My new scientist crush: Oxford’s Nick Bostrom, John Lilly’s ECCO Mission to Mankind, Movies This Week, Outsourcing Wombs, The Rage in Russia: Selling Fetuses, The Mountain Gorillas of Rwanda, Lieutenant Mark Alexander, Be Happy: The Rich Are Miserable, and more...

Uganda’s Mean Female Gorillas. From the New York Post’s Page Six: Animal Instinct. Kerry Washington won't forget her encounter with a gorilla while filming "The Last King of Scotland" in Uganda. Washington told Webster Hall's Baird Jones, "I got way too close to a female gorilla, who started toward me. If you run, they run after you. So I did my best gorilla imitation: chewing leaves, head scratch, kneeling. I remembered watching animal behavior on TV and zoo trips." It worked. "I would not be having this interview now if that gorilla had attacked me."

Perhaps Kerry Washington was wandering around the mountain all alone. We seven tourists, on the other hand, had a sanctuary guide, 3 armed guards, and several porters. It cost $10 to have a porter carry your backpack. (The porters and top guide hit the mother lode with me since I got special attention hiking up the mountain.) The trackers were also on hand communicating with our guide by walkie-talkie. There is a special sound that the guides and trackers made that constantly communicated to the gorillas that we humans were friendly and would not harm them. We also could look directly at the females since they were not hostile. We were, of course, advised not to look into the eyes of the Silverback alpha male.

We visited the mountain gorillas in Rwanda (photo of road leading to the mountain). There are only 60 permits sold per day for $500 per ticket. There are strong rumors that the cost will soon increase to $1,000.)

Photo of my porters. I was not allowed to take a photo of the soldiers.

When asked why there were three rifle-toting soldiers along with each of the seven groups, we were told they were watching for poachers. Poachers should know that every day at 11AM groups of tourists come to see the mountain gorillas for one hour. That is exactly when poachers should be hiding out of sight. Or, considering how the soldiers kept a military style perimeter watch over us, was it for our protection?

In 1999, a team of FBI agents landed in Kampala, Uganda to investigate the brutal murder of eight tourists by Rwandan rebels during a holiday vacation tracking rare mountain gorillas. As survivors of the massacre prepared to fly home, the FBI agents arrived to help investigate how the ethnic Hutu rebels abducted 31 tourists and executed eight of them.

The victims were four Britons, two Americans and two New Zealanders -- four men and four women. One survivor said the victims were bludgeoned and macheted to death and that one of the women was apparently raped before she was killed. The hostage crisis began at dawn when more than 100 ethnic Hutu rebels from Rwanda attacked three tourist camps in the Bwindi National Park of southwest Uganda, famous as one of the last remaining habitats of mountain gorillas.

Seventeen of the 31 international tourists escaped or were freed shortly after, but 14 others were frog-marched towards neighboring Congo and eight of them were murdered before the end of the day. The remaining six were released with a grim warning from the Hutu rebels to the West: Stop dealing with Rwanda's Tutsi-led government or more tourists will die.

The rebels slaughtered their victims in the same manner of the genocide of 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994 -- with clubs and machetes. A handwritten note given by the rebel’s leader to one released hostage said Uganda was now considered a "war zone."

In 1999, the rebels also kidnapped four international tourists and seven Congolese guides and porters on a trek to observe the gorillas. They later released a Canadian tourist and all the Congolese escorts. The three other tourists -- two Swedes and one New Zealander -- have not been heard from since.

Dian Fossey's meeting with Dr. Leakey at Olduvai Gorge inspired her to study mountain gorillas. In 1967 Dian moved to Rwanda where she established Karisoke, a research camp in the Parc National des Volcans. In 1970, Peanuts, an adult male, touched her hand. This was the first friendly gorilla-to-human contact ever recorded. To visit Fossey’s grave, next to that of her beloved gorilla “Digit,” costs $100. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International: Saving gorillas and their habitats in Africa

After we got back from East Africa, the Animal Planet Network had a special called “Saving a Species: Gorillas on the Brink” with Star Wars actress Natalie Portman and wildlife guru Jack Hanna. They went to the same jungle, Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park, as we did.

Movies This Week. “Control” (NO), “Love in the Time of Cholera” (NO), and “I’m Not There” (YES, YES).

Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Nick Bostrom is called a Transhumanist Philosopher and teaches at Oxford University. Bostrom’s theory is catching on: Maybe our universe is some PlaySkool toy that some kid, somewhere, is assembling, disassembling, and through whimsy, controlling. If you ever role-played online or created a personality in Dungeons and Dragons, you understand the concept Bostrom is promoting.

For Dr. Bostrom, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation – just like we all saw in “The Matrix.” Dr. Bostrom is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford and he says that technological advances will soon produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Computer experts say we will have such a computer by the middle of this century and “post-humans” will be running lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment. The number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors. There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.” Nick Bostrom's home page

I much prefer John Lilly’s revelation concerning ECCO. Dr. Lilly believed he was being watched over and guided by higher powers of an extraterrestrial origin. Lilly referred to this network of sublime entities as ECCO ("Earth Coincidence Control Office").

Dr. John Lilly is renowned for his work communicating with dolphins and he invented the isolation tank (pictured below) to understand how the brain works in sensory deprivation. My husband John brought an isolation tank in the 1980s and says he “used it all the time. It was in the basement.” Unfortunately, John never met anyone from ECCO.

Dr. Lilly came to this realization through the use of Ketamine.

I met some folks in Peru who had recently injected Ketamine (called by U.S. users “Special K.”). You can buy Ketamine in some very remote parts of Peru at pharmacies without a doctor’s prescription!

As Dr. Lilly increased his frequency of injecting himself with massive doses of Ketamine, he began having contact with another alien intelligence agency, which he called SSI (Solid State Intelligence). SSI was a supercomputer-like entity. SSI was of a malevolent nature, at odds with ECCO. SSI's apparent goal was to conquer and dominate all biological life forms on Earth. To combat SSI, ECCO enlisted Lilly in this archetypal battle of good against evil, charging him with the mission of alerting the world to these solid state beings of evil intent. To further confirm the dual existences of these two opposing alien intelligence networks, Lilly was given a sign, and message, in the autumn of 1974. Flying into Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Dr. Lilly saw the Comet Kahoutek (pictured) out of the southern sky. Momentarily the comet grew brighter. At this point a message was laser-beamed into Lilly's mind, which said: "We are Solid State Intelligence and we are going to demonstrate our power by shutting down all solid state equipment to LAX."

Dr. Lilly shared his foreboding message with his wife Toni, who was seated next to him. A few minutes later, the pilot instructed the passengers that they were being diverted to Burbank due to a plane that had crash-landed near the runway and had knocked down power lines, causing a power failure at the airport.

Dr. Lilly’s website explains ECCO and ECCO has a message for all humans. I think we should pay attention to their conditions (However, I did fix all the ECCO misspellings. English is apparently not their first language):

"There exists a Cosmic Control Center (C.C.C.) with a Galactic substation called Galactic Coincidence Control (G.C.C.). Within which is the Solar System Control Unit (S.S.C.U.), within which is the Earth Coincidence Control Office (E.C.C.O.). The assignments of responsibilities from the top to the bottom of this system of control is by a set of regulations, which translated by E.C.C.O. for humans is somewhat as follows:"

To all humans: If you wish to control coincidences in your own life on the planet Earth, we will cooperate and determine those coincidences for you under the following conditions:

1) You must know/assume/simulate our existence in ECCO.

2) You must be willing to accept our responsibility for control of your coincidences.

3) You must exert your best capabilities for your survival programs and your own development as an advancing/advanced member of ECCO's Earth-side corps of controlled coincidence workers. You are expected to use your best intelligence in this service.

4) You are expected to expect the unexpected every minute, every hour of every day and of every night.

5) You must be able to maintain conscious/thinking/reasoning no matter what events we arrange to happen to you. Some of these events will seem cataclysmic/catastrophic/overwhelming: remember stay aware, no matter what happens/apparently happens to you.

6) You are in our training program for life: There is no escape from it. We (not you) control the long-term coincidences; you (not we) control the shorter-term coincidences by your own efforts.

7) Your major mission on earth is to discover/create that which we do to control the long-term coincidence patterns: You are being trained on Earth to do this job.

8) When your mission on planet Earth is completed, you will no longer be required to remain/return there.

9) Remember the motto passed to us (from GCC via SSCU): "Cosmic Love is Absolutely Ruthless and Highly Indifferent: It teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not." John C. Lilly Homepage

Outsourcing Wombs in India. The future is here! And I want to be part of it! Whatever celebrities and socialites want to call it, it’s “rent a womb for nine months” and it’s catching on! Celebrities may call it having a “gestational carrier” or that they are suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome and must use surrogates, but its really womb renting.

India has become renowned for outsourcing and now poor Indian women are renting out their wombs to foreigners. Surrogate motherhood -- carrying to term and giving birth to another woman's baby - once was limited in India to helping close relatives who couldn't complete a pregnancy due to medical difficulties.

It is now becoming a regular "profession" in India, with more and more women willing to carry babies for others, for a fee. India has for years been providing foreigners with in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatment at a cheaper rate than the equivalent services in Western countries.

Surrogacy comes in when the biological mother is unable to carry the child. Alternatively, a surrogate also provide eggs when the woman wanting a child is unable to do so herself.

In the Anand district in the western state of Gujarat, more than 50 economically deprived women are reported to be presently carrying babies for foreigners and non-resident Indians. While a couple in the U.S. will generally pay tens of thousands of dollars to a surrogate mother and affiliated agencies, in India the cost could be around $5,000, plus medical and attendant costs.

There is an increasing number of young, healthy, married working women unwilling to put their careers on hold to have a baby, and will pay someone else to do so on their behalf.

Stem cells are all the rage in Russia and people are flocking to the country for stem cell therapy to stop the aging process. And where are the stem cells coming from? Many believe the stem cells are being smuggled in from neighboring Georgia and Ukraine, where there’s a growing black market. Poverty-stricken women are often paid the equivalent of $200 to carry fetuses for up to twelve weeks, before they are aborted and sold to cosmetic clinics.

Lieutenant Mark Alexander. Congratulations to Mark Alexander! On November 1st, John’s son (and my stepson) was promoted to lieutenant on the Palm Beach Sheriff’s Department. Competition for these positions was intense and he finished fourth out of over 60 applicants. Mark had been serving in a sensitive position as an investigator in the Internal Affairs Division. Congratulations to Mark and his lovely wife Isabel. (Photo of Sheriff Bradshaw and Mark (on left.)

Pity the Prince. He may be suffering from Wealth Fatigue Syndrome. Yes, it may even make it into the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), due for publication in 2012. That nasty year once again!

Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia (pictured), has purchased a $300 million-plus "Flying Palace" plane. Is it a sign of his psychological inadequacies? Alwaleed, who recently just lost $2.5 billion of his personal fortune due to the mortgage meltdown, but apparently decided to buy a flying palace for $300 million and then customize it for another $150 million.

He could be suffering from Wealth Fatigue Syndrome – the poor thing!

According to therapists, being a super-millionaire is a sure-fire recipe for unhappiness. It is called “Wealthy Fatigue Syndrome.” Such excessive spending might not be a sign of conspicuous consumption but of addiction. However, Bo Derek summed up most everybody’s opinion on the subject of acquiring wealth: "Whoever said money can't buy happiness simply didn't know where to go shopping."

Love in the Time of Cholera. Beloved book, lousy movie. He ages to 72, she stops aging at 35. He stays virile, she crumbles. He cries a lot while having sex with 600 desperately horny Columbian women. He’s the only potent man in the country.

Here’s the standard I go by. If I walk out of the theater and say, “I want to read the book,” then the movie worked.

With “Cholera,” I walked out thankful I never read Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel whose appeal has to be the weepy premise that a woman could be loved (for her beauty alone) the over 55 years, even if she doesn’t deserve it.

“Cholera” is the story of a man, Florentino (Javier Bardem), who uses women for sex and keeps a list he brags about (seems the whole town knows the ongoing tote) while flattering himself that he could never commit to a relationship because he is in love with a pretty woman, Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno), he saw when he was 18 years old.

All “lifelong bachelors” should use this excuse. “Lifelong bachelors” say, “I’m married to my work.” Now they should say, “I’m keeping myself a virgin for [insert a female name here].”

“Cholera” shows every Columbian woman (strangers grab him as he walks down the street) as desperate for sex and hungry for Florentino’s throbbing manhood. What is wrong with all the other men in Columbia? Even at 72 years old, Florentino has a hungry teenager lusting over him begging for seconds!

I know. I missed the whole point of the novel: Selfless, everlasting love with plenty of tears. But this weepy saga wants it both ways. Florentino cries while sleeping with everything (but not young boys) that moves. He is praised for this achievement. Other men want to know why he is so good with women. His answer goes something like this: They know I am suffering from a love I cannot have. Women long to fill my aching heart.

Young Florentino is a poor man infatuated with Fermina, the daughter of wealthy Lorenzo who demands she marry well, instead of bothering with a lovesick puppy. She eventually marries a dashing doctor.

Florentino waits for 53 years and finally her husband drops dead. He immediately goes to Fermina. After again pursuing her with a stalker’s vengeance, she goes off with him on a riverboat tour. He wants to make love but Fermina, looking all of 35, tells him to stay away from her, she “smells like an old woman.” Florentino, the old coot, smells like a freshly picked daisy. When he finally talks her into bed, she does not want him to see her aged body. Florentino is fine with his 72 year old body.

Women of a certain age are wise and know their physical attractiveness has diminished with age, but this goes to prove men have no such hang-ups. Quite the contrary.

I kept hoping Florentino and Fermina would come down with cholera.