Welcome to the SMN Blog
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Currently the blog contains 112 entries.
Has Atlantis been found? No
Last week the papers ran a story about Bernie Bamford, an aeronautical engineer, who was browsing Google Ocean, and found a rectangle on the sea floor, criss crossed with lines and right angles, about the size of Wales, in the middle of the Atlantic (see picture). It looks like a city grid, and he gave the image to the media, suggesting that maybe it could be the long lost city of Atlantis. The myth of Atlantis, a civilisation that is said to have sunk into the sea 12,000 years ago, is an enduring one. And the image correspondingly got some serious press coverage in tabloids and broadsheets alike.
But the debunkers came along and said that in fact it was just 'ship tracks' from the kind of echosounding process that is used to map the ocean floor.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/atlantis-no-it-atlant-isnt.html
So Atlantis hasn't been found yet. But the story does point towards the fact that with so much data about the world, the oceans and universe, now available to everyone in their own living room, by way of the internet, perhaps it is going to be someone like Bernie who makes the next big scientific discovery. Will someone browsing Google Earth spot Nessie or a family of yetis? Maybe not. But there's no doubt that we are all discoverers now if we want to be.
SMN
Some thoughts on Poletti and purpose
"In the past 150 years since Darwin, we've discovered amazing things. We've discovered the big bang. We've discovered DNA. We've discovered that we live in a 14-billion-year evolutionary event that has formed massive galaxies, including our own Milky Way. We've discovered that our Earth is about 5 billion years old and that bacteria have lived on the Earth for 2 billion years. We've discovered that hominids are about 5 million years old, that Homo sapiens are about 150,000 years old, and that civilization is about 5,000 years old. We've discovered that who we are is the product of an immense evolutionary journey...
Geert Wilders and the fundamentalist reaction to fundamentalist Islam
Yesterday, Britain refused entry to Geert Wilders, a far right Dutch MP. He was turned away at Heathrow. My initial reaction was that by doing this the government created a media storm and huge publicity for this man when there needn't have been any serious coverage. I read that he had created a film called Fitna about Islam and that it was on the internet. So wondering what all the fuss was about, I did a quick Google search and started watching it. What I saw was exactly the response that the West does not want to islamic fundamentalism - a twisted, propogandising, fundamentalist piece of video. It interspersed passages from the Koran with shocking images of people being beheaded by terrorists, children of fundamentalist muslims saying on camera that they thought Jews were pigs, and the de facto shots of planes and towers. This is then paraded as evidence that Islam is an evil religion.
Review of How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body by David Hamilton
With his background in the pharmaceutical industry where he worked as a biochemist, David Hamilton builds a bridge between mind and body in this well-informed book. The first part reviews scientific studies showing that the mind can heal the body in terms of positive thinking, belief, the placebo effect, visualisation and affirmation. The second part tells the stories of people who have successfully used their minds to heal themselves of cancer, heart conditions, pain, viruses and chronic fatigue. Each story is followed by a commentary saying why the technique seem to have worked in this particular case. An appendix gives suggestions for a wide range of conditions. The whole is a balanced blend of science and human experience. All his work is underpinned by a passionate belief in the power of love, which includes gratitude and
kindness. A wise doctor is said to told a younger colleague than the best medicine is love, and if it doesn't work, then the dose should be doubled.
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