No, your brain is not alive when you’re dead.
I feel stupider for having to write that.

Have you noticed this recent rash of truly stupid headlines?

I could show you many more, but that’s enough. None of that makes any sense! Some of the stories make it sound like your mind is trapped and screaming inside of your corpse after you’re dead, and none of it is true — it’s all an incredibly egregious distortion of what the paper actually says. I don’t know whether the ‘journalists’ were too stupid to comprehend the work, or they simply hadn’t read it so they were just making stuff up.

I read it, though. Here’s the summary:

Purpose of Review

Of the approximately 350,000 out-of-hospital, and 750,000 after in-hospital cardiac arrest (CA) events in the US annually approximately 5-9% and 20% respectively may achieve return of spontaneous circulation (ROSC) after attempted cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). Up to 2/3 of these initial survivors may go on die in the subsequent 24-72 hours after ROSC due to a combination of (1) on-going cerebral injury, (2) myocardial dysfunction and (3) massive systemic inflammatory response. In order to successfully manage patients more effectively, monitoring methods are needed to aid clinicians in the detection and quantification of intra-cardiac arrest and post-resuscitation pathophysiological cerebral injury processes in the intensive care unit.

Recent Findings

Over the last few years many modalities have been used for cerebral monitoring during and after CA, these include quantitative pupillometry, transcranial doppler sonography, optic nerve sheath diameter measurements, microdialysis, tissue oxygenation monitoring, intra-cranial pressure monitoring, and electroencephalography. Current studies indicate that these modalities may be used for the purpose of neurological monitoring during cardiac arrest resuscitation as well as in the post-resuscitation period.

Summary

Multiple overlapping processes, including alterations in cerebral blood flow (CBF), raised intracerebralpressure, disorders of metabolism, imbalanced oxygen delivery and reperfusion injury contribute to cell death during the post-resuscitation period has led to the birth of post-resuscitation management strategies in the 21st century. This review provides a succinct overview of currently available bedside invasive and non-invasive neuro-monitoring methods after CA.

The rest of the paper consists of fairly detailed descriptions of various techniques of assessing the neurological state of dying patients. What it’s saying is that death isn’t like flipping off a light switch — there’s a progression of physiological changes over a short period of time, some of them irreversible, and many of them contributing to problems in prognosis if the patient is successfully resuscitated. None of this is surprising.

Unfortunately, the lead investigator, Sam Parnia, babbles somewhat outside of the content of the paper about near-death experiences and unconscious patients being able to witness what’s going on around them and the usual bullshit wrapped around confabulation. None of that is in the paper, though! It is kind of sleazy: say defensible, sober things inside a peer-reviewed paper, and then make up crap and pretend it’s supported by scientific research by association.

Niraj S, Parnia S (2017) Monitoring the Brain After Cardiac Arrest: a New Era. Current Neurology and Neuroscience Reports 17:62.

The Battle of Tollense Valley

Here’s an odd little article about some significant archaeological discoveries in Germany: the site of a major Bronze Age battle is being excavated in the Tollense Valley. On the order of 2000 men fought in it; radioisotope analysis reveals that the men came from a couple of distinct geographic areas, and that some of the fighters were presumably mercenaries. At least 130 men died — that’s the number of skeletons that have been dug up. It was a huge conflict, possibly over a nearby causeway, for its time, 3200 years ago.

Yet no one knows who these combatants were, or what they were fighting for, or even who won.

Just keep that in mind next time someone asks people to die for a cause.

Exposing Christian inanity is a life-long calling

You know what really annoys me about creationists? The unwarranted confidence in their beliefs; the smug and almost always incorrect dismissal of the evidence; and the ridiculous repetition. There isn’t an original thought in their heads, so every discussion turns into yet another refutation of the same stupid talking points we dealt with last week, last year, last decade. Here’s an example, a letter the the editor of the Argus Leader by Jeff Hambek. He’s complaining about a previous letter from a <gasp> atheist.

He stated that he does not believe in an afterlife. Since that cannot be scientifically proven, this is an element of faith. Is there a way to establish the truth regarding afterlife? For the free thinker, the well-documented life, death and resurrection of Jesus present plenty of evidence that there is a soul or being that remains after death of the body.

Hang on there, Mr Double Standard. You dismiss the idea that there is no afterlife, because it “cannot be scientifically proven”, yet you immediately turn around and claim that the Jesus myth is evidence of an afterlife. This is a lie. There is no scientific proof, to turn your claim against you, of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. There isn’t even any contemporary evidence. It’s a religious fable packed with miracles and magic written decades after the claimed events.

On the other hand, we do have good scientific evidence that the mind is a product of activity in the brain. Damage to the brain causes, for instance, personality changes. We don’t have any evidence of human minds functioning without a brain. It’s reasonable to infer that the self does not survive brain death, and that there is no mental activity when the brain rots down into a putrescent puddle.

Mr Hambek is just getting started, though, and launches into a criticism of the science of the origins of life, and quickly demonstrates that he has no idea what he’s talking about.

The atheist must also believe that life in the universe began as a happy accident. Science cannot prove this either.

Chance and necessity, guy. Early chemistry was a stochastic process that depended on random events that produced a predictable outcome. Chemistry is not a series of “happy accidents”.

Consider that the chemistry of the early earth was not favorable to formation of amino acids (per NASA).

Huh. That’s weird. We find amino acids in meteorites, for instance. The early Earth was not favorable for formation of stable compounds when it was molten, but once it cooled enough for water to condense, amino acids would have formed. That part isn’t hard.

Even if there were amino acids,

There were amino acids, no “if” about it.

it is against the statistical odds that these would spontaneously form life-sustaining proteins, since only some amino acids will work and other chemicals combine more readily with amino acids than other amino acids.

Isn’t organic chemistry fun?

This odds-based argument is bunk, though. It’s not about chance at all. It’s about likely chemical pathways that would have been present in the pre-biotic earth.

Even if there were the right proteins, they would have to combine with other chemicals in just the right way to form a cell wall. The cell wall would have to be in the right place at the right time and enclose itself around the instruction manual (DNA) and power plant (mitochondria) necessary for the cell to live.

Early cells would not have had DNA or mitochondria. Mitochondria evolved a bit over 2 billion years ago, about 2 billion years after life arose. It’s also unlikely that the first cells would have had a cell wall — a cell membrane would have been assembled some time after the first autocatalytic processes evolved, but even that wouldn’t have come first.

I’m going to guess that Mr Hambek hasn’t read one book or paper about origin of life models.

No one has a reasonable explanation of how those things came into being by themselves.

Incorrect. See below.

Even if that very first cell were formed, it is an incredible leap from there to a multi-celled organism, which requires finely-tuned and interlocking systems to intake and distribute sustenance and dispose of waste.

Multicellular organisms aren’t as big a leap as Mr Hambek thinks. We all still use the same metabolic and replicative processes that evolved in prokaryotes, and even the cell signaling mechanisms that we’ve elaborated upon to produce greater complexity are present in single-celled organisms.

Atheistic religion was easier back in Darwin’s day. With what we now know about the chemistry and machinery inside a cell, I cannot muster the level of faith required for this religion.

Oh god, here we go again — a religious believer using a claim that atheism is a religion as a pejorative, and using the same old slogans I’ve heard for forty years. Please learn a new routine.

I’m going to have to recommend some remedial reading for Mr Hambek. Here’s a paper on Early bioenergetic evolution by, among many others, Martin and Lane. It kinda contradicts a lot of his half-assed claims about the science.

Life is the harnessing of chemical energy in such a way that the energy-harnessing device makes a copy of itself. This paper outlines an energetically feasible path from a particular inorganic setting for the origin of life to the first free-living cells. The sources of energy available to early organic synthesis, early evolving systems and early cells stand in the foreground, as do the possible mechanisms of their conversion into harnessable chemical energy for synthetic reactions. With regard to the possible temporal sequence of events, we focus on: (i) alkaline hydrothermal vents as the far-from-equilibrium setting, (ii) the Wood–Ljungdahl (acetyl-CoA) pathway as the route that could have underpinned carbon assimilation for these processes, (iii) biochemical divergence, within the naturally formed inorganic compartments at a hydrothermal mound, of geochemically confined replicating entities with a complexity below that of free-living prokaryotes, and (iv) acetogenesis and methanogenesis as the ancestral forms of carbon and energy metabolism in the first free-living ancestors of the eubacteria and archaebacteria, respectively. In terms of the main evolutionary transitions in early bioenergetic evolution, we focus on: (i) thioester-dependent substrate-level phosphorylations, (ii) harnessing of naturally existing proton gradients at the vent–ocean interface via the ATP synthase, (iii) harnessing of Na+ gradients generated by H+/Na+ antiporters, (iv) flavin-based bifurcation-dependent gradient generation, and finally (v) quinone-based (and Q-cycle-dependent) proton gradient generation. Of those five transitions, the first four are posited to have taken place at the vent. Ultimately, all of these bioenergetic processes depend, even today, upon CO2 reduction with low-potential ferredoxin (Fd), generated either chemosynthetically or photosynthetically, suggesting a reaction of the type ‘reduced iron → reduced carbon’ at the beginning of bioenergetic evolution.

Chemistry ain’t a religion, OK?

That paper might be too technical for someone who gets his ‘facts’ out of a Bible, so here’s a less complicated discussion of some possible 4 billion year old fossils.

Discovered in slices of rock recovered from northern Quebec, the microscopic metallic detritus—plus chemical signatures associated with ancient metabolisms—could push back the date at which life arose on Earth. If verified, these fossils would surpass 3.7-billion-year-old microbial mats found in Greenland as the oldest known traces of life.

The microfossils also lend support to the idea that the warm, watery, mineral-rich neighborhoods around submerged vents are prime places for life to emerge, whether on this planet, on the seafloors of icy moons, or elsewhere in the universe.

Scientists seem to think the emergence of life is probable, not just a “happy accident”. But who are you going to believe, a bunch of people who’ve studied chemistry and biology for years, or some random Christian doofus from South Dakota who doesn’t even realize that not all cells have mitochondria?

Weapon of choice?

Is this how it’s going to be, mass murder by rental truck? It’s another terror attack in NY, with a guy plowing at high speed down a bike lane in Manhattan, killing at least 8.

I do notice that officials were very quick to declare this an attack of terrorism — the driver is reported to have shouted “Allah Akbar” as he took off. Curious, isn’t it, that everyone was slow to call the same behavior in Charlottesville an act of terror…I guess “MAGA” isn’t enough of a sign.

The end of Scienceblogs. Long live Scienceblogs!

Let the countdown begin.


(you might not want to click on that — it’s loud)

The self-destruct sequence for Scienceblogs has begun. If you head over there on this last day of existence, you’ll find that the last post on most of the blogs is an announcement that they’ve jumped into their escape pods and are jetting off to new worlds of discovery.

It’s a shame. Scienceblogs really was revolutionary in its time — the idea was to bring in all these people who were writing about science as a hobby, give them a little profit from their work, and harness them to generate lots of continuous online content as part of a larger science communication strategy by Seed Media. It worked! Sorta. Unfortunately, the blog network was about the only part of the media empire that was running in the black, and the big projects — Seed magazine, a popular science glossy, and ideas about data visualization — didn’t last. And then online ad revenue started to get ugly (and still is!) as the ad companies cannibalized their readership with increasingly aggressive and off-putting ads (see freethoughtblogs now for example). Management tried to make it work with a few terrible missteps, like selling a blog to Pepsi, blurring the lines between commercialism and science content. But otherwise, it was a great, fun, contentious, interesting community.

The beginning of the end came when National Geographic bought up the network. It was clear in discussions with the new management that they had no idea what they’d bought — their concerns were all about bottling it up and constraining the beast by imposing conservative standards and practices on a diverse collection of independent bloggers. People started to leave. It didn’t help that one of their first acts was upgrading everyone to new software, botching the process (I lost about a third of my comments) and leaving us with rather drab, vanilla-ish appearances. And then neglecting everything. It was clear that they didn’t care, there were caretakers put in place to just reign over the decay, and there was to be no improvement, no growth, no excitement. So many of us drifted away.

And today is the day they nuke it from orbit.

One last fond look backwards at the main Sb page…

Gosh, I sure hope no hostile alien life forms have smuggled themselves aboard the escape pods.

Another attempt to divorce atheism from the asswaffles

I don’t want to be part of a movement that includes racists, sexists, and shitlords, which makes being part of atheism problematic right now. Philip Rose feels likewise, and has a proposal: Atheism Minus.

He’s introducing the idea on YouTube, which might be a mistake — already, the shitlords are flocking to attack it, and the comments are a horror show of the usual dorks with their revisionist history and dogmatic denial of the importance of social justice causes to a social movement. They just want their privileges extended. I’m not in total agreement with everything Philip says, but goddamn, his shallow, stupid, asshole critics are repellent.

However, I am going to pluck out one of their comments as a relevant example of all that is wrong with these nitwits.

The community went south precisely when the feminism/SJW nonsense [dogmatic rejection of feminism noted. I don’t want to associate with anyone who thinks equality of women and minorities is nonsense] got injected into it [Incorrect. There were feminists and anti-feminists in it all along. What happened is that the anti-SJWs rejected some of us rather vehemently (remember, “guys, don’t do that”? That triggered a mob) with harassment campaigns]. It was obvious to a great number that it was some kind of social shaming cult [You know, that happens when you have standards for ethical behavior. People who don’t meet some minimal expectations of civil social interaction get shamed. Do you really think /pol is a great finishing school for young gentlemen?] , so we walked away from it [Lie. You did not. Instead, you babbled a lot of dogmatic bullshit about how atheism isn’t allowed to have any moral expectations, and hounded women out of the movement. I wish you’d just left.] – and, as expected, we got ‘shamed’ by the group for not agreeing 110% with their superficially worthy, yet significantly flawed causes [flawed…how? Just the mention of feminism causes a knee-jerk response from you guys — FEMINISM IS CANCER. You can’t make a coherent critique.]. Philip attempted to turn the + of added social justice to a – of added social justice in a rather clumsy bait and switch that won’t fool those of us that rejected it the first time. [Then reject it. Walk away. Just fuck off, you regressive turds.]

Just because we’re agagainst the intersectional SJW nonsense [Social Justice: The concept of fair and just relations between the individual and society. This is measured by the explicit and tacit terms for the distribution of wealth, opportunities for personal activity and social privileges. Intersectionality: the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage. You object? Why?], doesn’t mean we hate women or folks of other ethnicities [Actually, it means you regard the goals of those groups as irrelevant and unimportant. Equal pay and fair treatment under the law for others are less important to you than that white men might have to back up their entitlement with responsibility] – it’s the inevitable victimhood cult and anti white male rhetoric that does that…. [And there it is: the big problem in society is that white men might get called mean names. A black man might fear getting shot by the police, a woman might fear getting raped or passed over for promotion, but the great American crisis is that white men are being told that they benefit from injustice.]

Let the shitlords rage. They dominate the discourse in areas of social media where they’re allowed to be totally anonymous and spew crap without any accountability, like YouTube, but out here in reality the major atheist organizations all recognize that that nihilistic, movement-without-meaning attitude doesn’t work, and as Philip points out, you can’t fight for the rights of an atheist minority while denying the rights of far more oppressed groups.

I do have one objection to the idea of Atheism Minus. The onus shouldn’t be on civil, normal, healthy members of a community to separate themselves from the rotten apples. We should recognize that Atheism Plus or Atheism Minus or whatever we call it isn’t the weird subset — it’s the standard. We need to just reclaim the title of Atheism as our own.

Ominous hallway

This is the second floor office wing of the science building where I work. You may notice how well kept-up it is, the floors clean and shiny — our custodians do an excellent job. But notice the line of ceiling lights marching off into the distance, with their bright reflections in the shiny floor, one aligned with each office door…except one. One office sits in a pool of relative darkness. One where the lights don’t shine, where the resident lurks in perpetual gloom.

Can you guess who dwells there, in room 2390? Who has crouched there in the room haunted by gloaming murk for years?

Hey, my old high school is in the news!

That’s rarely a good thing anymore, and it isn’t good news. Someone went into the girls’ restroom and scrawled hateful graffiti on the walls: swastikas, death threats against Muslims, and of course, the universal shorthand of American assholes everywhere, “MAGA”.

These people are effectively tarring their own slogans by association. I see “Make America Great Again” on a hat, and it’s as bad as if they have a swastika, a Confederate flag, or racial slur proudly displayed on their clothes.

Money laundering, tax evasion and conspiracy against the United States

The first indictments have come down, and the targets are Paul Manafort and his crony, Richard Gates. I suspect it’s the money charges — money laundering and tax evasion — that are really going to hurt Manafort and Gates. If conspiracy and treason could get you in trouble, we’d have to arrest most of the members of the Republican party.

Let’s hope these two are just the start.