The Stem Cell Debate is Over?

These were the words of Dr. Oz to Michael J Fox on Oprah earlier this year. Sadly, though the science is settled, the debate rages on. Hopefully that can be changed.I recently came across this article, which claims that Chinese scientists have created stem cells that are identical to embryonic stem cells. Here's the equivalent article form the Washington...

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Aborting Health Care

I know I am preaching to the choir, since all 3 of my readers probably know this better than me, but I'd still like to say my piece about why abortion should not be in the health care bill, and specifically should be excluded from it. So hear are my 6 reasons to reject the health care bill as it is written, no matter what your views. 1. Abortion kills a human being. 'Nuff said. But if you don't believe that consider 2. More Americans are pro-life than pro-choice. So, in addition to the above, by passing it our representatives are not representing...

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Junk? Science?

I recently stumbled upon a "60 Minutes" (for those abroad "60 Minutes" is an hour long weekly news show) video segment from April 22, 2009 (my anniversary! Yay!) about Cold Fusion. "Isn't that just junk science?" you might ask. Well, check out the video and come on back for the rest of this post.I remember the day 20 years ago sitting in my Bell Labs' office, pondering with my office mate whether or not the discovery would be confirmed. "I'd bet against it" he stated, matter of fact-ly. That way if it's fake at least I win the bet, and if I lose...

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Sell the Vatican!

The other day I was speaking with an "ex-Catholic" friend about faith. There were a number of things we discussed, which I will blog about as time goes by, but one thing was his statement that he can't believe in Catholicism because the Pope doesn't. According to him (and others), if the Pope really believed in Catholicism he would sell all the billions of dollars of art work, all the buildings and land, etc. and give all the money to the poor and ed world hunger once and for all.There are two aspects of this logic that are mistaken. First off,...

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The Catholic Laboratory

The other day I was listening to the SaintCast and caught a blurb about the Catholic Laboratory. This is a web site for a podcast about Catholics and science, and science and Catholics. If you recall, my primary reason for starting this blog was my outrage over Stephen Hawking's false and irrational bashing of the Catholic church. So it was with great interest that I listened to the podcast.As of now I have listened to the first two episodes and I love it! The podcaster, Ian Maxfield, is intelligent, well spoken and has clearly done his research....

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e-book bash wrap up.

OK, I promised to blog more on e-books, and never did. If you remember the list I did not address.1. E-book readers suck.2. E-book readers are hard to use.3. Professors wanted to be "on the bandwagon".4. Batteries die.Quite frankly I'm not sure how much addressing this needs. We've been promised fuel cells and all sorts of batteries that will run for many many hours and can be recharged instantly. The technology isn't there. The long last batteries are proprietary, and batteries I can change quickly and find everywhere don't last.I have used a...

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Searching Plurks

How often do you find code in a blog post? I became a plurk fan a while back, but the one feature I missed (and apparently couldn't live without) was a way to "grep" my time line. For non-UNIX geeks, "grep" is a command on UNIX for finding patterns in files. It stands for:g/re/pwhich in the original UNIX editor, "ed" meant globally search for a regular expression and print lines that match.Here's a sample of how it works:$ perl plurkgrep.pl youngfetching http://www.plurk.com/mfetching http://www.plurk.com/m/p/178i6rfetching http://www.plurk.com/m/p/178g4gfound...

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