I saw this quotation on a Starbucks cup a while back and thought it was worth posting.

The Way I See it #289

So called “global warming” is just a secret ploy by wacko treehuggers to make America energy independent, clean our air and water, improve the fuel efficiency of our vehicles, kick-start 21st-century industries, and make our cities safer and more livable. Don’t let them get away with it!

-Chip Giller, founder of grist.org, where environmentally minded people gather online.

I recently ran across Virtual Parks, a cool website where users have uploaded interactive 360 degree panoramas from different national and state parks, mostly in California. Here are some of my favorites:

Mt. Whitney summit.
Yosemite Falls.
Guitar Lake (on the western side of Mt. Whitney).

Before going to sleep, Carey and I set an alarm for 2:45am so we could get up and see the full lunar eclipse this morning. The Moon was nearly full and provided a wonderful show. Given all the light pollution that comes with having 10 million neighbors, it was one of the few astronomical phenomena we can appreciate within the city. Did you get a chance to see the eclipse?

This story and picture about physicist Stephen Hawking taking a zero-G flight made me smile.

Given the predicted value of stem cells as well as the heated ethical debate behind them, I’m surprised that this story isn’t all over the front pages: “Report: Amniotic Fluid Yields Stem Cells.”

Researchers at Wake Forest University and Harvard University reported Sunday that the stem cells they drew from amniotic fluid donated by pregnant women hold much the same promise as embryonic stem cells.

They reported they were able to extract the stem cells from the fluid, which cushions babies in the womb, without harm to mother or fetus and turn their discovery into several different tissue cell types, including brain, liver and bone.

From the World AIDS Day website facts page:

Internationally, 40 million people live with HIV worldwide and with only 8% of people with the virus in developing countries having access to treatment there were 3 million deaths in 2005. However, unprecedented top-level agreements since 2000, (UNGASS, Africa Commission, G8) and the roll out of treatment to 1.3 million people in developing countries have been important steps forward.

A while back Carey and I saw an episode of the PBS show Bill Moyers on Faith & Reason. In it Moyers interviewed novelist Salman Rushdie and it was one of the most interesting exchanges I had seen in a long time. Rushdie, an avowed atheist who strongly defends the freedom of speech offers several challenging ideas. As a religious person, I found Rushdie’s opinions surprising and hopeful. I recommend the interview highly, especially for those interested in the role of faith in the public sphere. I don’t necessarily agree with Rushdie on all points, but he is engaging on nearly every topic. You can watch the interview here. I watched other interviews online and also recommend the interview with Sir John Houghton, a well-respected scientist who discusses how he sees his Christian faith and scientific pursuits as compatible. That interview can be seen here. The interviews are about an hour each and I think show why we benefit from public television since I can’t think of another television venue where such conversations would be given the depth and time they find here.

The Los Angeles Times reports, “King/Drew Fails Final U.S. Test.”

Federal regulators notified Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center late Friday that it had failed what was billed as a “make or break” inspection and would lose annual funding of about $200 million — more than half the hospital’s budget — at the end of the year.

The move is likely to force Los Angeles County to close the long-troubled public hospital, give it to someone else to run or turn it into a clinic, as officials have repeatedly acknowledged.

During a lengthy meeting, federal inspectors told King/Drew officials that the hospital still did not meet minimum patient-care standards.

King/Drew has been out of compliance with federal guidelines since January 2004, when it was first cited for serious lapses in care that had injured and killed patients.

During the latest inspection, the hospital failed nine of the government’s 23 conditions for federal funding, according to a letter from the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that was hand-delivered Friday to King/Drew’s administrator.

Federal regulators identified problems in nursing, pharmacy, infection control, surgical services, rehabilitation services, quality control, patients’ rights and the hospital’s governing body and physical plant.

In fact, inspectors found more problems in the supposedly reformed King/Drew than they had at any time in the last three years. Some of the life-threatening lapses cited were nearly identical to those found in the past.

For instance, the letter said, “there were no appropriately trained and competent staff, on the 3E unit, assigned to watch the heart monitors of seriously ill patients who required cardiorespiratory monitoring. This is especially troublesome, because previously documented cases showed that patients died when nurses at King/Drew failed to heed heart monitor warnings.”

For those who don’t know, King/Drew has been in trouble for years now (The Los Angeles Times won a Pulitzer Prize for their series “The Troubles at King/Drew” a couple of years ago.) Today’s article gives a good summation of its prominence in the community:

The 252-bed hospital south of Watts is one of the few sources of acute healthcare for the uninsured in South Los Angeles, most of them African American or Latino. King/Drew has enormous symbolic value as well: It was created to remedy racial inequities in healthcare after the 1965 Watts riots and has long been a source of pride — and jobs — in the community.

The AP reports, “Astronomers say Pluto is not a planet.”

Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

Textbooks will need to be rewritten.

“Faithful to God, Science,” by Stephanie Simon is a great story in today’s Los Angeles Times about Francis Collins, the scientist who headed the Human Genome Project. He is also a devout Christian, believing in both the God of the Bible and evolution, for which he draws heat from all sides. I find I resonate greatly with Collins.

He urges his fellow scientists to give up the arrogant assumption that the only questions worth asking are those science can answer. He entreats his fellow believers to recognize it’s not blasphemous to learn about the world.

One day last summer, in the basement office of his suburban home here, Collins dictated this manifesto into a tape recorder: “Science is not threatened by God; it is enhanced. God is most certainly not threatened by science; He made it all possible.” It became the central thesis of his book — with this addendum: “Abandon the battlements.”

These statements are somewhat reminiscent of something Dieterich Bonhoeffer wrote (I read this in A Year With Dieterich Bonhoeffer, 214):

Weizsacker’s book The World View of Physics is still keeping me very busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stopgap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that’s bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know; God wants us to realize the divine presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. That is true of the relationship between God and scientific knowledge, but it is also true of the wider human problems of death, suffering, and guilt.