The rise and fall of Gurus and alikes

The lives of Guru's and other holy men (woman less so!) are similar to great empires. There's a frugal growth period of energetic frank drive and search towards the goal; then a grand period of achievement and accumulation of followers and power; and finally the inexorable decadence and fall for fame, power, money and sex.
ecce huMAN nature (woman seem to be doing much better!).

choose your guru young and honest, or simply choose her.

Neuronal inhibition of God

From Neuron, Volume 65, Issue 3, 309-319, 11 February 2010 


The predisposition of human beings toward spiritual feeling, thinking, and behaviors is measured by a supposedly stable personality trait called self-transcendence. Although a few neuroimaging studies suggest that neural activation of a large fronto-parieto-temporal network may underpin a variety of spiritual experiences, information on the causative link between such a network and spirituality is lacking. Combining pre- and post-neurosurgery personality assessment with advanced brain-lesion mapping techniques, we found that selective damage to left and right inferior posterior parietal regions induced a specific increase of self-transcendence. Therefore, modifications of neural activity in temporoparietal areas may induce unusually fast modulations of a stable personality trait related to transcendental self-referential awareness. These results hint at the active, crucial role of left and right parietal systems in determining self-transcendence and cast new light on the neurobiological bases of altered spiritual and religious attitudes and behaviors in neurological and mental disorders.

Long term enlightenment

Becoming enlightened is not a problem; in fact I become enlightened typically about 3-5 times a week. The problem is to stay enlightened for more than 5 seconds!

American Football

I think it is a great relief for the rest of the world, that the US are not much interested in soccer.With their potential of people, enthusiasm for sport, money and avant-garde drugs, they could put up an all-star football (=soccer) team almost impossible to beat.

Admin satisfaction

Administrators feel the most useful and humane when they finally solve the problems that they created.

Modern statistics for the modern man

The HRA institutional results indicate that 64% of our employees who completed the HRA were overweight (27%) or obese (37%). Obesity has been shown to increase the risk of cancer, as well as coronary heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure and diabetes.


2 out of 3 persons are far too fat!


 The first phase of this initiative was launched in December with the installation of more than 100 food and beverage vending machines around the institution. The new machines offer more healthful snack items and diet sodas at lower or competitive pricing. The machines will contain 20% healthy food items.

Even the new health-improved machines offer 80% of unhealthy food! 

Congratulations to the managers of fast food producing facilities!

Nonlocality everywhere

From the 4th of December edition of 'Science': "Today, all experiments conclude that Nature is nonlocal".
If true, all ramifications of this may well turn the world as we know it upside down...

Restricted choice in adult H. sapiens

In any given situation in an adult's life, the amount of physically possible actions that one should NOT take is gargantuan.

Run Baby run

Forget 'Call of Duty' ... here's the true massacre!
http://www.break.com/games/tiger-woods-wife-outrun.html

Progress

In old times the saying went:
"Wherever you go, there you are."

now it is:
"Wherever you go, you are in your blackberry."

More Memory anyone?

From last week's Nature;
We can create mice with enhanced memory. These animals are very anxious and have a higher chance of getting cancer.
Forgetting seems as necessary as forgiving for a happy live.

Civilised religion

I wonder: is religion just the attempt to reattain a thoughtless state we had before using our brain so much that we had to create civilisation?

Worry out of Eden

I wonder: was the garden eden just a time when humans didn't think (and hence worry) so much? Sometime before the first settlements, during the happy hunter and gatherer period, say before 50,000 BCE?

Laws of happiness

I wonder: what would be the minimum number of laws that, if strictly observed, would lead to violence-free happiness and justice?
10,000? more? or just one, such as 'do unto others as you would have them do unto yourself?'

The Inexorable Sophistication of Technology

The rational of technology is to make a solution to a problem increasingly sophisticated until it doesn't work any more. Then you have a new problem, much more sophisticated than the first one, for which one finds ever increasingly sophisticated solutions, until ...

Sex in Monte Carlo

Is sex in evolution what Monte Carlo is in simulated annealing?

A prolific equation

I wonder how many scientists get cancer because they do cancer research (cancerogenous products, stress).
Do we create more cancer than we cure?

The Darwin-year God of Creation and Evolution

Dear Mr. Harun Yahya

A friend recently gave me your Atlas of Creation (Vol I), thinking I might find it inspiring.
This is indeed the case.
I am sure God will be pleased that you devote so much energy to prove his existence through making and distributing this wonderfully crafted book.
And it does indeed very convincingly prove God.
When looking through these pages, one can but feel that it is simply DIVINE, that all these fascinating and diverse creatures have, in fact, evolved from one single cell!
Because if God exists, then He/She is not only limited to 'Creation'. Man can create cars, and they will always be cars; Man can create houses that will always be houses. Man can even create new races of animals or plants. But Man can not create a single cell that evolves into a whole biosphere of a whole planet. We are limited, but God is everything, or God is not. Thus if God is Creation, He/She is also Evolution. 
Thank you for pointing this out to so many of us with your Atlas!
Yours
BLT

PS: In case you want to make an additional volume of this exciting series, please consider making an Atlas of Embryonic Development. It is fascinating how the embryos of all animals reproduce, in their mothers womb, the hundreds of million years of evolution of their species. From a single cell to their present state, including, for us, stages with webbing or a tail. And this is so much better documented than the sparse fossil record, and happens million times every day around us! The fact that the simple existence of you, me, everyone on this planet proves that God is Creation and Evolution, is certainly worth an Atlas.

Inner Answering-Machine (I AM)

autistic and enlightened humans, as well as probably animals use often a sort of instinctive, not directed cognition to find answers to complicated problems. They don't really think, they just listen, or see. Should I try and trust this first 'inner intuitive answer' for complicated and important matters?

>NO< says my inner intuitive answering machine.

So what? says my rational guided thought: If instinct answers NO, don't believe it, then the answer should be YES, believe it...!?

oh bugger.

dilemma of faith

As a rational scientist, having judged all arguments, I came to the conclusion that it is favourable for the human being to be religious.
So rationally speaking, I have to be religious.
However 'religion' is a matter of faith, not of rationalism.
oh bugger.
any suggestions for available Gods suitable for rational scientists?