the freedom from self that is both the goal and foundation of spiritual life is
coincident with normal perception and cognition though admittedly this can be
difficult to realize
Man who videotaped Alton Sterling’s death was arrested at his job for assault & battery. After failing to produce a warrant the police held him on unpaid traffic tickets. He uses Uber to go to work and back home. Because of his arrest at work his supervisor told him not to return.
Christopher LeDay was arrested less than 24 hours after he posted video of #AltonSterling being shot and killed by Baton Rouge police officers. Police came to his job at Dobbins Air Force Base in and put the cuffs on him for alleged assault and battery.
LeDay’s lawyer says that he was taken in on false charges.
“He never had a warrant for an assault,” lawyer Tiffany Simmons told the station. “My client has never had any criminal history.”
She adds, “They never showed a warrant for an assault to my client, in fact my client was held in DeKalb County Jail for at least 26 hours and they never produced a warrant.”
Simons told that when police could not produce a warrant, she was then told her client was being held for unresolved traffic tickets.
After paying those tickets and trying to return to work, LeDay’s lawyer says he was turned away at the gate of the base for “security clearance issues.”
Yet, LeDay, who was just hired about six weeks ago, said his supervisor knew about the traffic tickets when he was hired.
“He should not be penalized or possibly retaliated against, he should not be embarrassed at his place of employment for doing what is right,” Simmons said.
Actually even farmers are more than twice as likely to be killed in the line of duty. Being a cop hasnever been safer. They want it to be perceived as being horribly dangerous so they can get military weapons they don’t need and nobody with half a brain would trust them with.
Rats that responded to cues for sugar with the speed and excitement
of binge-eaters were less motivated for the treat when certain neurons
were suppressed, researchers discovered.
The findings suggest these neurons, in a largely unstudied region of
the brain, are deeply connected to the tendency to overindulge in
response to external triggers, a problem faced by people addicted to
food, alcohol and drugs. The findings, due to appear in the June 15
issue of the journal Neuron, are now available online.
“External cues — anything from a glimpse of powder that looks like
cocaine or the jingle of an ice cream truck — can trigger a relapse or
binge eating,” said Jocelyn M. Richard, a Johns Hopkins University
post-doctoral fellow in psychological and brain sciences and the
report’s lead author. “Our findings show where in the brain this
connection between environmental stimuli and the seeking of food or
drugs is occurring.”
(Image caption:
The brain’s ventral pallidum glows red during the experiment)
First researchers trained rats to realize that if they heard a
certain sound, either a siren or staccato beeps, and a pushed a lever,
they would get a drink of sugar water. Then, as the rats performed the
task, researchers monitored neurons within the ventral pallidum area of
the rats’ brains, a subcortical structure near the base of the brain.
(Image caption:
Neurons react to the cue for sugar during the experiment)
When the rats heard the cue linked to their treat, a much
larger-than-expected number of neurons reacted — and vigorously,
researchers found. They also found that when the neuron response was
particularly robust, the rats were extra quick to go for the sugar. The
researchers were able to predict how fast the rats would move for the
sugar, just by observing how excited the neurons became at the sound of
the cue.
“We were surprised to see such a high number of neurons showing such a
big increase in activity as soon as the sound played,” Richard said.
Next, the researchers used “optogenetics,” a technique that allows
the manipulation of cells through targeted beams of light, to
temporarily suppress the activity of ventral pallidum neurons while the
rats heard the sugar cues. With those neurons inactive, the rats were
less likely to pull the sugar lever; when they did pull it, they were
much slower to do so.
That ability to slow and calm the reaction to cues or triggers for
binges could be key for people trying to moderate addictive behaviors,
Richard said.
“We don’t want to make it so that people don’t want rewards,” Richard
said. “We want to tone down the exaggerated motivation for rewards.
I want to draw your attention to a rather wonderful free online research resource for all you writers who want to know more about science but don’t know where to start, or for you students looking for extra resources. Richard Feynman’s Lectures on Physics have held a unique position in science pedagogy since their initial publication in 1963. A comprehensive overview of mankind’s understanding of the physical world written with Feynman’s characteristic accessibility, humor, and reverence, the Lectures span three volumes covering everything from the basic definition of the atom to Quantum Mechanics and Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity.
Full and fair warning: while the Lectures are not a full, technical curriculum on par with getting a bachelor’s degree, they were written with lower-division college students in mind and many if not most of the entries rely on varying levels of mathematical knowledge, or at least a level of comfort following along with mathematical notation as it is being simultaneously explained in prose. The Lectures do generally progress in order, and it is not recommended that you flip to the middle of Volume III with an expectation of full understanding without having read at least some ‘prep knowledge’ lectures in the relevant subject area. Not ALL lectures reference math, however, and with the less-technically-minded reader in mind certain subsets of the Lectures were excerpted and published as Six Easy Pieces andSix Not-So-Easy Pieces. The Six Easy Pieces cover many conceptual fundamentals of physics in an accessible way while the Six Not-So-Easy Pieces deal entirely with Einstein’s Relativity. These twelve lectures are more or less completely understandable without foreknowledge, mathematical or otherwise, and are a good place to start (though the second set may come fully only with some re-reading). I have included the aforementioned subsets below:
Richard Feynman’s larger-that-life personality only partially comes out in his writing, and for those of you who are interested in watching some of his famous lectures, a decent repository exists on YouTube. I have linked some such videos below:
The Character of Physical Law
Much of the information presented here overlaps with the Six Easy Pieces and Six Not-So-Easy Pieces.
This lecture series is based on Feynman’s highly acclaimed accessible, if somewhat difficult, overview of Quantum Electrodynamics that fundamental physicist Anthony Zee described as neither a “typical popular physics book” nor a textbook, but “a rare hybrid.”
While Kip Thorne’s recent work on the film Interstellar is a particularly extreme (and great) example, the success of the movie is one indicator of many that the market exists for accurate, interesting science married with good artistry and storytelling. One rather interesting approach to this marriage I found in the work of James Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota who has received acclaim for his classes and published novel on the “Physics of Superheroes.” In a behind-the-scenes featurette on the DVD of Watchmen (for the production of which he was head science consultant) Kakalios describes his approach to scientifically “accurate” superhero stories as centered on a single ‘miracle exception.’ If we allow for a single physical impossibility such as super-strength or the power of flight, etc., we can then, Kakalios reasons, work out otherwise realistic physical/scientific ramifications of the situation, creating a close approximation to ‘scientific accuracy’ in superheroes. Such a thought exercise might be interesting or useful for any kind of fantastical writing, I think, from the flight abilities of a dragon to a wormhole superhighway. Feynman’s Lectures certainly provide a wide enough breadth of subject matter to be applicable in a variety of such exercises.
I hope some of you will find these works enjoyable or at the very least useful research tools. Feynman had a particular knack for conveying even the most difficult concepts to a general audience without sacrificing scientific truth or comprehensibility. To all of you who have wondered about the physical ramifications of Heisenberg’s famous Uncertainty Principle or what Einstein meant when he described a curvature of spacetime, this is as good a place as any (and a better place than most) to dive in. I hope you enjoy.
- Dev
I cannot recommend these enough, these are fantastic resources!!
