Veronica Nobel

That's my favorite performance from the Beatles of all time. They were at their coolest looking in this video too.

Many believe that the Year 2012 will be the year that our current era ends. There is much speculations and myths about the year 2012. Many believe that the planet may ascend to another dimension during that time. Also, some others believe that something magical will happen that bring certain people to a better place.

In my opinion, all these scenarios may be too far fetched to be true. People have been taking symbolic interpretations too literally.

...a foreseeable transformative event will happen on or near this year.

That event is that the trend of exponentially accelerating technological capability (the ability to inform matter...or "information") will hit the elbow of the hockey stick...that is, the line representing this trend, when charted on a graph, will change from near horizontal to near vertical.

Even now, brain function is being mapped; individual genome mapping and manipulation is progressing rapidly; nanotechnology is being applied through biotechnology to medicine. These things are happening fast, and accelerating. Our experience of the world is also changing quickly through the internet, and it's rapidly proliferating new applications.

When you imagine the moment when this acceleration itself accelerates by an order of magnitude, you get an event horizon.

In reality, it's just a continuation of what has been happening forever, throughout evolution, and history. The very idea of evolution, vis a vis "revolution," is that rather than a cyclical series of repeating events, you get a series in which each milestone marks a change, or transformation, that is more complex, more advanced, more adapted to circumstances, than previous versions. The fossil record verifies this.

So this sudden flash in which humanity as a whole will be able to process, contain and apply information will certainly constitute a drastic change. Whether is has anything to do with astronomical alignments, or if Mayans could foresee the event, seems to me mostly speculation.

However, there is a good change with our increased processing power, humanity as a whole will know a lot more about the implications and causes of this event when it happens.

For charts that map these exponential trends in detail, see Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity Is Near."

http://www.levity.com/eschaton/Why2012.html

In think all the legal hullabaloo misses a big part of the point.  The problem with health care is not just if people have access to it, but how effective it is. 

The solution to quality of care, as well as access, is to open up the process of clinical testing.  It shouldn't cost a lot of money.  People would try anything for free, and sign legal waivers.

  Then, not only would all medicine become cheaper, but we could also make tests to prove how things like diet, lifestyle, and herbs might be just as effective, both for cures, and health maintainence, as phramacuiticals and more invasive techniques. 

Yeah, the open mail feature is sort of like comments in other sites. But you can also write an open mail to a public figure. Like, maybe you want to say something to Sarkozy.

Seems to me, there have been a fair amount of credible detractors, even when Gore was saying all scientists agreed.  It's pretty easy to find famous and well reasoned criticism of the idea of human caused global warming, using Google, Youtube, etc.  

This guy, Glenn Beck, is pretty funny.

Remember that commercial? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie sucker?