The Atheist at the Breakfast Table

April 28th, 2012 § 4 comments § permalink

The new face of faithlessness

from PSYCHOLOGY TODAY, June 2012

On a recent Sunday, Ross Harvey sat in the back pew of the North Shore Unitarian Church in North Vancouver, BC. A visiting gospel choir from Oakland filled the vaulted ceiling with soaring harmonies, and Harvey, whose flash of white T-shirt beneath a black dress shirt made him mistakable for a padre at a distance, was among the first to stand and clap and groove at the chord changes, the shared emotion in the room. The only thing preventing full-on abandon was the part himself that was irked by the words. (Later, over soup and coffee in the church basement, he would joke to some of the visitors: “You know why the Baptists are such better singers than us, don’t you? It’s because UUs are always reading ahead to make sure that what we’re about to say we actually believe in. That kind of slows us down.”)

Read the full post

The Library of Flesh and Blood

April 16th, 2012 § 2 comments § permalink

From The Responsibility Project, by Liberty Mutual

The sign just inside the doors of Surrey City Centre Library was small enough, or strange enough, that most of the patrons who’d been waiting outside filed right past it without even noticing.

Human Library—Open Today

Surrey City Library, in a bedroom community of Vancouver, British Columbia, is a just-opened Modernist gem, and it has all of the things you’d expect in a library — books and magazines and scores of multimedia options —plus one rare new thing: a small collection of “human books” that you can “sign out” for 30 minutes at a time.*

Human books are, simply, people. They are volunteers who have made themselves available to the public, as stories. They were chosen because they have something unique to say and a compelling way of saying it, and because they reflect the cultural diversity of the community. Theirs are stories that – because they don’t involve vampires or boy wizards or ladies’ detective agencies— might otherwise be lost, in the blockbuster-or-nothing climate of today’s publishing world.

Read the full post

This Won’t Hurt a Bit

March 11th, 2012 § 0 comments § permalink

from the archives: East Meets West in the Dentist’s Chair

From Saturday Night magazine, 2002

For whatever reason—and there’s endless scope to speculate – pain is a hot topic these days. “That’s gotta hurt!” we say of the extreme snowboarder who lands face-first while jumping a Volkswagon, or of our friend’s kid who flashes her tongue stud or lumbar tattoo. But we’re fascinated. In an age where pain is optional, it has acquired a strange new cachet.

On today’s maternity wards, experiments in mystical stoicism have replaced old-style epidural-aided childbirth (which at least offered mothers-to-be some relief) with “natural childbirth, where lucky women get to sweat and holler and squeeze the doula’s hand, the pain simply the price of being fully present in the moment. The Dene and the Inuit of the Northwest Territories would understand. Many of their traditional games – the mouth pull, the knuckle hop – involve the mutual affliction of pain. “If we know how much pain we can take,” an elder named Big Bob Aikens explained to writer John Vaillant not long ago, “we know we can survive if we are injured.” Most of us below the tundra line are so far away from needing pain for that reason that it’s hard to fully appreciate what Big Bob is getting at. But the possibility glimmers on the periphery of awareness that maybe the Inuit are onto something. Maybe anesthetizing pain is a bad idea, evolutionarily. Maybe learning to feel pain, to take it, to “live inside” it, to study it, to re-engineer our relationship with it, is part of the secret of advancing the species.

Read the full post

The Great Fossil Feud

December 14th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

fossils.strelley

from DISCOVER MAGAZINE

Dec. 7, 2011

The first shot across the bow came in 2002, when Oxford paleontologist Martin Brasier challenged the authenticity of what were then widely regarded as the fossil remains of some of Earth’s first life-forms. In the bargain he took on one of paleobiology’s great lions, J. W. “Bill” Schopf of UCLA, who made that find and still defends it. “It was like tackling Jesus or Moses,” Brasier says.

Now Brasier has emptied his second barrel. In August he and David Wacey of the University of Western Australia staked their own claim to a candidate for the oldest known fossil: a set of Slinky-shaped cells found on an ancient beach in western Australia, just 20 miles from the site of Schopf’s discovery. Brasier asserts that his fossilized cells are the remains of primitive anaerobic bacteria that lived 3.4 billion years ago. Schopf’s samples, he believes, are just ancient, patterned rock, with no fossils at all.

Settling the debate matters a great deal. At its heart is one of the biggest questions in science: When and where did life begin? Brasier’s find suggests that life on Earth started not near some oceanic thermal vent but rather in a warm, oxygen-depleted bath near the surface. It also bolsters the case that there once was life on Mars.

Read the full post

The Incredible Flying Nonagenarian

December 6th, 2011 § 1 comment § permalink

From THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE

Nov. 28, 2010 

On the third floor of the Montreal Chest Institute, at McGill University, Olga Kotelko stood before a treadmill in the center of a stuffy room that was filling up with people who had come just for her. They were there to run physical tests, or to extract blood from her earlobe, or just to observe and take notes. Kotelko removed her glasses. She wore white New Balance sneakers and black running tights, and over her silver hair, a plastic crown that held in place a breathing tube.

Tanja Taivassalo, a 40-year-old muscle physiologist, adjusted the fit of Kotelko’s stretch-vest. It was wired with electrodes to measure changes in cardiac output — a gauge of the power of her heart. Taivassalo first met Kotelko at last year’s world outdoor masters track championships in Lahti, Finland, the pinnacle of the competitive season for older tracksters. Taivassalo went to watch her dad compete in the marathon. But she could hardly fail to notice the 91-year-old Canadian, bespandexed and elfin, who was knocking off world record after world record.

Read the full post

Congrats, you’re a Dad. Time to dial back the risk-taking?

September 14th, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

From THE RESPONSIBILITY PROJECT by LIBERTY MUTUAL

June 29, 2011

Not long ago, a French-Canadian skydiver named Pascal Coudé, who hopes to break a world record by freefalling for 6 to 7 minutes from an altitude of 30,000 feet, was telling me about his preparation. He plans to make the jump in a baggy costume known as a “wingsuit” – a specially designed jumpsuit with webbing that catches wind and creates massive air resistance. Sounds fun, but in fact it’s incredibly dangerous. If you tire and lose your stable position, you can start tumbling uncontrollably.

When the time seemed right I asked Coudé: “Do you have kids?” He replied that he does – a 19-year-old son.

“Do you think about him as the plane nears the drop zone?”

No, Coudé said. “I’m thinking only of the jump: nothing else.” There could be no distractions up there, in the brief prelude to glory.

Everything about “adventurers” tends to be writ large – which is what makes them such appealing profile subjects. Over the years I’ve covered a guy trying to skydive from the troposphere; a woman diving unprecedentedly deep in the ocean on a single breath; a Norwegian explorer walking across remote northern Canada, without support or even a phone. These are seriously brave people, and very often there’s poignancy to their motivations.

Read the full post

What does the future hold for the Twins Who Share a Brain?

September 1st, 2011 § 0 comments § permalink

from Vancouver Magazine

Sept. 1, 2011

he moment they were born, on October 25, 2006, in Vancouver, this much was known about Krista and Tatiana Hogan. The girls were conjoined—what used to be called “Siamese”—twins. Their skulls were fused such that their tiny bodies together made the shape of an open hinge, the girls facing the same direction but essentially away from each other. Each had her own organs and limbs, but they shared plenty of blood vessels in the netlike sheath beneath their scalp. And they shared something else, too, something believed to be unprecedented among living twins: a “bridge” of tissue connected their otherwise-separate brains amidships, at a crucial relay station called the thalamus.

Eight hours after the twins’ birth, a remarkable thing happened, and it immediately transformed the story of two little girls from Vernon, B.C., into something almost mythic. Tatiana got a shot and Krista flinched. Clearly, the girls were not just attached but connected. Sensory information passed between them.

Read the full post

A bomb is ticking in your genome. Do you want to know about it?

May 3rd, 2011 § 2 comments § permalink

from Psychology Today

May 3, 2011

Paula Wishart, a career counselor from Ann Arbor, Michigan, learned in her 40s a sinister family secret: Lynch syndrome runs through their genes.

Lynch syndrome is caused by a collection of genetic mutations that vastly predispose a person to an early and aggressive form of colon cancer. (In women it’s linked, too, with uterine or endometrial cancer.) The mutations were discovered in the early 1990s. That was too late for a whole string of Wishart’s ancestors—including her great-grandfather and her grandfather. Their mysterious deaths fostered the mythology that there was, as Wishart puts it, “bad blood in the family.”

Lynch syndrome is like an assassin hiding in the attic with a dozen different ways to kill you. It’s a specter so dire that, when Wishart’s aunt learned a decade ago that there were now tests for diseases like Lynch, “she wanted no part of it,” Wishart recalls. “The feeling was, ‘Why would I want to know that?’” That aunt died of colon cancer. Shortly thereafter, her daughter—Wishart’s beloved first cousin—succumbed to cancer in her 40s. “If my aunt had been screened, then my cousin would have been screened earlier,” Wishart says. “It could have prevented their deaths.”

Read the full post

Environmental Visionaries: The Diaper Farmer

July 7th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

from POPULAR SCIENCE

July, 2010

hen asked to imagine the Earth in 2040, many scientists describe a grim scenario, a landscape so bare and dry, it’s almost uninhabitable. But that’s not what Willem van Cotthem sees. “It will be a green world,” says van Cotthem, a Belgian scientist turned social entrepreneur. “Tropical fruit can grow wherever it’s warm.” You still need water, but not much. A brief splash of rain every once in a while is enough. And voilà—from sandy soil, lush gardens grow.

The secret is hydrogels, powerfully absorbent polymers that can suck up hundreds of times their weight in water.

Hydrogels have many applications today, from food processing to mopping up oil spills, but they are most familiar as the magic ingredient in disposable diapers. The difference with agricultural hydrogels is that they don’t just trap moisture; they let it go again, very slowly, almost like time-release medication, into the root system of plants. That continuity of moisture is what brittle landscapes like deserts need to become fertile again. Water activates a mineralization process, setting free nutrients in the soil so that life can grow.

Read the full post

The Western/Eastern Mind Divide

April 30th, 2010 § 0 comments § permalink

UBC cultural psychologist Steven Heine discovered profound differences between Western and Eastern minds. A recipe for prejudice, or just the opposite?

from VANCOUVER MAGAZINE

April, 2010

It would be overstating things to claim it made Steven Heine famous—because nobody in his emerging field of cultural psychology is famous—but a study led by the young UBC professor did generate chatter in all kinds of quarters, from academic journals to the back page of Time. It got people thinking about the Western mind and the Eastern mind and the differences between them. Now that the East has just overtaken the West in economic strength (the tipping point, after a couple of centuries of Western dominance, came in 2006), Heine’s experiment seems positively pregnant with meaning.

Read the full post

« Older Entries