Super Odd Stories
By tony leather, 6th Aug 2012 | Follow this author
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Posted in WikinutNewsOff Beat
Whether human beings would want to live forever is going to be a hot topic, including debate on how boring that could be, and if life itself might lose meaning, beauty and urgency if death - which currently gives meaning to life - were no longer an issue.
Super Odd Stories
Unbelievably, the John Templeton Foundation - California - has awarded University of California philosophy professor Jon Martin Fischer a 3-year, $5 million grant to study the incredible topic of immortality, and even teach students about it.
Both Fischer and Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin, his post-doc, will be teaching related classes, having frequently taught - at Yale University and UC Riverside - previous classes on death and immortality. Both professors will be open to the study of varying views on immortality.
Whether human beings would want to live forever is going to be a hot topic, including debate on how boring that could be, and if life itself might lose meaning, beauty and urgency if death - which currently gives meaning to life - were no longer an issue.
The foundation felt that, whilst anecdotal reports of the afterlife are commonplace, comprehensive and rigorous, scientific studies of global near-death and other experiences have never been undertaken. That being so, this research will look at heaven, hell, purgatory, karma and other such phenomena.
This truly unusual grant is the largest ever awarded to a humanities professor at the university, and will be used to document various phenomena, in an attempt to determine if an afterlife is real or a biologically induced illusion. As well as this research, two conferences to discuss the findings will also be funded.
This so-called Immortality Project will engage eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians - respected leaders in their fields - published in academic and popular journals - to try to come to a realistic consensus, also delving into cultural aspects of the afterlife, such as that infamous bright light at the end of a tunnel.
If indeed humans are material beings, how a ghostly existence in heaven be possible, is a subject the research will try to answer, there being a lot of interest in near-death experiences and the relationship between moral behaviour, crime rates and belief in an afterlife.
As if that were not strange enough, yet another new study offers some helpful hints on how to keep people from sitting next to you on the plane, bus or train, all down to Yale University based Esther Kim having spent three years covering thousands of miles of U.S. bus travel in compiling the observations that led to her results.
This seasoned traveller jotted down many of the different ways in which people avoid sitting next to someone else, engaging in various tactics from checking phones through pretending to be busy to rummaging through bags, or even wearing a don't bother me face.
Avoiding fellow travellers can be accomplished through physical postures, especially with use of the eyes, avoiding eye contact altogether by pretending to be asleep or staring out of the window with a blank stare. Then there are the more anti-social stastements, such as While placing your bag on the empty seat next to you or even lying by saying the seat next to you is taken when it clearly is not
The researcher describes the rarely spoken bur almost universally understood truth of this being in reality a game of chess played by passengers. Strategically situating themselves in ways that maximize their own comfort as well as minimizing the odds of sitting beside a stranger, except when the flight or bus is full, in which case simply avoiding sitting next to any undesirable company becomes the priority.
Kim found that none of race, class or gender played any significant role in people's choice of seat, personal comfort levels being the main concern, though avoiding fat people - who may sweat more and be more likely to smell - seemed to rate quite high with most people asked.
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