even the common telephone is evolving

Well,
It Happened
In 1947

(just consider the complexity of what's happened since then)








"It has been said that since the end of World War II, the amount of information generated by our society doubles every seven years. A daily copy of the New York Times, for instance, has as much information as the educated individual of the 16th century absorbed in a whole lifetime. … Even the common telephone—which has been with us for a hundred years now—is evolving into an ideal instrument for the electronic age." —Shatner presents microelectronics to 1976

Equating Angels with Transistors...

http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/2/22/equating-angels-with-transistors-shatner-spent-the-70s-rhapsodizing-about-tech-for-at-t--2



P.S. Thanks Kimberly

a range of hypothetical disgusting situations

Disgust Sensitivity and the Neurophysiology of Left-Right Political Orientations

"Given its primal nature and essential value in avoiding pathogens disgust likely has an effect even without registering in conscious beliefs."

© 2011 Smith et al *

Abstract

Disgust has been described as the most primitive and central of emotions. Thus, it is not surprising that it shapes behaviors in a variety of organisms and in a variety of contexts—including homo sapien politics. People who believe they would be bothered by a range of hypothetical disgusting situations display an increased likelihood of displaying right-of-center rather than left-of-center political orientations. Given its primal nature and essential value in avoiding pathogens disgust likely has an effect even without registering in conscious beliefs. In this article, we demonstrate that individuals with marked involuntary physiological responses to disgusting images, such as of a man eating a large mouthful of writhing worms, are more likely to self-identify as conservative and, especially, to oppose gay marriage than are individuals with more muted physiological responses to the same images. This relationship holds even when controlling for the degree to which respondents believe themselves to be disgust sensitive and suggests that people's physiological predispositions help to shape their political orientations.

Full article...

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0025552

* This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

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Can Politics Make You Vomit? Of course.

by Will Oremus

"On Sunday, Rick Santorum told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the idea of absolute separation of church and state “makes me want to throw up.” In October, the GOP candidate said he “almost threw up” reading John F. Kennedy’s 1960 speech on the topic. Can just thinking about something you find morally objectionable cause you to lose your lunch?"

Full article...

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2012/02/could_the_separation_of_church_and_state_make_rick_santorum_throw_up_.html

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When Evidence Is Powerless

by Salman Hameed

"It seems that for many there is no connection between belief and evidence. If evidence is powerless, what are some other factors that shape their beliefs, and what are the implications for science education?"

Video from TEDxPioneerValley (19 minutes)...

http://youtu.be/i_bpURQrG4Q

mind under matter

Consciousness in the Universe: Neuroscience, Quantum Space-Time Geometry and Orch OR Theory

FEB 05 2012

"Instead [of OR], our criterion for consciousness is Orch OR, conditions for which are fairly stringent: superposition must be isolated from the decoherence effects of the random environment for long enough to reach the DP threshold. Small superpositions are easier to isolate, but require longer reduction times τ. Large superpositions will reach threshold quickly, but are intrinsically more difficult to isolate. Nonetheless, we believe that there is evidence that such superpositions could occur within sufficiently large collections of microtubules in the brain for τ to be some fraction of a second. 

It is our belief that, quite apart from detailed aspects of the physical mechanisms that are involved in the production of consciousness in human brains, quantum mechanics is an incomplete theory. Some completion is needed, and the DP proposal for an OR scheme underlying quantum theory's R-process would be a definite possibility. If such a scheme as this is indeed respected by Nature, then there is a fundamental additional ingredient to our presently understood laws of Nature which plays an important role at the Planck-scale level of space-time structure. The Orch OR proposal takes advantage of this, suggesting that conscious experience itself plays such a role in the operation of the laws of the universe."

Consciousness in the Universe » http://www.quantum-mind.org/Cosmology160.html

The brain’s molecular memory code revealed?

JAN 30 2012

"Generally considered as merely bone-like structural girders, microtubule lattices have also been proposed to process information via dynamic interactive states of tubulins. But any semblance of a common code connecting synaptic activity to microtubule processes has been missing. Until now."

Memory » http://www.quantumconsciousness.org/memory.htm

Stuart Hameroff - Beyond Belief 2006 

Video 1 of 2 » http://youtu.be/RFvaRTJ76A8