Is it Friday again already? Wow. And so forth.

Enough chitchat, it’s science time!

First, we have to start off with the Cardboard Cathedral.

Amongst the many terrible consequences of this year’s massive earthquake in Christchurch, in New Zealnd (a place that did not need yet another damned disaster) was the total destruction of the world famous Christchurch Cathedral.

This was a terrible loss both to the world of classic Christian architecture and, more importantly, the Catholic community of Christchurch, who were suddenly without a place in which to practice their faith.

Enter cardboard innovator Shigeru Ban, who says that he can build an entire working cathedral out of cardboard and it would only take three months and cost $3.4 million.

That sounds like a lot of money, but I am pretty sure that a real cathedral made of stone and glass costs a hell of a lot more than that these days, and this is only meant to be a temporary replacement while a proper, traditional cathedral is built.

Ban insists cardboard is cheap, plentiful, easy to get your hands on in large quantities in disaster-stricken areas where (understandably but cruelly) building material prices tend to go through the roof, and makes a perfectly acceptable emergency building material.

It would be made of massive cardboard tubes and sit on a foundation of used freight containers, and be built to last the whole ten years it would take to build a new cathedral.

Now I know what you are thinking. This sounds completely insane, not to mention gross and amazingly tacky. I confess, my own open-mindedness abotu the subject of alternative building methods took a hit when I first read about this idea.

Visions of something that looks like a group of homeless children were gripped by religious fervor and bodged together something out of cardboard boxes and used staples, with “chirch” scrawled on the side in Sharpie, comes to mind.

And I mean, what would it look like inside? What would it feel like? Hell, what would it smell like? Sure, I know it’s not used cardboard, but cardboard itself does not smell all that great in large quantity.

So I am assuming that all the cardboard has some sort of coating on it to make it less, well, cardboard-y. Something cheap that you spray on which seals it against the weather and makes it more like building with a very light wood.

It still sounds highly dubious to me, but I am a big fan of all attempts to innovate in the world of housing. If we can find a cheaper way to make houses, it could have an amazingly positive rippling effect on damn near everything.

Imagine if a new house cost around the same as a new car. What a difference that would make!

Next up, turns out that those probiotic formulae being hawked in everything these days might do more than promote healthy digestion, they might also help mellow you out.

Turns out, your own little personal ecosystem of gut bacteria could have an effect on your mood. The study cited in the above link fed one of the most popular probiotics, a friendly little fellow called Lactobacillus rhamnosus, to some mice, and found that said mice were way less stressed out in situations mice normally find stressful.

This seems promising, especially for yogurt companies, but we have to keep in mind that the causal link has been demonstrated but not explained. How, exactly, does the bacterial help the mice be more calm? Perhaps all it does is improve their digestion, and that alone makes them calmer because their little tummies are calmer.

And finally, in the realm of Gross As Hell But Not Technically Wrong, a funeral home in Florida is offering yet another way to dispose of human remains : liquefaction.

I will not go into the gory details. Not in the mood today. Suffice it to say that through heat and pressure, they melt the flesh right off the bone.

And this is the truly mind raping bit : then they pour you down the drain.

Yes, the same drain down which we pour, say, spoiled gravy.

The company that makes the device that makes all this marvelous science possible (the Resomator, which sounds like an excellent Doctor Who villain) assures us that liquid person is completely ecologically safe and that their process uses way less energy and produces way less greenhouse gas than a standard cremation.

Oh, and yes, that still leaves your skeleton, which is pulverized, and any metal you might have in your body.

Again, gross, but not actually wrong per se. But I wouldn’t go for it and I can’t imagine too many people wanted their dear departed loved ones melted like that.

Right now, I am still wanting to be composted when I am gone. Just put my left-behind flesh back into the ecosystem. I am not using it any more.

That is all for this week, folks. Aren’t you glad?

Been thinking a lot about this subject recently, so I thought I would put some of said thoughts down here. in my bloggy little blog, to help sort them out and maybe turn them into something that makes to people who live outside my brain.

That’s most of you, right?

As with a lot of deep philosophical thoughts, this begins with martial arts movies.

One of the things stressed in martial arts movies and a lot of other media dealing with Eastern religion and other acetic disciplines is that you can only achieve these advanced levels of enlightenment and awesomeness by many, many years of gruelingly hard training, discipline, meditation, and suffering.

And a big part of me has always rebelled against this idea. What is the big deal? Why can’t you just teach me what you know now? Sure, maybe it took you decades of self-deprivation and meditation and flagellation to learn it, but that doesn’t mean I have to do the exact same thing in order to learn it. You could just tell me, and then I would know too, and without a lot of pointless suffering and enduring a life that basically sucks balls.

Or is it that you are pissed off that it took you so long to learn things which are actually really simple and obvious once you know them, and now you want other people to have to suffer like you in order to make it all seem worth it?

And it’s a nice racket, stringing people along, making them be your eager disciples and making your life way easier by just selling them on the idea that you are wise and powerful and can teach them the secrets if they just hang around and do absolutely everything you say for a long enough time.

“No, grasshopper…. you are not yet ready to learn the next big secret… ask me again next year. And make sure not to burn the rice this time, bitch. ”

By the time they figure out you don’t know anything that any moron could figure out in ten minutes, they have already invested so much of their life in your service that they are emotionally compelled to keep going.

“OK, that last bit of wisdom was crap, but I am sure the next one will be important… better not burn the rice this time… ”

And the thing is, part of me still thinks like that, but I have realized recently that the problem is that, as an intellectual, I don’t value experience nearly as much as I value knowledge (or wisdom, or understanding, or whatever you want to call it).

In fact, I am beginning to see this as a failing typical of intellectuals in general : we think that if you know the destination, the journey is a waste of time you should minimize as much as possible so you can go on the to the next thing as soon as possible.

The journey itself, and whatever experiences you might have on it, hold no value whatsoever. Even though we all know damned well that in our own lives, we have had many experiences that have changed us profoundly, some positive and some negative, we continue to think that what matters is what you learn, not what you do, and if you could have learned the same thing faster, that would have been better.

The metaphor that comes to mind to explain this folly : A man takes a long journey from his village to the big city, and as he takes his first step into the city, he exclaims “What a fool I have been! Obviously, I should have taken this step first, and saved myself the rest of the trip!”

Oh well, next time you’ll know, right?

Everything we do, even if we do nothing, changes us. The river never stops flowing and carves new channels, or makes the old ones deeper.

And therefore, some changes in us can only be wrought by experiencing certain things. You can’t skip the middle simply because you know the ending. It is an experience that will change you, not simply an insight or a technique.

You have to actually change who you are and not just what you know.

And to an intellectual (who probably thinks of themselves as open-minded and freethinking) change of self is the most frightening kind of change and is to be blindly and ferociously avoided at all costs.

And so we end up going around and around in the same big circles over and over again, all the while thinking we are finding something new.

Big brains do not solve all problems.

Sometimes, you have to let things happen to you instead.