McCain: Iraq-Pakistani Border???

Does this presidential candidate even know what he's talking about? This guy could probably be worse than our current C-in-C!! Do these guys give nothing but empty rhetoric??
Disturbing................... >:)

Racism well & truly alive in Parliament by KTemoc (http://ktemoc.blogspot.com/2008/07/racism-well-truly-alive-in-parliament.html )

Racism well & truly alive in Parliament

Note the wordings in the headlines of Malaysiakini news article Another shouting match over racism in the House!

Yes, that’s right, it says “Another …….. over racism in … House” ;-)

No worries, racism is still well and truly alive, as a matter of fact, kicking quite vigorously too.

What happened started with Nazri Abdul Aziz, the Minister in the PM's Department, announcing that non-bumiputeras are entitled to JPA (Public Service Department) scholarships.

Knowing that the word ‘entitled’ doesn’t mean much unless it’s spelt out in fine print, my heroine, sweetie Fong Po Kuan, asked precisely for that – namely, what’s the quota of the JPA scholarships for each ethnic group.

‘Quotas’ are very important as we all know – we are still trying to achieve 30% economic equity for bumiputeras.

Two years ago it went up to 45% and then, subjected to strong gravitational 'forces', plummeted down to 19%; in fact the figure porpoised for a fair while - see Bumi Equity - a Never Ending Story - with various figures in between including a 2002 university study by Dr M Fazilah, in which she pronounced:

“Nevertheless, the percentage of corporate equity owned by bumiputeras fluctuated between 16 percent in 1999 to 22 percent in 1995 and reached the NEP target only in 1997.”

That’s right, Dr Fazilah said: Bumi equity surpassed 30% TEN YEARS ago

Anyway, back to Parliament, otherwise known as the Monkey House.

At this stage (when Fong asked for more details about the ethnic share of the JPA scholarships) Tajuddin Abdul Rahman (Umno-Pasir Salak) stood up and shouted: "The constitution is clear on bumiputera rights and we can't compromise that. No more compromises!"

Huh? I didn't realize the Constitution mentions JPA scholarships?

So all hell broke loose with the inevitable shouts of racism ringing loud across the so-called august House wakakaka.

Tajuddin then condemned the government’s new policy on the JPA scholarships as a ‘populist’ decision but obviously to him, not a ‘popular’ one.

Despite several DAP MPs protesting, Tajuddin was unrepentant, shouting: "This is Malay rights. I have met several cabinet ministers and they agreed me with me that scholarships should only be reserved for Malays. There should be no compromises!”

Hmmm, no longer bumiputera rights? Only Malay rights?

Kulasegaran interjected: “This is racist!”

Tajuddin retorted: "You shut up! You shut up! I have children studying in England, Ireland and Australia and they have no scholarships. But I want rural Malays and lower income groups - even in Sabah and Sarawak - to get scholarships, like what is said in the constitution!”

He sounded like some comments on my blog, I mean the 'shut up' bit ;-)

Kulasegaran: “In Pasir Salak, are there no Chinese and Indians?”

… perhaps implying that in the next election, the Chinese and Indians should not vote for Tajuddin.

Maybe Tajuddin panicked leow and resorted to hitting below the belt by labelling Kulasegaran a Hindraf supporter.

He shouted: “You think you are so smart? Penyokong Hindraf! Penyokong Hindraf! (Hindraf supporter! Hindraf supporter!) Anti-Malaysia.”

Then the man who thinks 50-year old women are no longer good enough for men to have ‘fun’ with, dear Ibrahim Ali (Independent-Pasir Mas) said: “I support the Chinese and Indian communities. For them, set up foundations. But what’s written in the constitution is that the right to scholarships are only for Malays and bumiputera.”

;-) this bloke sure wants his cake and eat it as well. But we notice that apart from intimate knowledge on the age of women to have fun with, he's also another constitutional expert.

… by which time it was obvious House deputy speaker Ronald Kiandee had lost control of the Monkey House (hmmm, I wonder whether he was engrossed in playing sudoka under the speaker's desk?), because anak jantan Tajuddin challenged Kulasegaran to settle the issue outside the hall.

After the furore died down with the session over, a Tajuddin outside the House (no, he didn’t silat Kulasegaran), defended his verbal assaults on Kulasegaran. He said: "I'm not racist.”

Now, who would have thought he was - wakakaka

Continuing: “I've stated it before, if you want to help the non-Malay students, especially those who are doing well in their studies, by all means do it. But why not do it in such a way that is not at the expense of bumiputera students because if we do that, we will fail in our national integration and unity."

'National integration and unity' by marginalising non-Malay ethnic groups, especially the much marginalized Indians?

But my Penang larng Chong Eng opined: "Pasir Salak is racist. He is defending a racist policy. On the other hand, we are opposing a racist policy and yet we are called racists."

And cutie Fong said that racist remarks in the House have gotten worse in recent times, saying: “He (Tajuddin) speaks as though his constituency is 100 percent Malay. He speaks as though non-Malays are non-existent in this country. When you get elected, you should speak for everyone.”

Aiyah, I have arrived at the end of my post and forgotten to include a certain someone ;-)

See photo below for the true Maha-Dewa (he's walking last, in the place of honour!) wakakaka

copyright: ktemoc ( http://ktemoc.blogspot.com/)

Hear the one about Obama?

Hear the one about Obama?

Published: July 19 2008 03:00 | Last updated: July 19 2008 03:00

As Barack Obama prepared to leave for Europe this week, Americans fretted over why they can't seem to make jokes about him. One explanation is that he's just too wonderful - "not buffoonish in any way", as one tongue-tied comedian put it in a press account. But surely that can be fixed. What is the internet for, after all, if not to humiliate public figures who have done nothing to deserve it? Another explanation is that Mr Obama is lucky to be black at a time when white people are skittish about cracking racial jokes. True enough, but Mr Obama is more than just a black person.

He is also, for example, a stingy person, according to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times. How stingy is he? Why, he's so stingy that, in campaign headquarters, the first time you put your hand under the electric towel dispenser you get a towel. The second time, you get a message to go see David Plouffe, the tight-fisted campaign manager. Or so the joke goes. Are you laughing? No? Not even a tiny bit? Then we are getting closer to the real problem: there are plenty of jokes about Barack Obama; there just aren't any good jokes about Barack Obama. And that is because of the obstacles that partisanship has raised to political humour.

The occasion for America's comedic soul-searching was the latest dud joke, a New Yorker cover that aimed to elicit a partisan chuckle against Mr Obama's foes. In it, Mr Obama and his wife Michelle are pictured in the Oval Office, he wearing a turban, she in combat fatigues, both of them warmed by an American flag burning in the fireplace. It has infuriated Obama supporters without titillating anybody else. "I understand if Senator Obama and his supporters would find it offensive," candidate John McCain was quick to say. That was the gracious and decent thing to say, of course, but it was also exactly what Machiavelli would have said. The cartoon is offensive only to the extent that it is thought plausible.

The problem with the cartoon is not that it violated the amour propre of the Obama camp or bumped up against any taboos about race but that it was an artistic failure. First, its message was alien to its genre. The cartoonist, Barry Blitt, assured readers he was mocking certain "ridiculous" paranoid attitudes about the Obamas, not the Obamas themselves. But a picture cannot convey the mental states of people who are not in it, any more than a sculpture can rhyme.

Second, the visual cues Mr Blitt used were ambiguous. The Somali turban he drew on Mr Obama was the one he'd worn in a 2006 photo of an African visit, reportedly released by the Hillary Clinton campaign to embarrass him. Is Mrs Clinton one of the paranoids assailed? Is it just Republicans? Or is it an attack on gullible Middle Americans of all descriptions? As Wolf Blitzer, the CNN reporter, put it: "There are going to be a lot of people who are not sophisticated New Yorker magazine readers who don't necessarily appreciate the satire."

Understanding the cartoon requires sharing the New Yorker's prejudices, not its sophistication. Without a prior understanding that the magazine is hostile to the paranoid style in American politics and well-disposed towards the Obamas, the cartoon is unintelligible. This problem would never have come up 20 years ago, when the only people who read the New Yorker were subscribers. But today, billions of people are a mouse-click away from being New Yorker "readers". Enough clicks and the cartoon begins to convey the opposite of what it meant to. Under the influence of a hyperdemocratic medium like the internet, you can't say anything to anyone that won't be heard by everyone.

The overthrow of "elite" media makes humour harder to practise, because humour is always a collusion of some people against others - "an understanding, almost a complicity, with other laughers", as Henri Bergson wrote in 1899. Through the fear it inspires, laughter represses eccentricities. It breaks up pockets of resistance to the social consensus. Something is comic when it is rigid, inflexible, mechanical, at odds with the social graces. "And laughter," Bergson wrote, "is its punishment."

Comedy resembles politics more than we think - it provides people with identities by providing them with enemies. And it is scurrilous, defamatory politics that comedy resembles most. As politics grows more partisan, the line between humour and sloganeering blurs. During the primaries, the comedy show Saturday Night Live did an oppressively unfunny skit that showed debate moderators favouring Mr Obama. It became well-known when Mrs Clinton crowed about it in a debate. In other words, it failed as a joke but succeeded as propaganda and few Americans could tell the difference. Mrs Clinton then tried to accuse Mr Obama of borrowing oratory from the Massachusetts governor, Deval Patrick, saying what he offered was "not change you can believe in, it's change you can xerox". Drum roll! Mrs Clinton delivered the line during a debate as if she were some Borscht Belt stand-up comic and she was booed like one, too. The comedian Jon Stewart recently spoke about "resistance" from audiences when people make Obama jokes.

In a partisan climate, any joke that rises above mere jeering will miss its mark. For half the country, the target is too decent to ridicule; for the other half, he is beneath contempt. On the eve of the primaries, 39 per cent of young Americans told the Pew Research Center they got most of their news through late-night comedy shows. So comedy has never been more important to American politics. Perhaps as a consequence, it has never been less funny.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Elanor Rigby

Ah, look at all the lonely people
Ah, look at all the lonely people

Eleanor rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from ?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong ?

Father mckenzie writing the words of a sermon that no one will hear
No one comes near.
Look at him working. darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there

What does he care?

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Eleanor rigby died in the church and was buried along with her name
Nobody came
Father mckenzie wiping the dirt from his hands as he walks from the grave
No one was saved

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

Deus Ex Machina

God Is the Machine

IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS 0. AND THEN THERE WAS 1. A MIND-BENDING MEDITATION ON THE TRANSCENDENT POWER OF DIGITAL COMPUTATION.

By Kevin Kelly

At today's rates of compression, you could download the entire 3 billion digits of your DNA onto about four CDs. That 3-gigabyte genome sequence represents the prime coding information of a human body — your life as numbers. Biology, that pulsating mass of plant and animal flesh, is conceived by science today as an information process. As computers keep shrinking, we can imagine our complex bodies being numerically condensed to the size of two tiny cells. These micro-memory devices are called the egg and sperm. They are packed with information.

Alex Ostroy
Alex Ostroy
That life might be information, as biologists propose, is far more intuitive than the corresponding idea that hard matter is information as well. When we bang a knee against a table leg, it sure doesn't feel like we knocked into information. But that's the idea many physicists are formulating.

The spooky nature of material things is not new. Once science examined matter below the level of fleeting quarks and muons, it knew the world was incorporeal. What could be less substantial than a realm built out of waves of quantum probabilities? And what could be weirder? Digital physics is both. It suggests that those strange and insubstantial quantum wavicles, along with everything else in the universe, are themselves made of nothing but 1s and 0s. The physical world itself is digital.

The scientist John Archibald Wheeler (coiner of the term "black hole") was onto this in the '80s. He claimed that, fundamentally, atoms are made up of of bits of information. As he put it in a 1989 lecture, "Its are from bits." He elaborated: "Every it — every particle, every field of force, even the space-time continuum itself — derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, bits. What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions."

To get a sense of the challenge of describing physics as a software program, picture three atoms: two hydrogen and one oxygen. Put on the magic glasses of digital physics and watch as the three atoms bind together to form a water molecule. As they merge, each seems to be calculating the optimal angle and distance at which to attach itself to the others. The oxygen atom uses yes/no decisions to evaluate all possible courses toward the hydrogen atom, then usually selects the optimal 104.45 degrees by moving toward the other hydrogen at that very angle. Every chemical bond is thus calculated.

If this sounds like a simulation of physics, then you understand perfectly, because in a world made up of bits, physics is exactly the same as a simulation of physics. There's no difference in kind, just in degree of exactness. In the movie The Matrix, simulations are so good you can't tell if you're in one. In a universe run on bits, everything is a simulation.

An ultimate simulation needs an ultimate computer, and the new science of digitalism says that the universe itself is the ultimate computer — actually the only computer. Further, it says, all the computation of the human world, especially our puny little PCs, merely piggybacks on cycles of the great computer. Weaving together the esoteric teachings of quantum physics with the latest theories in computer science, pioneering digital thinkers are outlining a way of understanding all of physics as a form of computation.

From this perspective, computation seems almost a theological process. It takes as its fodder the primeval choice between yes or no, the fundamental state of 1 or 0. After stripping away all externalities, all material embellishments, what remains is the purest state of existence: here/not here. Am/not am. In the Old Testament, when Moses asks the Creator, "Who are you?" the being says, in effect, "Am." One bit. One almighty bit. Yes. One. Exist. It is the simplest statement possible.

All creation, from this perch, is made from this irreducible foundation. Every mountain, every star, the smallest salamander or woodland tick, each thought in our mind, each flight of a ball is but a web of elemental yes/nos woven together. If the theory of digital physics holds up, movement (f = ma), energy (E = mc²), gravity, dark matter, and antimatter can all be explained by elaborate programs of 1/0 decisions. Bits can be seen as a digital version of the "atoms" of classical Greece: the tiniest constituent of existence. But these new digital atoms are the basis not only of matter, as the Greeks thought, but of energy, motion, mind, and life.

From this perspective, computation, which juggles and manipulates these primal bits, is a silent reckoning that uses a small amount of energy to rearrange symbols. And its result is a signal that makes a difference — a difference that can be felt as a bruised knee. The input of computation is energy and information; the output is order, structure, extropy.

Our awakening to the true power of computation rests on two suspicions. The first is that computation can describe all things. To date, computer scientists have been able to encapsulate every logical argument, scientific equation, and literary work that we know about into the basic notation of computation. Now, with the advent of digital signal processing, we can capture video, music, and art in the same form. Even emotion is not immune. Researchers Cynthia Breazeal at MIT and Charles Guerin and Albert Mehrabian in Quebec have built Kismet and EMIR (Emotional Model for Intelligent Response), two systems that exhibit primitive feelings.

The second supposition is that all things can compute. We have begun to see that almost any kind of material can serve as a computer. Human brains, which are mostly water, compute fairly well. (The first "calculators" were clerical workers figuring mathematical tables by hand.) So can sticks and strings. In 1975, as an undergraduate student, engineer Danny Hillis constructed a digital computer out of skinny Tinkertoys. In 2000, Hillis designed a digital computer made of only steel and tungsten that is indirectly powered by human muscle. This slow-moving device turns a clock intended to tick for 10,000 years. He hasn't made a computer with pipes and pumps, but, he says, he could. Recently, scientists have used both quantum particles and minute strands of DNA to perform computations.

God Is the Machine (continued)

A third postulate ties the first two together into a remarkable new view: All computation is one.

In 1937, Alan Turing, Alonso Church, and Emil Post worked out the logical underpinnings of useful computers. They called the most basic loop — which has become the foundation of all working computers — a finite-state machine. Based on their analysis of the finite-state machine, Turing and Church proved a theorem now bearing their names. Their conjecture states that any computation executed by one finite-state machine, writing on an infinite tape (known later as a Turing machine), can be done by any other finite-state machine on an infinite tape, no matter what its configuration. In other words, all computation is equivalent. They called this universal computation.

When John von Neumann and others jump-started the first electronic computers in the 1950s, they immediately began extending the laws of computation away from math proofs and into the natural world. They tentatively applied the laws of loops and cybernetics to ecology, culture, families, weather, and biological systems. Evolution and learning, they declared, were types of computation. Nature computed.

If nature computed, why not the entire universe? The first to put down on paper the outrageous idea of a universe-wide computer was science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. In his 1956 short story "The Last Question," humans create a computer smart enough to bootstrap new computers smarter than itself. These analytical engines recursively grow super smarter and super bigger until they act as a single giant computer filling the universe. At each stage of development, humans ask the mighty machine if it knows how to reverse entropy. Each time it answers: "Insufficient data for a meaningful reply." The story ends when human minds merge into the ultimate computer mind, which takes over the entire mass and energy of the universe. Then the universal computer figures out how to reverse entropy and create a universe.

Such a wacky idea was primed to be spoofed, and that's what Douglas Adams did when he wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In Adams' story the earth is a computer, and to the world's last question it gives the answer: 42.

Few ideas are so preposterous that no one at all takes them seriously, and this idea — that God, or at least the universe, might be the ultimate large-scale computer — is actually less preposterous than most. The first scientist to consider it, minus the whimsy or irony, was Konrad Zuse, a little-known German who conceived of programmable digital computers 10 years before von Neumann and friends. In 1967, Zuse outlined his idea that the universe ran on a grid of cellular automata, or CA. Simultaneously, Ed Fredkin was considering the same idea. Self-educated, opinionated, and independently wealthy, Fredkin hung around early computer scientists exploring CAs. In the 1960s, he began to wonder if he could use computation as the basis for an understanding of physics.

Fredkin didn't make much headway until 1970, when mathematician John Conway unveiled the Game of Life, a particularly robust version of cellular automata. The Game of Life, as its name suggests, was a simple computational model that mimicked the growth and evolution of living things. Fredkin began to play with other CAs to see if they could mimic physics. You needed very large ones, but they seemed to scale up nicely, so he was soon fantasizing huge — really huge — CAs that would extend to include everything. Maybe the universe itself was nothing but a great CA.

The more Fredkin investigated the metaphor, the more real it looked to him. By the mid-'80s, he was saying things like, "I've come to the conclusion that the most concrete thing in the world is information."

Many of his colleagues felt that if Fredkin had left his observations at the level of metaphor — "the universe behaves as if it was a computer" — he would have been more famous. As it is, Fredkin is not as well known as his colleague Marvin Minsky, who shares some of his views. Fredkin insisted, flouting moderation, that the universe is a large field of cellular automata, not merely like one, and that everything we see and feel is information.

Many others besides Fredkin recognized the beauty of CAs as a model for investigating the real world. One of the early explorers was the prodigy Stephen Wolfram. Wolfram took the lead in systematically investigating possible CA structures in the early 1980s. By programmatically tweaking the rules in tens of thousands of alterations, then running them out and visually inspecting them, he acquired a sense of what was possible. He was able to generate patterns identical to those seen in seashells, animal skins, leaves, and sea creatures. His simple rules could generate a wildly complicated beauty, just as life could. Wolfram was working from the same inspiration that Fredkin did: The universe seems to behave like a vast cellular automaton.

Even the infinitesimally small and nutty realm of the quantum can't escape this sort of binary logic. We describe a quantum-level particle's existence as a continuous field of probabilities, which seems to blur the sharp distinction of is/isn't. Yet this uncertainty resolves as soon as information makes a difference (as in, as soon as it's measured). At that moment, all other possibilities collapse to leave only the single yes/no state. Indeed, the very term "quantum" suggests an indefinite realm constantly resolving into discrete increments, precise yes/no states.

For years, Wolfram explored the notion of universal computation in earnest (and in secret) while he built a business selling his popular software Mathematica. So convinced was he of the benefits of looking at the world as a gigantic Turing machine that he penned a 1,200-page magnum opus he modestly calls A New Kind of Science. Self-published in 2002, the book reinterprets nearly every field of science in terms of computation: "All processes, whether they are produced by human effort or occur spontaneously in nature, can be viewed as computation." (See "The Man Who Cracked the Code to Everything," Wired 10.6.)

God Is the Machine (continued)

Wolfram's key advance, however, is more subtly brilliant, and depends on the old Turing-Church hypothesis: All finite-state machines are equivalent. One computer can do anything another can do. This is why your Mac can, with proper software, pretend to be a PC or, with sufficient memory, a slow supercomputer. Wolfram demonstrates that the outputs of this universal computation are also computationally equivalent. Your brain and the physics of a cup being filled with water are equivalent, he says: for your mind to compute a thought and the universe to compute water particles falling, both require the same universal process.

If, as Fredkin and Wolfram suggest, all movement, all actions, all nouns, all functions, all states, all we see, hear, measure, and feel are various elaborate cathedrals built out of this single ubiquitous process, then the foundations of our knowledge are in for a galactic-scale revisioning in the coming decades. Already, the dream of devising a computational explanation for gravity, the speed of light, muons, Higgs bosons, momentum, and molecules has become the holy grail of theoretical physics. It would be a unified explanation of physics (digital physics), relativity (digital relativity), evolution (digital evolution and life), quantum mechanics, and computation itself, and at the bottom of it all would be squirming piles of the universal elements: loops of yes/no bits. Ed Fredkin has been busy honing his idea of digital physics and is completing a book called Digital Mechanics. Others, including Oxford theoretical physicist David Deutsch, are working on the same problem. Deutsch wants to go beyond physics and weave together four golden threads — epistemology, physics, evolutionary theory, and quantum computing — to produce what is unashamedly referred to by researchers as the Theory of Everything. Based on the primitives of quantum computation, it would swallow all other theories.

Any large computer these days can emulate a computer of some other design. You have Dell computers running Amigas. The Amigas, could, if anyone wanted them to, run Commodores. There is no end to how many nested worlds can be built. So imagine what a universal computer might do. If you had a universally equivalent engine, you could pop it in anywhere, including inside the inside of something else. And if you had a universe-sized computer, it could run all kinds of recursive worlds; it could, for instance, simulate an entire galaxy.

If smaller worlds have smaller worlds running within them, however, there has to be a platform that runs the first among them. If the universe is a computer, where is it running? Fredkin says that all this work happens on the "Other." The Other, he says, could be another universe, another dimension, another something. It's just not in this universe, and so he doesn't care too much about it. In other words, he punts. David Deutsch has a different theory. "The universality of computation is the most profound thing in the universe," he says. Since computation is absolutely independent of the "hardware" it runs on, studying it can tell us nothing about the nature or existence of that platform. Deutsch concludes it does not exist: "The universe is not a program running somewhere else. It is a universal computer, and there is nothing outside of it."

Strangely, nearly every mapper of this new digitalism foresees human-made computers taking over the natural universal computer. This is in part because they see nothing to stop the rapid expansion of computation, and in part because — well — why not? But if the entire universe is computing, why build our own expensive machines, especially when chip fabs cost several billion dollars to construct? Tommaso Toffoli, a quantum computer researcher, puts it best: "In a sense, nature has been continually computing the 'next state' of the universe for billions of years; all we have to do — and, actually, all we can do — is 'hitch a ride' on this huge, ongoing Great Computation."

In a June 2002 article published in the Physical Review Letters, MIT professor Seth Lloyd posed this question: If the universe was a computer, how powerful would it be? By analyzing the computing potential of quantum particles, he calculated the upper limit of how much computing power the entire universe (as we know it) has contained since the beginning of time. It's a large number: 10^120 logical operations. There are two interpretations of this number. One is that it represents the performance "specs" of the ultimate computer. The other is that it's the amount required to simulate the universe on a quantum computer. Both statements illustrate the tautological nature of a digital universe: Every computer is the computer.

Continuing in this vein, Lloyd estimated the total amount of computation that has been accomplished by all human-made computers that have ever run. He came up with 10^31 ops. (Because of the fantastic doubling of Moore's law, over half of this total was produced in the past two years!) He then tallied up the total energy-matter available in the known universe and divided that by the total energy-matter of human computers expanding at the rate of Moore's law. "We need 300 Moore's law doublings, or 600 years at one doubling every two years," he figures, "before all the available energy in the universe is taken up in computing. Of course, if one takes the perspective that the universe is already essentially performing a computation, then we don't have to wait at all. In this case, we may just have to wait for 600 years until the universe is running Windows or Linux."

The relative nearness of 600 years says more about exponential increases than it does about computers. Neither Lloyd nor any other scientist mentioned here realistically expects a second universal computer in 600 years. But what Lloyd's calculation proves is that over the long term, there is nothing theoretical to stop the expansion of computers. "In the end, the whole of space and its contents will be the computer. The universe will in the end consist, literally, of intelligent thought processes," David Deutsch proclaims in Fabric of Reality. These assertions echo those of the physicist Freeman Dyson, who also sees minds — amplified by computers — expanding into the cosmos "infinite in all directions."

Yet while there is no theoretical hitch to an ever-expanding computer matrix that may in the end resemble Asimov's universal machine, no one wants to see themselves as someone else's program running on someone else's computer. Put that way, life seems a bit secondhand.

Yet the notion that our existence is derived, like a string of bits, is an old and familiar one. Central to the evolution of Western civilization from its early Hellenistic roots has been the notion of logic, abstraction, and disembodied information. The saintly Christian guru John writes from Greece in the first century: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." Charles Babbage, credited with constructing the first computer in 1832, saw the world as one gigantic instantiation of a calculating machine, hammered out of brass by God. He argued that in this heavenly computer universe, miracles were accomplished by divinely altering the rules of computation. Even miracles were logical bits, manipulated by God.

There's still confusion. Is God the Word itself, the Ultimate Software and Source Code, or is God the Ultimate Programmer? Or is God the necessary Other, the off-universe platform where this universe is computed?

But each of these three possibilities has at its root the mystical doctrine of universal computation. Somehow, according to digitalism, we are linked to one another, all beings alive and inert, because we share, as John Wheeler said, "at the bottom — at a very deep bottom, in most instances — an immaterial source." This commonality, spoken of by mystics of many beliefs in different terms, also has a scientific name: computation. Bits — minute logical atoms, spiritual in form — amass into quantum quarks and gravity waves, raw thoughts and rapid motions.

The computation of these bits is a precise, definable, yet invisible process that is immaterial yet produces matter.

"Computation is a process that is perhaps the process," says Danny Hillis, whose new book, The Pattern on the Stone, explains the formidable nature of computation. "It has an almost mystical character because it seems to have some deep relationship to the underlying order of the universe. Exactly what that relationship is, we cannot say. At least for now."

Probably the trippiest science book ever written is The Physics of Immortality, by Frank Tipler. If this book was labeled standard science fiction, no one would notice, but Tipler is a reputable physicist and Tulane University professor who writes papers for the International Journal of Theoretical Physics. In Immortality, he uses current understandings of cosmology and computation to declare that all living beings will be bodily resurrected after the universe dies. His argument runs roughly as follows: As the universe collapses upon itself in the last minutes of time, the final space-time singularity creates (just once) infinite energy and computing capacity. In other words, as the giant universal computer keeps shrinking in size, its power increases to the point at which it can simulate precisely the entire historical universe, past and present and possible. He calls this state the Omega Point. It is a computational space that can resurrect "from the dead" all the minds and bodies that have ever lived. The weird thing is that Tipler was an atheist when he developed this theory and discounted as mere "coincidence" the parallels between his ideas and the Christian doctrine of Heavenly Resurrection. Since then, he says, science has convinced him that the two may be identical.

While not everyone goes along with Tipler's eschatological speculations, theorists like Deutsch endorse his physics. An Omega Computer is possible and probably likely, they say.

I asked Tipler which side of the Fredkin gap he is on. Does he go along with the weak version of the ultimate computer, the metaphorical one, that says the universe only seems like a computer? Or does he embrace Fredkin's strong version, that the universe is a 12 billion-year-old computer and we are the killer app? "I regard the two statements as equivalent," he answered. "If the universe in all ways acts as if it was a computer, then what meaning could there be in saying that it is not a computer?"

Only hubris.

Dr. Michael DeBakey: 1908-2008 'Greatest surgeon of the 20th century' dies

Dr. Michael DeBakey: 1908-2008
'Greatest surgeon of the 20th century' dies

By TODD ACKERMAN and ERIC BERGER
Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle



Dr. Michael Ellis DeBakey, internationally acclaimed as the father of modern cardiovascular surgery — and considered by many to be the greatest surgeon ever — died Friday night at The Methodist Hospital in Houston. He was 99.

Methodist officials said DeBakey died of natural causes. They gave no additional details.

Medical statesman, chancellor emeritus of Baylor College of Medicine, and a surgeon at The Methodist Hospital since 1949, DeBakey trained thousands of surgeons over several generations, achieving legendary status decades before his death. During his career, he estimated he had performed more than 60,000 operations. His patients included the famous — Russian President Boris Yeltsin and movie actress Marlene Dietrich among them — and the uncelebrated.

"Dr. DeBakey singlehandedly raised the standard of medical care, teaching and research around the world," said Dr. George Noon, a cardiovascular surgeon and longtime partner of DeBakey's. "He was the greatest surgeon of the 20th century, and physicians everywhere are indebted to him for his contributions to medicine."

Debakey almost died in 2006, when he suffered an aortic aneurysm, a condition for which he pioneered the treatment. He is considered the oldest patient to have both undergone and survived surgery for it. He recovered well enough to go to Washington earlier this year to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, one of the nation's two highest civilian honors.

He remained vigorous and was a player in medicine well into his 90s, performing surgeries, traveling and publishing articles in scientific journals. His large hands were steady, his hearing sharp. His personal health regimen included taking the stairs at work and a single cup of coffee in the morning.

DeBakey's death was mourned Friday night by the leaders of Methodist and Baylor. Methodist President Ron Girotto said, "He has improved the human condition and touched the lives of generations to come. We will greatly miss him." And Baylor President Dr. Peter Traber added that "he set a standard for preeminence in all areas of his life that those who knew him and worked with him are compelled to emulate. And he served as a very visible reminder of the importance of leadership and giving back to ones community."

Debakey was born in Lake Charles, La., in 1908, a month before Ford began making Model Ts and a quarter-century before the discovery of bacteria-fighting drugs. His genius helped shape surgery and health care as we know it. While still in medical school, he developed the roller pump for the heart-lung machine. DeBakey invented many of the procedures and devices — more than 50 surgical instruments — used to repair hearts and arteries today.

He is widely credited with laying the foundation for the Texas Medical Center in Houston by recruiting pre-eminent doctors and researchers and giving the city an international reputation for leading-edge health care. He was a maverick, running afoul of the Harris County Medical Society for insisting that surgeons be certified by the American Board of Surgery. At the time, it was common for general physicians to operate.

"DeBakey built a department of surgery at Baylor and at The Methodist Hospital, which was to become one of the most celebrated in the world, a galaxy of young stars," the late author Thomas Thompson wrote in 1970 in Hearts: Of Surgeons and Transplants, Miracles and Disasters Along the Cardiac Frontier. "In a city where 25 years ago there was practiced medicine of the most mediocre sort, there sprung up in a swampy area six miles south of downtown ... one of the handful of distinguished medical centers in the world."

He invented and refined ways to repair weakened or clot-obstructed blood vessels using replacements made from preserved human blood vessels, and later, with artificial ones. He is credited with the first successful surgical treatment of potentially deadly aneurysms of various parts of the aorta. He co-authored one of the earliest papers linking smoking and lung cancer in 1939.

During World War II, serving in the office of the U.S. Surgeon General, DeBakey's work led to the development of mobile surgical hospitals, called MASH units. He helped President John F. Kennedy lobby for Medicare; he recommended creation of the National Library of Medicine, subsequently authorized by Congress. In 1963 DeBakey won the Lasker Award for Clinical Research, considered the U.S. equivalent of a Nobel.

"At times he could act like the meanest man in the world. He didn't let you breathe," said Dr. John L. Ochsner of New Orleans, who trained under DeBakey and whose father, Dr. Alton Ochsner, was DeBakey's mentor at Tulane University School of Medicine. DeBakey baby-sat the four Ochsner children, including John, and let them do chin-ups on his arm.

Said John Ochsner, "The thing that made him so mad all the time was he was trying to conquer the world and every minute was so important to him. He didn't have time for frivolity at all."

Patients and their families saw him otherwise. To them, DeBakey was a healer with quiet authority who seemed to work miracles. Enfolding a patient's hands in his, the patient's face would relax, some recalled.

He was pained by the breakup in 2004 of the historic, 50-year marriage between Baylor and Methodist, which dissolved over disagreements about the future of the institutions. DeBakey said the breakup made no sense and hurt both parties. Friends described him as "heartbroken" about the split and in an interview earlier this year he said the description was not inaccurate.

In 2003, his MicroMed DeBakey LVAD was implanted in a 10-year-old girl, the youngest patient in the world to receive the device. In 2004, a special child-sized version became available for children as young as 5. DeBakey developed the device, which boosts the heart's main pumping chamber, in collaboration with heart surgeon Dr. George Noon and NASA.

"The man has an incredible mind and an incredible grasp of details," said former MicroMed CEO Travis Baugh . "He's also never stopped inventing. We are working on a project with him a new way of attaching sutures to the heart.'"
The power to intimidate and awe

In his prime — and it was an unusually lengthy prime — DeBakey, with his sharp-nosed profile and dark brown eyes, had the power to intimidate and awe his acolytes. In surgery, DeBakey was famous for his withering remarks, delivered in a velvety Louisiana drawl, directed at the anxious and ambitious residents operating alongside him.

John Ochsner recalled how, if an operation was going slowly, DeBakey might ask, ''Am I the only one here doing anything?"

Or a clumsy resident might prompt DeBakey to say, ''Do you have two left hands?"

If DeBakey was displeased by the progress of a procedure, he would remark with an air of faint disgust, ''I am surrounded by incompetence."

DeBakey's trainees cringed at his criticism but, among themselves, recounted the barbs in a sometimes dead-on imitation of the revered surgeon. Ochsner, now chairman emeritus of the Department of Surgery at Ochsner Clinic in New Orleans, said DeBakey's stern manner came from a desire to prepare his students for the demanding career that lay ahead.

''He's not hard to work with if things are done right," said Noon, DeBakey's colleague of more than three decades, in a 1995 interview. ''He was hard on people who slacked off or made mistakes. But he was so busy. He had to depend on people, and he could be tough. But he was always tough for a reason."
Family roots in Lake Charles, La.

DeBakey was the eldest of five children born to Lebanese immigrants Raheehja and Shaker Morris DeBakey. Shaker Morris DeBakey was a well-to-do businessman and pharmacist in Lake Charles who invested in real estate and rice farming. Michael DeBakey grew up with his brother and three sisters in a large house two blocks from the public school with maids, butlers and gardeners.

The DeBakeys ate healthy foods — fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, seafood, rice and beans. They didn't smoke or drink. They encouraged their children to check out books from the library every week. At dinnertime, the family chatted about things that happened at the drugstore or the doings of politicians who sought out Shaker's advice.

"You could not get a word in edgewise until one of our parents announced who had the floor," DeBakey recounted to a reporter in 1997. "It was very stimulating."

Each Sunday after services at their Episcopal church, the DeBakeys would take clothing to a nearby orphanage. One time, the give-away bundle included DeBakey's favorite cap. When the youngster protested, his mother sat him down and said, "You have a lot of caps. These children have none."

"It made a great impression on me," he said.

DeBakey's mother also taught him one of his future career's essential skills — sewing. He would help her repair items headed for the orphanage. He also learned to tat, using a little bobbin to make lace. Years later, in the 1950s, DeBakey would introduce artificial arteries made from Dacron; he sewed the prototype on his wife's sewing machine using fabric purchased at Houston's downtown Foley's.

He went to medical school at Tulane after graduating as valedictorian from his high school class. During his senior medical school year, he developed the roller pump, a device which two decades later became a crucial component of the heart-lung machine used on patients during open-heart surgery.

As a surgery resident at New Orleans' Charity Hospital, DeBakey caught his first glimpse of a living human heart — pink and pulsating in the chest of a knifing victim.

''I saw it beating and it was beautiful, a work of art,'' DeBakey said in 1987. ''I still have an almost religious sense when I work on the heart. It is something God makes, and we have yet to duplicate."

Later, at Charity Hospital, DeBakey experienced a potentially catastrophic near-miss — he accidentally punched through a patient's aorta — which gave him an appreciation for the steadying influence of his mentor, Alton Ochsner.

He and Ochsner were operating in an amphitheater with a full audience of visiting surgeons. DeBakey was on one side of the patient, Ochsner on the other. DeBakey was attempting to lift up the aorta, which had been weakened by infection "when I suddenly realized, with a gripping terror, that I had entered the aorta."

DeBakey whispered this to Ochsner, who calmly instructed DeBakey to leave his finger over the hole. Ochsner stitched it up, and no one realized a near-fatal accident had occurred.

During the late 1930s, DeBakey married his first wife, Diana, a nurse he met in New Orleans. They had four sons: Michael, Ernest, Barry and Denis. When he came to Houston in 1948 to head up Baylor's surgery department, he moved his family into a home near Rice University, only five minutes from the Texas Medical Center, so he wouldn't waste time commuting. He never moved from that home.

Diana DeBakey died of a heart attack in 1972. They had been in Mexico for a medical meeting, staying with a close relative of the President of Mexico. They ate well and stayed up late, and when the DeBakeys got back home, Diana was complaining of an upset stomach.

At that time, gastrointestinal problems were not widely recognized as a heart attack symptom in women. When her discomfort worsened, DeBakey had her admitted to the hospital to find out what was wrong. While DeBakey was in surgery on someone else, he got a call that there was an emergency. When he reached his wife's bedside, she had died.

Three years after her death, DeBakey married German film actress Katrin Fehlhaber, whom he met through Frank Sinatra. They had a daughter, Olga. In 1978, DeBakey was hospitalized for smoke inhalation sustained in rescuing his daughter after a Christmas tree caught fire in his home, he told the New York Times.
A disciplined, hard-working life

The workaholic DeBakey rarely slept more than five hours a night, awaking at 5 most mornings to write research papers or read medical journals. He rarely drank, never smoked, ate sparingly — mostly salads, late in life — and didn't watch television. Lean and nearly 6 feet tall, he weighed the same as he did in 1926 when he graduated from high school — about 160 pounds. He spent much of his adult years in light-blue scrubs, and wore a pair of gleaming-white cowboy boots for the operating room. He liked to say that he conducted the presidency of Baylor between cases.

In 1948, when DeBakey came to Houston, he had turned the Baylor job down twice. The fledgling school had moved to Houston from Dallas just five years earlier, and Baylor students were scattered all over the city doing their clinical rotations, a situation that didn't appeal to DeBakey. He finally was persuaded to come when Hermann Hospital promised the school a 20-bed surgical service, according to Ruth SoRelle's history of Baylor, The Quest for Excellence.

The Hermann deal fell through, and DeBakey nearly left. But the Truman administration asked DeBakey to transfer Houston's Navy hospital into aVeterans Administration hospital, an idea championed by DeBakey that evolved into the national VA system. There, DeBakey's students started the city's first surgical residency program.

DeBakey's program was legendary for cutting its participants off from all contact with the outside world. As a DeBakey trainee, Dr. Edward Lefrak once spent 91 consecutive days on duty in the cardiovascular intensive care unit, missing the birth of one of his children, sleeping when he could in the patient recovery ward. Lefrak's rotation was supposed to last just 30 days, but DeBakey had a tendency, when things were going well, to keep arrangements unchanged.

''It was like a compliment,'' said Lefrak, medical director of cardiac surgery at the Inova Heart and Vascular Institute in Falls Church, Va. ''But then, on the other hand, it was another 30 days."
From colleagues to rivals

One of the most talked-about events of DeBakey's life was his legendary feud — more Arctic freeze than hot-tempered spat — with Dr. Denton Cooley, his one-time close collaborator. DeBakey hired Cooley in 1951 after the Houston native finished his training at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore.

In 1965, DeBakey participated in a federally funded program to design an artificial heart. Within a few years he had a device that some physicians felt was ready for human trials, but DeBakey believed it needed more work.

Then, to international acclaim in 1969, Cooley performed the first implantation of an artificial heart into the chest of 47-year-old Haskell Karp, a dying heart surgery patient. Karp lived with the heart in his chest 65 hours before dying shortly after a heart transplant.

Cooley's fame was quickly tarnished after DeBakey said the heart was identical to one under development in the Baylor labs, and that Cooley had used it without permission.

Cooley said he and Dr. Domingo Liotta, who also designed artificial hearts in DeBakey's lab, had built the heart privately, and that he had no choice but to use the heart because the patient's life was in jeopardy.

After the incident, the American College of Surgeons voted to censure Cooley, and, amid a dispute with the trustees of Baylor, Cooley resigned from the institution. The two men never collaborated again and rarely spoke. DeBakey changed his focus and decided funds would be better spent developing pumps to assist failing hearts. Such devices became the mainstream treatment for patients with failing hearts.

The episode ''stole DeBakey's shot at a Nobel Prize," Methodist heart surgeon Mike Reardon said in 2004. ''What Mike needed was one crowning event to make him a candidate. And that was going to be the artificial heart."

But the two buried the hatchet last year. Cooley inducted DeBakey into his surgical society and, in a surprise, DeBakey accepted, telling his former colleague he was touched by the gesture. Earlier this year, DeBakey returned the favor, granting Cooley membership in his surgical society. In April, when DeBakey was given the Congressional Gold Medal, Cooley made the trip to Washington too.

For a man who outlived most of his peers, he seemed surprisingly unphilosophical about death, appearing to view it as a personal enemy. Losing a patient put him in a black mood and set his mind spinning with thoughts of what he might have done differently.

''You fight (death) all the time, and you never really can accept it," he once said. ''You know in reality that everybody is going to die, but you try to fight it, to push it away, hold it away with your hands."

DeBakey was preceded in death by his sons, Houston lawyer Ernest O. DeBakey, who died in 2006, and Barry E. DeBakey, who died in 2007. In addition to his wife, Katrin, and their daughter, Olga, DeBakey is survived by sons Michael DeBakey of Lima, Peru, and Denis DeBakey, of Houston; brother Dr. Ernest G. DeBakey, of Mobile, Ala., and sisters Lois and Selma DeBakey, both medical editors and linguists at Baylor.

Why News Channels in India need to be more responsible in their reporting and not twist facts to sensationalise..

Drama in real life
Shailaja Bajpai Posted online: Friday , July 11, 2008 at 1548 hrs

Here’s how a news story spins out of control in successive broadcasts
They call it the news and then make it into fiction. We know this but somehow can never quite find the clinching evidence. Well, here’s one example where first there was news and then there was a story.

Friday, CNN-IBN: A report on a young girl named Shinjini, who had participated in a reality talent contest on a regional channel and was gravely ill with a debilitating condition that had robbed her of her voice and mobility. We see Shinjini lying helpless in a hospital bed. The father of the girl said the harsh words of the judges before she was eliminated had depressed her enormously, leading to her mysterious ailment. CNN-IBN quoted a doctor in Kolkata who said that depression cannot cause such a condition and that the responsibility lay elsewhere — it is of chemical origin.
Five minutes later, Aaj Tak broadcast the same item. ‘Judges scold Shinjini’, was the first headline (the original Hindi daant maari sounds more ominous and hard-hitting). We see Shinjini dancing during the show, lively, vibrant. Cut to the judges who look forbidding. Aaj Tak said that the judges were very harsh (only to Shinjini?). The father was quoted saying roughly what he said on CNN-IBN — that the judges had brought on the ailment. Then, Aaj Tak asked a rhetorical question: “Judges ne Laxman rekha to nahin paar ki?”, thereby suggesting that they had (but which rekha is that?).
Ten minutes on, it was the turn of Star News. “Reality show ne chheen li uski awaaz”, it cried out. It repeated Shinjini’s experience on the reality show, it showed Shinjini perform on stage, cut to the same grim judge and reached the same conclusion (or should it be accusation?) — that the judges had done it to Shinjini.

We were then transported to her bedside where we saw a lady (presumably her mother) and were told by the anchor that Shinjini is being treated at Bangalore’s Nimhans Hospital. “Awaaz gum ho gayi hai”, is the accompanying commentary, “Ek reality show ne ... kiya hai”.
The angry father spoke: Shinjini was eliminated when in tenth position. She was very depressed. He excoriates the judges and the show — programmes like this should be stopped if they cannot be conducted in the right manner. A friend (or fellow contestant) takes the stand and describes Shinjini’s hopes and dreams of an acting career. But, declares, Star News, the judges gave their verdict (“Suna diya faisla”) and it proved very costly (“Bhaari padi”). One judge named Ringo replied: it’s been two months (since Shinjini was eliminated) and now they are saying we are responsible... how is it possible (or words to that effect). Star News is not listening. It returned to the helpless Shinjini: “Khamosh hai Shinjini — her childhood has been snatched from her.
There you have it: a tweak here, a tweak there, and a straight report developed twists and turns. In its report, CNN-IBN did not air the views of the judges and the Hindi channels chose to believe the father without any recourse to a second opinion from the medical profession.
Nobody told us what harsh words were used by the judges to Shinjini, nor did anyone question the advisability of parents allowing children to compete in reality shows or their pressure on the youngsters to excel. And what about the nature of the ailment?
A sad and saddening account of Shinjini’s condition became a sensational story about the judges’ malevolent role. This happens to the news every day. Facts become fiction faster than a novelist could convert them.
That, possibly, explains why so many of us so often turn to sports for relief. Last week there was plenty of it — Euro soccer, Asia Cup, New Zealand-England and West Indies-Australia ODIs, Wimbledon, etc. In sports we can take the news for what it is: Spain-1, Germany-0.

Betancourt `Put Off' Suicide to Hear Colombian Radio Broadcasts By Andrea Jaramillo

Betancourt `Put Off' Suicide to Hear Colombian Radio Broadcasts


More Photos/Details

July 7 (Bloomberg) -- Within hours of being freed after six years as a terrorist hostage in the Colombian jungle, Ingrid Betancourt paused during a press conference when she spotted a man she said helped keep her alive.

``I'm sorry,'' said Betancourt, 46, as she moved away from a microphone set up on the military airport runway in Bogota. ``But this has to be a hug.''

She then embraced Herbin Hoyos, founder and host of ``Voices of Kidnapping,'' a radio program that relays messages from family members to people held captive by terrorists. Betancourt, a former presidential candidate, said the words read over the airwaves helped her fend off suicide.

``I never attempted it,'' she said. ``I put it off every day upon hearing my mom and my children on the radio.''

The program is unique to Colombia, where guerrillas, paramilitaries and cocaine traffickers have used kidnapping for decades to raise cash and strengthen their negotiating position with the government. Today, about 2,800 Colombians are being held, the most in the world, according to Fundacion Pais Libre, a Bogota-based organization. Most are held for ransom, which can top 1 billion pesos ($574,000), according to the organization.

Betancourt, who was freed with 14 others by the Colombian army last week, called Hoyos, 38, a ``friend for life.''

Hundreds of Calls

During the program, transmitted by Caracol Radio from midnight to 6 a.m. each Sunday, Hoyos takes hundreds of calls from Colombians who hope their kidnapped relatives are listening. Betancourt's mother, husband, son and daughter called regularly.

Captors hand out radios to keep up the morale of the hostages and discourage them from committing suicide. Hoyos calls the program a ``cruel mutual need.''

``We do this to keep them alive,'' Hoyos said. The guerrillas ``use the program for the same reason.''

Luis Eladio Perez, a 55-year-old former senator, said the radio was his ``umbilical cord'' during the seven years he was held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the country's biggest guerrilla group, which also held Betancourt.

FARC guerrillas gave Perez his radio -- a silver, pocket- sized Sony -- in mid-2001, days before chaining him by the neck to a tree.

Back in his apartment overlooking the mountains that edge eastern Bogota, Perez clutched the Sony as he spoke one night in May of how the messages from his wife, Angela, and children kept him alive.

`Want to Die'

``There comes a point when you want to die,'' Perez said. The messages ``make you remember that your family is fighting to get you out. You have to hold on. You have to eat. And you have to exercise. You just have to try to stay alive.''

Hoyos hatched the idea for the show in 1994, when he himself was kidnapped as he finished his weekly news program. Whisked to a rebel camp, he encountered a hostage shackled to a tree.

Hoyos said he thought the man was dead. As he looked closer, he realized that 62-year-old Nacianceno Murcia, gaunt, pale and barefoot, was alive. In one hand, he held a radio.

Murcia told Hoyos he listened to him all the time. He urged the reporter to do a program on kidnap victims.

``You never talk about us,'' Hoyos recalled Murcia telling him.

Freed days later, Hoyos dedicated part of his air time to relatives of kidnap victims. Overwhelmed by the number of calls, he soon turned the whole show over to ``Voices of Kidnapping.'' Others have followed, including RCN Radio, Colombia's biggest station after Caracol.

`No Reply'

Martha Arango, 53, said she suffers from not being able to have a conversation with her husband, Oscar Tulio Lizcano, a 63- year-old former congressman kidnapped in 2000.

``They are monologues,'' said Arango, who sends at least one message a day. ``Words with no reply.''

While radio messages gave Betancourt some solace, the French-Colombian, who was kidnapped as she campaigned in 2002, wrote in a proof-of-life letter in October that she was tormented by not being able to watch her son Lorenzo, who was 13 when she was seized, grow up.

She said she found a Carolina Herrera magazine advertisement featuring a young man, tore it out and kept it, taking the image to be that of her son.

``That broke my heart,'' Juan Carlos Lecompte, Betancourt's husband, said in an interview outside Caracol's studios on a recent Sunday.

100,000 Photos

Lecompte said he made 100,000 copies of a picture of Betancourt's two children, Lorenzo, now 19, and Melanie, 22. In April, Lecompte took the prints, emblazoned with the words ``To Ingrid, From Juan Carlos,'' and scattered them across the jungle from a small plane.

Betancourt, who heard about the pictures by radio, said she asked her captors to bring her one. None ever reached her.

She got to see Lorenzo and Melanie on July 3, a day after her rescue. She climbed onto the government plane that brought them to Bogota and cried as she ran her hands through Lorenzo's hair. They look, she said, ``big and beautiful.''

``So different, yet the same.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Andrea Jaramillo in Bogota at ajaramillo1@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: July 7, 2008 00:01 EDT

This is not an isolated case...a symptom of what is terribly wrong with the health care system of the United States... When doctors start valuing their pocket more than their Oath, when more money is spent on war than on your own health care system...when you would not be treated in a public hospital without insurance even if you are bloody well dying of the Peruvian Tongue Rotting Disease (Nope..no way sir...I gotta need your policy..no policy...no admitting.. =P)..then you know that you stand a better chance of quality medical service in a Indian hospital in Madras, than in the best bleedin hospital in the US...the American people have to decide what to care about: blowing up imaginary terrorists or trying to salvage a national health care system that has utterly failed to care for its people.

PlusVideo Shows Woman Dying on NY Hospital FloorVideo Shows Woman Dying on NY Hospital Floor. At a New York hospital, officials agreed in court Tuesday to implement reforms at a psychiatric ward where surveillance footage captured a woman falling from her chair and dying as workers failed to help. (July 1)(New York)) A sad death in New York City. Surveillance cameras at a city-run psychiatric hospital emergency room in Brooklyn capture a woman falling from a chair, writhing on the floor and dying. Hospital staff and other patients watch and do nothing for more than an hour. One guard doesn't even leave his chair, rolling it around the corner to stare at the body. The New York Civil Liberties Union sued the facility, Kings County Hospital Center, last year over the way it treats psychiatric patients. ((Donna Lieberman, NY Civil Liberties Union)) "A chamber of filth, decay, indifference and danger and seeks an end to the culture of abuse and neglect where patients are regularly ignored and those that dare advocate for themselves are punished with forcible injections of psychotropic drugs."The city's medical examiner has yet to determine why the woman, 49-year old Esmin green, died on June 20th. She had been waiting in the emergency room for nearly 24 hours. ((Rob Cohen, Lawyer Suing Hospital)) "There is a culture of indifference to patients that permeates every aspect of KCHC's psychiatric care." The city-run agency that runs the hospital released a statement, saying: "We are shocked and distressed by the situation. It is clear that some of our employees failed to act based on our compassionate standards of care. (The hospital has) directed the suspension and termination of those involved." ---- Alan Aviles, Kings County Hospital Center The surveillance video eventually shows a member of the medical staff attending to Green. But it's too late, she had already died.Esmin Green, a 49-year old native of Jamaica, died in the waiting room of hospital's G Building, a psychiatric ward. Videotape shows several guards and even a doctor walking through the camera view without doing anything to help the woman, who was prone on the floor. In addition, records were falsified, stating her status at times which the time-stamped video prove false, even going so far as to giving reports about her status after she was apparently dead. Several people were fired in the immediate aftermath, and investigations and lawsuits are pending. This incident came in the midst of a federal lawsuit charging neglect by the hospital[6][7].

Some background on the hospital: Kings County Hospital Center is a hospital located at 451 Clarkson Avenue in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, New York City. It is under the umbrella of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (HHC), the municipal agency which runs New York City's public hospitals.

According to the HHC, "Kings County was named the first Level 1 Trauma Center in the U.S." [1]. Because of this trauma center, police officers have been quoted as saying, "If I get shot... bring me to Kings County." [2]

In 1997 KCHC began a modernization program[3]. Phase 1 a 250,000 sq ft Bed Tower was completed in 2001,Phase 2 a 260,000 treatment and diagnostic center was completed in 2005 and Phase 3 an ambulatory center in 2006.

This work was managed by the Dormitory Authority of the State of New York, with the TDX Construction Company as the project manager.[citation needed] A 300,000 sq foot Behavorial Center is under construction and will be complete in 2008.[citation needed]

Kings County hospital has paid out more than 1/3 of all malpractice claims against the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation (over $60 million). Since there are 11 city hospitals, this indicates that Kings County hospital has a very high amount of malpractice claims compared to other city hospitals. Kings County hospitals has been the most sued hospital of the city's health care system[4].

In 2003, the United States Army established a training program at the hospital called the Academy of Advanced Combat Medicine to train reservists in an emergency room that has received 600 cases per year of gunshot and stabbing victims.[5]

In May 2007, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Mental Hygiene Legal Service sued Kings County in federal court, alleging that conditions at the facility are filthy. Patients are often forced to sleep in plastic chairs or on floors covered in urine, feces and blood while waiting for beds, the groups allege, and often go without basic hygiene such as showers, clean linens and clean clothes.

The lawsuit claims that patients who complain face physical abuse and are injected with drugs to keep them docile.

The hospital, the suit alleges, lacks "the minimal requirements of basic cleanliness, space, privacy, and personal hygiene that are constitutionally guaranteed even to convicted felons."




On a lighter note: What would an ambulance in France sound like? Here's Bill Bailey:

Sam Harris on Religion....

How many more architects and mechanical engineers must hit the wall at 400 miles an hour before we admit to ourselves that jihadist violence is not merely a matter of education, poverty, or politics? The truth, astonishingly enough, is that in the year 2006 a person can have sufficient intellectual and material resources to build a nuclear bomb and still believe that he will get 72 virgins in Paradise. Western secularists, liberals, and moderates have been very slow to understand this. The cause of their confusion is simple: They don't know what it is like to really believe in God.

Anyone who imagines that terrestrial concerns account for Muslim terrorism must answer questions of the following sort: Why are there no Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? The Tibetans have suffered an occupation far more brutal, and far more cynical, than any that Britain, the United States, or Israel have ever imposed upon the Muslim world. Where are the throngs of Tibetans ready to perpetrate suicidal atrocities against Chinese noncombatants? They do not exist. What is the difference that makes the difference? The difference lies in the specific tenets of Islam. This is not to say that Buddhism could not help inspire suicidal violence. It can, and it has (Japan, World War II). But this concedes absolutely nothing to the apologists for Islam. As a Buddhist, one has to work extremely hard to justify such barbarism. One need not work nearly so hard as a Muslim. The truth that we must finally confront is that Islam contains specific notions of martyrdom and jihad that fully explain the character of Muslim violence.[13]

"The usefulness of religion, the fact that it gives life meaning, that it makes people feel good is not an argument for the truth of any religious doctrine. It's not an argument that it's reasonable to believe that Jesus really was born of a virgin or that the Bible is the perfect word of the creator of the universe. You can only believe those things or you should be only able to believe those things if you think there are good reasons to believe those things."

Quote: Richard Dawkins

"I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so (see Ibn Warraq's excellent book, Why I am not a Muslim). Moonies and scientologists get a bad press, but they just haven't been around as long as the accepted religions. Theology is a respectable discipline when it studies such subjects as moral philosophy, the psychology of religious belief and, above all, biblical history and literature. Like Bertie Wooster, my knowledge of the Bible is above average. I seem to know Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon almost by heart. I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum - you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns. "

Richard Dawkins