryness, while fairy tales still have that metaphorical magic that touches the soul and transfers lasting moral knowledge. Why is that?

Here's an easier question: What practical virtues do the Left Behind books teach?
Search as you may, the answer is none (even if they weren't meant to be more than mere entertainment).





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The 5000 Fingers Of Dr. T

Book Time

I got through Friedman's The World Is Flat and I have to almost agree with this review I just found via Metafilter.

The book is good, the ideas are important, but the metaphors do get a bit droll.

I liked The Lexus And The Olive Tree better.

And for you nurses out there, I highly recommend the Tarascon Pocketbooks. They absolutely rock!
Let's hear it for nursing books!


Hello?



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If Andy Handcuffed Opie, It Would've Been Cute.

It's absolutely fascinating to watch issues like the little girl who got handcuffed while throwing a temper tantrum at school roll into a boil of opportunistic, nonsensical, shoot-up-in-the-air activism.
You get all kinds of goofballs coming out of the woodwork yelling, "Yee-Haa! I don't know what the issue is really about, but I'm gonna get me some money out of it! Hey, Mr. Cameraman, over here!"
And the lawyers gleefully hand out their cards.

It's truly a compound fiasco. You've got the mom of the kid yelling abuse, the other kids' parents yelling trauma, the police yelling protection, the school yelling zero tolerance, the community yelling reform, the press yelling tragedy, and if you ask them again what they're yelling, they'll tell you the opposite.

Then again, it's Florida.

Florida--America's freaky ADHD state. They should make the whole state a reality-show. Now that's some good TV!
Plus, we could all watch the drama as Jeb becomes President.




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Canting Dictionary

Bubble Wrapped Living

I took care of a patient a while back who was a quadriplegic. He was in the hospital for recurring bedsores one of which went all the way through to his coccyx. He could move head around and his left arm up and down a bit, but that was all. The fingers were grossly contracted and disfigured.
He became a quad from a diving accident in Lake Powell where he and some friends decided to do some thrill jumping off a high cliff but didn't check the water depth properly. He was the first and obviously only one to try the dive. He was only 25 years old at the time.

He spoke openly about the experience. I asked if he regretted it and he said he did and didn't. He said that since he was young and had no family to take care of, and since he had always been a thrill-seeker he didn't regret it. But the carelessness of not checking the depth well enough he did regret. "It was stupid not to check it." He did talk a bit about bouts of depression that he had sometimes when he thought about his predicament, but he said they don't last long because he accepted responsibility for it. "It was my f--king call." He did regret the burden he placed on others.
He had a pretty good handle on the thing, I thought.

We then talked about thrill-seekers. The show Jackass was popular at the time. I told him I thought the show was hilarious, but if any of them got seriously hurt they don't deserve to whine about it. They all seemed to be single, but if someone has a wife and kids it would be totally irresponsible to try and feed their thrill-needs like that, just like he had pointed out.
The patient then said that people get hurt everyday doing responsible stuff too, but the meaning changes. If a selfish act is involved in causing the accident, then your injuries have "no honor", he said. He did say he thought there was honor in extreme sports when people approach them with great responsibility, planning, and care.

I thought about him a few weeks ago when I saw an old story being rerun about a BASE jumper who died after jumping off the Royal Gorge Bridge. His friends were interviewed and said things like "He died doing what he wanted to do," and "That's how he would've wanted to go."
Perhaps the guy's death has some sort of honor, but the people did seem a little silly when they tried to say it.
If he had a wife and kids, I hope his death gives them some sort of meaning.

What about people who work hard at advancing a sport, like big wave surfer Laird Hamilton for example? If he ever dies out there, will it mean anything?
And I've always been intrigued by skydivers who feel they have to start wearing skiboards or doing crazy tricks to try and tweak out some more adrenaline. The honor in one of their deaths is hard to find.

I suppose it's a debatable thing.




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Say It Often Enough And...

I haven't read George Orwell's 1984 since...well, 1984. If you've read it, you cannot help but be reminded of it whenever things like "Healthy Forest Initiative" or "Clear Skies Initiative" are said.
When I heard those, I immediately remembered the propaganda tool of doublespeak (a term Orwell really didn't use in the novel, but rather doublethink and newspeak).

Whenever something sounds oddly ironic (in that it means its opposite), it should obviously set off your bullshit detector.

John Stewart once pointed out that listening to politicians is like going to the zoo: don't act surprised when they lie and twist facts around, because just like monkeys playing with themselves that's what they do!

Just keep demanding facts.




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Strange Facts

Heavy Metal Thunder

The Discovery Channel must have wet their pants when they saw their ratings soar with the bike building shows. I'll admit I'm addicted to watching them. They're fun.
Monster Garage has managed to stay fresh so far. Jesse James is a talented builder, but that whiney-boy voice kinda gets to you after a while. I like the freakshow people on American Chopper, but their bikes are built a little too undisciplined and half-assed. They're interesting, but are probably the cotton-candy builders of the bike world. I wonder if the custom builder community out there thinks they're posers or not.

Indian Larry, who died last year being an idiot, was truly a master craftsman.

When you see a well built bike pass by, it really grabs your attention and gets your adrenaline up. There are so many great builders out there these days. Their talent makes you proud to live in this country. I don't know why, but everytime I read or hear about some scary right-wing conservative uprising, I think about buying a chopper and hitting the road. Perhaps it's the American-rebel, don't-tell-me-what-to-do-and-stay-out-of-my-business thing.





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Take your pick: Wacky Packages or Odd Rods

Take Care Of Your Goodness

A rather Buddhist life-lesson I learned when I worked with the mentally ill is that it's not the absence of suffering that makes life good, it's the choices one makes in response to the suffering. However, they also taught me that tiny creatures live in the electrical sockets and should be fed on Thursdays.

Something I always say is "It's all good." Which is not to say suffering is good in the sense that it is 'nice', nor is it to passively watch suffering occur and not react and help out. "It's all good" means that you are affirming the suffering. You are saying "yes" to life, the good and the bad. You are not hiding, or denying, or dismissing life. You are taking full responsibility for life, even when the bad stuff happens, and getting in there with full participation. It is just a different way of saying the Sufi adage "Be present at every breath." Live life to the hilt, grab the bull by the horns, act like today is your last day on earth, life is the journey not the destination, etc., etc. And if you say it enough, you annoy all your co-workers and ironically become a source of their suffering.

The evil part of our mental health system is the focus on technique in spite of the individual. There are hundreds of techniques focused on relieving suffering without allowing the individual the responsibility and work of dealing with the suffering. Anger or depression, for example, are not fixed quantities that can be simply used up and then you are cured. They are part of the waxing and waning sufferings of life that one must learn how to deal with. Modern mental health treatment pays little attention to this personal responsibility. It goes where the money is, baby! That usually means pills.

All a pill does is dull a person's experience of the illness (I'm talkng mainly about mood disorders, not psychotic disorders which certainly need plenty of pills.) so that they can function in daily life, but the suffering is still there. Sure, one can go on through life like that, but the suffering rarely stays quiet--it finds other ways to express itself. The pill is a tool that should only be used for a short time while the person is taught how to say "It's all good" and learn how to go through suffering. Unfortunately insurance pays for the pills well enough, but for therapy? Eh...not so much.

Freedom is making conscious decisions amid life's sufferings (and all life is suffering is some form or another).
Effective therapy teaches a person awareness of this freedom and the tools to help maintain it. Ineffective therapy attempts no teaching or guidance, but makes the person a non-participatory bump-on-a-log victim of life who lives at home with their mother even though they're 40 years old. And the increasing odds are, unfortunately, that you know someone like that.



Say, here's some related ER trivia: A 40 year old male who lives with their mother and whines about whatever symptoms they are having is sometimes refered to as a Mangina, as in, "Hey, The Mangina in Bed 1 wants his demerol again."





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Word Oddities And Trivia

Below The Turquoise Trail

We took a trip down to New Mexico this weekend. One of my favorite roads is Highway 41 which is found off of I-25 just before you get to Santa Fe. It runs on the east side of the Rockies down through the lovely town of Galisteo, which looks to be an artist's community because all the adobe buildings are made to look "just right". Galisteo is absolutely gorgeous in the Fall. It's sad that the Santa Fe development flood is flowing their way.

After you pass through there, you come upon a ridge of hellish rock that surfs in and out of the land like the spine of a dragon. It would be a great treasure map feature.

Just south of that is a strange little group of buildings off to the west of the road. There is a big gate with a lot of forbidding signs warning you that the place is private and to stay away. To help further promote their privacy and hide from curiosity, they've painted all their buildings bright red and yellow.
It's probably just some art commune, celebrity compound, or religious school. Or...is it?

Past that you drive along the sleepy edge of the prairie to the town of Stanley which has the coolest cemetery--it just seems to be there in the center of the world. Soon after Stanley you meet up with I-40 which finds its way through the Sandia Mountains into Albuquerque (originally spelled Alburquerque).

But if you turn east on I-40, you'll go to Stuckey's!




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http://www.space.com/

A Trip Into AM Hell

Last night I went to pick up my son from a track meet, and as I sat waiting in the car I began flipping around the AM dial. I don't think I've listened to AM radio since I was a little kid and my parents used to tune into the CBS Radio Mystery Theater with E.G. Marshall and that scary creaking door.

Anyway, the AM realm is now populated by talk radio, which is either some right-wing nut speaking in constant hyperbole, or some religious fanatic with a bad case of Bible Quotation Diarrhea.
I listened to the right-wing nut for awhile as he took a few callers. The topic was Are Liberals Becoming More Violent And Are You Afraid? The nut kept big pimping a strawman argument to ridiculous extreme.

Then I caught the last few minutes of the Dr. Laura show. Now, I used to listen to Dr. Laura back in the mid-90's when I was driving to work (was that AM radio, too?). She seemed like a refreshing voice, calling for personal responsibility and common sense. It was fun to listen to her masochistic callers set themselves up with things like, "I married a guy who used to live with his mother up until he was 36. Should I be offended that he gave his mother a key to our house so that she could come over and do his laundry?" You can feel Dr. Laura's sadistic glee in lighting into people like that. It's like a radio car crash; you can't help rubbernecking it.

The problem with her though is that 1) she's not a medical or psychiatric doctor and 2) her fundamentalist and impractical morals are shouted down to people in Betty Bowers fashion (sans the humor of course)--there's no compassion, and thus no way for a caller to connect to what Laura's saying. Like I said, most of them are just there for the berating anyway. Then, Laura's got that hypocrite stench that seeps out slowly until you finally shake your head in disgust and turn her off.

I finally turned back to good ol' FM rock-and-roll. The SUV in front of me had a friggin' overhead flip-down TV. Why can't I get one of those?





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Atlas Of Cyberspace

Post Traumatic Misdiagnosis Disorder

So this morning on ESPN I hear about POD, Post-Olympics Depression.

Excuse Me?

Half the stuff that's in the DSM-IV (the manual they use to diagnose people with mental illnesses) is bull-hoggary used to prescribe some pill or sign someone up for months of therapy. If you don't think POD will show up in there in the next five years, just you wait.
Oh, serious mental illness exists alright, and it's not pretty. But the rest of the time it's just stress or the blues. People need to just ride the ride for a bit and then get off. The blues are not a "disorder", yet there's a whole industry that promotes the opposite.

Does everyone need a personal SuperNanny to slap them in the back of the head these days to check their reality?

POD. POD. Your POD is over here at the other end of the pool. Now shut up, dive in, and come and get it!

***

Sorry, I don't mean to make fun (too much) of these things. I worked with the acutely mentally ill for 8 years, and it's insulting to them to apply serious diagnoses like PTSD to someone who once saw a car crash or a dog die. If someone thinks they have PTSD after experiencing the normal dramas of life, then I don't know...





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How Much Is Inside?

Cultural Walls Must Come Tumblin' Down

I'm halfway through Thomas Friedman's The World Is Flat. Interesting stuff. He is good at explaining the current pros and cons of globalization and how competition in the world market is opening up to just about anyone; how outsourcing levels the playing field; how science professions are extremely important to produce and maintain if you want to stay in the game--which is something America is obviously falling behind in. For example, did you know that some American hospitals send their x-rays to India to be read because we don't have enough radiologists?
You sometimes get the sense that Friedman is biased in speaking only about the 20 to 30 % of people in the world who own or have access to computers and thus do most of the selling/consuming, so I hope that bubble expands a bit before I get to the end of the book. But he does give an overall picture or framework that fits well around the world economy at this point. (Friedman, by the way, is a master of analogy which is great on the page, but have you ever heard him speak? He's like an analogy/simile/anecdote robot from Hell.)

The world's real estate has obviously been conquered and established (with a few minor quibbles here and there). In a kind of re-world-conquering scenario we find that Isolationist policy leaves a country vulnerable to recession and ripe for being exploitatively conquered by wealthier countries, and not just economically but academically too. The flat playing field of the information age is helping those countries re-think their Isolationism and open up to competing out on the dance floor.

The intricate player in this big tangle is law and the enforcement of law across cultural boundaries. To do this a certain amount of flattening of cultural boundaries will be necessary, which includes, of course, religious tolerance.
So here we are again on my favorite topic of curing people from being metaphorically challenged by helping them in understanding.
Globalization will not succeed without including the cultural factor.





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Scary Vatican Sculpture Haunts Me

I was intrigued by a photo in last week's Newsweek commemorative issue on the Pope which showed the Pope on some sort of stage with his College of Cardinals in a line behind him. They are standing in front of a gargantuan sculpture (which looks to be bronze) of a man rising up from an intricate twisted tree-like form that is hellish at the bottom and becomes more loose and flowing at the top.

Looking around on the web for it, I happened upon this globe in the Courtyard of the Pine. Now that's a fascinating thing! Here are two more views: 1 , 2.

But alas, I cannot find anything about the tree-like sculpture. It looks truly remarkable.






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More cool sculptures.

Holy Molten MagMa

It's amazing to find out that Yellowstone National Park is actually the largest volcano in the world and may erupt in the near geologic future. Although, the "near geologic future" may be in a few hundred thousand years......or maybe tomorrow.

Yellowstone also has more geyser activity than all the world combined.


We took a trip in 1997 to the Big Island and walked out to where the lava was flowing into the ocean with violent steam blasts throwing refrigerator-sized chunks of lava in the air. It was reckless fun until we looked down through the cracks and saw the flowing red stuff only about a foot below our feet and our shoes were kinda sticking to the rocks. For some reason that was scarier than the gigantic flying rocks.

We did take some lava, but Pele hasn't complained about it yet.


All I know is: I don't know where I'm a gonna go when the volcano blow.




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Take your pick: Amputation or Appendectomy

Got Chile Jones, Need Chile Fix

I love living in Colorado. I love the high altitude weather, the mountains, the wildlife. The only thing about Colorado I don't like is the chile. It sucks.
The restaurants in Colorado serve tomato sauce instead of red chile, and somehow the green chile here has had all the life drained out of it and tastes like slabs of boiled Gumby. It's maddening.

We have to drive down to New Mexico to get good, hot chile--the hotter, the better.
"There's nothin' for it," as Samwise would say.

The best chile in the world comes from Hatch, New Mexico. That is flavor! Total flavor.
Oh, how the good restaurants and good cooks have a time with that stuff! It seeps right into your soul, especially in the Fall when the harvest comes in and you smell roasting chile wafting across the Mesilla Valley through the crisp autumn air. Oh, man!

I heard about a mexican restaurant up in Barrow, Alaska. I wonder if their chile is any good?





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The Wilhelm Scream

Full Moon Crazy Night

A persistent post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this) argument that you hear in hospitals, especially in the E.R., is that things get more busy and/or more crazy during a full moon.

It isn't true, but just try and convince people of that.

I tried once, and failed to shake anyone's beliefs about the matter. No matter how much evidence you provide, people want to believe in the power of the moon.
I even tried pointing out how crazy it was on certain non-full moon nights. But they just stared at me like I was crazy. It's hard to tell though; people often stare at me like I'm crazy.

We are pattern-seeking animals, and the moon is a wondrous object to utilize in that respect. We have been looking at it since the dawn of man. So it's easy to correlate it with craziness.

Trying to debunk the moon-myth has taught me a lot about blind faith and its resilience.





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Thomas Pynchon

The Oddly Placed Car Will Explode

One big change in the composition of movies due to computer graphics and technology is the decreased emphasis on the "wow" shot. Those are usually the shots where something blows up or some amazing stunt is performed.
In the pre-computer movie age the "wow" shot was usually filmed with a few different cameras so several angles could be shown, or perhaps in slow motion, or repeated over and over, and there was also an odd change of pacing in the movie because of the attention to the shot.
Hey, they spent a lot of money and time to get those shots so they made sure the movie framed them prominently.
But nowadays those shots are a dime-a-dozen. Which is good and bad, because you can do those shots cheaply and not have to 'frame' them (make their emphasis disproportionate to the rest of the movie), but now they are used too much and the "wow" is diminished.
Film-makers now have more artistic control, and also more artistic responsibility.

Then you have non-computer movies that seem to linger more in the pleasure of your mind than do all those flashy computer ones. Like the upcoming Corpse Bride, by Tim Burton.



Ok, here's a dilemma: I saw Heavy Metal when I was about 12 years old. My excellent sister took me. The movie was cool then and it's cool now. I have a son who's 14, and I had some reservations about showing him the movie because of the sex and nudity in it. This freaked me out because then I felt old. So now I'll let him see it and throw that dilemma out the window. Will this start a devastating revolutionary backlash against the conservative empire? Maybe I should ask Betty.




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Simon

The Mythic Loss Of Alan Dundes

Alan Dundes has died.
A scholar of folklore, culture, jokes, religion, patterns.
A great teacher.







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Folktales, of course.