Microsoft Announces the "Surface" - 1st Tabletop Computer

Microsoft has announced the first commercially available surface computer called “Surface”. The Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, interactive surface. It's really cool!

The product provides effortless interaction with digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. In essence, it’s a surface that comes to life for exploring, learning, sharing, creating, buying and much more. Soon to be available in restaurants, hotels, retail establishments and public entertainment venues, this experience will transform the way people shop, dine, entertain and live.

Microsoft has announced the first commercially available surface computer called “Surface”. The Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a vibrant, interactive surface. The product provides effortless interaction with digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. In essence, it’s a surface that comes to life for exploring, learning, sharing, creating, buying and much more. Soon to be available in restaurants, hotels, retail establishments and public entertainment venues, this experience will transform the way people shop, dine, entertain and live. In viewing the promotional videos, it seems the surface will integrate with mobile devices by Bluetooth.

Time lists 50 'coolest websites'

Video website YouTube and social networking site MySpace are among the 50 "coolest websites" of the year as chosen by US magazine Time.

The magazine breaks its choices down into categories including entertainment, shopping and news.

The complete list is here

Russia Knows How To Prevent Global Warming

A report from Rusia says:

Russian scientists have found a way to prevent global warming of the Earth, the director of the Global Climate and Ecology Institute said Wednesday. Russian Academy of Sciences Academic Yury Izrael told a news conference that the method envisions air spraying of a sulfur-containing aerosol in lower stratosphere layers at a height of 10-14 kilometers (six to 10 miles). Sulfur drops would then reflect solar radiation.

According to scientists, one million tons of aerosol sprayed above the planet would make possible a reduction of solar radiation by 0.5-1%, and a reduction of air temperature by 1-1.5 degrees Celsius.

Deepak Chopra's Buddha Story

Deepak Chopra's book "Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment" tells the story of Buddha Gautama in a form of a fiction, because he said: "Fiction is a much better way for telling the truth than fact." "We know the historical story, so I wanted to look at what [Buddha was struggling with inside, his inner demons, his own shadows. In a sense this is everyone's struggle. In order to find your own awakening you have to confront your dark side."


Read an excerpt of the book here: "A Buddha is born"

Deepak Chopra himself knows many religions intimately, but does not associate with any traditional religion:

"I've been influenced by Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Judaic teachings," he said. "I'm as familiar with the Kabbalah as I am with the Torah and with Christian teachings. "I draw on the useful, practical and insightful teachings of the great religions, only that which helps us to heal our emotions and our spirit," he said. "I think spirituality is a domain of awareness where we experience universal truths. As soon as you make it a dogma, or an ideology or a belief system you lose essential truths of those teachings."
He is reported to work on his new book, The Third Jesus, "which looks at the historical Jesus, the theological Jesus and the third Jesus, which the author calls "a state of consciousness that we all long for.""

In summary, a commentator wrote: "What Chopra says about Buddha applies to himself and to us: "He had found his freedom, and in freedom everything is permitted." Chopra has always come from that place of freedom, but perhaps he has not so boldly said so. This book is subversive, radical, and undermining. Like Hesse's book Siddhartha, Deepak Chopra's Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment, is personal. It could change people by penetrating their consciousness."

The Huffington Post blog summarizes (see Part 4):

"Most importantly, Buddha's truth is not packaged. You can't turn it into dogma that authorities enforce or a catechism that the devout memorize.

Where the growth of consciousness is being nourished anywhere in the world, the following trends are evident:

--Meditation will become mainstream.
--Healing, both physical and psychological, will become commonplace.
--Prayer will be seen as real and efficacious.
--Manifestation of desires will be talked about as a real phenomenon.
--People will regain a connection to spirit.
--Individuals will find answers inwardly to their deepest spiritual questions. They will believe in their private answers and live accordingly.
--Communities of belief will arise.
--Gurus and other spiritual authorities will wane in influence.
--A wisdom tradition will grow to embrace the great spiritual teachings at the heart of organized religion.
--Faith will no longer be seen as an irrational departure from reason and science.
--Wars will decline as peace becomes a social reality.
--Nature will regain its sacred value."

Links:

• Deepak Chopra's Biography

• Book Excerpt

• Huffington Post blogs Buddha and the World (Part 1), Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4
  

• BuddhisChannel review of Deepak does Buddha

Solving and outgrowing problems

When the tsunami comes, you run uphill. When you sit in an exam doing algebra or geometry, you have to solve the problem. And when you are faced with an insoluble problem such as aging, death, you outgrow it. These are different ways of tackling problems: running away from it, solving it, or outgrowing it.

Many people, including myself, enjoy solving problems, taking pride in their problem solving skills and tricks arsenal.
Problem solving requires getting a new perspective on the situation, and perhaps expressing creativity to find solutions.
Their attitude is like Kaizen' motto: "Problems are a mountain of treasure". This is a positive attitude in always improving oneself.

When I worked in the field of Artificial Intelligence, problem solving is studied from the point of view of automating it for programs to allow them to solve search, optimization, matching, and other tasks.
At one time it was believed that a "General Problem Solver (GPS)" could be developed for programs to have general intelligence. Later, most retreated from that position, and turned to specific domain problem solving.

An earlier and parallel development was in Logic and Mathematics. Kurt Gödel proved his incompleteness theorem: a logical system is either incomplete or inconsistent. The equivalent Turing theorem is: there are functions that can never be computed by a universal machine.

These results gave constraints on what problem solving can do. Later another practical constraint was discovered. Some problems are definitely solvable, but not in polynomial time in the size of the problem. Large such problems cannot be practically solved.
Hence, people turned to approximate solutions using heuristics problem solving, which aims at getting good results instead of optimal results.

Many years ago, I read "The Secret of the Golden Flower" by Richard Wilhelm, with commentary by C.G. Jung. Jung was the Swiss founder of the Jungian school of analytic psychology. Jung wrote: "I had learned in the meanwhile that the greatest and most important problems of life are all in a certain sense insoluble. They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating systems. They can never be solved, but only outgrown."

I could not at first fully understand the sentence, but the more I read it, the more I was aware of the astonishing insight contained in the writing. Not only did Jung stated the unsolvability, but he gave reasons for it, and showed how one must outgrow fundamental problems.

The reason "They must be so because they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating systems" sounds very modern. It can be appreciated if we read Fritjof Capra's "The Tao of Physics" and "The Web of Life".
The dynamic, ever-changing equilibrium of the forces of Yin and Yang is the inherent polarity, and self-regulating systems is a precursor of the idea of autopoiesis, the pattern or process of life. Hence the fundamental problems of life are insoluble.

Outgrowing a problem does not mean making the problem disappear, it is still there, but somehow its significance has diminished, mainly because we have changed ourselves.

In normal problem solving, the problem is thought to be there independent of the us, the subject. But in outgrowing problems, we recognize that the problem and the subject are intricately connected.
The analogy is like between classical physics where something is observed objectively, and quantum physics, where any observation by the subject distorts the object of observation.

According to Jung, the key to outgrowing is letting go or letting things happen, or Wu Wei ("non-action"). Jung then continued with the interplay of the conscious and the unconscious, including the collective unconscious, and took us to his theories of psychology.

In Buddhism, "Mind harbours all" said the Dhammapada, therefore all problems are in our minds, created by our minds, and to be outgrown by our minds.
Another Buddhist term often used to describe outgrowing is spaciousness. For example, when meditating, we aim to be as spacious as possible.
Gil Fronsdal, give the following illustration of spaciousness: If we are in a small room, perhaps 2 by 2 meters, and there is nail in the middle of the room, we have a problem of constantly watching not to step on it. If the room is the size of a big hall, the nail is still there, but it has become a minor problem.

In summary, we have problems that we can run away from, problems that can be solved rationally, and problems that need to be outgrown. It is the last category which is most important, because those are the fundamental problems of life.

Some Quotes taken from here:

• "Having a problem is no problem. It's denying you have it that creates the difficulty." - John Cleese

• "There is no problem so big it can't be run away from." - Charles Schultz

• "One of the nice things about problems is that a good many of them do not exist except in our imaginations." - Steve Allen

• "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." - Albert Einstein

Scientists create 'miracle water' that kills infections and MRSA

Scientists have created a form of water which can zap hospital superbugs and speed up wound healing.

Dermacyn – dubbed "miracle water" – is effective against infections ranging from MRSA to TB and has just been approved for sale in the UK.

A splash can also speed up the healing of wounds by increasing the flow of blood to the area.

Dan McFadden, of manufacturer Oculus, said: "People think it is too good to be true. Our challenge is to get beyond that disbelief. This is the real thing."

The liquid is a chemically-altered version of salty water which is full of negatively-charged particles.

These are capable of killing dangerous micro-organisms by punching holes in their cell walls.

While bacteria and viruses are quickly dispatched, human cells are left intact because they are packed too tightly together to be attacked.

The traits of Buddhist Economics

"Buddhist Economics" often means different things to different people, and now that its concepts converge with "Sufficiency Economics", "Sustainable Economics", etc., I would like to describe what I think are the most important characteristics of it.

Let us start with the three E's, Economics, Ecology, and Ethics.

Basically it means that economy cannot be considered in isolation, we must apply systems thinking, which will automatically bring factors, traditionally considered as non-economic, such as social cost, global warming, bio-diversity, damage to culture, consumerism, health hazards into play.
We then must look at products in their whole life-cycles. Cigarettes are a health hazard and pollutes the air. It also brings addiction and make poor people poorer. Looking at paper as a product in the context of Buddhist Economics, leads to deforestation questions and to global warming. However paper is also useful for books in education. Which in turn leads to the need for recyclable paper. These are simple examples of the interconnectedness in systems thinking.
The interconnectedness of all things is also an aspect which is stressed in Buddhism.

One could object that it would make economics very complex, and indeed it would. All too often economics is simplified into quantitative (i.e. monetary) considerations only, and declares itself free from ethics, politics, etc., when in fact they are non separable in practice.
The attempt to introduce social costs and environmental taxes are well intended, but can also be seen as an attempt to make everything quantifiable.

The fact that it makes everything more complicated is a big challenge for systems thinkers. Approximations are often necessary, but we must constantly improve them. Computer technology can be a help here.
Traditional Economics dealt mostly with simple relations expressed in closed form mathematical formulae such as the yield curve, and the Black Scholes option pricing model. More complicated situations cannot be expressed in such terms. One of the more recent developments is the multi agent-based approach for analysis, which rely much on computers.

In this context, Ethics plays the important role of defining goals and constraints in the above systems thinking approach to Economics and Ecology. Without ethical guidelines on what is right and what is not right, the outcome can only be muddled.
Buddhists can fall back to the precepts of non-violence, non-stealing, telling the truth, no sexual misconduct and narcotics, and to the eight noble path, particularly right livelihood.
Right livelihood means making money honestly, e.g. not cheating or misleading in advertisements.
Ethics matters in how we make a living, in what products or services we offer, and what we consume.
Note that creating wealth is not taboo in Buddhism. But we must accumulate wealth ethically, not to become attached to it when we have wealth, and generously use wealth for the good of all.

Traditional supply and demand relations in the market are recognized in Buddhist Economics, but they are only considered as a first approximation, since the assumptions made are not true, e.g. disregard of ethics, politics, environmental factors, social costs, etc.
Take the law of supply and demand. In practice demand is often manipulated by the producers by advertising. Selling products not as they are, but considering them as part of life-style is another trick. We know the phenomena of consumerism, where we buy something not because we need it.
The pretext that it is good for economic growth is fallible, uncontrolled growth has done much damage to our planet.
A modest measure of economic growth is good, in fact studies show that people are happy when the economy is not stagnant, but there is some economic growth. Such growth must be sustainable, in order to benefit not just us, but the future generations.

What shall we do to resist consumerism? The consumer was the king, but not anymore if the supplier can manipulate our needs. Here we are dealing with the battle of the minds. The answer is general awareness of what constitutes wholesome living and mindfulness in everyday life. Constantly being mindful of what we consume, what we eat, buy, etc.

I think the above are the most important traits of Buddhist Economics, interconnectedness, ethics, and mindfulness. Buddhist Economics is a movement similar to the Green movement. As formulated above, I think many non-Buddhists would endorse it as well.

There are other characteristics of Buddhist Economics, but I consider them of secondary importance. For instance, with regard to property, the precept of not stealing means that Buddhists respect property (even when knowing that everything is an illusion). Here there are Buddhists who lean towards capitalism, and other towards socialism. I think such things are not of secondary importance.

Related;
Buddhist Economy in Practice

Google Starts Security Blog

Google started an Online Security Blog: "we've started this blog where we hope to periodically provide updates on recent trends, interesting findings, and efforts related to online security. Among the issues we'll tackle is malware, which is the subject of our inaugural post."

More excerpts:

"To protect Google's users from this threat, we started an anti-malware effort about a year ago. As a result, we can warn you in our search results if we know of a site to be harmful and even prevent exploits from loading with Google Desktop Search.

Unfortunately, the scope of the problem has recently been somewhat misreported to suggest that one in 10 websites are potentially malicious. To clarify, a sample-based analysis puts the fraction of malicious pages at roughly 0.1%. The analysis described in our paper covers billions of URLs. Using targeted feature extraction and classification, we select a subset of URLs believed to be suspicious for in-depth investigation. So far, we have investigated about 12 million suspicious URLs and found about 1 million that engage in drive-by downloads. In most cases, the web sites that infect your system with malware are not intentionally doing so and are often unaware that their web servers have been compromised."
"At the moment, the majority of malware activity seems to happen in China, the U.S., Germany and Russia"

Guidelines on safe browsing

First and foremost, enable automatic updates for your operating system as well your browsers, browser plugins and other applications you are using. Automatic updates ensure that your computer receives the latest security patches as they are published. We also recommend that you run an anti-virus engine that checks network traffic and files on your computer for known malware and abnormal behavior. If you want to be really sure that your system does not become permanently compromised, you might even want to run your browser in a virtual machine, which you can revert to a clean snapshot after every browsing session.

Webmasters can learn more about cleaning, and most importantly, keeping their sites secure at StopBadware.org's Tips for Cleaning and Securing a Website.

What is Vesak?

from BuddhistChannel.Tv:
Vesak (Sinhalese) is the most holy time in the Buddhist calendar. In Indian Mahayana Buddhist traditions, the holiday is known by its Sanskrit equivalent, Vaisakha. Due to the leap year in the lunar calendar, Vesak is celebrated on both May 1 and 31 in 2007 (varies according to countries).

The word Vesak itself is the Sinhalese language word for the Pali variation, "Visakha". Visakha/Vaisakha is the name of the second month of the Indian calendar.

On Vesak Day, Buddhists all over the world commemorate events of significance to Buddhists of all traditions: The Birth, Enlightenment and the Passing Away of Gautama Buddha.

The exact date of Vesak is defined according to the astrological calendar, as the time of the full moon of Taurus, which corresponds to the birth, enlightenment (Nirvana) and the passing away (Parinirvana) of Gautama Buddha. According to the Chinese Lunar calendar, Vesak is usually celebrated on the full moon day of the fourth month.

For this year 2007 however, there are two full moon days in the month of May. Some countries have opted to celebrate on the first full moon (May 1) based on the resolution passed at Conference of the World Fellowship of Buddhists in 1950, whereas others have chosen to do so on the second full moon day (May 31), based on the traditional chinese calendar.

Vesak trivia

Official name: Visakah Puja; Vaishaka; Buddha Jayanti; Buddha Purnima; Visakha Bucha; Wesak; Saga Dawa

Also called: Buddha's Birthday or Buddha Day

Significance: The birth, enlightenment and passing away of Buddha

Date: First full moon of the Taurus, in May (common years) or June (leap years); Full moon on the fourth month of the Chinese lunar calendar

Where Vesak is celebrated in 2007 (brackett denotes what the public holiday is called in each respective country).

May 1: Sri Lanka (Vesak), Malaysia (Wesak), Cambodia (Visaka Bochea - Buddha Day), Myanmar (Kason Full Moon - Buddha Day)

May 2: Nepal - (Buddha Jayanti - Buddha Day), Laos - (Vesak), India (Buddha Purnima - Buddha Day), Bangladesh (Buddha Purnima - Buddha Day)

May 24: Hong Kong (Buddha's Birthday), South Korea (Seokka Tanshin-il - Buddha's Birthday), Macau (Buddha's Birthday), Taiwan (Buddha's Birthday)

May 31: Singapore (Vesak), Thailand (Visakha Bucha Day)

June 1: Bhutan (Buddha Day), Indonesia (Waisak - Buddha Day)

Observances: Meditation, sutra chanting, blessing ceremonies, acts of generosity (dana), partaking in vegetarian food, giving to charity

New Security Survival Guide: How To Layer A Solid Defense

While the layered model of security is not new, this article discusses the all important configuration

Excerpt:

A New Look at Layers
While emerging classes of tools may fend off attacks at multiple layers of a security strategy, there are pitfalls if the tools are not properly configured, managed or integrated with existing systems.

Layer 1: Perimeter Security
Layer 2: Host Security
Layer 3: Identity and Access Management
Layer 4: Network Access Control
Layer 5: Vulnerability Management
Layer Integration: Pulling It All Together

Security is a many-layered thing for most I.T. managers. Attacks may target network, server or application vulnerabilities. Blended threats combine multiple attack vectors Trojan horses, worms and viruses, for example in an attempt to outflank an organization's defenses.

In response, enterprises erect a series of barriers on the principle that an attack that beats one security measure won't get past other protections. This approach goes by several names: layered security, defense-in-depth and, on the folksy side, belt and suspenders. But the underlying premise is the same.

The traditional view of layered security places firewalls at the outermost ring of protection, guarding the corporate network from Internet-borne incursions. Inside the firewall, attention turns to network-based intrusion detection/intrusion prevention systems that aim to snuff out attacks that sneak through the firewall. Antivirus software and host-based intrusion detection/prevention systems protect servers and client PCs, providing still another layer.

Buddhist Economy in Practice

The term "Buddhist Economy" was first used by E.F. Schumacher in his book "Small is beautiful".
Schumacher said: "He [the modern economist] is used to measuring the "standard of living" by the amount of annual consumption, assuming all the time that a man who consumes more is "better off" than a man who consumes less. A Buddhist economist would consider this approach excessively irrational: since consumption is merely a means to human well-being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well being with the minimum of consumption." (E.F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, 1973.)

The concept has been very influential, but has also received a lot of criticism, in fact it has never been accepted in mainstream economics.

Recently it has grown in popularity, often without using the term "Buddhist Economy", in parallel with the movement of "Sustainable Economics," and "Corporate Social Responsibility".

One of its characteristics is holistic Systems Thinking:
Economy must always be considered together with the two other E's: Ecology and Ethics.
We cannot look at just the percentage growth in the form of growth of GDP, without considering the ecological footprint and social frictions. The introduction of the Happy Planet Index (Must we be happy at the cost of the earth? ) is an example of an attempt to redefine GDP.
Maximizing consumption is not and should not be our goal, maximizing the quality of life of people is.

One recent success of Buddhist Economy in Thailand, was reported in "United Nations endorses Thai Buddhist Economic model"

The following are excerpts from the article.

While Bhavana (Buddhist meditation), has become a form of modern psychotherapy and influenced Western lifestyles, is there anything in the religion's 2500 year old teachings, which could influence modern economics?

According to Thailand's much revered King and lately members of the (new military installed) government and a growing number of economists and grassroots development activists, the answer is, yes, there is. They call it 'Sufficiency Economics', a term coined by King Bhumibol Adulyadej in the midst of Thailand's economic meltdown in 1997.

The Thais have recently got a strong endorsement of this Buddhist development strategy from the United Nation's main development agency. In a report released in January, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) hailed Thailand's new "Middle Path" development model as a key to fighting poverty, coping with economic risk and promoting corporate social responsibility.

The UNDP's 'Thailand Human Development Report 2007: Sufficiency Economy and Human Development', a result of a year-long collaboration between Thai and international experts, is designed to bring Sufficiency Economic thinking to a wider international audience.

UNDP describes 'Sufficiency Economics' as a set of tools and principles that help communities, corporations and governments to manage globalisation - maximising its benefits and minimising its costs - by making wise decisions that promote sustainable development, equity, and resilience against shocks. Thus, the report says that the 'Sufficiency Economy' is a much needed "survival strategy" in a world of economic uncertainty and environmental threats.

"We believe that Sufficiency Economy principles are applicable around the world, especially for rapidly-developing countries that are experiencing some of the same pressures as Thailand" said Joana Merlin-Scholtes, UNDP's Resident Representative in Thailand.

For communities, Sufficiency Economics principles are fundamental to empowerment and building resilience, such as setting up savings groups, revolving credit lines, and local safety nets. For private business it means, "taking corporate responsibility to the next level" by using this approach as a guide to management and planning.

"This approach encourages them to focus on sustainable profit, to adhere to an ethical approach to business, to pay special attention to their employees, to respect nature, to have careful risk management, and to grow where possible from internal resources" the report explains.

Dr. Sumet Tantivejkul, former chief of Thailand's National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) and currently the secretary-general of the Chaipattana Foundation under royal patronage, argues that it is not correct to suggest that Sufficiency Economics was suitable only for the poor and grassroots communities, while everyone else follows the Western capitalist and consumerist economic model.

Citing the unrelenting growth of the world's population and global competition for natural and other resources, to match growth in consumption, which has already outgrown Mother Nature's capacity to replenish by a ratio of 3:1, he argues the mainstream economic model could only lead us to disaster and conflict.

Dr. Sumet points out that only 4 percent of the benefits of Thailand's decades long economic growth (until 1997) has trickled down to the country's poor who constitute 60 per cent of the population, while Thailand's middle class women are renowned for being world-class shoppers - second only to those from Hong Kong - for spending as much as US$ 1000 on designer-labelled handbag when they go shopping abroad.

Dr. Sumet argues that Sufficiency Economics is what Western economists call 'risk management' and the Thai model sees this path as one which develops an economic policy on moderation, rationale and immunity. He cites the revival of the Siam Cement Group, which is Thailand's largest company, as a good example of how Sufficiency Economics could be applied to risk management.

In a 1998 statement on the essence of the Sufficiency Economics model, King Bhumibol said: "Sufficiency is moderation. If one is moderate in one's desires, one will have less craving. If one has less craving, one will take less advantage of others. If all nations hold to this concept, without being extreme or insatiable in one's desires, the world will be a happier place".

Related:

• Shall We Pave the Planet, or Learn To Wear Shoes? A Buddhist Perspective on Greed and Globalization By David R. Loy
  

• Scholars recommend 'Buddhist economics' for the 21st century

Google: 10 percent of sites are dangerous

Google is warning Web users of the increasing threat posed by malicious software that can be dropped onto a computer as a Web surfer visits a particular site.

The search giant carried out in-depth research on 4.5 million Web sites and found that about one in 10 Web pages could successfully "drive-by download" a Trojan horse virus onto a visitor's computer. Such malicious software potentially enables hackers to access sensitive data stored on the computer or its network, or to install rogue applications.

Google's report (PDF: The Ghost in the Browser: Analysis of Web-based Malware), published last week, said the rise in Web-based malicious software has been aided by the increasing role that the Internet plays in everyday life, along with the ease in setting up Web sites.

160,000 Computers Infected With Mpack

An exploit detected by NanoScan, an online scanner from Panda Software, apparently led PandaLabs on the trail to uncover Mpack, a program used to download malware onto remote computers by exploiting numerous vulnerabilities.

Mpack has already been used in several cases. One of the versions that PandaLabs has had access to has been used to infect 160,000 computers.

Mpack infects silently. The cyber-crooks use several techniques to get users to run the malicious code. In the case of Web servers, they usually add an iframe-type reference at the end of the file which loads by default and indicates the index page where the MPack is installed. Sometimes they use the same hacked site to host MPack or other types of malware. The reason they host malware on third-party servers is in order to cover their tracks. Another infection technique is to include certain words, generally those commonly used in searches, on the host Web pages. This way, when the pages are indexed in search engines, users looking for these words can end up on the page containing Mpack and become infected.

The Hyperplanes of Science and Religion

There are 2 views on the relationship between science and religion.

The simplest (View 1) says that there is no relationship at all between the two. We can imagine science and religion here as occupying disjoint multi-dimensional planes of discourse or hyperplanes in space.
This is an easy way out for any possible conflict between the two. Even when they do literally conflict, as in the case about the time the universe was created, there is no logical contradiction if the unit of time is only meant figuratively.
View 1 is an a way unsatisfactory, having both of the bad sides of Einstein's "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." If the hyperplanes are disjoint, neither can say anything about the other.

View number 2, on the other hand, views science and religion in the same hyperplane of discourse. They can occupy different areas of the hyperplane, and not come to contradiction with each other. Imagine a normal plane where science occupies an area on the left and religion on the right. An example is when religion talks about loving-kindness and compassion, and science talks about mass, velocity and acceleration.
However, the body of scientific knowledge will grow with time, and sooner or later, will come to intersect with religion. Evolution definitely bring many religious beliefs in question. The discovery of mirror neurons gives some insight on how compassion developed.
Altruism is an unexpected outcome of the iterated prisoner's dilemma.
In View 2, science and religion can avoid the lame and blind properties referred to in the Einstein quote above. Scientists can have beliefs, which although unproven, motivates their research. The assumptions used in science are often such beliefs used as hypotheses.

When both science and religion address the same topic, and we agree that they are not speaking in different tongues, they cannot be in logical contradiction. And if they do, one of them must be abandoned.
We can then subdivide View 2 into View 2A, where religion holds the absolute truth, and View 2B, where religion is to be modified if ultimately found unscientific.
View 2A is the position of the fundamentalists. Here religion becomes blind faith followed fanatically by its believers.
In View 2B, we use the phrase "ultimately found unscientific", because the scientific community can be wrong for a long time, before somebody realize develop a better theory. Science here is seen as approximations to truth. It is to be noted, that not all religions can fit into View 2B, in fact many religions will fall apart if some of its tenets are taken away.
This is where Buddhism differs from many other religions: "The view endorsed by the majority of Buddhists, is represented by the Dalai Lama who is willing to jettison Buddhist doctrines if shown to be scientifically false (of course with reasonable care, since scientific truth can change also with time)" (see Brouhaha over Buddha on the Brain) .

Nothing is absolutely sacred in Buddhism, all can be questioned. The truth is to be experienced individually, the Buddha can only point the way.

Related: Science and Buddhism
Ajahn Brahmavamso on Buddhism as Science
A civilized debate on Faith
Brouhaha over the "Buddha on the Brain"

Scientists Develop Internet Catalog of All Earth's Species

Scientists have announced they have begun assembling an Internet catalog of every living thing on Earth. The organizers say the new website will become the single location where researchers can go to study the nearly 2 million known plant and animal species. This so-called Encyclopedia of Life is expected to be a major help to scientists in developing countries.

One of the intellectual forces behind the project is renowned Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, who says only about 10 percent of all living things are currently known.

"Our lives depend upon this largely unknown living world that we now propose to understand more fully," he said. "Humanity exists, in other words, on a little known planet. What knowledge we have is scattered all through very technical literature. It is hard to obtain. It is usually available to and known about by a limited number of experts."

It is accessible at http://www.eol.org.

Ajahn Brahmavamso on Buddhism as Science

Venerable Ajahn Brahmavamso Mahathera was born Peter Betts in London, United Kingdom on August 7, 1951. He studied theoretical physics at Cambridge, but later became disillusioned.

His article "Science and Buddhism" has been widely circulated and received a lot of attention. A more recent article is "Buddhism, the only real science".

Among other things, he liked the non-dogmatic character of Buddhism, questioning everything:

Buddhism is more scientific than modern science. Like science, Buddhism is based on verifiable cause-and-effect relationships. But unlike science, Buddhism challenges with thoroughness every belief.
The famous Kalama Sutta of Buddhism states that one cannot believe fully in "what one is taught, tradition, hearsay, scripture, logic, inference, appearance, agreement with established opinion, the seeming competence of a teacher, or even in one's own teacher".

This last article has not gone unchallenged, for example Hor KC in "Ajahn Brahm on science: Jigsaw pieces at all the wrong places" , himself a Buddhist, is against "Buddhism is more scientific than science."
Instead he preferred "Buddhism is beyond science" as Buddhism is not about trying to be, but rather about not trying to be."

At the end of the article, Hor, with tongue in cheek, suggested that Ajahn Brahm was merely testing us.

There is another thing which bugs me: It is the theme of rebirth which Ajahn Brahm repeatedly say. He said that rebirth has been scientifically proved, citing people who can remember their past lives. Rebirth may or may not be true, but subjective experiences do not stand rigorous scientific scrutiny.

That is why many Buddhists prefer to stand clear of metaphysical and other "difficult" questions, better saying simply "I don't know now, but we may know one day". Of course we can believe one way or the other, but believing is not the same as knowing.

What is an indirect antiviral therapy?

The following article in the field of biological viruses is published with the kind permission from the author, Karin Peuschel.

More:
Who can afford not to be interested in new antiviral therapies (part 1)?
Antiviral therapy, part 2
Antiviral therapy, part 3 (mechanism)

She also has some interesting observations about the established academic and business communities: "One wouldn't think that anybody could afford NOT to be interested in new antiviral therapies with the HIV pandemic being at 20 mio deaths, 40 mio infected people and 12,5 mio orphans, and of course the bird flu threat, but there ARE people who lighthandedly refuse to feel concerned for years or even decades..."

Full article:
Antiviral therapies normally target one virus only, and therefore they act directly on that virus, and not a single other one (if not accidentally). Development is very expensive of course and quite a risk, because if acts on only one type of virus. That's probably the reason why it took relatively long to develop the first highly specific HIV drugs and that pharma industry was a bit hesitant (the HIV-timeline can be found on the web). In the recenty year there has been a different approach with interferon, especially for some chronic infections like chronic hepatitis. Interestingly interferon also acts on some diseases where a viral cause has not been proven clearly so far, like multiple sclerosis. Why it has been more difficult to treat acute viral infections with interferon so far is not clear, maybe there are some unknown inhibitory mechanisms that inactivate the effect of interferon, whereas for some reason it works in chronic hepatitis. Occasionally interferon can be boosted by adding other antivirals like Ribavirin, I have had a patient recently who improved her hepatitis from a stage 3 to a stage 2 with such a mixture. The mechanism of interferon is to stimulate the inbuilt antiviral mechanisms theoretically present in any cell, and this results in a cytotoxic, cytostatic, antiproliferative, antiviral and immunomodulatory activity. In other words interferon has a mixed direct and indirect antiviral activity, acting both directly on viruses and on the immune system, plus on tumors. The most recent development is the pure indirect antiviral activity, where the drug does NOT act on any virus anymore, but only on the immune system. This allows for a much broader antiviral activity, because in this case it is the immune system that mediates the antiviral effect with its overwhelming bandwidth of target viruses (in the internet language this would correspond to a broadband internet access). Inderal is such a drug that acts improves the function of the immune system by blocking an important inhibitory pathway related to the stress response.

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The relevancy of "old" Buddhist teachings for the modern world

David Loy in an article "The Three Poisons Institutionalized"
asked whether Buddhist teachings of 2400 years ago have anything to say about modern problems of economic globalization, new diseases, terrorism, global climate change and other environmental issues.

The short answer is yes, very much so, Buddhism is very relevant today. The basic notion of the three poisons (greed, ill-will, and delusion, including self-delusion) should be applied to not only to individuals, but also to the collective self, the collective or institutionalized greed, collective ill-will, and collective delusion.
What applies to the individual self-delusion, should also be applied to the collective self, in the form of greedy corporations, narrow chauvinism, religious fanatics, etc.

Quotes:

"In fact, many of our social problems can be traced back to such a group ego, when we identify with our own gender, race, ethnic group, nation, religion, etc., and discriminate between our group and another group."

"From a Buddhist perspective, the problem with modern institutions is that they tend to take on a life of their own as new types of collective ego."

"We can envision the solution to social dukkha as a society that does not institutionalize greed, ill will, or delusion. In their place, what might be called a dharmic society would have institutions encouraging generosity and compassion, grounded in a wisdom that recognizes our interconnectedness."

Solving collective problems must be non-violent, and start with personal spiritual practice parallel with social engagement.

"The importance of personal spiritual practice, commitment to non-violence, and the realization that ending our own dukkha requires us to address the dukkha of everyone else as well, because we are not separate from each other."

Full text: Tikkun