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[29 May 2008|12:08am] |
uh...do i actually have friends that would be willing to see the sex and the city movie with me? or is that asking too much?
seeing as most of my friends are
a) male,
b) not shallow, or
c) both
i probably am asking too much.
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[27 May 2008|03:51pm] |
j. robert oppenheimer was the leader of the manhattan project during WWII; the project's objective was to design and build american bombs. john archibald wheeler was the head scientist in charge of designing and constructing the nuclear reactors from which the plutonium-239 for nagasaki was made. they both expressed deep anguish over their work, but for completely different reasons:
oppenheimer: "If atomic bombs are to be added to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the name of Los Alamos and Hiroshima…In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”
wheeler: "As I look back on [1939 and my fission theory work with Bohr], I feel a great sadness. How did it come about that I looked on fission first as a physicist and only secondarily as a citizen?…A simple survey of the records shows that between twenty and twenty-five million people perished in WWII and more of them in the later years than in the earlier years. Every month by which the war was shortened would have meant a saving of the order of half a million to a million lives. Among those granted life would have been my brother Joe, killed in October 1944 in the Battle for Italy. What a difference it would have made if the critical date had been not August 6, 1945 but August 6, 1943."
i find myself sympathizing with oppenheimer, but wheeler makes an interesting point. also, oppenheimer knew full well that the soviets were also attempting to develop atomic weapons--so was he just very naive?
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THE DE SILVA FAMFAM GOES TO ALASKA?! OHHHH SHIIIIIIIIT
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[26 May 2008|01:25pm] |
First of all:
I am tired.
I am true of heart!
And also:
You are tired.
You are true of heart!
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[25 May 2008|01:13pm] |
this article (http://www.tnr.com/currentissue/story.html?id=d8731cf4-e87b-4d88-b7e7-f5059cd0bfbd) seems pretty important.
Cloning is confused with resurrecting the dead or mass-producing babies. Longevity becomes "immortality," improvement becomes "perfection," the screening for disease genes becomes "designer babies" or even "reshaping the species." The reality is that biomedical research is a Sisyphean struggle to eke small increments in health from a staggeringly complex, entropy-beset human body. It is not, and probably never will be, a runaway train.
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