Viraj's Weblog

I found this fascinating documentary called The Trap which explains alot of political theory. The most interesting thing conveyed (to me at least), and also talked about in many other science circles, is the concept that human beings are simply machines for DNA replication. That is, DNA is code, and this code manufactures machines to replicate itself. Imagine a program that could manifest proteins to essentially spread itself. These proteins could get more and more complex, eventually making the structure of a human being.

I'm reminded of the Simpsons evolution intro (I especially like the scene where the 2 humans cross paths, one evolving, and one devolving back to the lower creature). The evolution of species is the evolution of DNA. First starting out as one amino acid, then getting larger, multi-celled, sprouting legs, arms, etc. It's almost like DNA is the primitive spinal cord, and in it is the history of life on earth. A book continually being written, branching and creating countless editions, languages, mutations.

The Trap describes the idea of wanting to spread your politics around the world, and the example is US and democracy. There is almost something primitive and visceral in this, as if it harks back to nature's need to spread genes. Our wanting to spread political ideologies is just one manifestation of this. Getting people to conform and resisting revolutionaries is like fighting off anything that prevents you from spreading your genes.

I'm reading a great book called The Omnivore's Dilemma. Here's an excerpt:

But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e., lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.

• 30 days: an Atheist among Christians
• Louis Theroux visits the Westboro Cult (7 parts)

Here is an interview with Philip Zimbardo, who did the infamous Stanford prison experiment. He has a new book called The Lucifer Effect which describes his findings.