09.28.10
Posted in Science & Religion at 11:23 am by nemo
On Basic Religion Test, Many Doth Not PassBy LAURIE GOODSTEIN – THE NEW YORK TIMES
Added: Tuesday, 28 September 2010 at 6:51 AM
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/526107-on-basic-religion-test-many-doth-not-pass
Americans are by all measures a deeply religious people, but they are also deeply ignorant about religion.
Researchers from the independent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life phoned more than 3,400 Americans and asked them 32 questions about the Bible, Christianity and other world religions, famous religious figures and the constitutional principles governing religion in public life.
On average, people who took the survey answered half the questions incorrectly, and many flubbed even questions about their own faith.
Those who scored the highest were atheists and agnostics, as well as two religious minorities: Jews and Mormons. The results were the same even after the researchers controlled for factors like age and racial differences.
“Even after all these other factors, including education, are taken into account, atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons still outperform all the other religious groups in our survey,” said Greg Smith, a senior researcher at Pew.
That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”
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Posted in Evolution at 11:12 am by nemo
‘Hobbit’ Was an Iodine-Deficient Human, Not Another Species, New Study Suggests
ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2010) — A new paper is set to re-ignite debate over the origins of so-called Homo floresiensis — the ‘hobbit’ that some scientists have claimed as a new species of human.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100928025514.htm
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Posted in General at 11:11 am by nemo
Right or Left? Brain Stimulation Can Change Which Hand You Favor
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Posted in General at 11:10 am by nemo
A Shot to the Heart: Nanoneedle Delivers Quantum Dots to Cell Nucleus
ScienceDaily (Sep. 28, 2010) — Getting an inside look at the center of a cell can be as easy as a needle prick, thanks to University of Illinois researchers who have developed a tiny needle to deliver a shot right to a cell’s nucleus.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:08 am by nemo
Complexity Not So Costly After All: Moderately Complex Plants and Animals Can Be Better Equipped to Adapt
ScienceDaily (Sep. 27, 2010) — The more complex a plant or animal, the more difficulty it should have adapting to changes in the environment. That’s been a maxim of evolutionary theory since biologist Ronald Fisher put forth the idea in 1930.
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Posted in Evolution at 11:07 am by nemo
Genetic Clues to Evolution of Jaws in Vertebrates Unearthed
ScienceDaily (Sep. 27, 2010) — A half-billion years ago, vertebrates lacked the ability to chew their food. They did not have jaws. Instead, their heads consisted of a flexible, fused basket of cartilage.
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Posted in global warming at 11:05 am by nemo
A Troubling Decline in the
Caribou Herds of the Arctic
Across the Far North, populations of caribou — an indispensable source of food and clothing for indigenous people — are in steep decline. Scientists point to rising temperatures and a resource-development boom as the prime culprits.
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Posted in you've got mail at 11:01 am by nemo
Published on Tuesday, September 28, 2010 by The San Francisco Chronicle
What if Everyone Had Medicare?by Henry Abrons
The Census Bureau released its annual report on income, poverty and health insurance coverage in the United States earlier this month, and it’s no surprise to learn that we’re in bad shape. The number of people living in poverty was 43.6 million (14.3 percent), up sharply from 2008, and real per capita income declined 1 percent.
Looking at health insurance, the situation is truly dire. There was a dramatic spike in the uninsured – 4.3 million more, to a record 50.7 million – in spite of the expansion of government health insurance rolls by nearly 6 million.
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:58 am by nemo
NY Times September 27, 2010
Water Use in Southwest Heads for a Day of Reckoning
By FELICITY BARRINGER
LAKE MEAD NATIONAL RECREATION AREA, Nev. — A once-unthinkable day is
looming on the Colorado River.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:56 am by nemo
Center for Responsive Politics: OpenSecrets.org Launches ‘Races to Watch: Investigating the Cash Behind Election 2010′
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2479?akid=215.96588._3OmHQ&t=38
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:54 am by nemo
Mass Arrests in DC: We Shall No Longer Be Crucified Upon the Cross of Coal
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2461?akid=215.96588._3OmHQ&t=2
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:53 am by nemo
Thomas Steinbeck | John Steinbeck, Michael Moore, and the Burgeoning Role of Planetary Patriotism
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2471?akid=215.96588._3OmHQ&t=22
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:52 am by nemo
Andrew Bacevich | Prisoners of War: Bob Woodward and All the President’s Men (2010 Edition)
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2470?akid=215.96588._3OmHQ&t=20
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:51 am by nemo
Fate of Thousands of Iraqis Unknown
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2468?akid=215.96588._3OmHQ&t=16
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:49 am by nemo
Ashcroft’s Post-9/11 Roundups Spark Lawsuit
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2465?akid=215.96588._3OmHQ&t=10
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Posted in you've got mail at 10:46 am by nemo
Campaigners Defend ‘Celebrated Novels’ from US Censors
http://act.commondreams.org/go/2462?akid=215.96588._3OmHQ&t=4
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09.27.10
Posted in Evolution at 1:43 pm by nemo
God or Darwin? Randomness of life reminder may drive the decision
This strangely pathetic article shows Darwin propagandists thinking out loud: they lose a lot of the public over the issue of randomness, and wish to reframe the jargon to give another impression.
I fear it won’t work. Randomness is built into Darwinism.
But I would say that the alternative ‘god or Darwin’ is totally false. How does such simplistic duality enter the minds of these supposed scientists???
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Posted in General at 1:38 pm by nemo
Theism/Atheism: The God Debates
Taking sides in a debate as demented as that of Christians and New Atheists is a liability of thought, and one is soon speaking gibberish using the now exhausted term ‘god’, a word that should be set aside until its user has deserved the priviledge. I should note that athiests are almost as confused as theists, solely for using such a term, and that the ancient Isrealites warned that this confusion would happen, warning the newly forming monotheistic cult/public of the danger of god references, in vain.
The abuse of the terms of divinity by monotheists is so slovenly that their use becomes impossible, full stop, and we must simply terminate the use of a term like ‘god’ for our discussion. Human culture is essentially deprived of the honest use of such terms as ‘god’. We should be wary of any negation of such an incoherent discourse as ‘atheism’. Spiritual empires claim exclusive rights over the usage of such terms, and manipulate credulity for purposes of social domination.
We cannot arbitrarily exclude arguments by design, but we can demand new terminology, and precise definitions. We will make this our one inviolable rule. Thus, it is almost impossible to use the term ‘god’ without prejudice in relation to differing religion s and our study will completely disallow it in any (theoretical) context. This is not an atheistic stance since the discussion is mostly meaningless, and it does allow fresh terms and definitions. Our position here is neither theistic, atheistic, or agnostic. These terms buttonhole all discussion.
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Posted in 9/11, atheism at 1:30 pm by nemo
Beyond the “New Atheism”?
Whatever the case with the ‘new atheism’ in general, one of the traps, or else, deceptions, of the onset, viz. via Harris’ spiel, was the concealed hatred of Moslems, and the use of 9/11 to subtly feed that.
Have none of these smartie nerds ever heard of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Where’s their indignation at the way the CIA et al. set up Moslems for patsies in this intelligence crime of the US government?
Whereas religion had seemed benign, if not actually true, to many thinking people, the September 11 attacks, the widespread religion-based opposition to stem cell and therapeutic cloning research
, the never-ending resistance to gay rights and abortion rights, the callous actions of the religious in the Schiavo affair, the Catholic Church’s appalling insensitivity towards abused children, and the many atrocities perpetrated daily in the name of religion of one kind or another, all converged to create a sense that human religiosity has a dark side of cruelty, dogmatism, moral blindness, authoritarianism, and intolerance.
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Posted in Fourth Edition, World History and The Eonic Effect at 1:13 pm by nemo
Chapter 5 of World History And The Eonic Effect now online: Symphony of Emergence: World History and the Axial Age!
An entire epoch of higher civilization is now reaching its end, and the world of early Sumer is a forgotten legend buried in the oddities of Akkadian cuneiform, while the civilization of Egypt is in decline. Although we don’t see the total collapse into medievalism that will occur in the next Occidental phase of our history our system comes close to this at many points, as civilization is frozen in the repetition of its basic forms. Most of all the progression of empires has risen to dominate civilization. This creates a crisis of development. Something spectacular is about to occur.
…
We have created the question, then, in relation to our eonic sequence, what next? The stream and the sequence interplay quite obviously stages the competition of two different futures in each case. More specifically, what are the next points of transformation in this ‘eonic’ series? That is, when do we again see a period of phasing onset, of parallel, interactive, zones of accelerated cultural evolution? Now, all at once, the Axial phase makes complete sense.
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Posted in General at 12:02 pm by nemo
Sir Martin Rees and Stephen Hawking in all-star theology smackdown
Actually reading theology would disquality most from speaking of ‘god’, having adjoined verbiage and sophistry to their null arguments.
Pace Kant, any knowledge of god is impossible, therefore erudition therein tends to be delusive.
Martin Rees, the outgoing president of the Royal Society, has stirred up the Stephen-Hawking-says-there’s-no-God controversy all over again, this time by saying that, since Hawking has read little to no theology, we shouldn’t “attach any weight to his views on this topic.” (At least he didn’t accuse him of being like the Taliban.)
This has been an ongoing debate for a while. Terry Eagleton once said of Richard Dawkins that debating with him on the subject of God is like hearing someone holding forth on biology “whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds”. Do we need to understand theology to debate God?
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Posted in Science & Religion at 11:57 am by nemo
Beyond God and atheism: Why I am a ‘possibilian’
When it comes to the big questions, why should we have to either deny God or believe? Surely good science doesn’t so restrict us, says David Eagleman
I HAVE devoted my life to scientific pursuit. After all, if we want to crack the mysteries of our existence, there may be no better approach than to directly study the blueprints. And science over the past 400 years has been tremendously successful. We have reached the moon, eradicated smallpox, built the internet, tripled lifespans, and increasingly tapped into those mind-blowing truths around us. We’ve found them to be deeper and more beautiful than anyone could have guessed.
But when we reach the end of the pier of everything we know, we find that it only takes us part of the way. Beyond that all we see is uncharted water. Past the end of the pier lies all the mystery about our deeply strange existence: the equivalence of mass and energy, dark matter, multiple spatial dimensions, how to build consciousness, and the big questions of meaning and existence.
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Posted in physics at 11:43 am by nemo
Everything really is relative
Physicists demonstrate time-warping principle in the realm of the ordinaryBy Rachel Ehrenberg Exploring the peculiar effects of Einstein’s relativity is no longer rocket science. Tabletop experiments at a lab in Colorado have illustrated the odd behavior of time, a strangeness typically probed with space travel and jet planes.
Using superprecise atomic clocks, scientists have witnessed time dilation — the bizarre speeding up or slowing down of time described by Einstein’s theories of relativity. The experiments are presented in the Sept. 24 Science.
“Modern technology has gotten so precise you can see these exotic effects in the range of your living room,” says physicist Clifford Will of Washington University in St. Louis. The experiments don’t reveal any new physics, Will says, but “what makes it cute and pretty cool is they have done it on a tabletop.”
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Posted in General at 11:41 am by nemo
Wildlife filmmaker Chris Palmer shows that animals are often set up to succeed
By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 22, 2010; C01
Not long after Chris Palmer broke into environmental filmmaking in the early 1980s, he brought home a newly completed film to show his wife, Gail.
She loved it — especially the close-up of the grizzly bear splashing in a stream. She asked Palmer how the crew had captured the sound of water dripping from the bear’s paws. He confessed: The sound guy had miked up a water basin and recorded splashing sounds made by his own hands.
She turned to him and said, “You’re a big fake.”
Three decades later, Palmer hasn’t quite recovered. And, at 63, he has written a confessional for an entire industry. “Shooting in the Wild,” published this year by Sierra Club Books, exposes the unpleasant secrets of environmental filmmaking: manufactured sounds, staged fights, wild animals that aren’t quite wild filmed in nature that isn’t entirely natural.
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Posted in General at 11:28 am by nemo
Robert Comments on Economists as trained seals (what to say of Darwinists)
Robert said,
September 26, 2010 at 7:01 pm ·
One can also bring up the example of Japan (if one believes that “lost decade” was a myth as Eamonn Fingleton suggests):
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=sun_still_rising
“The first chapter of your book is entitled “Sayonara, Capitalism.” You believe that the information age undermines capitalism, something that Japan has figured out?
I don’t think that necessarily it’s the information age, but it’s the way that the cost and the industry have changed that has made possible a very different approach to economic development from the traditional or the natural approach that was developed in the 18th and early 19th century, the system that we call capitalism. The world economy has changed in ways that have allowed Japan to develop a different approach to economic development. And frankly, the way the Japanese system works is more effective at creating long-term economic success.
Read the rest of this entry »
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Posted in Science & Religion at 11:22 am by nemo
Why It’s So Hard for Scientists to Believe in God
One of the reasons belief in ‘god’ is so difficult, and not just for scientists, is the idiocy of Christians. Look at the behavior of Christians with their use of the term ‘god’ and the prayer muddle surrounding it. Even someone diposed to god beliefs must be wary of the god quagmire.
In a way Collins is more dangerous: he wishes to hybridize scientism and bad Xtianiaty, as a social propaganda subsized by muliple establishments.
Question: Why is it so difficult for scientists to believe in a higher power?
Francis Collins: Science is about trying to get rigorous answers to questions about how nature works. And it’s a very important process that’s actually quite reliable if carried out correctly with generation of hypotheses and testing of those by accumulation of data and then drawing conclusions that are continually revisited to be sure they are right. So if you want to answer questions about how nature works, how biology works, for instance, science is the way to get there. Scientists believe in that they are very troubled by a suggestion that other kinds of approaches can be taken to derive truth about nature. And some I think have seen faith as therefore a threat to the scientific method and therefore it to be resisted.
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Posted in Science & Religion at 11:11 am by nemo
Martin Rees Explains Accommodationism
By LARRY MORAN – SANDWALK
Added: Monday, 27 September 2010 at 11:25 AM
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/525729-martin-rees-explains-accommodationism
Martin Rees is the President of the Royal Society in the UK. This is a position of enormous influence. When Rees speaks you can assume that he is representing the position of the Royal Society, or at least it’s leaders.
Martin Rees was recently interviewed by The Independent [Martin Rees: 'We shouldn't attach any weight to what Hawking says about god'].
He is equally scathing about Hawking’s more recent comments about there being no need for God in order to explain creation. “Stephen Hawking is a remarkable person whom I’ve know for 40 years and for that reason any oracular statement he makes gets exaggerated publicity. I know Stephen Hawking well enough to know that he has read very little philosophy and even less theology, so I don’t think we should attach any weight to his views on this topic,” he said.
Unlike many of the Fellows of the Royal Society he has presided over in the past five years, Lord Rees is not a militant atheist who goes out of his way to insult people of belief – Richard Dawkins once called him “a compliant quisling” for his tolerance of religion.
“I would support peaceful co-existence between religion and science because they concern different domains,” Lord Rees said. “Anyone who takes theology seriously knows that it’s not a matter of using it to explain things that scientists are mystified by.”
His next popular science book is about these things that science still cannot explain, such as the origin of life on Earth and the scientific nature of human consciousness. This, he insisted, is what science is really about, and why it has the power to touch everyone of every culture.
I don’t have time for a detailed explanation of this particular accommodationist position so I’ll just note a few points.
Hawking said there’s no need for God but his views can be dismissed because (unlike Martin Rees?) he’s not an expert on philosophy and theology.
Rees does not go out of his way to insult people of belief. Good for him. Neither do lots of atheists, including Stephen Hawking. What’s the point? Sounds to me like Dawkins might have been correct.
Did Martin Rees just go out of his way to insult atheists like Stephen Hawking? I guess atheists don’t deserve the same kid-gloves treatment that we owe to theists.
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