But, but… Mom said…

The dentist from our Tee Family Dental decided to look through past research papers to see if I needed any more work on done my teeth, since I’ve being doing a lot of oil pulling lately and you might ask what is oil pulling?T Well this is the practice of swirling oil around your mouth and then spitting it out. It usually involves coconut oil, sunflower oil or sesame seed oil. Rinsing should be continued for perhaps 5 to 20 minutes, so that the edible oil is pulled through the teeth and mouth.

Various websites advocate coconut oil pulling as an effective way to whiten teeth and remove bacteria. Some advocates online suggest it can treat tooth decay, kill bad breath, heal bleeding gums, prevent cavities and even prevent heart disease. There is a book, entitled Oil pulling therapy,1 that promises it exerts a powerful cleansing and healing effect on the mouth and sinuses and the rest of the body.

Their research was published this week in the British Medical Journal, and the Guardian has a story about them here.

What can I say? I told you so, Ma! 🙂

Geeky joke

This is an Absolute Geeky domain!

hee hee! 😛

My Daemon from "The Golden Compass"

http://goldencompassmovie.com/goldenCompass_blog.swf?id=738917

UPDATE: Stupid movie site seems to have taken away the Flash widget. Sigh.

Romney, Religion, Bah!

Here’s a funny thing. Very little of America is openly atheist (most surveys seem to put the figure at between 5 – 15%) and yet, most of the atheist blogs I read are American!

Anyway, Mitt Romney (a presidential candidate for 2008) has been making the news on these blogs (and elsewhere) for his recent speech on his faith.

It just boggles my mind!

Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom. Freedom opens the windows of the soul so that man can discover his most profound beliefs and commune with God. Freedom and religion endure together, or perish alone.

Freedom requires religion??? The purpose of his speech was apparently to affirm his faith and also to reassure voters that his faith did not come in the way of him performing his duties but in fact helped it. But if this what he thinks, well then, what of atheists in America? They are to be denied freedom since they don’t have religion?

He goes on to say:

No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America – the religion of secularism. They are wrong.

The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust.

Thus propagating the myth that the founders of the United States wrote the words “under God” and “In God We Trust.”

In point of fact, “One nation under God” is actually a phrase from the “Pledge of Allegiance” which was first written in the 1890s and even then didn’t include the phrase “under god!” The “under god” part was added in in the 1950s after the lobbying of a Christian organisation and a pastor!

As far as “In God We Trust” goes, it was adopted as the national motto only in 1956! It was preceded by “E Pluribus Unum” by a century and a half.

So to all my American friends, atheists and otherwise, don’t look askance at Mitt Romney because of his faith, but because of his ignorance of American history! Or if he does know history, he certainly seems to be blithely lying about facts in a speech he expects to be his turnkey!

Santa Claus about Jesus

Santa Claus

This hilarious image speaks far, far better than anything I can say about it! 🙂

(grabbed from fukung.net)

We didn’t start the bubble!

Sung to the tune of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” this hilarious video by The Richter Scales is a neat caricature of “Bubble 2.0.”

Not so fast, light!

A physicist at Harvard, Lene Vestergaard Hau, slowed down a beam of light and even stopped it inside a Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC.) If that wasn’t enough, she even moved the frozen one from one BEC to another!

Citizens For Peace

I helped set up the website for an NGO called Citizens for Peace a month or so ago. I helped pick and customise the theme and also convinced them to use WordPress as their CMS!

Incidentally I also support their message and mission, so please go take a look at their website.

Empty Again.

A physicist, a biologist, and a mathematician are sitting in a café and notice people going into and coming out of the house across the street. First they see two people going into the house. Time passes. After a while, they notice three persons coming out of the house.

The physicist: “The measurement was not accurate.”

The biologist: “They have reproduced.”

The mathematician: “If one person enters the house, then it will be empty again.”

From: Eric’s favourite Math jokes

The Inner Life of a Cell

For all biologists who couldn’t think in 3-D, and were bored of illustrations in text books. This will really show you how dynamic life is, even at the level of a single cell.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMrvmZ2i1sE

David Bolinsky, former lead medical illustrator at Yale, lead animator John Leibler, and Mike Astrachan are some of the creators at XIVIO who made the movie. They created the animation for Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. Most of the processes animated were the result of Alain Viel’s Ph.D. work describing the processes to the team.

14 months to create for 8.5 minutes of animation! Well worth it, don’t you think?

For more on how it was made, read Studio Daily’s report here. And an interview with Wired here.

(posted originally by MadGenius)