Early Blackout Newspapers: The Statement (September 29, 2010) A Closer Look: How University Scientists are Defining the Field of Stem Cell Research

Early Blackout Newspapers: The Michian Daily (September 28)

Early Blackout Newspapers: The Michigan Daily (Monday, September 27)

I think science is often perceived as definitive, but I am coming to realize that there is a limit, a range of error, to everything that exists. Once something exists, there are rules in place that support its existence. How do we even know what exists? For all we know, objective reality is false and the universe is a giant hologram. Science is really the antonym of definitive: incomplete, inconclusive, inexact, interim, temporary, unreliable.

All I can wonder now is where our certainty stems from in a world where the definitive cannot be reached. We approach the truth, but fact strays just past our reach. There is a feeling of clarity and a strength in diction that makes the truth seem tangible, but many of our truths, especially those about ourselves, are based on memory. We can solemnly swear or promise that we are telling the truth, but are we? Memory falters. The more you access a memory, the more it changes. This article explains that "memory is a ceaseless process, not a repository of inert information. It shows us that every time we remember anything, the neuronal structure of the memory is delicately transformed, or reconsolidated."

I am still left wondering: what is awareness?

Something separates the atoms into forms. The initial awareness, the oneness of all things, is lost. Consciousness strays from the origin in haphazard chance. Perhaps the pattern is too big to perceive or maybe it's a fractal we have yet to understand, or cannot understand because we are limited by our dimensionality.

Science is the measured observation, the explanation, the definitive system of rules that defines our universe. The smoothness of mathematics feels like an appealing way to explain the world around us. The chaos of entropy denied because math is so exact that it starts to have a weight and a truth that is more compelling than the imperfections of our senses, of the unknown.

Yet we forget that human bodies are mangled and broken pieces of equipment which cannot be calibrated to the same standard as a machine. Circles are never perfectly round; the earth is not a sphere, but a lumpy ball with many crevices and peaks forming a mashing, flaky crust wobbling through space.

We organize the world into the various compartments of our brains, filing away each piece of information so we can build our picture of the cosmos with tiny data inputs. We use numbers to represent transitory things, as an attempt to measure a motion that cannot be stopped. It is the birth of concept.

Seven years, but how many days? And hours? And minutes? Dare we go beyond the seconds? A precise mechanization of each metered breath is filed for later.

Our hearts beat so we count along with global meter. What happens if everything stops? The stories depend upon the metronome never changing nor ceasing to tick with assured cadence. Time unites all things.

We get lost in a web of stories built tangentially off of each other until the origin, the spark of initial awareness, is gone: a math equation with missing parenthesis and brackets of closure. Seven seems to be the number repeating itself today, partially because I left "Seven" on repeat while I was baking cupcakes in the kitchen. It all seems to fit--creating new tines in the fork--from my story, to that of a seven year old imagining mermaids in the clouds, to my earlier thoughts of my cousin's seven year old daughter trying to process the death of her father in the heat of the Ohio summer. Something is feeding on my memory, causing me to scribble out strange Rules & Obstructions from the place where my brain cannot separate the senses.

Synesthetics began the evening by tasting the muddled murmurs of the funerary feast; their stiffly pressed pant legs of coarse cotton clung to bruised kneecaps while rumpled handkerchiefs hung limply with discarded grief.

______ [began] the evening [before] the [feast].

Create iterations for rules & obstructions.