November 1: the US Patent Office granted patent 6,960,975 to Boris Volfson for a space drive that generates propulsion by altering space-time.
This marks a turning point in patent law. In the future, patent litigation will cover not only non-obviousness and originality but also whether inventions obey the laws of physics.
I made many mistakes over the past five days. Not that there weren’t others in the five days before that, there just weren’t nearly as many.
They’re all little, but they’re still important: moments when you say or do the wrong thing or what you said could have been said better. No single one has ever affected my life significantly either way.
Assuming they aren’t simply the same mistakes over and over (which happens from time to time no matter what), life is exactly what it’s meant to be.
A new book by a Vatican astronomer ponders whether original sin and the salvation of Jesus are universal.
History shows that when two technologically disparate peoples meet, the more technologically primitive is either absorbed or annihilated. If/When aliens arrive, their salvation will not be among the pertinent issues.
Last month a North Carolina student was investigated by the Secret Service for a school project on the Bill of Rights. He took a photograph of his own thumb pointing down next to a photo of Dubya, to illustrate our right to dissent. He had it developed at Wal-Mart, and an employee turned the photo over to the local police who gave it to the SS.
The SS conducted interviews at the boy’s school, taking the poster from the classroom and questioning the teacher. “You didn’t think this was suspicious?”
I love it when respected people start telling it like it is (or at least as they truly see it) at the end of their careers. It’s usually a big surprise that causes half the people in the room to nod in agreement and the other half to scowl and walk out, like when Bill Cosby told African Americans that they were responsible for their own socio-economic status.
Such is the polarizing nature of honesty.
Walter Cronkite recently told students at USC that Americans were simply not educated well enough to cast their votes wisely. Story.
This notion provides an interesting hypothetical relationship: because education is controlled by the state, if an elected group receives more votes from an undereducated population, it has absolutely no incentive to improve education; it instead has incentive to [i]reduce[/i] the quality of education so its claims are less likely to be challenged, thus securing its role as the source of ‘truth’.
Oregon’s Death with Dignity Law is going to be reviewed by the high court on October 5. Since its passing in 1997, only 208 patients have taken advantage of the legistlation that permits a doctor to prescribe a lethal dose of medication to suffering patients who wish to end their lives on their own terms.
A group of doctors and the Church have filed opposing briefs in the matter, arguing that the law reverses the primary role of the doctor as a healer and that it sends a negative message to sick people: that their lives aren’t worth protecting, that their suicides aren’t worth preventing.
We’re talking about a very small group of terminally ill patients (1 in 1000 deaths) who want to say goodbye to their families. How would taking this choice away from them improve their lives or anyone else’s?
In the US in 2000, 16,586 people chose firearms as the means to take their own lives. Those are the suicides to prevent.
In breeding domesticated animals to obtain desirable qualities (meat, strength, obedience, hunting skills, coats, etc.), sometimes odd consequences emerge. Behold the fainting goat, who is easily startled and collapses momentarily, not a great way to evade predators.
There are more than 400 exorcists in Italy, recently recognized for their work by Pope Ratzi. It’s nice to know someone is worrying about demon affliction in the modern age. Sadly they are all in Italy, freeing demons in the rest of the world to run amok on the internets.
While the US is allocating Federal funds for abstinence-only ’sex education’, Planned Parenthood in Canada gets it on a level that’s difficult to describe: Commercial.
More than half of US adults are overweight ( Flegal et al. 1998 ), which makes food the most abused substance in our country. If it continues its rise, poor physical condition will supplant tobacco as the leading voluntary cause of death.