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Showing posts from August, 2012

Clint Eastwood Speak at Republican National Convention

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Years from now when  election's usual trade crafts will be thing of the past, perhaps Clint Eastwood's speech at Republican National Convention will be remembered in fond recollection. He looked a bit disheveled, and it seemed his delivery was unscripted, but funny nonetheless. His empty chair talk is being mocked around the net, but his message I found to be neither democratic nor republican as he mentioned: "Politicians are employees of ours.. will beg for our votes every four years". I've loved his movies for many years, including two of his last ones, Million Dollar Baby and "Grand Torino". At the end of another not so humoring workday, Clint Eastwood's humorous unscripted speech made my day!

Jim Holt's Book "Why Does the World Exist" - Initial Observations

The following are few extracts from Jim Holt's existential detective book Why Does the World Exist? "The problem with the science option would seem to be this. The universe comprises everything that physically exists. A scientific explanation must involve some sort of physical cause. But any physical cause is by definition part of the universe to be explained. Thus any purely scientific explanation of the existence of the universe is doomed to be circular. Even if it starts from something very minimal— a cosmic egg, a tiny bit of quantum vacuum, a singularity— it still starts with something, not nothing. Science may be able to trace how the current universe evolved from an earlier state of physical reality, even following the process back as far as the Big Bang. But ultimately science hits a wall. It can’t account for the origin of the primal physical state out of nothing. That, at least, is what diehard defenders of the God hypothesis insist. (Page 5-6)" My Comment:

Climate Change is Here - Is it Worse than We Thought?

James E. Hansen's article in The Washington Post is  a plea. A plea from the writer who directs the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. His credentials seem impeccable. This coming week a study will be published by the article's author and his colleagues containing a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures revealing "a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for out present." Of course there are doubters who may say that all these extreme weather events like severe droughts in some parts of our world, scorching heat waves in exceptionally hot summer in North America, are all part of the natural rhythm of our planet. James E. Hansen observes that the "odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.