I rather like the Anglicans Online analysis of the now-concluding Primate's Conference.

30 January 2011: Anglican Primates meet in Dublin.

About two thirds of the primates of various Anglican provinces met this past week in Dublin. The Anglican Communion Office, grateful for having something to do, issued a vast number of reports and press releases in English, Spanish, and French. Oh, and there were podcasts, too. We've read them all, and if you go to the Anglican Communion News Service website, you can also read them all. We confess not to have listened to any podcasts. What does it all mean?

On this page, the BBC has logged live reports of the final match of a cricket series between England and Australia; on this page, the BBC reports the last match of the series and its eventual outcome. If you are not steeped in Anglican Communion politics, we suspect that you can learn just as much about what the Primates' meetings mean by reading the BBC cricket coverage. If you are not familiar with cricket, we suspect that you can learn just as much about England vs Australia by reading the Anglican Communion News Service dispatches about the Primates' meeting. If you want to learn the True Purpose of the Primates' meeting, you can instead read an explanation of the game of cricket and learn all you need to know unless you are an Anglican primate.

My Political Views
I am a left social moderate
Left: 5.58, Libertarian: 0.53

Political Spectrum Quiz

We had an informal 'Soirée' with our Parish Advent dinner this year. I read this:

The ballad of old man Noah

And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard . . . ¹
—R. F. Brissenden

Here's a health to Father Noah    Who built his ark of wood, Packed wife, kids, birds and beasts aboard    And saved them from the flood! But there's another reason    Why you should raise your glass— So listen to my story, boys,    And let the bottle pass. After months of weary sailing    Beneath the weeping sky Noah muttered, "All this water, Lord,    Sure makes a man feel dry. "Don't think that I'm not grateful:    I'm glad we didn't sink And I've grown quite fond of animals    —But, Lord, I need a drink! "And, mate, I don't mean water!    Please, when I beach this boat, Could you give me something stronger    To soothe my thirsty throat?" And the Lord said "Noah, baby,    I'm tired of water too: So park your ark on Ararat    And I'll tell you what we'll do: "We'll plant a little vineyard    And we'll get the sun to shine; And when the grapes have ripened    We'll turn them into wine."

So when the flood subsided    And the rainbow spanned the sky, And all God's creatures, two by two,    Went forth to multiply, Noah set the first grapes growing    Upon a sunny hill, And vintaged them, and vatted them    Then sat to drink his fill. He took one sip, and laughed aloud;    He shouted: "Thank you, Lord!" He drank, he sang, he drank again,    And then lay down and snored. Flat on his back lay Noah,    His hairy legs spread wide, With his bunch of grapes and vine rows    All standing in their pride. That's how Ham, Shem and Japheth    Found their old dad lying bare; So they fetched a rug and covered him    With tender loving care. It's all there in the Bible—    Genesis, chapter Nine: The flood, the naked drunk old man    The water and the wine. So, lift a glass to Noah, boys;    Don't pike when it's your shout; Praise the Lord and pass the bottle;    And let it all hang out.

From: The Flight of the Emu: contemporary light verse, edited by Geoffrey Lehmann. North Ryde: Angus and Robertson, 1990, pp.9-10.

1. Genesis 9.20

Forget the all-night cramming. If you want to learn, get regular sleep!

A recently published study suggests that sleep helps people to remember a newly learned words and incorporate them into their thinking. But the same principles are likely to apply to other types of learning. Sleep has a role to play in the reorganization of new memories.

J Tamminen, JD Payne, R Stickgold, EJ Wamsley, and MG Gaskell. Sleep Spindle Activity is Associated with the Integration of New Memories and Existing Knowledge. Journal of Neuroscience, Oct 2010; 30: 14356 - 14360.

Abstract:Sleep spindle activity has been associated with improvements in procedural and declarative memory. Here, for the first time, we looked at the role of spindles in the integration of newly learned information with existing knowledge, contrasting this with explicit recall of the new information. Two groups of participants learned novel spoken words (e.g., cathedruke) that overlapped phonologically with familiar words (e.g., cathedral). The sleep group was exposed to the novel words in the evening, followed by an initial test, a polysomnographically monitored night of sleep, and a second test in the morning. The wake group was exposed and initially tested in the morning and spent a retention interval of similar duration awake. Finally, both groups were tested a week later at the same circadian time to control for possible circadian effects. In the sleep group, participants recalled more words and recognized them faster after sleep, whereas in the wake group such changes were not observed until the final test 1 week later. Following acquisition of the novel words, recognition of the familiar words was slowed in both groups, but only after the retention interval, indicating that the novel words had been integrated into the mental lexicon following consolidation. Importantly, spindle activity was associated with overnight lexical integration in the sleep group, but not with gains in recall rate or recognition speed of the novel words themselves. Spindle activity appears to be particularly important for overnight integration of new memories with existing neocortical knowledge.

When the researchers examined whether newly learned words had been integrated with existing knowledge, they discovered the involvement of a different type of activity in the sleeping brain. Sleep spindles are brief but intense bursts of brain activity that reflect information transfer between different memory stores in the brain—the hippocampus deep in the brain and the neocortex, the surface of the brain.

Memories in the hippocampus are stored separately from other memories, while memories in the neocortex are connected to other knowledge. Volunteers who experienced more sleep spindles overnight were more successful in connecting the new words to the rest of the words in their mental lexicon, suggesting that the new words were communicated from the hippocampus to the neocortex during sleep.

New memories are only really useful if you can connect them to information you already know. For this, you need sleep.

We've heard the idea that our entire universe might just be an atom in some gigantic table leg or a spot on some celestial wall paper.

Apparently, according to recent physics, our entire universe could be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe. In a paper about the nature of space and the origin of time, Nikodem Poplawski, of Indiana University, suggests that a small change to the theory of gravity would imply that our universe inherited its arrow of time from the black hole in which it was born. Poplawski says that the idea that black holes are the cosmic mothers of new universes is a natural consequence of a simple new assumption about the nature of spacetime. He points out that the standard derivation of general relativity takes no account of the intrinsic momentum of spin half particles. However there is another version of the theory, called the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity, which does. This theory predicts that particles with half integer spin should interact, generating a tiny repulsive force called torsion. In ordinary circumstances, torsion is too small to have any effect. But when densities become much higher than those in nuclear matter, it becomes significant. In particular, says Poplawski, torsion prevents the formation of singularities inside a black hole.

Now I'm not entirely sure what that means exactly, but I do understand that astrophysicists have long known that our universe is so big that it could not have reached its current size given the rate of expansion we see now. Instead, they believe it grew by many orders of magnitude in a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the period known as known as inflation. Poplawski's approach immediately solves the inflation problem, saying that torsion caused this rapid inflation, which means the universe as we see it today can be explained by a single theory of gravity without any additional assumptions about inflation.

A corollary of this is that it makes it possible for universes to be born inside the event horizons of certain kinds of black hole where torsion prevents the formation of a singularity but allows energy density to build up, with creation of particles on a massive scale via pair production followed by the expansion of a new universe. "Such an expansion is not visible for observers outside the black hole, for whom the horizon's formation and all subsequent processes occur after infinite time," says Poplawski. For this reason, he emphasizes, the new universe is a separate branch of space time and evolves accordingly. Poplawski's theory also suggests an solution as to why time seems to flow in one direction but not in the other, even though the laws of physics are time symmetric.

Poplawski says the origin of the arrow of time comes from the asymmetry of the flow of matter into the black hole from the mother universe. "The arrow of cosmic time of a universe inside a black hole would then be fixed by the time-asymmetric collapse of matter through the event horizon," he says.. Translated, this means that our universe inherited its arrow of time from its source. "Daughter universes," he says, "may inherit other properties from their mothers," implying that it may be possible to detect these properties, providing an experimentally falsifiable proof of his idea.

All of which seems to say, as far as my poor brain can fathom it, that we really don't understand the universe very well at all.

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Nikodem J. Poplawski (Department of Physics, Indiana University).
Cosmology with torsion - an alternative to cosmic inflation (4 Jul 2010)

The Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity provides a simple scenario in early cosmology which is alternative to standard cosmic inflation and does not require scalar fields. The torsion of spacetime prevents the appearance of the cosmological singularity in the early Universe filled with Dirac particles averaged as a spin fluid. Instead, its expansion starts from a state at which the Universe has a minimum but finite radius. We show that the dynamics of the closed Universe immediately after this state naturally solves the flatness and horizon problems in cosmology because of an extremely small and negative torsion density parameter, Ω_S ≈ -10^-69. This scenario also suggests that the contraction of our Universe preceding the state of minimum radius could correspond to the dynamics of matter inside the event horizon of a newly formed black hole existing in another universe.

The universe as a black hole in isotropic coordinates (2 Jan 2009)

We show that the radial geodesic motion of a particle inside a black hole in isotropic coordinates (the Einstein-Rosen bridge) is physically different from the radial motion inside a Schwarzschild black hole. A particle enters the interior region of an Einstein-Rosen black hole which is regular and physically equivalent to the asymptotically flat exterior of a white hole, and the particle's proper time extends to infinity. Because the motion across the Einstein-Rosen bridge is unidirectional, and the surface of a black hole is the event horizon for distant observers, an Einstein-Rosen black hole is indistinguishable from a Schwarzschild black hole for such observers. Observers inside an Einstein-Rosen black hole perceive its interior as a closed universe that began when the black hole formed, with an initial radius equal to the Schwarzschild radius of the black hole r_g, and with an initial accelerated expansion. Therefore the model of a universe as a black hole in isotropic coordinates explains the origin of cosmic inflation. We show that this kind of inflation corresponds to the effective cosmological constant Λ = 3/r_g², which, for the smallest astrophysical black holes, is ∼ 10^-8m^-2. If we assume that our Universe is the interior of an Einstein-Rosen black hole, astronomical observations give the time of inflation ∼ 10^-3s and the size of the Universe at the end of the inflationary epoch ∼ 10³²m.