Per Ardua Ad Astra

For those of us that visit Jason’s pseudoblog, you would doubtless be well acquainted with his entry on evolution, and the entry generated quite some feedback. It’s supposed to be an anomaly, since nobody ‘in their right mind’ visits it, but yet foreseeable by looking at the amount of debate generated in the Internet. Perhaps, perhaps I need to eke myself further out on controversial issues to generate more comments on my site. But however, comments or no comments, part of my vision of blogging is to fight the evils of misinformation and fundamentalism out there by presenting facts as impartially as possible. Now, enough of me talking about my lofty aims.

As I was saying, while they’re busy trying to make sense of what Romanticism is and how Evolution really shapes us in the pseudoblog, I came across a couple of pieces on the origins of life itself. So here is more facts for thought. The first was an analysis by The Economist, ‘In the beginning…’ on the current scientific school of thoughts on how life came to being. Nothing new in particular, if you’ve been reading the related chapter in Biological Science 2 (the first half of the analysis has already been elaborated on in the text), so it can serve as a refresher (or crash course) in getting to know the current lines of thought on how the first molecules of life came into being.

The other, a lengthy article in Discover titled ‘Unintelligent Design’ presents a new view of particles that exist in between the worlds of living and non-living objects. Apparently, viruses, or Latin for ‘poisonous slime’, could be our ultimate ‘mother cell’ of all life! How ironic. These ‘unliving’ crystalline particles which propagates by hijacking nuclei (and eventually killing the living cell) are actually the precursors of life itself. Their simplicity, and the fact that segments of our genome contain viral DNA, seems to be the irrefutable proof of this conjecture. Well, regardless of how this postulate turns out, the distinction of life and non-life is now completely blurred out by viruses. That’s because they just found the largest virus ever, one that can be seen under a light microscope! Imagine, from the nanoscale to the microscale! Must be like discovering that Jupiter and the Sun are the same.

Next, healthy chocolate bars! Unfortunately, we’re still better off eating vegetables and fruits (and it’s still cheaper!). What a bummer. BTW, it’s not the cocoa that’s unhealthy; it’s what they add to make chocolate bars. My conclusion? Go eat bittersweet chocolate.

Want more healthy stuff? Look, natural cures! Wait, look again. Just another one of those people out to get your cash whatever the cost. It was funny though, seeing how Michael Shermer sarcastically goes through some of the recommendations made in the book.

Gotten sick of those ‘healthy’ promotionals? Wait till you hear this, research that is actually fun to read! Darn those researchers, getting paid to count teaspoons! Too bad they can’t tell us quantitatively if buying Harry Potter books can reduce medical expenses by the same amount or more.

And for a little of foreign relations, the US is courting India by offering them a membership into the official nuclear club (I assume that everybody knows the 5 members). So that’s why Chirac is in New Delhi (but then, who cares?). If you ask me, that’s one step close to having India on the UN Security Council. The other leading Asian candidate IMO, Japan seems further from getting their seat on the UNSC. They just don’t get the point of apologising. Hopefully, it wouldn’t get to the point where ‘Sorry is not enough’. So far, India seems to be a more benign (except, perhaps in China and Pakistan’s POV) and responsible caretaker of atomic weapons (unlike Iran and Pakistan), so it’s good place for that country to start emerging as a world player. Now, if only they continue keeping their hands away from the red button …

It’s another failure for the NPT, but at least there is no major arms race sparked off anywhere, and nobody is threatening to nuke anyone yet. Except Iran,openly hostile in an already volatile region. Not my problem, I hear you say? Go Iran, nuke Israel! I don’t care! You know why you should care? If the day comes when somebody throws sanctions or bomb Iran, you could be walking and having candle-lit nights the next. It’s a bit on the exaggerating side, but if the crude oil and gasoline prices shoot up as predicted in such a situation, your mamak trips, MSN chatting, DoTA sessions, anime watching sessions are going to be in danger of being severely curtailed. Now that is going to be a little personal, I bet.

lol, to end by dispensing a little doom and gloom. Happy pondering!

P.S. Ben, that’s a darned good entry on the cartoon issue! For some reason, when you said  ‘wearing a turban and wielding a sword while shouting Allahu Akbar’ this came to my mind.

Copyright Time.com

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