Friday, December 19, 2008

What we should know about Assisted Suicide

Assisted Suicide is a complicated issue for law around the world and it has provoke a hot debate everywhere. In some countries, Assisted Suicide laws are clear but in others the law does not provide a clear message about it. This causes confusion, especially in the countries where the criminal code is not defined around the topic.
People tend to think that each person has the right and freedom to decide on a suicide or an assited suicide, and this is the reason why it occurs, even in those countries where it is forbidden. In most cases of Assisted Suicide, the people who help another one to die end in deep trouble with the law, but whichever the resolution that the law apply to them will depend on the country where the event takes place.
Although there are place where Assisted Suicide is legal, this doesn’t mean that anyone can committed. Firts of all, it is important to remember that Assisted Suicide is the process by which an individual is provided with the means (drugs or equipment) to commit suicide, because he or she is incapable of doing it. And this definition clearly shows a distinction between the case of an assited death and that of a simply suicide, the former being sometimes permitted and the later being completely forbiden by the law. Assisted suicide is then allowed in some places such as the Netherlands, Swistzerland and some states of the US, but only under strict criteria. And the procedure involves many doctors that should agree in the decision together with the patient, and some witnesses. In some cases the procedure does not succed and it has some complications for the pacient, for what the people involved in it previously sign a sort of contract where the details as regarding their responsibility is specified.
The most traumatic consequence of an Assisted Suicide that does not succed is when the result of the procedure does not end in the death of the patient but it puts he or she under coma. In such a case, the doctors and the relatives of the patient can still decide to provided him or her with Euthanasia. This term refers to suicide which is performed by people other than the patient and which does not involve the choice of the patient.

Review: A topic for Debate: The Right to Die

Title of the Article: TV Broadcast of an Assited Suicide Intensifies a Contentious Debate in Britain.
Author: Sarah Lyall
Date of Publication: December 11, 2008
Source: The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/11/world/europe/11suicide.html?ref=world

Garcia Fernandez, Gabriela

Assisted suicide is illegal in most of the world’s countries. However, the practise of it increase year after year. New cases are revelead every year which encourage people with fatal diseases to think of assisted suicide as an option to end the suffering.
As the article explains “it’s illegal in Britain to aid, abet, cousel ar procure suicide.” Dispite of what the law says, there has recently been in case of assited suicide in London, which caused a great deal of debate. A man almost completely incapacitated by motor neuron disease decided to kill himself. He was help to do so by his own wife, who took him to Dignitas Clinic, a Swiss clinic famouse for offering this kind of service.
It is believed that almost 100 Britons have already committed suicide in Dignitas Clinic. In it, the man took a fatal mixture of barbiture. He also allowed the cameras to film his last moments which was later on broadcasted on Sky Television as a film called ‘Right to Die?’
This case “throw a bomb into an already contentious debate”. Britain’s director of public prosecutions announced that he would not charged this man’s wife, as he did not charge other people also involved in cases of Assited Suicide. His decision is based basically on the fact that cases of Assited Suicide have often provoked police investigation in Britain but they never end in prosecutions, and people are rarely send to jail. Because of this, it’s strongly believed that law is simply not working.
Oregon, Washington State, Switzerland and the Netherlands are the only places that allow Assited Suicide and only according to strict criteria. In the rest of the world, as in Britain, people who are suffering a fatal medical condition or paralysis are forced to go abroad to die because they have no other option.
The law against Assisted Suicide is supported in Britain on the belief that “it is necessary to ensure that there’s never a case in the country where a sick or elderly person feels under pressure to agree to an assited death”. Unfourtunately, to those who are in that condition, reality is quite the opposite and in most of the cases they really feel that Assited Suicide is the expecting thing to do.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

The Tree of Life

The tree of life is a mystical concept used in most of the world’s theologies, mythologies and philosophies. This symbol has also been used in science and other areas. Various trees of life are recounted in the folklore and culture of many civilizations, often related to immortality or fertility. They had their origin in religious symbolism.
In Egyptian mythology, for example, the first couple are Isis and Osiris. They were said to have emerged from the acacia tree of Saosis, which the Egyptians considered the tree of life, referring to it as the "tree in which life and death are enclosed".
In the Hebrew Bible and within Christianity, the Tree of Life is mentioned in the Book of Genesis, in which it has the potential to grant immortality to Adam and Eve. It can be found in proverbs where it's a simile for a blessing. The Tree of Life, in the form of ten interconnected nodes, is also an important part of the Kabbalah.
Among pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures, the concept of "world trees", extremely related to that of the tree of life, is a prevalent motif in Mesoamerican mythical cosmologies and iconography. World trees embodied the four cardinal directions, which represented a symbolic connection between the Underworld, the sky and the terrestrial world. Depictions of world trees are found in the art and mythological traditions of cultures such as the Maya and the Aztec. Among the Maya, the central world tree was conceived as or represented by a ceiba tree.It is supposed that Mesoamerican sites and ceremonial centers frequently had actual trees planted at each of the four cardinal directions, representing the quadripartite concept.
In Chinese mythology a carving of a Tree of Life depicts a phoenix and a dragon. In Chinese mythology the dragon often represents immortality. There is also the Taoist story of a tree that produces a peach every three thousand years. The one who eats the fruit receives immortality.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

I choose

I choose reggae because it inspires and brings calm. It touches your soul whenever you hear it. It makes you slow down. This is how I feel it. You stop your rhythym and get somewhere finally. And you discover that you were not reaching anything since you were just running, and to run causes confusion. You may have believed that you were going to gain what you want faster, but you end up late for everything and without anything because you were lost. This is what you discover with reggae.
I choose reggae because it clears your mind. Its spiritual rhythym and its melodies are like chants with always overwhelming messages. They pull the trigger of your good thoughts and intentions and you start feeling in peace with you and the world. You feel happy and you feel like dancing despite you can be hearing it motionless. It fills you with dancing mood.
I choose reggae because it awakes and makes you be conscious. You commit to your cause when listening to it, because it shows you goods examples to follow. It brings you closer to a message of liberation that pushes you to act, and to never give up. You become doer, and your actions are done passionately. You start to value life and love, and to seek for a life of love.
I choose reggae because it transports you to a land of love, and it makes your actual land to become that land. Your space becomes pure and full of light. It takes you away and brings you closer at the same time. You make contact with the essential and simple marvellousness of the world.

To play drums

It’s not easy to describe how is to play drums. You feel many sensations runing down your body and there is a lot of movement going on. Your head beats as if to tell you when to hit the drums and your arms move as you are always beating, although you are not. You feel deaf of everything behing the sounds of the hits. The drum is an intrument that shuts up every other sound, except the ones that sound in harmony with it.
The beats are consistent but there’s always a minimal variation between each of them. However they always fill the air since they are perceived as the thick smell of yellow flowers floating on water. Each part seems like yellow flowers floating on water. Like little japanese trees growing in the middle of the wet bamboo jungle. As you play the drums the sound comes alive and the jungle comes alive.
Each part of you is connected with the drums, like energy constantly in contact with you and the instrument. And a high amount of coordination is requiered. This is not difficult to gain, it is just a matter of practise. What is really difficult is the tension of the beat. Sometimes you have to hold it, and others you have to pre-released it, and whichever is the case, it should always be done with perfect groovy.
To play the drums is great. It’s like connecting yourself with what exists behind a song. It is like getting in it from outside to inside, and like coming out from inside it to the outside world. Is like going inside you and outside your head at the same time.

Monday, December 1, 2008

Review: Cloning could save animals from extinction.

Tittle of the Article: The Big Question: Will scientists ever be able to resurrect long-extinct animals by cloning?
Author: Steve Connor.
Date of Publication: Wednesday, 5 November 2008
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/the-big-question-will-scientists-ever-be-able-to-resurrect-longextinct-animals-by-cloning-992019.html

Gabriela Garcia fernandez.

Scientists in Japan have refined a cloning technique that has enabled them to clone mice from the frozen corpse of a mouse that had been kept in a freezer for 16 years at a temperature of -20C. The team was led by Teruhiko Wakayama of the Riken Centre for Developmental Biology in Kobe, Japan. The scientists believe that it might be possible in the future to use the same techniques to clone creatures from the frozen tissue of animals found buried, for example, the frozen corpses of mammoths.
This is not the first time that scientists have produced clones from dead animals. In fact Dolly herself was cloned from a sheep that had died long before. Scientists took tissue from a dead sheep and carefully frozen it using special chemicals called "cryopreservatives". These prevent the formation of damaging ice crystals inside the cells. Dolly was therefore the clone of a frozen animal that had died many years before she was born.
Wakayama and his colleagues pointout that all clones so far produced from dead animals have been created from quick-frozen tissue that has been meticulously kept at very cold temperatures without thawing, using cryopreservation. Scientists declared that this is not possible with dead animals frozen in natural conditions, the cells of tissue will presumably bind strongly to each other and freeze gradually after death due to the large body size. It remains to be shown whether nuclei can be collected from the bodies frozen without cryoprotectants, and whether they will be viable for use in cloning. Scientists have tried with some success to extract DNA from various extinct mammals, such as mammoths and the Tasmanian tiger, but cloning implies a whole set of problems. The first concerns the difficulty of extracting cells with perfectly preserved DNA, since it degrades over time. Corpses frozen for several thousand years are likely to have suffered repeated thawing and freezing that will damage both the cells and their DNA. Another problem is trying to find suitable non-extinct animals to act as surrogate egg donors and mothers.
Some scientists are suggesting this as a last measure to safeguard threatened animals that are difficult to breed in captivity. However, cloning is never going to be the panacea to the threat of extinction. The biggest problems faced by threatened animals are habitat loss, human encroachment on their territories, hunting and climate change. Cloning animals on the verge of extinction could helpspecies to hang on in zoos and parks, but it does little to generate the genetic diversity that is so important for the long-term survival of species. It also does nothing to address the root causes of extinction.

Review: Deforestation increases Global Warming

ittle of the article: Deforestation: The hidden cause of global warming
Author: Daniel Howden
Date of Publication: Monday, 14 May 2007

The Global Canopy Programme, an alliance of rainforest scientists, recognized that the accelerating destruction of the rainforests around the Earth's equator, is one of the main causes of climate change. The GCP showed deforestation accounts for up to 25 per cent of global emissions of heat-trapping gases, while transport and industry account for 14 per cent each; and aviation makes up only 3 per cent of the total. Researches from 2003 proved that two billion tons of CO2 enters the atmosphere every year from deforestation, destruction which amounts to 50 million acres. The remaining standing forest is calculated to contain 1,000 billion tons of carbon, or double what is already in the atmosphere. Scientists believe that putting a price on the carbon these vital forests contain is the only way to slow their destruction.
Reducing those catastrophic emissions can be achieved most quickly and most cheaply by halting the destruction in Brazil, Indonesia, the Congo and elsewhere. Indonesia became the third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world last week. Following close behind is Brazil. Neither nation has heavy industry, yet they comfortably outstrip all other countries, except the United States and China. Both countries have tropical forest that is being cut and burned. Smoke stacks visible from space climb into the sky above both countries, while satellite images capture similar destruction from the Congo.
No new technology is needed to reduce deforestation, says the GCP, just the political will and a system of incentives that makes the trees worth more to governments and individuals than the cutting of them. Most people think of forests only in terms of the CO2 they absorb. The rainforests of the Amazon, the Congo basin and Indonesia are thought of as the lungs of the planet. But the destruction of those forests will in the next four years pump more CO2 into the atmosphere than every flight in the history of aviation to at least 2025.
Unfortunately, he problem behind deforestation was not included in the original Kyoto protocols. Many reports agreed that forests offer the "single largest opportunity for cost-effective and immediate reductions of carbon emissions". More than 50 per cent of the life on Earth is in tropical forests, which cover less than 7 per cent of the planet's surface. They generate the bulk of rainfall worldwide, function as a coolind band and act as a thermostat for the Earth. Forests are also home to 1.6 billion of the world's poorest people who rely on them for subsistence. However, forest experts say governments continue to pursue science fiction solutions to the coming climate catastrophe, preferring bio-fuel subsidies, carbon capture schemes and next-generation power stations.