Friday Geeky T-Shirt Blogging: Entropy. It Ain't What it Used to Be
I think of all my geeky t-shirts, this one is my favorite. For me these eight little words are not just chuckle-worthy, they say so much more than what is apparent.What is entropy? Without going into a thermodynamic treatise on usable and unusable energy, I will say that entropy is simply the disorder or randomness in a system. The higher the entropy the more disorder there is. Without adding anymore energy, the entropy of a system will increase but not decrease. For example, if I knock over a glass and it shatters on the floor, the entropy has increased. The glass is very disordered laying on the floor in a bunch of piece...
Source: Mary Meets Dolly - January 11, 2013 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Geeky T-shirts Source Type: blogs
"Human Rights" Court Overturns Costa Rica's Ban on IVF
This is depressing. Costa Rica, the only country to have an outright ban on IVF because IVF creates and destroys human life on an industrial scale, has been told by a "human rights" court that they have to abandon their prohibition. You would think that the numbers recently reported by the UK's Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority would bolster Costa Rica's case. In the UK, nearly 2 million IVF embryos have been created and then simply been discarded "unused." These shocking numbers prompted Lord Alton to say:It happens on a day-by-day basis with casual indifference. This sheer destruction of ...
Source: Mary Meets Dolly - January 8, 2013 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: IVF Source Type: blogs
Why You Need to Know About the Dickey Amendment
In an attempt to stop the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, two researchers sued the Obama Administration saying that the administration's funding of research that requires the destruction of a human embryo violates the Dickey Amendment. Unfortunately, while a lower court agreed that using tax-payer money to fund embryonic stem cell research is in conflict with the Dickey Amendment, higher courts have not agreed, and the Supreme Court has decided not to hear the case. So for now the federal funding of embryonic stem cell research continues.But what is the Dickey Amendment anyway? Why does everyone refer to i...
Source: Mary Meets Dolly - January 7, 2013 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Stem cells, Embryonic Source Type: blogs
Hope for 2013: Embracing human nature
Peering into the abyss of biotechnology, I have often mused that the problem with much of what goes on in fertility clinics and laboratories of the world is a denial of human nature. The denial that living human organisms, regardless of how they are created, are indeed human beings. They are small and immature, but human beings none-the-less.This denial of the nature of humanity can be seen in nearly all the moral problems in our society: from the denial of the humanity of the unborn, the sick and the disabled; to the denial of our need of an intact family unit with both a mother and a father; to the denial that sex is a p...
Source: Mary Meets Dolly - January 3, 2013 Category: Geneticists and Genetics Commentators Tags: Transhumanism Source Type: blogs
