The morning

Well good morning to you on this fine St. Patrick's day! Today was one of those mornings that, however crappy the human interaction & school/work is, you know its going to be beautiful. Walked outside to jump on the moped & the air was cool, crisp & moist (I know, is that possible? Yes, it is). And cresting the horizon on my way to work was the sun, in all its fireball glory, not to mention the moon who is staying out late. It better get to bed soon or its going to have a tough work night tonight.

So, I thought I'd share a few things that were on my mind this morning. Firstly I am about a third of the way into a very interesting book called 'The Limitations of Scientific Truth' by Nigel Brush. So far it has been an eye opening & excellent read. It starts off talking about the premise of science, philosophy & religion are all searching for truth & regardless of where truth is found all three of these institutions can recognize that truth is truth. One of its main focuses so far has been on sciences claim to be a superior line of study & truth because it can show its truths. Or, to show how much science has influenced our lives, its truths are better because they are scientific. Which leads to people to believe that they are set in stone & immovable... except more oft than not, they are not. If you take a look back of just the last 100yrs of scientific research & discovery you see that many of "the basics" of science have been scrapped & re-imagined, just to be scrapped again. We went from molecules to atoms, atoms to protons/neutrons/electrons, those to quarks & now we are looking @ string theory. And that's just with the 'hard sciences', or to say the laboratory sciences, the ones scientists can actually test, handle, measure. There's been a ton of rework done on the 'soft sciences', things like evolution, cosmology, anthropology & geology. Basically science is about as unbiased as TBN. Its truth can not be ultimately known. It also deals with a lot of science philosophers of the last few decades who have put forth arguments about the limitations of science - people who were atheists & hated namely Christianity - & said we should not rule out things like religion, witchcraft, magic & philosophy in our pursuit of the truth. For those of you who are up for a good read dealing with science & philosophy & religion, I highly recommend it.

Something else that's just recently happened is Obama's overturn on Bushes federal funding ban on embryonic stem cell research.You may have noticed I italicized & bolded embryonic. I do this because the general media likes to forget this aspect of it & the science community loves to let them so they can back to working with it & getting money for it. Bush did not place a ban on funding stem cell research in general. There are what are often called adult stem cells which have been widely used in treatments, have had major success in the lab & can culled from the patient themselves so there's even less likely a prospect of the body rejecting whatever treatment it may be. Embryonic on the other hand requires the destruction of a human embryo. Essentially its abortion for scientific research. While the embryonic stem cells are more 'versatile' in their use (ie, you can tease them to become almost any type of cell you want), they are also more likely to fail or mutate or become cancerous. Big companies prefer them though because they can patent them. As long as its from an unborn human the company has full rights over the money made from the genes culled from the embryo. Also it should be noted that while the embryonic ban was on in America it was not on in other countries. Its not like this 'progress' was halted because of Bush, he just wanted to distance the US gov from what was, and is, an ethically & morally controversial line of research.

One last thing dawned on me for some reason today - this is the ten year anniversary of the release of 'the Matrix'. I even looked it up this morning & it was released the 31st of this month in 1999. There have been many movies I have loved but very few impacted me the way the Matrix did. In my teens there were 2 big things in my life: my love of the martial arts & my love of the allegorical writings of C.S. Lewis. This movie combined both in a sci-fi setting to boot. Only thing wrong with the movie was its sequels.

Well, that's all for me today. I leave you with the Common Doxology:

"Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;
Praise Him, all creatures here below;
Praise Him above, ye Heavenly Host;
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
Amen."