David Smucker on Breaking the Light

Lloyd takes long, complex exposures in New York City’s streets at night with his handheld 35 mm Canon digital camera. Far from static and serene cityscapes, his photographs exuberantly embrace the energy of the city and its inhabitants. The word embrace, though, doesn’t fully cover what’s going on in these photos. These works are a dance with light. Trusting an intuitive response to the cadences of the patterns of lights illuminating the city, Lloyd moves himself and his camera in time to their unseen rhythms. Each exposure done this way is unpredictable, made in a kind of wild and blind trance. Lloyd must surrender to the power of light as it tears though the darkness. In his dance he follows the light, enabling it to reveal its secrets to him.

The Big Bang that Fizzled or, Hell no! No Big Bang

Cosmologist Sean Carroll gave a TED talk Distant time and the hint of a multiverse. He said “The universe is really big. We live in a galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy. There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. Every one of these (little blobs) is a galaxy roughly the size of our Milky Way — a hundred billion stars in each of those. There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. . .”
“What you have to think about is we have a universe with a hundred billion galaxies, and a hundred billion stars each. At early times, those hundred billion galaxies were squeezed into a region about this big – (literally a pinpoint) — at early times.

Ads and Myths About Quick Alzheimer Cures

Prevention, of course, is vital early in life. In my book SECRETS OF ETERNAL YOUTH, we study the newest information about brain plasticity. In 1995 it was discovered that our brains, contrary to previous beliefs, can grow new neurons all of our lives. The major factors that keep are brains young and even make them younger are diet, exercise, curiosity, learning and attitude. (Editor’s Note: SECRETS OF ETERNAL YOUTH will be available in the summer of 2016)

How does healthcare economics in the U.S. differ from traditional economics?

The concept of supply and demand is the cornerstone of economic theory. For simple commodities, the theory predicts that the demand for a product decreases as the price of the product increases and consumers are unwilling to pay the higher price. The supply increases as the price increases and suppliers increase production to capture increased profits. The actual price of the product is a compromise between the desires of consumers and the acumen of suppliers.

Clinical Trials in the Era of Personalized Medicine

Excerpts from the book Confronting Complexity X-Events, Resilience, and Human Progress by John L. Casti Roger D. Jones Michael J. Pennock preface table-of-contents Click to Buy Paperback E-Book Bundled The cost of sequencing an individual human genome is rapidly dropping below $1000. Much of the population can now easily access the details of their susceptibility…

The Patient-Driven Drug Pipeline

The new-drug pipeline is a mere shadow of its former blockbusting self. Despite the fact that R&D expenditures have been increasing over the last several years, the number of drugs in the pipeline has been decreasing. There have been many proposed explanations for this:

Quantum Entanglement Redux

The notes below from Wired Magazine (Jan. 2011) shed light on how BREAKING THE LIGHT images are made through an interaction with light photons called quantum entanglement. Each image is made during a single time exposure with a hand held camera. While the shutter is closed I am “blind” to the multi-colored lights where I am shooting. The camera does a “quantum dance” that guides it movements. These excerpts shed light on how my “blind” eye influences my other open eye and vice-versa through quantum entanglement. The robin’s eyes, through a layer of cryptochrome at the retina, are theorized in this article to have quantum entanglement with the earth’s very weak magnetic field.

Healthcare Patents and Hot-Dog Vendors

While patents on medical devices seem normal, patents on drugs and chemical entities may seem like a stretch. I am not sure that the law makers in Venice in 1474, who invented the legal concept of a patent, envisioned the need to patent molecules. In fact, molecules were not even envisioned at that time. We all know that a patent allows an inventor time to commercialize his or her product, but are patents really needed for the economic viability of healthcare? Shouldn’t healthcare be all about saving lives and promoting health and not about making money on people who desperately need healthcare? Do patents have a benefit to patients, not just the patent holders? I think the answer to this question is “perhaps.” Patents promote diversity of products in the healthcare market place by forcing inventors to develop drugs outside the domain of currently patented products.

How the World Works

Excerpts from the book Confronting Complexity X-Events, Resilience, and Human Progress by John L. Casti Roger D. Jones Michael J. Pennock preface table-of-contents Click to Buy Paperback E-Book Bundled     Watch the video.

Rancho de Taos Church

This immense block of church masonry and metaphysical undercurrents stands like a monolith at the approach to Taos, a guardian angel strangely looming out of the road, Ayers rock in miniature, but not in any way inferior to the gigantic red monolith in the Australian desert. A titan’s block, immoveable and immeasurable, an omniscient god looks out from the windowless adobe pueblo inhabited by the spirits of the ancestors, the Anasazi who vanished around eleven hundred A.D., long before the Rancho de Taos church was built.

Musings of a Curious Atheist: What does the Bible say about life after death?

Election season is the time that the crazies come out. We have seen the serial adulterer and Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis, thumb her nose at the law of the land by refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. She says she wants to uphold the sanctity of marriage as specified by her religion. There is the ironic case of the mistake of a 14 year-old Muslim geek for a bomb-making terrorist in Irving, Texas. The mayor of Irving is the woman who is trying to protect the U.S. from Sharia law. In older news, Joe Barton (R-Texas), says that man had no effect on climate change because the Great Flood was climate change and man-made hydrocarbons were not involved in that extreme event. The 2012 Republican Party of Texas platform declared that critical thinking should be discouraged in Texas schools—they threaten long-held beliefs. (If it looks like I am picking on Texas, it is just because they are such an easy target.)