WEEKLY NEWSREEL–3 1/2 TIME-OUTS TUESDAY (VOL. 26)

Good evening Mr. & Mrs. Catholic, and all you other Christians at sea. Those wacky slightly mad scientists have been at it again, which means we’re here with another Newsreel to tell you all about it. As always, the Newsreel is sponsored by the fine folks at Acts of the Apostasy, home of the 3 1/2 Time-Outs Tuesday. And now, off to press.

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DATELINE: MASSACHUSETTS – War and rumors of war? Global economic ruin? Rampant social unrest? Oh sure, the big brains will get around to solving those problems someday. Maybe. But for now, a group of mechanical engineers and nano-technologists at MIT have been hard at work developing a possible solution to what has surely been one of the most pressing issues of the modern age… how to get ketchup to come out of a bottle quicker. Their patented (and unfortunately named) LiquiGlide Condiment Lubricant appears to ensure that every drop of the sauce of your choice makes it onto your plate rather than sticking to the inside of the bottle. MIT PhD candidate Dave Smith remarks, "It’s funny: Everyone is always like, 'Why bottles? What’s the big deal?' But then you tell them the market for bottles--just the sauces alone is a $17 billion market… and if all those bottles had our coating, we estimate that we could save about one million tons of food from being thrown out every year." So you see, while they haven’t quite solved the problem of world peace yet, the folks at MIT at least seem to still be following the principle stated in the Catechism that “science and technology are precious resources when placed at the service of man and promote his integral development for the benefit of all.”

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DATELINE: GOTHENBURG – While the idea of condiment lubricant may sound unappealing, dietary supplements made from lizard spit sounds downright revolting. But that hasn’t stopped researchers at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg from developing a new drug made from the saliva of Gila monsters. It turns out that saurian drool, or at least the naturally occurring exendin-4 found in it, is pretty effective in reducing the craving for food, and not just because the idea of putting it in your mouth is enough to turn your stomach. “In a study with rats published in the Journal of Neuroscience, Assistant Professor Karolina Skibicka and her colleagues show that exendin-4 effectively reduces the cravings for food… ‘The implications of the findings are significant’ states Suzanne Dickson, Professor of Physiology at the Sahlgrenska Academy: ‘Most dieting fails because we are obsessed with the desire to eat, especially tempting foods like sweets. As exendin-4 suppresses the cravings for food, it can help obese people to take control of their weight,’ suggests Professor Dickson. Research on exendin-4 also gives hope for new ways to treat diseases related to eating disorders, for example, compulsive overeating.” It’s for those kinds of results that the Catechism reminds us that (as we’ve previously discussed in more absurd detail) “medical and scientific experimentation on animals is a morally acceptable practice if it remains within reasonable limits and contributes to caring for or saving human lives.” Now, as to how reasonable it was for someone to dream up the idea of putting lizard spit in their mouths in the first place, we’ll just leave that to you to decide.

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DATELINE: BRUSSELS – Alas, not all scientists are as creative in their thinking as the folks from Gothemburg. In this week’s installment of science telling us stuff we already knew for ages, “a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that both men and women see images of sexy women's bodies as objects… We see sexualized women every day on billboards, buildings, and the sides of buses and this study suggests that we think of these images as if they were objects, not people. ‘What is motivating this study is to understand to what extent people are perceiving these as human or not,’ [Philippe] Bernard says. The next step, he says, is to study how seeing all these images influences how people treat real women.” Really, that’s the next step? Well, let’s save some them time and just quote the Catechism where it states that “it does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others.” There, we just saved the government of Belgium hundreds of thousands in euros in grant money. You’re welcome.

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For those of you who might have read some of the above items and felt the urge to exclaim WTF! but don’t feel comfortable indulging in the implied profanity, have you ever considered the time honored alternative of… Wha…?

And with that we sign off another Newsreel, as is our custom, with the immortal words of the great Les Nessman. Good evening, and may the good news be yours.

LIFE’S LIKE A MOVIE: THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

So I crank up the engine the other day and and lo and behold, it seems my truck has decided to start communicating with me through binary…

Now I couldn’t quite place it at the time, but there was just something about the number 101010 that was familiar, which for me usually means there’s a related snippet of some movie or television show tucked away somewhere in my skull. And sure enough, once I had the time to look it up, the connection was obvious. It turns out that in the binary numeral system the number 101010 = 42. And 42, as any Sci-Fi fan worth his or her salt should already know, is the very number which is the answer to the ultimate question of LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING as calculated by the supercomputer Deep Thought in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Now, just in case you’ve managed to avoid science fiction for the past thirty years and are not familiar with the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in any of its many incarnations, it’s the story of the last two earthlings in existence (our planet having been blown to smithereens by a Vogon construction crew to make way for a hyperspatial express route) who traipse around the cosmos in a stolen starship accompanied by the alien Ford Prefect, his cousin Zaphod Beeblebrox (the three-armed two-headed President of the Galaxy), and Marvin the Paranoid Android (a morbidly depressed robot with a self-proclaimed brain the size of a planet). This band of misfits eventually make their way to the planet Magrathea where they are indeed presented with the ultimate answer to LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING, only to be informed that nobody knows what the actual question is.

Now, lots of people have spent way too much time trying to figure out what Douglas Adams meant by making the answer to the ultimate question be the number 42. Was he referencing the angle in degrees at which light reflects off of water to create a rainbow (awww, sweet), or maybe the number of rules in the game of cricket (Adams’ favorite sport), or perhaps even the forty-two-lettered name of God from Jewish tradition (though an atheist, the author confessed a lifelong fascination with studying religion). Adams never said, passing the whole thing off as a whim. “The answer to this is very simple.” he related in an interview, “It was a joke. It had to be a number, an ordinary, smallish number, and I chose that one. Binary representations, base thirteen, Tibetan monks are all complete nonsense. I sat at my desk, stared into the garden and thought '42 will do' I typed it out. End of story.”

Of course, there’s still a lot of people to this day who refuse to accept Adams’ own explanation, so the speculations continue. But whether or not there is a hidden meaning to 42 is probably missing the point. Being that The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a farcical satire written by a (mostly) committed atheist, it’s seems more than probable that Adams was taking a potshot at what he saw as the seeming futility of posing such metaphysical questions in the first place. After all, if life has no externally determined purpose, as atheists believe, then to ponder what meaning life has is nothing but a big waste of time. Or as it plays out in the Hitchhiker’s Guide, if you ask something nonsensical like ‘what is the meaning of life’ then all you’ll get in response is a nonsensical answer like 42.

And yet, as noted, despite atheism’s general disdain for anyone’s claim to having at least some of the answers to life’s big questions, Douglas Adams admitted in interviews that he just couldn’t seem to stop thinking about God, philosophy in general, and the questions they both raised, things like why are we here and does anything we do really matter in the end? And that ultimately says something good about the man. Peter Kreeft, renowned Catholic philosopher, wrote that “anyone who is simply not interested in these questions is less than fully human, less than fully reasonable. Reasonable persons, even if skeptical about the possibility of answering them, will not dismiss them as unanswerable without looking (that is not reason but prejudice) but will examine the claims of philosophers to have given reasonable answers to these questions before settling into a comfortable, fashionable skepticism.” Professional atheist Austin Cline actually agrees with this, writing that “although there is a role for dispassionate research, philosophy must derive from some passion for the ultimate goal: a reliable, accurate understanding of ourselves and our world. This is also what atheists should seek.” So, while on the surface the eternally morose Marvin the Paranoid Android might seem like the epitome of atheism as he bemoans, “Life? Don't talk to me about life!”, the opposite is actually true for the mature atheist.

Which leads to a strange instance in which a thinking atheist can actually agree with something in the Catechism, at least where it states “Catechesis on creation is of major importance. It concerns the very foundations of human and Christian life: for it makes explicit the response of the Christian faith to the basic question that men of all times have asked themselves: ‘Where do we come from?’ ‘Where are we going?’ ‘What is our origin?’ ‘What is our end?’ ‘Where does everything that exists come from and where is it going?’ The two questions, the first about the origin and the second about the end, are inseparable. They are decisive for the meaning and orientation of our life and actions.”

The difference is that the subsequent answer to the ultimate question of LIFE, THE UNIVERSE, AND EVERYTHING arrived at by Christians turns out to pretty simple, to know and love God, and from that to be able to know and love his creations. That’s how we’re to orient our lives (and we even manage to do so on our good days). But what about the atheists? By asking the same questions, yet rejecting the religious answer, to what ultimately are they orienting their lives? The pursuit of one’s own self interests? Meandering from one fleeting moment of happiness to another? Resignation to nihilism? I guess they still have a lot of questions to ponder, huh? Me, I think I’ll stick with the few answers provided so far by faith. They make a lot more sense.

And to think, I was reminded of all that just by looking at a odometer. Well, that and the fact that I needed an oil change, but still. Funny the weird places you find God in sometimes.

(Oh, and speaking of Binary, feel free to go here and listen to the song of that title by the Catholic folk duo Popple. It’s pretty catchy)

STILL VOICES #015

OUTTAKES #040

SHORT FEATURE: REVERSE PARTHENOGENESIS

So, why has the Catholic Church teamed up with NeoStem, Inc. to promote adult stem cell research? Why does the Vatican continue to operate one of the oldest astronomical research institutions in the world? And why was the Pontifical Academy of Sciences founded in 1603? Good questions, and the makers of this short film (starring Buffy’s Amber Benson and Adam Busch) think they may just have an answer as to why the Catholic Church has had such a lifelong interest in scientific advancements.

Well, I suppose that could be the reason?

Or maybe it’s just because, as the Catechism points out, “Basic scientific research, as well as applied research, is a significant expression of man's dominion over creation. Science and technology are precious resources when placed at the service of man and promote his integral development for the benefit of all.”

Either way’s fine with me.

WEEKLY NEWSREEL – 3 1/2 TIME-OUTS TUESDAY (VOL. 23)

Good evening Mr. & Mrs. Catholic, and all you other Christians at sea. After a brief hiatus, the theater doors are open once again. We’ll kick things off with another Weekly Newsreel, sponsored as usual by the fine folks at Acts of the Apostasy, home of the 3 1/2 Time-Outs Tuesday. Now off to press.

I

DATELINE: WROCLAW, POLAND – The Daily Mail reports that “a dentist pulled out all her ex-boyfriend’s teeth after he dumped her for another woman – who has now left him because he is toothless.” While the jilted tooth doctor faces up to three years in prison for abusing the trust of a patient, the victim himself most likely faces a whole lifetime full of incredulous people wondering just what the hell he was thinking when he kept a dental appointment with a woman he had broken up with only three days before. After all, the old quote “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” may not actually be from the Bible, but we’re betting there’s a whole lot of ladies out there who think that it should be.

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DATELINE: SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS – The latest theory to surface regarding what may have caused the Salem Witch Trials comes from a thesis written by By economist Emily Oster who speculates that the whole ordeal was caused by climate change. According to Oster, "The most active period of the witchcraft trials (mainly in Europe) coincides with a period of lower-than-average temperature known to climatologists as the ‘little ice age’… The coldest segments of this ‘little ice age’ period were in the 1590s and between 1680 and 1730… The colder temperatures increased the frequency of crop failure… [and] people would have searched for a scapegoat in the face of deadly changes in weather pattern." Danvers archivist Dick Trask isn’t convinced of this theory however, noting that people often use their present day concerns to interpret what was happening hundreds of years ago. Trask points out how, in the drug addled early 70s, a popular theory blamed the witch trials on the accidental ingestion of hallucinogenic fungi, while the socialist movement of the 60s advanced the notion of a greedy capitalist plot to seize land from poor farmers by accusing them of witchcraft. “These theories tell us more about the present than they do about the past.” Trask says. This same type of thing often happens in modern biblical scholarship where those predisposed to certain ideologies will often ‘discover’ their personal agendas buried (usually pretty deep) within Scripture, i.e. the recent ludicrous assertion by Anglican priest Paul Oestreicher that Jesus was gay. That’s why Pope Benedict XVI wrote that “If scholarly exegesis is not to exhaust itself in constantly new hypotheses, becoming theologically irrelevant, it must take a methodological step forward and see itself once again as a theological discipline, without abandoning its historical character. It must learn that the positivistic hermeneutic on which it has been based does not constitute the only valid and definitively evolved rational approach; rather, it constitutes a specific and historically conditioned form of rationality that is both open to correction and completion and in need of it.” Or in the simplest of terms, if the Church has taught something steadily for over 2000 years and you’ve amazingly just now discovered something that contradicts it, it’s probably best to go back and study a little bit more before you say something to embarrass yourself.

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DATELINE: HIDDEN UNDER YOUR HAT – So you’re fond of Captain Picard and Lieutenant Ilia but would rather look more like a tribble? Well, there’s hope for all you chrome domes out there. ScienceDaily has the story of a group of Japanese researchers who have demonstrated functional hair regeneration utilizing adult stem cells. “Reporting in Nature Communications the group demonstrate that bioengineered hair follicle germ reconstructed from adult epithelial stem cells and dermal papilla cells can regenerate fully functional hair follicle and hair growth. Their bioengineered follicles showed restored hair cycles and piloerection through the rearrangement of follicular stem cells and their niches. The bioengineered hair follicle also developed the correct structures and formed proper connections with surrounding host tissues such as the epidermis, arrector pili muscle and nerve fibers.” In short, this appears to be the first step in creating a working treatment that will cure baldness for those who want one. And it is being developed using, ONCE AGAIN, adult stem cells rather than embryonic stem cells. Ethical science that respects human life, you gotta love it.

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Oh, and scientists, if this hair growth thing does work out as planned, please do us all a favor and keep the formula away from the Catholic blogsphere. As LarryD points out, it’s already hairy enough out there as it is.

Just saying.

And on that note it’s time to bid adieu to another Newsreel, as is our custom, with the immortal words of the great Les Nessman. Good evening, and may the good news be yours.