Another Sacrifice To The God Of Future Worshippers

Remember, kids, all scientific advance is good because it was created by man. Evil is not a created thing in the scientific community; it is merely the denial of the intentions of science. That's the kind of thinking that leads to things like this:

A mother desperate to have a second child has told how she lost her last IVF embryo when the U.K. National Health Service implanted it into the wrong patient.

When the other woman found out that the embryo was not hers, she aborted it.

Details of the blunder raise fresh questions about the way IVF clinics are regulated.

The Sunday Times has previously revealed that women undergoing fertility treatment have had their eggs fertilized with the wrong sperm.

More and more, I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe in the back of Aldous Huxley's mind.

This is further proof of our culture of death and narcissim, and of the persistent postmodern premise that human life has meaning when we assign it meaning.

"Clearly, Sterility Doesn't Matter Given That Death Is The Desired Outcome."

What's creepier? The fact that our culture is seeking to treat the sick among us like racehorses with broken legs, or that euthanasia is being addressed in such casual terms in a forum like Time Magazine? This, from the article glibly titled "Foolproofing Suicide with Euthanasia Test Kits":

When someone with a terminal illness decides to end his or her life by overdosing on barbiturates, they may hope the drugs will lull them into a peaceful and permanent sleep. But if the drugs have passed their expiration date or lack a sufficiently lethal concentration, the would-be suicide victim may actually survive — risking an array of complications including coma, reduced physical functioning and the opprobrium of disapproving friends and family. Now, in an effort to provide certainty to those contemplating suicide, one of the world's leading euthanasia advocates plans to sell barbiturate-testing kits to confirm that deadly drug cocktails are, in fact, deadly.

"People who are seriously ill don't want to experiment," says Dr. Philip Nitschke, the physician known as Dr. Death for his efforts to legalize euthanasia in his native Australia. "They want to know they have the right concentration of drugs so that if they take them in the suggested way, it will provide them with a peaceful death."

The kits, which will debut in Britain in May and retail for $50, include a syringe that allows users to extract half a milliliter of barbiturate solution without breaking the sanitary seal. "Clearly, sterility doesn't matter given that death is the desired outcome," Nitschke says. But the solution deteriorates slower in a sterile environment, allowing those with painful conditions to "lock it away in the back of the cupboard in case things gets too bad." The extracted sample is then mixed with chemicals from the kit; a color change indicates a lethal solution.

I'm wondering how the ads for this will be worded: "Want to end it all, but hate to leave a gross-looking corpse?" or perhaps "have you tried to kill yourself before, but other assisted suicide kits just didn't get you quite dead enough?"

Mercy.

Dubai Doubles A Dromedary

Five years ago, if I had read a headline like "Dubai Claims World's First Cloned Camel," I would have treated it like an email from a Nigerian businessman. These days, however, anytime I see a story about a woman extracting sperm from her dead son, or someone trying to reanimate a sabretooth tiger, I pretty much take it as gospel.

And unless PhysOrg.com is scamming me, I'm pretty sure that there's now a camel running around some Middle Eastern cage that has the same genetic makeup as another camel that was sold for meat four years earlier.

The only thing that made me think for a second that it was a hoax: the director of the lab that did the deed is named Dr. Lulu Skidmore.

Thank You, Future, For Freaking Us All Out With Gross New Ethical Questions

In my collegiate days, I remember many a coffee-sustained night in many a dorm room and diner wherein my fellow budding intellects and I tackled improbable ethical question after improbable ethical question in the interest of stimulating both our common desire to work our philosophical muscles, and our common interest in The X Files.

I remember pondering questions such as, "when science comes up with ways to replace every human body part incrementally with mechanical parts, at what point does the person cease to have a human soul?", "is it immoral to murder a child zombie?" and "should that lady in The Good Son have let go of Elijah Wood or Macaulay Culkin?"

However, never in our wildest imaginations could we have come up with something as disturbing and ethically befuddling as what one greiving mother is trying to accomplish:

A Texas woman, Missy Evans, has harvested her dead son's sperm and hopes to find a surrogate and one day raise her son's child.

(...)

Nikolas Colton Evans had talked about how much he wanted to have a child, but the 21-year-old died after he was punched and hit his head on the ground in a fight. Evans isn't concerned about what others might think. She says she is only doing what her son would have wanted. "He would love me so much for doing this," she told the Associated Press.

After a doctor told her that nothing more could be done for her son, Missy Evans came up with the idea of harvesting his sperm. She discussed the idea with her ex-husband, her older son and other family members, and said all supported her wish to help a part of Nikolas live on through his future offspring. She said her son once told her he wanted three sons and had already picked out names.

(...)

Evans had to go to court to get permission to harvest his sperm. On Tuesday, a Travis County probate judge granted her wish and ordered that local officials nearly freeze his body so experts could come in and take his sperm to allow a future birth.

Apoloblogology Bioethics Correspondent Dr. Ian Malcom, when reached for comment, had this to say: ""Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever witnessed, yet you wield it like a mom that's harvested her kid's semen."

Babylon Kneels Before Her Digital Master

Not content to rule us merely in the temporal order, it appears that robots are now attempting to conquer the spiritual one as well. At informationageprayer.com, Protestants (as though they were a monolithic body), Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and those who describe themselves as "Unaffiliated" (I can only assume this refers to those who worship at the grocery magazine racks) can submit prayers to be voiced by synthesizers and played on loop. If you're like me, you have lots of questions about this. Fortunately, the FAQ section gives us some semblance of clarity as to how the whole thing works. Here are some excerpts:

-The omniscient God knows exactly who has subscribed and who each prayer is from when their name is displayed on screen and their prayer voiced.

-We use state of the art text-to-speech synthesizers to voice each prayers at a volume and speed equivalent to typical person praying. Each prayer is voiced individually, with the name of the subscriber displayed on screen. If the prayer is for someone else, then that name is displayed on screen instead.

-Prices are determined by the length of the prayer. A discounted prayer will cost less than other prayers of similar length.

And so forth.

Right now, in keeping with the times, the Prayer for Economic Stability is neatly discounted- for only $3.95, you can get a month's worth of robot intercession. But be sure to heed the caveat attached to the prayer, which warns that the subscription is "not an alternative to fiscal responsibility!" If that's outside your means, they're running a special on Hail Mary's at $.07 apiece.

Unfortunately, there's no information on whether or not there's an extra charge if you want to add the phrase "Father God" after every fifth word.

Coming Soon To An Administration Near You

Don't waste your breath seeking which former or current administration to blame. They each have (had) their own favorite rich folk to cater to, at the expense of pretty much everyone else. The situation is (will be?) the same soon enough.

This is why I raise chickens.

Because They're Trying To Figure Out How To Make Cylons

A 'Battlestar Galactica' Panel Discussion At The United Nations

Ubermensch: T Minus Six Months And Counting

Fertility technology has existed for years that allows parents to select the gender of their offspring, typically by mixing sperm and egg in a petri dish and killing all the fertilized embryos that don't meet the criteria of the highly discerning parents' taste in offspring.

However, new technology is on the rise that will allow Frankenparents to select things like eye and hair color for their progeny, much in the way they might edit their Mii profile. Fortunately, at least a few people have noticed this disturbing trend and are saying something about it:

Dr. Jeff Steinberg has already let thousands decide their kids' gender. Now he says that within the next six months, the Manhattan and L.A. offices of his Fertility Institutes will let would-be moms and dads pick whether junior has blue or brown eyes or black or blond hair.

"In the process of doing gender selection ... we've also uncovered the technology [to] characterize things like eye and hair color," said Steinberg, 54.

The idea of a Build-A-Bear style baby was slammed Monday by bioethicists and right-to-life groups - and Pope Benedict has warned against it for years.

The Pope railed against the "obsessive search for the perfect child" just two weekends ago. "A new mentality is creeping in that tends to justify a different consideration of life and personal dignity," he said.

Steinberg countered that reproductive technologies aren't about to go away.

"Genetic health is the wave of the future," he said. "It's already happening and it's not going to go away. It's going to expand. So if they've got major problems with it, they need to sit down and really examine their own consciences because there's nothing that's going to stop it."

(snip)

Steinberg, one of the doctors who helped produce the first test-tube baby, admits the technology isn't 100% - and says for now the best results are with couples of Scandinavian heritage, whose gene pools are the least diluted. (Aryan emphasis mine).

"Say you made seven embryos, and one of them has got the highest chance of green eyes, and that chance is 80%. It's not perfect science because eye and hair color are not perfect genetics," said Steinberg, who opened an office on E. 40th St. two months ago.

Speaking of 80%, that's 11 points below the figure on children diagnosed with Down's Syndrome who never get born. Looks like humanity is willing to put no limits on its self-imposed survival of the fittest.

Reminds us of this gem by pioneering eugenicist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger:

"Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying... demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism ... [Philanthropists] encourage the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it, as I think the reader must agree, a dead weight of human waste...

We are paying for, and even submitting to, the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all."

Farewell, human weeds.

Immanent Destruction Continues To Breathe Down Our Neck

And no, I'm not talking about our downward economic spiral.

Leave it to the British press to express the impending apocalypse in the most artistically appealing way possible:

Autonomous military robots that will fight future wars must be programmed to live by a strict warrior code or the world risks untold atrocities at their steely hands.

The stark warning – which includes discussion of a Terminator-style scenario in which robots turn on their human masters – is issued in a hefty report funded by and prepared for the US Navy’s high-tech and secretive Office of Naval Research .

(snip)

“There is a common misconception that robots will do only what we have programmed them to do,” Patrick Lin, the chief compiler of the report, said. “Unfortunately, such a belief is sorely outdated, harking back to a time when . . . programs could be written and understood by a single person.” The reality, Dr Lin said, was that modern programs included millions of lines of code and were written by teams of programmers, none of whom knew the entire program: accordingly, no individual could accurately predict how the various portions of large programs would interact without extensive testing in the field – an option that may either be unavailable or deliberately sidestepped by the designers of fighting robots.

The solution, he suggests, is to mix rules-based programming with a period of “learning” the rights and wrongs of warfare.

A rich variety of scenarios outlining the ethical, legal, social and political issues posed as robot technology improves are covered in the report. How do we protect our robot armies against terrorist hackers or software malfunction? Who is to blame if a robot goes berserk in a crowd of civilians – the robot, its programmer or the US president? Should the robots have a “suicide switch” and should they be programmed to preserve their lives?

The report, compiled by the Ethics and Emerging Technology department of California State Polytechnic University and obtained by The Times, strongly warns the US military against complacency or shortcuts as military robot designers engage in the “rush to market” and the pace of advances in artificial intelligence is increased.

(snip)

“We are going to need a code,” Dr Lin said. “These things are military, and they can’t be pacifists, so we have to think in terms of battlefield ethics. We are going to need a warrior code.”

Mark my words. Angelina Jolie is going to become self-aware any day now, and when she does, we're all hosed.

“The Day Before Something Is Truly A Breakthrough, It’s A Crazy Idea.”

The latest pie-eyed efforts toward making Skynet self-aware come from two of our all time favorite future-worshipping organizations. Paging John Connor:

Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people.

The new institution, known as “Singularity University”, is to be headed by Ray Kurzweil, whose predictions about the exponential pace of technological change have made him a controversial figure in technology circles.

Google and Nasa’s backing demonstrates the growing mainstream acceptance of Mr Kurzweil’s views, which include a claim that before the middle of this century artificial intelligence will outstrip human beings, ushering in a new era of civilisation.

The so-called “singularity” is a theorised period of rapid technological progress in the near future.

Proponents say that during the singularity, machines will be able to improve themselves using artificial intelligence and that smarter-than-human computers will solve problems including energy scarcity, climate change and hunger.

Yet many critics call the singularity dangerous. Some worry that a malicious artificial intelligence might annihilate the human race.

Mr Kurzweil said the university was launching now because many technologies were approaching a moment of radical advancement. “We’re getting to the steep part of the curve,” said Mr Kurzweil. “It’s not just electronics and computers. It’s any technology where we can measure the information content, like genetics(emphasis mine).”

“We are anchoring the university in what is in the lab today, with an understanding of what’s in the realm of possibility in the future,” said Mr Diamandis, who will be vice-chancellor. “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it’s a crazy idea.”

Not much to say here. I think the story speaks for itself. Nothing like allowing self-aware advanced artificial intelligences to tamper with human genetic material to really get us where we need to be as a race.

Please send your copies of Terminator and The Matrix to:

Singularity University
NASA Research Park, Building 17
MS 566-120, Moffett Field, CA 94035

Prepare To Be Beamed

University of Geneva's Group of Applied Physics has apparently given her all she's got, developing a prototype of an actual teleporter. So far, the physicists have been able to teleport a single photon over four miles. The next step: teleporting an entire molecule, and then on from there. We shall see.

At best, such a device, if modified to transport human beings, could save us from risky situations involving alien life; at worst, we could end up being Mike Teevee'd to a fraction of our actual size. My own guess is that the first efforts to teleport will have mixed results, perhaps akin to those which take place at about the two minute mark in the video below.

A Gift Idea For That Pneumatic Female In Your Brave New World

Gives a whole new meaning to the "(International) Noise Conspiracy's" song, Capitalism Stole my Virginity:

The (gift) certificates (to Planned Parenthood) come in $25 increments. They can be used for everything from birth control to $58 examinations that include breast exams and pap tests. Men who receive healthcare at Planned Parenthood can use them too.

"They can be seen for sexually transmitted disease screenings, HIV tests and general prostate exams and those kinds of things," said Struben-Hall.

Some Hoosiers 24-Hour News 8 talked to asked if the gift certificates could be used towards abortions. The answer is yes. But, Planned Parenthood said that's not the purpose of the gift certificates.

Struben-Hall said, "They really are intended for preventative healthcare. We decided not to put restrictions on the gift certificates so it's for whatever people feel they need the services for most."

Because, in the words of Margaret Sanger herself, "“The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.”

And if you're trying to figure out which special person in your life that you don't want to be reproducing, Ms. Sanger offers this helpful suggestion:

"Negroes and Southern Europeans are mentally inferior to native born Americans."

Happy Black Friday, everyone!

We Are Living In The Freaking Future

Meet Jules. Jules has a special application wherein if you look at him, he can mimic your expressions. If Jules were trying to kill me, and I began to scream in terror, and I saw my own terror reflected in his mechanical visage, I think I would lose all hope.

And he looks eerily like Kevin Spacey.

Less And Less Morally Ambiguous

At a certain point, even radical eugenicists have to realize there's something wrong with creating frankenbabies in labs, only to kill them when they become a nuisance to the convenience of the bourgeiosie:

The Oregon Court of Appeals on Wednesday denied a father's appeal to keep his six frozen embryos alive, and ordered that the embryos be destroyed by thawing, as ordered by his ex-wife. The court also ruled that the embryos' fate fell under the issue of "property rights."

The court unanimously agreed that the father, orthodontist Dr. Darrell Angle, had no right to "impose a genetic parental relationship" on his ex-wife, pediatrician Dr. Laura Dahl, who did not wish to be considered the mother of the preborn children in the event that they were carried to term. Angle, on the other hand, insisted that the embryos were alive and deserved to be protected from destruction.

In 2000, Drs. Angle and Dahl had married and given birth to a son, and in 2004 decided to conceive again via in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment at the Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU). The treatment failed, and six embryos were frozen for indefinite preservation. The agreement signed by both parties named Dahl as the default decision-maker concerning the fate of the embryos, should the couple separate.

When the couple divorced soon after, Dahl indicated that she wished to destroy the embryos because she "did not want anyone else to raise her child," and also feared that the child might one day contact his or her sibling, Dahl's naturally-conceived son.

Is this even real? God help us.

Welcome To The Brave New World

Does nobody else think that it's crazy that we live in a world where there's such a thing as the Donor Sibling Registry?

The focus of the Donor Sibling Registry (DSR) is to assist individuals conceived as a result of sperm, egg or embryo donation who are seeking to make mutually desired contact with others with whom they share genetic ties. This may include:

Their own or their child's half-siblings, or

their own or their child's sperm or egg donor, or

their own genetic offspring.

The DSR fully supports openness, honesty and the acknowledgement of these family connections. We realize, however, that some folks may want to remain anonymous while sharing important medical or genetic information with their fellow "donor families". For these people, we suggest using a throw away untraceable email address.

Egg, sperm or embryo donors who are willing to have contact with the children born as a result of their donations are VERY WELCOME! Even if you do not know your donor number, it is still possible to search and be found.

Here's a question: what happens if two people, descendents from the same sperm donor through different mothers, fall in love without realizing they're related, and get married, and it's later discovered that they're related, can their marriage be declared illegal?

The Lights Are Back On

After Sunday's maelstrom, we in the Cincinnati area are beginning to finally be back in business, electricity wise. My place of employment went back online around 1:30 this morning. The humble Hartwell Homestead still remains electricity-free.

I, for one, must express my slight disappointment at the fact that we're getting the power back. These days of no electricity have been some of the most peaceful in recent memory. Odd how when there aren't televisions, ipods, computers, and cell phones to monopolize our every waking moment, people actually hang out with their neighbors. Call me crazy, but I sort of wish the Duke Energy people would have been more relaxed in their approach to Cincinnati's own localized experience of Hurricane Ike.

(That's right, I said HURRICANE Ike. He hit the tri-state Sunday afternoon with Category 1 strength.)

Went to a Panera across town yesterday just to check things out. It was a veritable laptop-fest, as young and middle aged professionals clamored for their respective pieces of the wi-fi pie. One person recounted how on Monday, two such customers were thrown out of the place because one of them, furious that he had as yet been (gasp) Unable To Check His Email, unplugged another person's power source, sparking a heated altercation that, from anecdotal reports, nearly escalated to fisticuffs.

In this great, prosperous and civilized nation, I've come to the conclusion that we are roughly five to seven telecommunications-free days away from total barbarism.

"Send a solar flare, Jesus..."

Humankind To Blow Up World

Skynet becoming self aware, the power going out at Jurassic park, and HAL shutting the pod bay doors combined could not equal the possible man-made catastrophe that awaits the world when a real live Doomsday Machine is switched on in Switzerland tomorrow.

That's right. A freaking Doomsday Machine.

London's Evening Standard reports:

The £5billion Large Hadron Collider aims to recreate the conditions moments after the Big Bang that created the universe.

To do this, a massive 27km tunnel has been constructed under countryside in France and Switzerland near Geneva, which will be used to smash protons together at 99.99 per cent of the speed of light.

And from Yahoo! News:

Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho (have) filed suit in U.S. and European courts to stop the L(arge) H(adron) C(ollider). Their theory is that the LHC will produce micro black holes and "stranglets" that may not decay as rapidly as mainstream physics predicts.

"Any miniature black hole created at rest in a collider would essentially be trapped in Earth's gravitational field, and over seconds to hours, slowly interact and acquire more mass," Wagner says on his LHCDefense.org Web site.

Basically, by using a super collider to recreate the big bang underneath Switzerland, these scientists run the risk of creating a giant black hole bigger than the black hole that rich people have already discovered in the Swiss banking system.

However, Apoloblogology Cosmological Correspondent Steven Hawking isn't buying any of it:

Stephen Hawking has bet 100 dollars (70 euros) that a mega-experiment this week will not find an elusive particle seen as a holy grail of cosmic science, he said Tuesday.

"The LHC will increase the energy at which we can study particle interactions by a factor of four. According to present thinking, this should be enough to discover the Higgs particle," Hawking told BBC radio.

"I think it will be much more exciting if we don't find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again. I have a bet of 100 dollars that we won't find the Higgs," added Hawking, whose books including "A Brief History of Time" have sought to popularise study of stellar physics.

The Higgs particle is in other circles referred to as the "God particle," the thing that the infallible information agents at Wikipedia have referred to as "massless," "the only Standard Model particle not yet observed" and the thing that "if it exists... is an integral and pervasive component of the material world."

Dude. Seriously. We Christians have believed in a massless, scientifically unobservable, integral, pervasive, universe creating force since the beginning. And we're not dumb enough to think we can command it, which has never stopped some of us from trying. I guess everybody wants to play God in one sense or another.

Coming Soon: Cloak Of Invisibility

Leave it to the military to come up with stuff that scares the daylights out of me.

Maybe I should rephrase that:

Leave it to the military to come up with stuff that bends the daylights around me:

Xiang Zhang, the leader of the researchers, said: “In the case of invisibility cloaks or shields, the material would need to curve light waves completely around the object like a river flowing around a rock.” An observer looking at the cloaked object would then see light from behind it – making it seem to disappear.

Substances capable of achieving such feats are known as “meta-materials” and have the power to “grab” electromagnetic radiation and deflect it smoothly. No such material occurs naturally and it is only in the past few years that nano-scale engineering, manipulating matter at the level of atoms and molecules, has advanced sufficiently to give scientists the chance to create them.

Memo to the ancient art of Ninjitsu: you are about to become obsolete.

By the way, before the cloak of invisibility became a scientific phenomenon, it was attempted by the First Earth Battalion as a psychic phenomenon. No joke.

Freakish New Technology Allows Robots To Read The Minds Of Humans

From Japan (not surprisingly) comes the latest in an ongoing series of us delivering our fates into the mechanical digits of our future robotic rulers:

"Rolling your eyes to turn up the volume of a portable music player and tapping your fingers to turn on a DVD player are among technologies Japan's top mobile carrier is testing for "wearable" gadgets.

[snip]

In a demonstration Tuesday for the Associated Press, researcher Hiroyuki Manabe wore a giant headset covered with wires to show how computer graphic lines in a monitor connected to the headset darted wildly whenever his eyes moved.

He turned up the volume on a digital music player by rolling his eyes, and he jerked his eyes twice to the right to fast forward.

Not included in the article were the future Matthew Chapter Five-esque implications of pursuing such technologies to their logical end. What happens when one thinks murderously of one's brother, and his or her robotic headgear interprets such a brainwave as an order, resulting in the vaporization of said opponent? On we slip down the slippery slope of cat-killing technological curiosity...

For The Love Of God, Don't Try This At Home

Deepest apologies for the above image, but it unfortunately applies.

A Scottish scientist is warning other scientists and legislators about the possible fallout that might result from experimentation with human sperm and chimpanzee eggs. According to Dr. Callum McKellar (who wins the Awesome Scottish Name Of The Day Award), were a human to mate with a chimpanzee, the DNA are close enough to where a hybrid could result from the union.

When reached for comment, Apoloblogology Field Correspondent Dr. Ian Malcolm stated, "Yes first it's 'ooh, aah, look at the Manpanzee,' but then there's screaming, and yelling, and running..."

Does anyone else get the feeling that this was addressed in Leviticus? I feel like a couple verses after "you shall not boil a young goat in its mother's milk" there has to be something to the effect of "you shall not mate with another species that shares 98.5% of your DNA..."