WASP

WASP (World Atheist Science People) transfer to HASSERS

2007-12-06T07:36:00.000Z

With immediate effect, new WASP posts will be added to HASSERS - Humanist - Antireligious - Scientific - Secularist - Ethical - Rationalist - Sceptics.

Add a Bookmark for HASSERS http://hassers.blogspot.com/

WASP will continue to be online here until further notice.

The God FAQ

2007-11-26T07:49:00.000Z

reposted from: http://www.400monkeys.com/God/

THE OFFICIAL GOD FAQ

Question: “Is there a God?”

Answer: “No.”

In the quite unlikely event that you were to discover any omissions or inaccuracies on this page, they may be reported to the international headquarters of The Official God FAQ, at aod@400monkeys.com, where they will be thoroughly investigated, submitted to rigorous scientific testing and, if substantiated, included in a subsequent update. Thank you.

Debate between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ed Husain

2007-11-25T21:32:00.000Z

reposted from: http://www.socialcohesion.co.uk/blog/2007/11/centre_hosts_debate_between_ay_1.html
WASP comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

On 20th November, the Centre for Social Cohesion hosted an evening debate in Westminster between Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the former Dutch MP and self-declared Muslim apostate, and Ed Husain, the author of the best-selling book The Islamist.

Debating ‘The West and the Future of Islam’, the two speakers began by making a short speech setting out their arguments before taking questions from the audience.

During the discussion, which lasted for over an hour and a half,

Ayaan Hirsi Ali argued that Islam “as a body of ideas” is opposed to ‘Enlightenment’ values.

She further said that

unless Muslims actively confronted and rejected verses from the Quran which are hostile to women’s rights and homosexuals and accept a total separation of Church and State, then conflict between Islam and the West was inevitable.

Ed Husain responded that Islam could be interpreted in numerous different ways and that it was incorrect to state definitively whether Islam was for or against the rights of women and others.

He argued that Muhammad had aimed to improve the rights of slaves and women and that it was the responsibility of modern Muslims to continue to strive against injustice, intolerance and inequality.

Among the two hundred attendees were Charles Moore, the former editor of The Daily Telegraph, Martin Ivens, the deputy-editor of The Sunday Times, Melanie Phillips, the columnist and writer, and Owen Patterson, the shadow secretary of state for Northern Ireland.

Andrew Anthony, the author of The Fallout: How a Guilty Liberal Lost His Innocence, and Nick Cohen, author of What’s Left: How the Liberals Lost Their Way also attended, along with Jemima Khan.

Among those present was Asim Siddiqui, the chairman of The City Circle. Also in the audience were several former members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, including Maajid Nawaz and Shiraz Maher.

Earlier in the day, the Centre also hosted an informal discussion between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Douglas Murray, the Centre’s director, at the House of Lords.

The Centre will post a video of the debate between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ed Husain on this website by next week.

Blair 'nutter' fear angers bishop

2007-11-25T21:10:00.000Z

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7112256.stm
WASP comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

Blair 'nutter' fear angers bishop

Mr Blair said politicians who talk about religion "get into trouble"

A bishop has criticised Tony Blair after he said he avoided talking about his religious views while premier because he feared the "nutter" label.

The Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, said he was "sorry" the former prime minister felt unable to talk about his faith.

It would have led to more constructive social policy at home and principled policies abroad, the bishop said.

Mr Blair's admission comes in the final episode of BBC One's The Blair Years.

During the interview, Mr Blair said faith was a crucial component for him in having the character to take on the prime minister's job and had been "hugely important" to his premiership.

A Christian vision underlies all that is important about Britain: its laws, institutions and values

Bishop of Rochester

But while it was commonplace in the US and elsewhere for politicians to talk about their religious convictions, he added: "you talk about it in our system and, frankly, people do think you're a nutter".

British voters imagined that leaders who were informed by religion would "commune with the man upstairs and then come back and say 'Right, I've been told the answer and that's it'".
Bishop Nazir-Ali said: "I am sorry that Tony Blair feels he could not talk about his faith in case people thought he was a nutter.

"A Christian vision underlies all that is important about Britain: its laws, institutions and values.
"If Blair had been able to relate this vision to his policies, we would have had more constructive social policy at home and principled policies abroad."

Mr Blair's ex-spokesman Alastair Campbell famously warned reporters: "We don't do God."
He acknowledged to the programme that his former boss "does do God in quite a big way", but that both men feared the public would be wary.

Mr Campbell added that the former PM always asked his aides to find him a church to attend each Sunday, wherever he happened to be.

The Blair Years will be screened on BBC One at 2215 GMT on 25 November. The episode in which Mr Blair discusses his faith will be broadcast on Sunday 2 December.

Does religion have a place at work? Have you been discriminated against because of your beliefs? Do you think it would affect your opportunities for a promotion?

Divining pseudoscience

2007-11-21T06:22:00.000Z

reposted from: http://cectic.com/076.html

Gordon Moore tells how Moore's Law began and his predictions for chip development

2007-11-18T07:48:00.000Z

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_7080000/newsid_7084200/7084268.stm?bw=bb&mp=wm&asb=1&news=1

Gordon Moore tells Jonathan Fildes how Moore's Law began and his predictions for chip development. (video: 15 minutes)

Recommended!

Cloning using skin cells rather than stem cells

2007-11-17T14:49:00.000Z

reposted & edited from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7099758.stm
WASP comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

Dolly scientist abandons cloning

An egg being collected

The scientist who controversially created Dolly the sheep is abandoning the cloning of human embryos in stem cell research.

Professor Ian Wilmut, of Edinburgh University, believes a rival method developed in Japan holds the key to curing serious medical conditions.

The new method creates stem cells from fragments of skin and removes the need to use human embryos.

Prof Wilmut developed a cloning technique which involved creating stem cells - which have the potential to be grown into any cell in the human body - from human embryos.

Building blocks

Embryonic or stem cells are widely regarded as the most flexible cells in the body and are seen as the body's building blocks.

Wilmut has now embraced a technique developed by Prof Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University, Japan, that involves genetically modifying adult cells to make them almost as flexible as stem cells. The research has been conducted on mice.

The work is due to be published in a scientific journal on Tuesday. Prof Wilmut said his own research team held a meeting at which it was agreed the Japanese method had more potential than the use of embryonic cells.

He said:

"The work which was described from Japan of using a technique to change cells from a patient directly into stem cells without making an embryo has got so much more potential.

"Even though it's only been described for the mouse, when we were considering which option to pursue, whether to clone or whether to copy the work in Japan, we decided to copy the work in Japan."

More acceptable

Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Prof Wilmut said: "Before too long we will be able to use the Yamanaka approach to achieve the same, without making embryos. In the long term, direct reprogramming will be more productive.

"I decided a few weeks ago not to pursue nuclear transfer [the method used to create Dolly the sheep]," and he admitted the new method "was easier to accept socially".

Dolly the sheep was unveiled to the world in 1997

The eventual aim is to grow replacement tissue as body parts become worn out.

There is some way to go before Prof Yamanaka's method can be used to grow tissue for transplantation as the resulting cells are unstable and potentially cancerous.

But Professor Wilmut believes that within five years the new technique could provide a better and ethically more acceptable alternative to cloning embryos for medical research.

BHA - British Humanist Association - Science Vision

2007-11-15T21:18:00.000Z

reposted from: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bhascience/

Tom Rees has posted the following questions in the database of BHA Science. (to join this Yahoo group you must be a member of the BHA.

Tom, thanks for creating the four question Database table "What do you want from the group, what can you do for the group?" viz:-

1) Name
2) Where did you here about the group?
3) Why did you join the group?
4) Do you have a 'vision' for what you want the group to be?

Let me explain why I think the 'vision' bit is important for BHA Science group.

A vision should be a source of inspiration and will stretch the Resources and Capabilities of the BHA Science group. Because our Resources and Capabilities are not fixed our vision can be stretched a lot! For example we potentially have the resources of many science professionals of the honourary BHA associates, the capabilities of 7000+ BHA members and the BHA Philosophers group. We could get the help of some of the 17 Million people (MORI poll) in the UK that have a humanist outlook to life. We need to create a powerful BHA Science vision & mission that will encourage some of them to join BHA Science group in our venture!

We should aim for a BHA Science group statement of no more than one or two paragraphs which encapsulate our shared vision.

The vision is part of a strategic planning process which may include some or all of these steps (not necessarily in this order):-

* Vision - Define the vision after consultation with group members
* Set a Mission Statement with hierarchy of goals
o a Mission Statement tells you what the group is now. It concentrates on the present situation.
o because people have several goals - "Goal congruency" refers to how well the goals combine with each other. Does goal X appear compatible with goal Y? Do they fit together to form a unified strategy? "Goal hierarchy" consists of the nesting of one or more goals within other goal(s).
* SWOT - assess the current Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunites and Threats
o for example a Threat could be that a Steering Committee could be too controlling and dictatorial - losing motivation and commitment of many group members.
* Formulate - Formulate actions to be taken to attain these goals
* Implement - Implementation of the agreed upon action
* Control - Monitor and get feedback from implemented actions to more or less control the operation

BHA Science vision & mission statements should be part of the BHA culture & values and should re-energise the current BHA Vision & Mission Statements at http://www.humanism.org.uk/site/cms/contentChapterView.asp?chapter=333

BHA Vision
A world without religious privilege or discrimination, where people are free to live good lives on the basis of reason, experience and shared human values.

BHA Mission
The British Humanist Association exists to promote Humanism and support and represent people who seek to live good lives without religious or superstitious beliefs.

Onions 'cut heart disease risk'

2007-11-06T07:34:00.000Z

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7069343.stm
WASP comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

Onions 'cut heart disease risk'

Onions are a good source of quercetin

Eating a meal rich in compounds called flavonoids reduces some early signs of heart disease, research shows.

An Institute of Food Research team focused on one of the compounds, quercetin, which is found in tea, onions, apples and red wine.

The Atherosclerosis study examined the effect of the compounds produced after quercetin is broken down by the body.

They were shown to help prevent the chronic inflammation which can lead to thickening of the arteries.

The effect is more subtle than laboratory experiments using the parent compound

Dr Paul Kroon
Institute of Food Research

Previous research has shown quercetin is metabolised very quickly by the intestine and liver and is not actually found in human blood.

So instead the researchers concentrated on the compounds that enter the bloodstream after quercetin is ingested, absorbed and metabolised.

The compounds were used - in concentrations similar to those that would be produced following digestion - to treat cells taken from the lining of the blood vessels.

Lower dose, bigger impact

Lead researcher Dr Paul Kroon said: "We tested compounds that are actually found in the blood, rather than the flavonoid in food before it is eaten, as only these compounds will actually come into contact with human tissues and have an effect on arterial health.

"The effect is more subtle than laboratory experiments using the parent compound.

"But the metabolites still have an effect on the cells lining the blood vessels."

The research found that, in the case of one inflammatory process, a lower dose of the compounds - achievable by eating 100g to 200g of onions - actually had a bigger impact.

Bridget Aisbitt, a nutrition scientist at the British Nutrition Foundation, said: "Inflammation is an important process in the furring up of arteries that can lead to heart disease and stroke and this study gives us clues as to why a diet rich in fruit and vegetables appears to reduce the risk of these conditions.

"In the UK we are only consuming about two portions of fruit and vegetables per day on average, so this study underlines the importance of getting your five a day to stay healthy throughout life."

You big, fat pile of bacteria

2007-11-06T06:44:00.000Z

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1830,n,n
WASP comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

You big, fat pile of bacteria

Go ahead, roll in it. Revel in it. You're made of it. What, you prefer a meek, sterile world?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, November 2, 2007

I'm 2 or 3 years old. I'm out in the backyard playing in the grass and my dad is just over there, working in the garden, planting tomatoes or carrots or human shrunken heads or God knows what because how the hell should I know, I'm only 3.

Like any self-respecting child, I like to dig in the dirt with my bare hands, probe, investigate the planet I currently cruise so close to. It pays off nicely. I eventually find real treasure: a big, fat, juicy earthworm. Oh my yes.

It is fascinating. It is squiggly and squishy and weird and wonderful — you know, just like life. I hold it up to the light. I hold it close to my face, my nose, my mouth. I am examining. I am expanding my tiny little brain. My mouth is possibly wide open in wonder.

It is apparently at this precise moment that my father looks up, glances over to check on me, sees a giant earthworm dangling over my wide-open mouth. He is, naturally, a tiny bit startled. He shouts my name, hoping to halt the inevitable. I jump. I react accordingly.

And I do the only natural thing: I pop that fat sucker into my mouth and swallow it down whole, germs, dirt clods, slimy goodness and all, and give my dad an innocent "Who, me?" look. Mmmm, childhood.

I did not get the slightest bit sick. I did not even get queasy. I do not, in fact, recall feeling that I had actually done anything comestibly incorrect, nor did the act cause me any permanent aversion toward playing in the soil or digging for big fat happy earthworms. (Though of course, munching that bad boy, despite being a clear example of superior intelligence, is an act my two older sisters have, to this day, refused to let me live down. Sisters. What can you do?)

Of course, it turns out, biologically speaking, that big, dirty earth-muncher probably did my immune system, my intestinal tract and all the happy bacteria therein a world of good. It's true.

It's a notion backed up by my favorite article of late, from Kent Sepkowitz over at Slate, who happily argues, in the face of recent E. coli outbreaks and nasty meat recalls and the ominous dangers of virulent organisms out to eat your brain, that, far from not cleaning, cooking and irradiating our food well enough and far from not ensuring we have the correct FDA precautions, we as an overpampered culture are probably not getting enough nasty buggy immune-system-boosting microbes in our diet, in our meats, in our mouths. And therefore we should probably, you know, eat a bit more crap. As in, excrement.

He's referring, of course, to the trace amounts of nasty fecal-related bugs and bacteria that come along with our topsoil and meats and foodstuffs, and that, while minimizing their presence is an excellent plan, eradicating them completely from human consumption is doing our bodies more harm than good and might eventually make us all into a bunch of biological "bubble-baby" wimps who can't even touch a plant without falling over and convulsing. Hell, it's already happening.

All of which dovetails nicely with another new study, this one from Britain, that says guess what, boys and girls are actually not made of snips, or snails, or puppy dog tails, sugar or spice or anything nice. Nor are we made of the usual suspects, of blood and bone and skin and vodka and wine and residual plastic polymer molecules that come from licking your iPhone way, way too much.

No, unless you're Britney Spears or Paris Hilton or Pete Doherty and are therefore made up of equal parts Xanax and Diet Coke and nitrous oxide, we are all essentially made of — you guessed it — great heaping gobs of bacteria, massive hordes of them, all manner of wacky bugs and parasites and wondrous horrible-looking microorganisms all munching happily on the same air and blood and burrito that you do, trillions of toothy things working in some sort of bizarre harmony to keep you alive, despite how some might like to kill you. What's more, this is a good thing.

Ah, there's the rub. Because while this knowledge, these bacteria, is/are vital and essential to our survival, the cultural mind-set at large runs directly opposite. So much so that we could be, in effect, cleaning and scrubbing and protecting ourselves to death, as our immune systems whimper and wither and drug-resistant bacteria get nastier and nature always, always finds a way to thwart our silly efforts to eradicate its wild side.

Hell, just look at the ads, the obnoxious articles, the insidious marketing, the cleaning solvent aisle at the supermarket, all screaming the same shrill one-note alarm (and all, by the way, apparently aimed straight at the same sad demographic: frumpy paranoid moms with too many kids and too little time to actually, you know, read): Bacteria is bad! Germs are evil! Don't touch that doorknob! If you consider yourself a good parent, if you love your kids, you must scrub every surface and sanitize every toilet and wash your hands 12 times an hour and oh my God don't ever ever ever let your kids eat something from the floor or the table or the backyard garden because what are you, insane?

Yes, obviously, it's just more fear-based B.S. for a fear-based culture, right? Easy enough.

Problem is, the pattern doesn't stop there. That alarmist germophobic mind-set that insists on sanitized overcooked ultra-safe bleached-out everything then grows and mutates and extends well beyond the toilet and the kitchen and the backyard and the human gut, straight into human experience as a whole, resulting in one horrifically bland, edge-free, prefab life.

Tract homes. Cruise ships. Gated communities. Giant, vacuum-sealed malls. Swimming pools with no deep ends. Swimming pools built 50 yards from the warm, dangerous ocean in Hawaii. Theme restaurants. Theme hotels. Theme vacations. Theme nature. Second Life. Megachurches. Groupthink. Intellectual numbness. Spiritual stasis. Rubber gloves. Face masks. Body condoms. Processed foods. Bans on raw milk. Quadruple-washed lettuce. Spitting instead of swallowing. Entire islands and towns built and owned and operated by the Walt Disney Company.

And then, wider: Fear of your own body. Fear of sex, blood, bodily fluids, human contact. Fear of pain, aging, death. Fear of nature. Fear of the new. Fear of the different, the strange, the foreign, the Other. Voila: you're a meek little island and everything looks like an invading force.

The trend is palpable, obvious, sad. We seem to be all too happy to have as much raw human experience filed down to a safe nub as possible, all contingencies taken care of and all bacteria scrubbed away and all dangers bleached out and not a single thing left to chance because oh my God what if something went wrong? What if it all broke down? What if you caught something and got sick and died?

But then again, so what? Maybe we need to be reminded, over and over again, that taking that risk and eating that crap and rolling in the dirt and opening to that wicked sense of uncertainty is actually what makes all the difference. You think? Is it not better to swallow that fat squishy worm of dirty, squirmy life, and find out?

Thoughts about this column? E-mail Mark.

Mark Morford's Notes & Errata column appears every Wednesday and Friday on SFGate and in the Datebook section of the San Francisco Chronicle. To get on the e-mail list for this column, please click here and remove one article of clothing.

Mark's column also has an RSS feed and an archive of past columns, which includes another small photo of Mark potentially sufficient for you to recognize him in the street and give him gifts.

Jury Awards Father $11M in Funeral Case

2007-11-06T05:27:00.000Z

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1821,n,n
WASP comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

The Westboro Baptist Church is a pernicious hateful organisation that uses children, amongst others, to promote its beliefs. Its had a just come uppence by the legal system.

Jury Awards Father $11M in Funeral Case

by AP

Thanks to Stephen M. Weeks for the link.

Reposted from:
http://www.comcast.net/news/index.jsp?cat=GENERAL&fn=/2007/10/31/803048.html&cookieattempt=1

By ALEX DOMINGUEZ, Associated Press Writer

BALTIMORE - A grieving father won a nearly $11 million verdict Wednesday against a fundamentalist Kansas church that pickets military funerals out of a belief that the war in Iraq is a punishment for the nation's tolerance of homosexuality.

Albert Snyder of York, Pa., sued the Westboro Baptist Church for unspecified damages after members demonstrated at the March 2006 funeral of his son, Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in Iraq.

The federal jury first awarded $2.9 million in compensatory damages. It returned in the afternoon with its decision to award $6 million in punitive damages for invasion of privacy and $2 million for causing emotional distress.

Snyder's attorney, Craig Trebilcock, had urged jurors to determine an amount "that says don't do this in Maryland again. Do not bring your circus of hate to Maryland again."

The defense said it planned to appeal, and one of the church's leaders, Shirley Phelps-Roper, said the members would continue to picket military funerals.

"Absolutely; don't you understand this was an act in futility?" Phelps-Roper said.

Church members routinely picket funerals of military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, carrying signs such as "Thank God for dead soldiers" and "God hates fags."

Snyder claimed the protests intruded upon what should have been a private ceremony and sullied his memory of the event.

The church members testified they are following their religious beliefs by spreading the message that soldiers are dying because the nation is too tolerant of homosexuality.

Their attorneys maintained in closing arguments Tuesday that the burial was a public event and that even abhorrent points of view are protected by the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech and religion.

A number of states have passed laws regarding funeral protests, and Congress has passed a law prohibiting such protests at federal cemeteries. But the Maryland lawsuit is believed to be the first filed by the family of a fallen serviceman.

The church and three of its leaders _ Fred Phelps and his two daughters, Phelps-Roper and Rebekah Phelps-Davis, 46 _ were found liable for invasion of privacy and intent to inflict emotional distress.

The group is confident the award will be overturned on appeal, Phelps said

"Oh, it will take about five minutes to get that thing reversed," he said.

Earlier, church members staged a demonstration outside the federal courthouse. Phelps held a sign reading "God is your enemy," while Phelps-Roper stood on an American flag and carried a sign that read "God hates fag enablers." Members of the group sang "God Hates America" to the tune of "God Bless America."

Snyder sobbed when he heard the verdict, while members of the church greeted the news with tightlipped smiles.

It was unclear whether the plaintiffs would be able to collect the damages awarded.

Before the jury began deliberating the size of punitive damages, U.S. District Judge Richard Bennett noted that the size of the compensatory award "far exceeds the net worth of the defendants," according to financial statements filed with the court.

Defense lawyer Jonathan Katz said the church has about 75 members and is funded by tithing.

The defense attorney said that the assets of the church and the three defendants are less than a million dollars and that the compensatory award is about three times the defendants' net worth, mainly in homes, cars and retirement accounts.

One of Snyder's attorneys, Sean Summers, said he would tirelessly seek payment of the award.

"We will chase them forever if it takes that long," Summers said.

'Thousands' pose UK terror threat

2007-11-05T20:06:00.000Z

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7078712.stm
WASP comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

'Thousands' pose UK terror threat

Jonathan Evans took over as director of MI5 in April

There are at least 2,000 people in the UK who pose a threat to national security because of their support for terrorism, the head of MI5 has said.

Jonathan Evans said there had been a rise of 400 since November 2006.

He said children as young as 15 were being recruited for terrorist-related activity by al-Qaeda.

Resources that could be devoted to counter-terrorism were instead being used to protect the UK against spying by Russia, China and others, he added.

There had been "no decrease" in the number of Russian covert intelligence officers operating in the UK since the end of the Cold War, Mr Evans said in a speech in Manchester.

"A number of countries continue to devote considerable time and energy trying to steal our sensitive technology on civilian and military projects, and trying to obtain political and economic intelligence at our expense."

It was "a matter of some disappointment", he said, that this ongoing threat continued to take up significant amounts of equipment, money and staff.

'Deliberate campaign'

Mr Evans took over as director general of MI5 in April from Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller.

We will do our utmost to hold back the physical threat of attacks, but alone, this is merely containment

Jonathan Evans
MI5 director-general

Profile: Jonathan Evans

MI5 'evolving' to meet threat

Speaking on Monday at the Society of Editors' annual conference, he said the number of individuals in the UK causing concern had risen in part due to better intelligence gathering in "extremist communities".

"But it is also because there remains a steady flow of new recruits to the extremist cause."

In order to gather recruits, Mr Evans said,

extremists were methodically and intentionally targeting vulnerable young people and children.

The UK had to do more to protect these young people, he added.

Mr Evans said attacks on the UK were "not simply random plots by disparate and fragmented groups", but part of a "deliberate campaign" by al-Qaeda.

In the past 12 months, MI5 had found links between an increasing range of countries and terror plots in the UK, he said.

In Iraq, Algeria and parts of East Africa, especially Somalia, he said, the "al-Qaeda brand" had expanded and now posed a threat to the UK.

'Root causes'

Mr Evans said he did not think the level of terror threat against the UK had "reached its peak".

Every decision by the security service to investigate someone entails a decision not to investigate someone else

Jonathan Evans

"We will do our utmost to hold back the physical threat of attacks, but alone, this is merely containment.

"Long-term resolution requires identifying and addressing the root causes of the problem."

He said it was "inevitable" there would be individuals who came to police or security service attention, but were still able to go on to carry out acts of terrorism.

"Every decision by the security service to investigate someone entails a decision not to investigate someone else. Knowing of somebody is not the same as knowing all about somebody."

BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner said the speech contained the message that MI5 needed the public's help.

"It's about tackling the ideology at grass roots. They can only really tackle the symptoms. They can't go up to people and say, 'Do you follow al-Qaeda?'"

Shiraz Maher, a former member of radical Muslim group Hizb ut-Tahrir, said the recruitment of young people by militant groups was a reality.

Youth initiatives, including football training and anti-drugs schemes, were being used to groom "impressionable and idealistic" young people,

he told BBC Radio 4's The World at One programme.

Foreign policy

But the Ramadhan Foundation said it was concerned Mr Evans had not stressed the 2,000 people suspected of involvement in extremist activity made up only a small proportion of the 1.6 million Muslim population.

Mohammed Shafiq, a spokesman for the Muslim youth organisation, said the language was inflammatory and called for responsible dialogue.

He said the group was prepared to talk to the police and security services, but in order to defeat terrorism it was important to acknowledge the threat existed mainly due to foreign policy.

Liberal Democrat shadow home secretary Nick Clegg highlighted the timing of the release of these figures which comes a day before Gordon Brown's announcement on new anti-terror powers.

"It is crucial that the security services do not get drawn into politics," he said.

During his speech, Mr Evans also announced that MI5's new Northern Ireland headquarters would soon be formally opened and said that by 2011 25% of the service's staff would be based outside London.

spoon bending fraud

2007-11-05T09:10:00.000Z

reposted from: http://cectic.com/068.html

On arguing with a believer

2007-11-05T09:07:00.000Z

reposted from: http://cectic.com/069.html

Noctilucent Clouds

2007-10-29T01:10:00.001Z

reposted from: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Noctilucent Clouds Over Sweden
Credit & Copyright: P-M Hedén

Explanation: Sometimes it's night on the ground but day in the air. As the Earth rotates to eclipse the Sun, sunset rises up from the ground. Therefore, at sunset on the ground, sunlight still shines on clouds above. Under usual circumstances, a pretty sunset might be visible, but unusual noctilucent clouds float so high up they can be seen well after dark. Pictured above last month, a network of noctilucent clouds cast a colorful but eerie glow after dusk near Vallentuna, Sweden. Although noctilucent clouds are thought to be composed of small ice-coated particles, much remains unknown about them. Satellites launched to help study these clouds includes Sweden's Odin and NASA's AIM. Recent evidence indicates that at least some noctilucent clouds result from freezing water exhaust from Space Shuttles.

The Great Carina Nebula

2007-10-27T12:00:00.001+01:00

reposted from: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
WASP comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

The Great Carina Nebula
Credit & Copyright: Robert Gendler and Stephane Guisard

Explanation: A jewel of the southern sky, the Great Carina Nebula, aka NGC 3372, spans over 300 light-years, one of our galaxy's largest star forming regions. Like the smaller, more northerly Orion Nebula, the Carina Nebula is easily visible to the naked eye, though at a distance of 7,500 light-years it is some 5 times farther away. This stunning telescopic view reveals remarkable details of the region's glowing filaments of interstellar gas and dark cosmic dust clouds. The Carina Nebula is home to young, extremely massive stars, including the still enigmatic variable Eta Carinae, a star with well over 100 times the mass of the Sun. Eta Carinae is the bright star left of the central dark notch in this field and just below the dusty Keyhole Nebula (NGC 3324).

Shell shapes evolved to avoid 'turning turtle'

2007-10-25T06:44:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg19626275.800&feedId=fundamentals_rss20
WASP comments are in bright green; highlights in blockquotes (yellow).

Shell shapes evolved to avoid 'turning turtle'

27 October 2007

FOR a tortoise, being upside down is at best ignominious and at worst fatal. So to avoid it, some species have evolved a quite brilliant trick - perfectly shaped self-righting shells.

Gabor Domokos and Peter Varkonyi at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics in Hungary

modelled the geometry of turtle and tortoise shells of differing dome heights. Those with very tall domes, such as the star tortoise, effectively have just one stable orientation, right side up. Put another way, a star tortoise placed on its back will automatically roll back onto its front, righting itself with little effort.

In geometric terms, this tortoise's shell is known as a monostatic object, one that has only one stable way of resting on a horizontal surface. Such shapes are incredibly rare in nature, the researchers say.

Other, flatter species, such as the Argentine snake-necked turtle, have two stable points - on their belly and their back - and must use their neck as a lever to flip themselves back over. Animals with medium height domes have the worst shape of all, say the researchers. They can come to rest at three distinct points, right side up and on either side of the shell, meaning they can get stuck halfway through a roll

(Proceedings of the Royal Society B, DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2007.1188).

From issue 2627 of New Scientist magazine, 27 October 2007, page 22

Synthetic life 'no terror threat'

2007-10-25T06:34:00.001+01:00

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7059490.stm

Synthetic life 'no terror threat'

Scientist Craig Venter on his latest project

Philosophy Matters: a review

2007-10-21T02:18:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/think/article.php?num=16

For me a difficult read. What do you think?

Philosophy Matters: a review

Michael Lacewing

Roger Trigg, Philosophy Matters (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002)

Roger Trigg's new book continues his discussions from Rationality and Science (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993) and Rationality and Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) on the role of reason in our thought and lives.

Its fundamental premise is that philosophy is an irreplaceable discipline,

and Trigg seeks to defend it from the Scylla of scientism and the Charibdis of relativism. His bold tone will engage many readers in the challenges he discusses.

Scientism (which is my word, not Trigg's) is the belief that science is the only exemplar of rationality and all knowledge must come through empirical investigation; relativism is the belief that claims to truth are relative to the believer, so what is true for one person may not be true for another.

Trigg diagnoses that these views are two sides of the same coin with the common assumption that "once the constraint of empirical investigation is ignored, anyone can claim anything" (14). Therefore, either all knowledge must be established by science, or knowledge is constrained, if at all, only by cultural convention, not by how the world is.

Trigg begins his defence of philosophy by pointing out how many philosophical assumptions science makes.

Three key examples: materialism makes claims that go well beyond the empirical evidence, for it claims that everything, including what we have never experienced, is material. It thus becomes a metaphysical claim, requiring philosophical arguments.

Second, why, given its phenomenal improbability, is there a universe in which we exist at all? One popular scientific explanation of this claims, roughly, that there are an indefinitely large number of universes, so it becomes very probable that we would evolve in one of them. This claim involves many philosophical issues about whether this claim is really an explanation, about the possibility of other universes, why there are universes at all, and so on.

Third, science obviously presupposes rationality, but can it explain this rationality? There seems to be a conflict between the causal determinism science assumes and the type of rational freedom that is required for scientists (and the rest of us) to create and follow arguments, such as the argument that determinism is true.

It would seem that science throws up some inescapable philosophical issues, which cannot be resolved within science. Science is right to adopt certain constraints on the types of entities (materialism) and explanations (determinism) it works with. Trigg terms this 'methodological naturalism' (p. 27), and notes it is not a claim about the nature of reality nor the foundations of all knowledge.

From here, Trigg turns to argue that to retreat to the claim that reality is therefore whatever we make it (relativism) is self-contradictory. We must sustain a distinction between people's beliefs about reality and reality itself to make any claims about truth. The claim that truth is dependent upon belief, if true, is only true for those who believe it - so it ceases to be a claim about belief and truth in general! Of course, there is a more sophisticated form of relativism that points to the dependence of our conception of reality upon our language (this is the 'Sapir-Whorf' hypothesis, presented by US anthropologists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf). In its strong form, it argues that not only do different languages support different conceptions of reality, but that no 'neutral' conception of reality can be formed. The difficulty with this conclusion, Trigg claims, is that it fails to explain translation and the common everyday constraints on all human experience (such as the presence and solidity of physical objects). Finally, relativism presupposes there are alternative views of the world, but a thorough-going relativist should not be able to step back from his or her linguistically-saturated conception of reality to conceive of the alternatives. If stepping back is possible, then rationality and thought are not entirely conditioned by language and circumstance. We can therefore form a conception of reality that transcends these limits and so separate reality from what we believe about reality. So relativism is false.

With this fairly swift dismissal of relativism, Trigg considers the problem of scientism in greater depth. There are chapters on the neo-Darwinist attempt to explain rationality, determinism, the nature of the laws of nature, and the relation between mind and brain. Each is a reflection of the fundamental question 'how can reason, necessarily presupposed by science, be explained within the scientific picture of the world?' Trigg argues that reasoning is irreducible, that evolutionary and causal accounts fail, since they must presuppose reason is an autonomous activity aiming at truth. He concludes

'Philosophy matters if we think reason matters' (p. 138), for it is philosophy that tests the rationality of our beliefs and the assumptions made by science.

And we must think reason matters, because if reason is an illusion, a mere effect of causal processes, the arguments that it is an illusion could not be made.

Trigg's writing is forthright, free of technicalities, and he provides a helpful glossary of those terms that one cannot avoid using in these discussions. His approach enables him to get into deep philosophical questions very quickly, and his discussions are an admirable account of philosophical controversies raging at present. For those already familiar with the issues, reading Trigg's book may offer helpful clarity and useful synopsis, but it is unlikely to provide much new material. Its aim is clearly to reach those who are new to the area, such as undergraduates and (that ill-defined individual) the interested layperson, who should find it an appealing introduction.

The book serves more as a warning than an answer, which is its intention. It is a call to engage in philosophy, but does not seek to provide philosophical solutions to the very difficult problems it tackles. This is understandable, but it points towards a different type of ill that many believe afflicts philosophy as a discipline, viz. the lack of genuine solutions that can command universal assent. And this, I believe, is one of the motivations for the scientism and relativism Trigg discusses. Given that Trigg is clearly seeking to undermine our temptation towards either positions, it is a shame that he does not tackle this challenge head on.

The reader could well be left with a sense that Trigg has established just how difficult these questions are, but also with the sense that philosophy has done little to resolve them.

From this, one might conclude that either our faith is better placed in a scientific research programme to deliver whatever answers there may be, and/or that we should abandon the hope of 'truth' on these matters, diagnosing all beliefs that go beyond science as subjective or relative. If I am right, Trigg has left untouched a fundamental challenge to the view that philosophy matters.

Trigg has argued forcefully that we should not abandon philosophy, for no other discipline can address the questions it addresses; and yet, do we have good reason to believe that doing philosophy will help us understand, in more than the broadest of brushstrokes, the nature of reality? On the penultimate page, Trigg claims 'Without a self-conscious understanding of what we are about, we are liable to think and act uncritically, in ways that can be ultimately disastrous. If we do not know who we are, or where we are, how can we act with any autonomy or consistency, let alone wisdom?' (p. 142) This book establishes that these are ultimately philosophical, not scientific, questions; but it does not establish that they are answerable questions. This suggests that we may still lack the 'self-conscious understanding' Trigg argues is necessary for autonomous, consistent, wise action. Alternatively, if we can act autonomously, consistently, and wisely, but we have not successfully resolved philosophical questions, then what is it that philosophy is meant to contribute to our lives?

This line of argument makes an assumption which is highly questionable, viz. that there needs to be some positive content to the self-conscious understanding to which Trigg refers. Given the challenges of scientism and relativism that are so prevalent in the current intellectual climate, perhaps to avoid certain ways of heteronomous, inconsistent, and foolish action that may tempt us, ways that assimilate us to machines, for instance, we need understand no more than this: that certain questions are irreducibly philosophical, for this in itself tells us something important about who we are, and certainly something important about what we are not. We are beings for whom some questions must remain open, and, as far as we know, this is a unique position to be in. As Trigg never discusses what kind of self-conscious understanding we need, I am not certain that he would endorse this conclusion, but his book contributes to it, and I welcome that result.

Hillary brings up science, but will it stay in play?

2007-10-19T18:44:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?more=1&title=hillary_brings_up_science_but_will_it_st_5

Save for the media swarm in the wake of the hand raises by Republican candidates Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo, it appears Hillary Clinton is the first to put science in the spotlight in the race for the White House.

Speaking on the 50th anniversary of the Sputnik launch Thursday at the Carnegie Institution for Science, Clinton took the opportunity to talk about Bush's less publicized war--the one on science. (This, no doubt, had author and columnist Chris Mooney doing backflips.) She also released, via her website, an "Agenda to Reclaim Scientific Innovation."

Here's an outline of the other "war," thus far:

...instead of fostering a climate of discovery and innovation, the Bush administration has declared war on science.
The record is breathtaking: banning the most promising kinds of stem cell research, allowing political appointees to censor studies on climate change, muzzling global warming experts like Dr. James Hansen, overruling doctors and the FDA on emergency contraception, suppressing and manipulating data on mercury pollution, even delaying one report which found that 8 percent of women between 16 and 49 years of age have mercury levels in their blood that could harm future children, denying the risks of toxins like asbestos in the air after the 9/11 attacks, overruling scientists who sought to protect animals under the Endangered Species Act, eliminating scientific committees at the Department of Health and Human Services that did not parrot the politically accepted ideology -- or packing those committees with industry insiders, altering scientific tests on the lead content of children's lunch boxes -- and appointing a lead industry consultant to a key panel formed by the Centers for Disease Control, barring a USDA researcher from publishing or even discussing his work on antibiotic resistant bacteria, censoring government websites on breast cancer research, contraception, climate change, and so much else.

She covered all the highlights of science and policy: stem cells, the mess at the FDA, budget woes (at agencies from NIH to DARPA), space exploration (both manned and unmanned), climate change, and renewable energy. While, these issues are likely not new to readers of this publication and other science-savvy individuals, it's heartening to see them introduced on the political stump.

Of course (and here's my cynical streak erupting from my bile-filled belly) this speech was at the Carnegie Institution for Science. What was she going to talk about? Tax cuts for the rich?

Within the context of the entire Clinton campaign, this is something Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, and his colleague Matt Nisbet would call "framing." Hillary's platform is no doubt broad and has primarily focused on Bush's more well-known war, healthcare, education reform and whether or not she wants to pow wow with some of the more controversial world leaders in power today. But, on this day, she chose to focus on science.

Rather than framing, I call this "playing to the crowd." (I will consider calling it framing as soon as Mooney and Nisbet admit they are writing a book about framing in the Gladwellian mold, which, lucky for them, a recent Wired article can help them title and turn into a cash cow. For those interested, myself included, Mooney will be further breaking down the elements--or frames--of the speech all week on his blog.)

But, leaving the semantic discussion on framing, I am more concerned with whether the substance of this speech will just fade away to the bottom of Clinton's bullet-point list of stances, or whether such a strident call-to-arms will necessitate others (both Democrat and Republican) to refine their ideas about the role science plays in the next election.

I would like to see some alternative options to Clinton's proposals from other candidates because, frankly, this is a topic that's important to me. There is plenty to tweak, massage or offer alternative ideas here: The issue of manned vs. unmanned space exploration, new ideas for improving science education, how to increase the number of women pursuing science degrees, etc. The hope is that the Obamas and Edwards (and to a less likely extent the Giulianis and Romneys of the world) won't just say, "Hey, that sounds good, just fold all that business Hillary was talking about into my campaign, as well."

But will anyone step up and take what Hillary has proposed and run with it? Will Hillary even mention the subject in similar breadth and depth when it's not a significant scientific anniversary and she's not standing in front of a group of researchers?

With all the aforementioned highlights, it seems as though, if science and technology are going to have their day in the political arena, now would be the time. Hell, just days before Clinton's speech, Michael Griffin, NASA chief, admitted that China will likely beat the United States back to the moon. Do we have to wait another 10 years for another Communist country to beat us to a space goal before we re-prioritize science in our culture? (That last time really served to chap our collective hide.)

If no one else in either party puts their chips down, remember New York mayor (and rumored independent presidential candidate) Michael Bloomberg has been there, done that.

Hey, Hillary, can you say "running mate"?

Posted by Nikhil Swaminathan · 6 comments

1 - 6 of 6

Ashlie Hocking [Member] October 8, 2007 @ 8:35 pm writes:

I like that she's brought this issue to the forefront, but I doubt she differs much from most of the other Democratic candidates on this. Hopefully, some of the Republican candidates also feel this way, although you probably won't hear them bash Bush on this publicly.

Flag as inappropriate

Chad Brick [Member] October 9, 2007 @ 12:14 pm writes:

It's sad that so many people seem blind to the fact that Democrats are also at war with science, whenever it conflicts with their agenda. That is the nature of politics. Lots of scientific evidence shows that many boogey-men of the left, such as nuclear power or GMO's just ain't that bad. Yet they scream, twisting and distorting the matters while attempting to scare people, just as Republicans do when complaining about their pet peeves.

Ashlie Hocking [Member] October 9, 2007 @ 4:03 pm writes:

There are many far-left leaning members of the public who are against nuclear power and GMOs, but which of the Democratic candidates have come out against them? Al Gore (admittedly not one of the candidates) has expressed strong support for nuclear power, IIRC.

Kimberly Riley [Member] October 9, 2007 @ 6:07 pm writes:

I will add in this.. The media doesn't help. They love using scare tactics. And the recent TV shows that are on what I used to consider good science aren't helping either. Examples... Discovery shows end of world and dooms day programs, and what if the worst was to happen situations. Recent one up is methane gas in the atmosphere setting on fire. Animal planet, which gives animals motives and emotions they simply do not have. (note, animals can show empathy and can express a wide range of emotions, but give me a break, they aren't living a soap opera.. they take it too far, beyond what these animals are actually doing, which is surviving). Other programs which talk about ancient or future animals and presents everything as fact, rather than giving the supporting evidence. One of my biggest beefs was that walking with dinos, where they showed velociraptors as a selfish pack.. which actual evidence suggests they were the exact opposite of. They didn't give any reason to why they picked that behavior instead of, what most group living birds do, a cooperative pack. The list is very long, long enough I canceled cable because of all the bad shows (there are some good ones, I will admit, but they are far and few between) Bad and poor science is being propagated everywhere, even in what once were respected TV channels for showing good science. This problem goes beyond politics right down to what's being watched on TV and what's being taught in schools. The general public wouldn't be eating this stuff up if they were educated and if the TV channels actually assumed the human population had more than two cents to rub together between their ears.

Cellular Visions - the Inner life of a cell

2007-10-18T06:53:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.studiodaily.com/main/technique/tprojects/6850.html#commentform

Film with explanation of biochemistry: http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/anim_innerlife_Hi.html

Key gene work scoops Nobel Prize

2007-10-10T07:01:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7033492.stm

Key gene work scoops Nobel Prize

Sir Martin used the technology to probe cystic fibrosis

Two US scientists and their UK collaborator have been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine for their groundbreaking work in gene technology.

Mario Capecchi, Oliver Smithies and Briton Martin Evans developed a technique known as gene targeting.

It enabled them to replicate human diseases in mice by introducing genetic changes into the animal's stem cells.

The Nobel Committee said this had led to many new insights into conditions such as cancer and heart disease.

Its impact on the understanding of gene function and its benefits to mankind will continue to increase over many years to come

Nobel committee

For instance, science has gained a greater understanding of how disease can strike otherwise healthy people.

The technique has also helped to shed new light on the ageing process, and on how the embryo develops in the womb. It can be used to study almost every aspect of mammalian physiology.

In its citation, the Nobel Committee praised the technique as "an immensely powerful technology" which was now being used in virtually all areas of biomedical research.

"Gene targeting in mice has pervaded all fields of biomedicine," it said.

"Its impact on the understanding of gene function and its benefits to mankind will continue to increase over many years to come."

Gene knockout

The technique is commonly described as gene "knockout".

Professor Capecchi specialises in organ generation

It enables scientists to silence specific genes, and monitor the effect, so that gene-by-gene they are able to build a picture of the development of disease.

To date more than 10,000 mice genes - around half of the total - have been knocked out, with the rest confidently predicted to follow soon.

As a result, more than 500 different mouse models of human disorders have been developed - including cardiovascular and neuro-degenerative diseases, diabetes and cancer.

The technology spun out of the discovery by Sir Martin of embryonic stem cells in mice.

These cells form all tissues of the body and Sir Martin found that they could be removed and grown separately in the laboratory.

All three scientists, who will share the prestigious $1.54 million award, have subsequently used gene targeting to make significant advances.

This group's work has given hope to many thousands of people currently suffering from incurable genetic conditions

Jo Tanner
Coalition for Medical Progress

Professor Capecchi, based at the University of Utah, has used the technology to uncover the role of genes involved in organ development, and the overall plan of the body.

Sir Martin, of the University of Cardiff, has specialised on the inherited disease cystic fibrosis.

He described the award as like winning the "World Cup".

He said: "It's wonderful - the sort of thing which when you start off as a youngster in science you look up to these fantastic Nobel Prize winners, and think, could that ever be you? No, of course not.

Professor Smithies, of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was born in the UK, but has since taken US citizenship.

He has developed mouse models for common human diseases such as high blood pressure and thickened arteries.

Profound effect

Professor Stephen O'Rahilly, of the University of Cambridge, said: "The development of gene targeting technology in the mouse has had a profound influence on medical research.

"Thanks to this technology we have a much better understanding of the function of specific genes in pathways in the whole organism and a greater ability to predict whether drugs acting on those pathways are likely to have beneficial effects in disease."

Jo Tanner, of Coalition for Medical Progress, said: "If we are ever going to find cures for genetic conditions such as muscular dystrophy and cystic fibrosis, scientists will need to work on animal models, identifying the genetic defects responsible and correcting them in animals before trialling potential treatments in humans.

"This group's work has given hope to many thousands of people currently suffering from incurable genetic conditions."

Aurora, Stars, Meteor, Lake, Alaska

2007-10-09T20:16:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2007 October 9

Aurora, Stars, Meteor, Lake, Alaska
Credit & Copyright: Bud Kuenzli

Explanation: Sometimes, after your eyes adapt to the dark, a spectacular sky appears. In this case, a picturesque lake lies in front of you, beautiful green aurora flap high above you, brilliant stars shine far in the distance, and, for a brief moment, a bright meteor streaks by. This digitally fused breathtaking panorama was captured late last month across one of the Chena Lakes in North Pole, Alaska, USA, and includes the Pleiades open cluster of stars on the image right. The shot is unusual not only for the many wonders it has captured simultaneously, but because lakes this far north tend to freeze and become non-reflecting before a sky this dark can be photographed.

appendix’s purpose

2007-10-07T07:02:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21153898/

Scientists may have found appendix’s purpose

Seemingly useless organ may produce, protect good germs for your gut

WASHINGTON -

Some scientists think they have figured out the real job of the troublesome and seemingly useless appendix: It produces and protects good germs for your gut.

That’s the theory from surgeons and immunologists at Duke University Medical School, published online in a scientific journal this week.

For generations the appendix has been dismissed as superfluous. Doctors figured it had no function. Surgeons removed them routinely. People live fine without them.

And when infected the appendix can turn deadly. It gets inflamed quickly and some people die if it isn’t removed in time. Two years ago, 321,000 Americans were hospitalized with appendicitis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The function of the appendix seems related to the massive amount of bacteria populating the human digestive system, according to the study in the

Journal of Theoretical Biology.

There are more bacteria than human cells in the typical body. Most of it is good and helps digest food.

'A good safe house'
But sometimes the flora of bacteria in the intestines die or are purged.

Diseases such as cholera or amoebic dysentery would clear the gut of useful bacteria. The appendix’s job is to reboot the digestive system in that case.

The appendix “acts as a good safe house for bacteria,” said Duke surgery professor Bill Parker, a study co-author. The location of the appendix — just below the normal one-way flow of food and germs in the large intestine in a sort of gut cul-de-sac — helps support the theory, he said.

Also, the worm-shaped organ outgrowth acts like a bacteria factory, cultivating the good germs, Parker said.

That use is not needed in a modern industrialized society, Parker said. If a person’s gut flora dies, they can usually repopulate it easily with germs they pick up from other people, he said. But before dense populations in modern times and during epidemics of cholera that affected a whole region, it wasn’t as easy to grow back that bacteria and the appendix came in handy.

In less developed countries, where the appendix may be still useful, the rate of appendicitis is lower than in the U.S., other studies have shown, Parker said.

The appendix, which is about two to four inches long, may be another case of an overly hygienic society triggering an overreaction by the body’s immune system, he said.

Even though the appendix seems to have a function, people should still have them removed when they are inflamed because it could turn deadly, Parker said. About 300 to 400 Americans die of appendicitis each year,

according to the CDC.

Five scientists not connected with the research said that the Duke theory makes sense and raises interesting questions.

The idea “seems by far the most likely” explanation for the function of the appendix, said Brandeis University biochemistry professor Douglas Theobald. “It makes evolutionary sense.”

The theory led Gary Huffnagle, a University of Michigan internal medicine and microbiology professor, to wonder about

the value of another body part that is often yanked: “I’ll bet eventually we’ll find the same sort of thing with the tonsils.”

Two Million Galaxies

2007-10-07T06:53:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Two Million Galaxies
Credit & Copyright: S. Maddox (Nottingham U.) et al. APM Survey, Astrophys. Dept. Oxford U.

Explanation: Our universe is filled with galaxies. Galaxies -- huge conglomerations of stars, gas, dust -- and mysterious dark matter are the basic building blocks of the large-scale universe. Although distant galaxies move away from each other as the universe expands, gravity attracts neighboring galaxies to each other, forming galaxy groups, clusters of galaxies, and even larger expansive filaments. Some of these structures are visible on one of the most comprehensive maps of the sky ever made in galaxies: the APM galaxy survey map completed in the early 1990s. Over 2 million galaxies are depicted above in a region 100 degrees across centered toward our Milky Way Galaxy's south pole. Bright regions indicate more galaxies, while bluer colors denote larger average galaxies. Dark ellipses have been cut away where bright local stars dominate the sky. Many scientific discoveries resulted from analyses of the map data, including that the universe was surprisingly complex on large scales.

Melyn Bragg - Antimatter

2007-10-06T07:18:00.000+01:00

reposted from: Melvyn Braggs Newsletter today

Hello

.... contradictions between matter and antimatter.

One thing that fascinates me when I enter into the area of physics is the glossary that I usually get hold of. The glossary of physics terms.

Antimatter itself, of course: “material made from antifermions”,
fermions: “any particle that has odd-half-integer (1/2, 3/2 ...) intrinsic angular momentum (spin), measured in units of h-bar”, boson, hadron, kaon, photon, positron … I can understand why Christopher Marlowe was so entranced by the great names of cities and places which came out of the East and understand the allure of the shipping forecast to all of us – Seamus Heaney wrote a memorable poem about it which is a poetically-shaped listing of that reassuring, but somehow gallant, tour of these islands.

And so to antimatter. Once again, you have to be impressed by the generosity of people who are at the coal-face of modern physics, taking the time and finding the energy to communicate elliptically and, I thought, extraordinarily clearly, knowledge accumulated over so many years and making of such complicated matter (sorry) an understandable case.

At times, there is a faint whiff of the past. Is it a new version of how many angels can dance on the point of a needle?

In a sense, of course, it is.

Some men and women have always bent their minds to find out what is most difficult to discover, whether that has been of a philosophical, a religious or a scientific nature doesn’t much matter in one sense, ie: the sense that it is the exercise of intelligence itself which is the pleasure and the drive.

I’m Now off to endure a piece of science myself - a cataract to be removed. Not so very long ago, this was an operation spoken of in hushed tones, as if some curse had to be lifted. Now everybody tells me that it is the easiest thing in the world, a blink, a cinch, little more than brushing your teeth. I hope they’re right. I have a lot of reading to do as I am deep into Cormac McCarthy at the moment. I started on him two or three years ago and have now gone back to read as much of him as I can.

Now for a walk in Regent’s Park to limber up for the op. Should be wonderful this time of year, the leaves just turning to brown. I suppose being born in October might mean that you have a closer affinity with it. Discuss?

Best wishes

Melvyn Bragg

Visit the In Our Time website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/

or download the latest edition as an mp3 file: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

First Nontheistic Billboard

2007-10-05T20:05:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7028639.stm

Friday, October 05, 2007

First Nontheistic Billboard

From the press release:
The Freedom From Religion Foundation, which is the nation's largest association of atheists and agnostics, is unveiling what is believed to be one of the first nontheistic billboards erected in Madison, Wis.

"We are launching a campaign to place freethought billboards up around the country, wherever an irreverent billboard is needed--which is practically everywhere!" says Annie Laurie Gaylor, Foundation spokeswoman.

"We don't go to Mass, but we can go to the masses," adds Dan Barker, Foundation co-president. "We think it is time for the rest of us to use the mass media to counter the ubiquity of religious messages on roadsides everywhere!"

Bravo! Yes, I realize that many Americans will not know what "dogma" means, but plans are underway for adding an "imagine no religion" message. This is an impressive effort and one which I hope to see spread to every state.

a Presidential Debate solely on the subject of science

2007-10-05T07:33:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1703,n,n

A New Debate

by Matthew Chapman

I am advocating for a Presidential Debate solely on the subject of science, and I hope you will join me in trying to bring this about.

Had such a thing occurred during the election in 2000, perhaps we would have discovered that George W. Bush believed "the jury is still out on evolution."

In this election, we have been provided with an excellent reason to ask for a scientific debate by the fact that three Republican candidates for president, Brownback, Huckabee, and Tancredo indicated that they do not believe in evolution. For them the jury seems not to be out, but to have rendered a verdict against the theory.

A publication of the National Academy of Sciences states: "The evolution of all the organisms that live on earth today from ancestors that lived in the past is at the core of genetics, biochemistry, neurobiology, physiology, ecology, and other biological disciplines. It helps to explain the emergence of new infectious diseases, the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, the agricultural relationships among wild and domestic plants and animals, the composition of the earth's atmosphere, the molecular machinery of the cell, the similarities between human beings and other primates, and countless other features of the biological and physical world. As the great geneticist and evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973,

'Nothing in biology makes sense except in light of evolution.'"

Given the above, one is faced with two explanations of the three men's statements of disbelief. They are either honestly ignorant of the true scientific status of evolution, or are dishonestly pandering to the genuinely ignorant in order to get their votes. As a matter of politeness, one must accord them the benefit of the doubt and assume they are honest, which leaves only the first and more terrifying option, namely that they are genuinely and profoundly ignorant.

Is this level of ignorance shared by other Presidential candidates, both Republican and Democratic, in other scientific matters? If so, we have a right to know.

We are, after all, in a completely new situation. To quote entomologist Edward O. Wilson, human beings are "the first species in the history of life to become a geophysical force."

Through industrial pollution, the destruction of our rain forests, over-fishing, over-hunting and so on, we can destroy just about all life on earth. This is a problem that cannot be solved without an understanding of science, most specifically biology.

An American president who does not understand science - or worse, disdains it - is no longer just a fool, but potentially lethal.

The debate should be held in some august and inspiring place such as the American Museum of Natural History, or a great university, and should be attended primarily by people in the sciences.

The format of the debate should be simple. A panel of four or five scientists, specializing in a range of disciplines from microbiology and medicine to the composition of the earth's atmosphere, would ask the candidates questions. These might be on matters of opinion, such as whether stem cell research should be encouraged, while others would be purely factual.

Should a candidate respond incorrectly to a factual matter, or be incapable of responding at all, the scientist would provide the answer. If the scientists were famous, the event would be more persuasive and attractive (a Nobel Laureate or two would be good), but you would also need a scientific populist, someone like Gina Kolata, who writes about many aspects of science for the New York Times. Her job would be to translate and moderate if the scientific lingo became too arcane or the questioning too intense. In order to expand the debate, and perhaps clear up matters where educated audience members disagreed with scientific statements made by the panel, questions would be taken from the floor.

None of the candidates should know in advance what questions they will be asked. This would force them to study as much science as possible, and this in itself would be a marvelous thing. (To be fair to them, however, a statement would be read at the start saying that no one expects a politician to understand every aspect of the many scientific disciplines, just the basic ideas.) The debate's tone would not be adversarial, but cordial and educational. It could even be fun, almost like a quiz show. Indeed, if the event was sponsored by an influential scientific organization, there could even be a prize: the best informed of the candidates would win its endorsement. This would have the double benefit of promoting the idea that science is important, and also that it can and should be influential in the political process.

There is a secondary, but perhaps equally important reason for this debate, which is that

no discussion of science can really occur without understanding the scientific method. This would inevitably lead to reflections on the value of evidence, reason, and logic in the making of political decisions versus the uses of faith.

There is, of course, a chance that some of the candidates would refuse to attend, but an RSVP in the negative would beg the question: why on earth would a candidate turn his back on the opportunity to learn more about science?

George Carlin on God

2007-10-04T18:55:00.001+01:00

In the Bullshit Department, a businessman can't hold a candle to a clergyman. 'Cause I gotta tell you the truth, folks. When it comes to bullshit, big-time, major league bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims: religion. No contest. No contest. Religion. Religion easily has the greatest bullshit story ever told.

clipped from www.positiveatheism.org

Think about it. Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man -- living in the sky -- who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time!
But He loves you.
He loves you, and He needs money! He always needs money! He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing, and all-wise, somehow just can't handle money! Religion takes in billions of dollars, they pay no taxes, and they always need a little more. Now, you talk about a good bullshit story. Holy Shit!
-- George Carlin Politically Incorrect, May 29, 1997

Free Burma!

2007-10-04T18:04:00.000+01:00

reposted from: www.free-burma.org

Free Burma! - International Bloggers' Day for Burma on the 4th of October!

International bloggers are preparing an action to support the peaceful revolution in Burma. We want to set a sign for freedom and show our sympathy for these people who are fighting their cruel regime without weapons. These Bloggers are planning to refrain from posting to their blogs on October 4 and just put up one Banner with "Free Burma!".

What can I do?

1. Join our list of participants here
2. Take part in this action more
3. Spread the word here
4. Spread the graphics here

List of Signatories total 2965 at 3/10/07 6:50am

Flikr info

Avaaz.org

After decades of military dictatorship, the people of Burma are rising – and they need our help. Marches begun by monks and nuns snowballed, bringing hundreds of thousands to the streets. Now the crackdown has begun, but the protests are spreading...

When the Burmese last marched in 1988, the military massacred thousands. If the world stands up and supports their struggle, this time they could win. We're in a race against time-- targeting the dictatorship's main backer China in a global advertising campaign, delivering the petition to the UN secretary-general and sending the Burmese our support via radio--

Free Burma - Int'l Bloggers Day 04 Oct

2007-10-03T06:25:00.001+01:00

Join the campaign!

clipped from www.free-burma.org

clipped from www2.free-burma.org

International Bloggers' Day for Burma on the 4th of October

About "Free Burma!"

International bloggers are preparing an action to support the peaceful revolution in Burma. We want to set a sign for freedom and show our sympathy for these people who are fighting their cruel regime without weapons. These Bloggers are planning to refrain from posting to their blogs on October 4 and just put up one Banner then, underlined with the words „Free Burma!“.

1. Publish a posting (Bulletin Board, Forum, Blog, Social Network, Static Website…) on the 4th of October with the header: “Free Burma!”

2. Tag it if you can with “Free Burma”

3. Choose a grafic from our Grafics page and

4. Link to www.free-burma.org there your readers will find some informations about the campaign and Burma and a participant list which you can join. Even if you're a webmaster of a bulletin board or social network you will find a special Group List to join.

5. Feel free to write any additional text you want

Spread the word

The Incas "fattened up" children for human sacrifice

2007-10-02T22:27:00.000+01:00

reposted from: BBC (video)

The Incas "fattened up" children for human sacrifice, a British-led research team has discovered.

Birds see magnetic fields

2007-10-02T17:10:00.000+01:00

reposted from: SciAm (mp3)

Questions for Christians, #1

2007-09-30T22:13:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://templewhore.blogspot.com/2007/09/qs-for-xians-1.html
- and see her blogs comments

Questions for Christians, #1

Never having been a Christian per se, I find the Christian mythology perplexing, self-contradictory and often morally questionable, not to say absurd. In the unlikely event that there are any Christians lurking about, peeping at my nudies, I have a few questions I'd like to ask. Some I've asked before but never received a satisfactory answer to. These questions are intended to provoke thought and honest discussion. Former Christians are, of course, welcome to reply as well.

I've previously had some hostile reactions to questions like these. Christians who feel that I am attacking their religion simply by asking probing questions might ask themselves why analysis of their mythology makes them uncomfortable.

Question #1: If Adam and Eve didn't understand "good" and "evil" before eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, as it seems clear they could not have, why was god so angry with them? How could they know that it was "wrong" to disobey god before they understood good and evil?

Some Christians have tried to argue that, because god said "no" that his anger at them was justified. This makes no sense. If you don't know what "wrong" is, how can you know it is "wrong" to disobey god? Just because he said don't do it doesn't mean anything to a person with no concept of "right" and "wrong". Even if they understood "no" in the sense of "don't do it" how could they possibly understand the consequences?

This about says it all to me by middle-aged-atheist

2007-09-30T21:59:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://middle-aged-atheist.blogspot.com/2007/09/this-about-says-it-all-to-me.html

What is Science? What is Religion? by WASP

2007-09-30T19:16:00.000+01:00

What is religion? What is Science?

2007-09-30T19:12:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bhascience/files/

BASELINE THINKING: A Summary on 6 Sept 07
By David Flint

Science
We have a good consensus on the nature of science. Science, we think, is an attempt or set of attempts to understand the universe. It has four distinctive characteristics:

1. It creates theories (models) which must (after Popper) be refutable in principle (Rees, Coleman, Flint, Egan, Catt)
2. It tests its theories against evidence (from observation and experiment) (Pepperdine, Renshaw, Coleman, Flint, Rees, Jellis, Poppleton, Behman, Edmondson, Roberts)
3. It employs a variety of distinctive methods (eg peer review, double-blind testing) (Pepperdine, McNight, Rogers, Flint, Poppleton)
4. It is the product of a community (ideally but not necessarily open) which shares results, methods and comments (Flint, Poppleton).

Religious beliefs
The substance, nature, sources and consequences of religious beliefs are distinctive:
1. Substance: They claim to be about 'ultimate reality (aka "life, the universe and everything" (Renshaw, Edmondson).
2. Substance: They almost always include beliefs in supernatural entities or states (Rees, Flint, Edmondson, Behman, Rogers, Poppleton).
3. Nature: The beliefs are not testable (Rees) and specifically (after Popper) such that no evidence could show them to be false (Flint).
4. Source: They are based on faith, revelation or tradition (Rees, Jellis, McNight, Coleman, Behman, Roberts, Poppleton) rather than evidence (Renshaw, Edmondson, Roberts, Catt).
5. Consequences: They always demand that people do some things and refrain from others (Poppleton).

Religious beliefs are protected two supplementary beliefs which discourage close examination by adherents:
" The belief that belief itself is virtuous - even in the absence of understanding (Coleman, Flint, Catt).
" The belief that doubt is undesirable, even wicked.

Religious practices
We recognize that each religion is a system of beliefs and practices but had little to say about the practices.

[Comment: This is a weakness since for many adherents the practices ARE the religion whilst theology is little considered.]

Religion as an historical phenomenon
There was less consensus on the historical, social and psychological nature of religion. The following views were expressed about origins:
" Religions were originally attempts to understand the world (McNight).
" It was natural to personify natural phenomena (Rogers) through rituals, prayers, etc. (Flint)
" It seemed possible to influence these supernatural persons - giving power to priests and their allies (McNight, Behman).

Pepperdine suggested that religion evolved to strengthen the cohesion of human groups.

McNight, Broughton and Pepperdine suggested that religion is a psychological prop, welcomed by "that part of human nature which rejects evidence, reason and logic in favour of emotionally charged conclusions" (McNight).

Astronomy Picture of the Day - Milky Way

2007-09-30T17:39:00.000+01:00

reposted from:

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Discover the cosmos! Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.

2007 September 30
A Milky Way Band
Credit & Copyright: John P. Gleason, Celestial Images

Explanation: Most bright stars in our Milky Way Galaxy reside in a disk. Since our Sun also resides in this disk, these stars appear to us as a diffuse band that circles the sky. The above panorama of a northern band of the Milky Way's disk covers 90 degrees and is a digitally created mosaic of several independent exposures. Scrolling right will display the rest of this spectacular picture. Visible are many bright stars, dark dust lanes, red emission nebulae, blue reflection nebulae, and clusters of stars. In addition to all this matter that we can see, astronomers suspect there exists even more dark matter that we cannot see.

Camelot is Only a Model: Scientific Literacy in the 21st Century

2007-09-28T07:14:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/09/camelot_is_only_a_model_scient.php

The Second Prize Winner of the Second Annual Seed Science Writing Contest answers the question: What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st Century?

by Steven Saus • a nuclear medicine technologist at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, OH.

When I was five, my mother tried bribing me to behave while she shopped. She handed me a toy plane as we passed through that aisle; I held the package tightly while we checked out. After we got to the car, my childish fingers attacked the plastic and pulled the die-cast jet from its marketing prison. The long, patient wait while Mom finished shopping had paid off. In my hands I held a brand-new replica of a Harrier jet. A brand-new replica Harrier that had one tail fin angled forty-five degrees out of true.

After some crying on my part, we gathered the packaging from the car floor and re-entered the store. One in-kind exchange later, I ripped apart another package only to find that this toy model had the same defect. The problem was not with the individual plane. The problem had occurred at the factory. All of the models had the same mistake. My mother said I should pretend it was turning left.

"All the time?" I wailed.

My mother, unlike my five-year-old self, knew not to take models so seriously. Models are inherently flawed; they are lesser than the original. Regardless, models can still be extremely useful. Newton's model of gravity was enough for the Apollo missions, and what good is a 1:1 scale map?

Understanding that our scientific knowledge is "only" a model is the key to true scientific literacy.

Knowing this tells us that our science has built-in limitations, but that it does resemble reality in very fundamental ways. More importantly,

that understanding gives us permission to use our models when they are useful—and permission to discard them when they no longer meet our needs.

A literate person is not a walking dictionary, but someone who has enough knowledge about the language to be able to read.

Being able to examine our models, critically evaluate them, and even discard them is far more scientifically literate than being able to regurgitate facts for a standardized test.

Surely, a certain basic, fundamental knowledge is vital to avoid having to constantly return to Descartes. But as he found, even then, critical thinking is necessary to verify these fundamental "facts." Ultimately,

our models and descriptions of reality must be subject to two overriding criteria: How useful is this model, and how much does this model resemble our observations?

Scientific literacy requires an understanding that science is only a model. We have to be able to jettison our models when our critical thinking leads us to that conclusion.

Our society has largely lost that understanding. We desire immutable facts and constant certainties.

We want clean, hard edges to our world and our knowledge about that world. Politicians, educators, and business leaders crave quantitative metrics that can be compared, compiled, and correlated.

As agenda-driven pundits have attacked scientific thought, we have countered their extremism with our own. Both attackers and defenders blur the distinctions between theories, facts, and hypotheses.

A scientifically literate society knows none of that is necessary.

The edifice of science is not in danger of crumbling; it is under constant renewal.

Each generation's orthodoxy was the prior's heresy.

Many commonly-accepted "facts"—plate tectonics, quantum mechanics, birds' relation to dinosaurs, the Big Bang, RNA's role in the cell, punctuated equilibrium, global climate change, good and bad cholesterol—were extremely controversial not so long ago.

And the process continues, with ongoing challenges to accepted models both in their details and in their broad brushstrokes.

It is understanding the inherent value of this uncertain interplay that is true scientific literacy. It is knowing that Newton, Galileo, or any of our forebearers were scientifically literate themselves, despite not having all the data that we have today.

It is the difference between reciting spelling words and grokking e.e. cummings and Maya Angelou.

Sciences and pseudo-science at Think Humanism forum

2007-09-27T08:41:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.thinkhumanism.com/phpBBForum/viewforum.php?f=14

Interesting sub forum at Think Humanism. Topics include:
British Humanist Association Science Group at Yahoogroups
Critical Analysis of Icons of Evolution
The mind is what the brain does
Richard Dawkins - Enemies of Reason:Slaves to Superstition
Global Warming
Aliens, biology, evolution and organised religion

About the British Humanist Association Science Group

2007-09-27T08:33:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.bhascience.org.uk/

About the British Humanist Association Science Group

The BHA Science Group is for all members of the BHA with an interest in science. You do not need any formal scientific qualifications to join, but you do need to have a passion for science and a concern for the role of science in society.

The group has two broad aims. Firstly, it

aims to encourage interest and awareness of humanism (and membership of the BHA!) among scientists and people with a scientific bent.

It will do this by reaching out to such people who are not currently members, and also by providing news and activities and information to those who are already BHA members.

Secondly,

the group aims to increase improve understanding of scientific knowledge and principles among the BHA membership and wider public.

It will do this by providing resources on relevant topics to any and all interested individuals.

Currently, the group operates informally, with activity focussed on a Yahoo! discussion forum. Members are encouraged to take an active role in developing the group and increasing its scope. There is a great opportunity to make a meaningful contribution, as well as simply to share thoughts and chat informally with like-minded people. So if you are a BHA member with an interest in science, please join us at the link on the right.

My God Problem

2007-09-27T07:40:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/angier_24_5.htm

My God Problem

by Natalie Angier

The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 24, Number 5.

In the course of reporting a book on the scientific canon and pestering hundreds of researchers at the nation's great universities about what they see as the essential vitamins and minerals of literacy in their particular disciplines, I have been hammered into a kind of twinkle-eyed cartoon coma by one recurring message. Whether they are biologists, geologists, physicists, chemists, astronomers, or engineers, virtually all my sources topped their list of what they wish people understood about science with a plug for Darwin's dandy idea. Would you please tell the public, they implored, that evolution is for real? Would you please explain that the evidence for it is overwhelming and that an appreciation of evolution serves as the bedrock of our understanding of all life on this planet?

In other words, the scientists wanted me to do my bit to help fix the terrible little statistic they keep hearing about, the one indicating that many more Americans believe in angels, devils, and poltergeists than in evolution. According to recent polls, about

82 percent are convinced of the reality of heaven (and 63 percent think they're headed there after death); 51 percent believe in ghosts; but only 28 percent are swayed by the theory of evolution.

Scientists think this is terrible—the public's bizarre underappreciation of one of science's great and unshakable discoveries, how we and all we see came to be—and they're right. Yet I can't help feeling tetchy about the limits most of them put on their complaints. You see, they want to augment this particular figure—the number of people who believe in evolution—without bothering to confront a few other salient statistics that pollsters have revealed about America's religious cosmogony. Few scientists, for example, worry about the

77 percent of Americans who insist that Jesus was born to a virgin, an act of parthenogenesis that defies everything we know about mammalian genetics and reproduction. Nor do the researchers wring their hands over the 80 percent who believe in the resurrection of Jesus, the laws of thermodynamics be damned.

No, most scientists are not interested in taking on any of the mighty cornerstones of Christianity. They complain about irrational thinking, they despise creationist "science," they roll their eyes over America's infatuation with astrology, telekinesis, spoon bending, reincarnation, and UFOs, but toward the bulk of the magic acts that have won the imprimatur of inclusion in the Bible, they are tolerant, respectful, big of tent. Indeed, many are quick to point out that the Catholic Church has endorsed the theory of evolution and that it sees no conflict between a belief in God and the divinity of Jesus and the notion of evolution by natural selection. If the pope is buying it, the reason for most Americans' resistance to evolution must have less to do with religion than with a lousy advertising campaign.

So, on the issue of mainstream monotheistic religions and the irrationality behind many of religion's core tenets, scientists often set aside their skewers, their snark, and their impatient demand for proof, and instead don the calming cardigan of a a kiddie-show host on public television. They reassure the public that religion and science are not at odds with one another, but rather that they represent separate "magisteria," in the words of the formerly alive and even more formerly scrappy Stephen Jay Gould. Nobody is going to ask people to give up their faith, their belief in an everlasting soul accompanied by an immortal memory of every soccer game their kids won, every moment they spent playing fetch with the dog. Nobody is going to mock you for your religious beliefs. Well, we might if you base your life decisions on the advice of a Ouija board; but if you want to believe that someday you'll be seated at a celestial banquet with your long-dead father to your right and Jane Austen to your left-and that she'll want to talk to you for another hundred million years or more—that's your private reliquary, and we're not here to jimmy the lock.

Consider the very different treatments accorded two questions presented to Cornell University's "Ask an Astronomer" Web site. To the query, "Do most astronomers believe in God, based on the available evidence?" the astronomer Dave Rothstein replies that, in his opinion, "modern science leaves plenty of room for the existence of God . . . places where people who do believe in God can fit their beliefs in the scientific framework without creating any contradictions." He cites the Big Bang as offering solace to those who want to believe in a Genesis equivalent and the probabilistic realms of quantum mechanics as raising the possibility of "God intervening every time a measurement occurs" before concluding that, ultimately, science can never prove or disprove the existence of a god, and religious belief doesn't—and shouldn't—"have anything to do with scientific reasoning."

How much less velveteen is the response to the reader asking whether astronomers believe in astrology. "No, astronomers do not believe in astrology," snarls Dave Kornreich. "It is considered to be a ludicrous scam. There is no evidence that it works, and plenty of evidence to the contrary." Dr. Kornreich ends his dismissal with the assertion that in science "one does not need a reason not to believe in something." Skepticism is "the default position" and "one requires proof if one is to be convinced of something's existence."

In other words, for horoscope fans, the burden of proof is entirely on them, the poor gullible gits; while for the multitudes who believe that, in one way or another, a divine intelligence guides the path of every leaping lepton, there is no demand for evidence, no skepticism to surmount, no need to worry. You, the religious believer, may well find subtle support for your faith in recent discoveries—that is, if you're willing to upgrade your metaphors and definitions as the latest data demand, seek out new niches of ignorance or ambiguity to fill with the goose down of faith, and accept that, certain passages of the Old Testament notwithstanding, the world is very old, not everything in nature was made in a week, and (can you turn up the mike here, please?) Evolution Happens.

And if you don't find substantiation for your preferred divinity or your most cherished rendering of the afterlife somewhere in the sprawling emporium of science, that's fine, too. No need to lose faith when you were looking in the wrong place to begin with. Science can't tell you whether God exists or where you go when you die. Science cannot definitively rule out the heaven option, with its helium balloons and Breck hair for all. Science in no way wants to be associated with terrifying thoughts, like the possibility that the pericentury of consciousness granted you by the convoluted, gelatinous, and transient organ in your skull just may be the whole story of you-dom. Science isn't arrogant. Science trades in the observable universe and testable hypotheses. Religion gets the midnight panic fêtes. But you've heard about evolution, right?

So why is it that most scientists avoid criticizing religion even as they decry the supernatural mind-set?

For starters, some researchers are themselves traditionally devout, keeping a kosher kitchen or taking Communion each Sunday. I admit I'm surprised whenever I encounter a religious scientist. How can a bench-hazed Ph.D., who might in an afternoon deftly purée a colleague's PowerPoint presentation on the nematode genome into so much fish chow, then go home, read in a two-thousand-year-old chronicle, riddled with internal contradictions, of a meta-Nobel discovery like "Resurrection from the Dead," and say, gee, that sounds convincing? Doesn't the good doctor wonder what the control group looked like?

Scientists, however, are a far less religious lot than the American population, and, the higher you go on the cerebro-magisterium, the greater the proportion of atheists, agnostics, and assorted other paganites.

According to

a 1998 survey published in Nature, only 7 percent of members of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences professed a belief in a "personal God."

(Interestingly, a slightly higher number, 7.9 percent, claimed to believe in "personal immortality," which may say as much about the robustness of the scientific ego as about anything else.) In other words, more than 90 percent of our elite scientists are unlikely to pray for divine favoritism, no matter how badly they want to beat a competitor to publication. Yet only a flaskful of the faithless have put their nonbelief on record or publicly criticized religion, the notable and voluble exceptions being Richard Dawkins of Oxford University and

Daniel Dennett of Tufts University. Nor have Dawkins and Dennett earned much good will among their colleagues for their anticlerical views; one astronomer I spoke with said of Dawkins, "He's a really fine parish preacher of the fire-and-brimstone school, isn't he?"

So, what keeps most scientists quiet about religion? It's probably something close to that trusty old limbic reflex called "an instinct for self-preservation." For centuries, science has survived quite nicely by cultivating an image of reserve and objectivity, of being above religion, politics, business, table manners.

Scientists want to be left alone to do their work, dazzle their peers, and hire grad students to wash the glassware. When it comes to extramural combat, scientists choose their crusades cautiously. Going after Uri Geller or the Ra‘lians is risk-free entertainment, easier than making fun of the sociology department. Battling the creationist camp has been a much harder and nastier fight, but those scientists who have taken it on feel they have a direct stake in the debate and are entitled to wage it, since the creationists, and more recently the promoters of "intelligent design" theory, claim to be as scientific in their methodology as are the scientists.

But when a teenager named Darrell Lambert was chucked out of the Boy Scouts for being an atheist, scientists suddenly remembered all those gels they had to run and dark matter they had to chase, and they kept quiet. Lambert had explained the reason why, despite a childhood spent in Bible classes and church youth groups, he had become an atheist. He took biology in ninth grade, and, rather than devoting himself to studying the bra outline of the girl sitting in front of him, he actually learned some biology. And what he learned in biology persuaded him that the Bible was full of . . . short stories. Some good, some inspiring, some even racy, but fiction nonetheless. For his incisive, reasoned, scientific look at life, and for refusing to cook the data and simply lie to the Boy Scouts about his thoughts on God—as some advised him to do—Darrell Lambert should have earned a standing ovation from the entire scientific community. Instead, he had to settle for an interview with Connie Chung, right after a report on the Gambino family.

Scientists have ample cause to feel they must avoid being viewed as irreligious, a prionic life-form bent on destroying the most sacred heifer in America. After all, academic researchers graze on taxpayer pastures. If they pay the slightest attention to the news, they've surely noticed the escalating readiness of conservative politicians and an array of highly motivated religious organizations to interfere with the nation's scientific enterprise—altering the consumer information Web site at the National Cancer Institute to make abortion look like a cause of breast cancer, which it is not, or stuffing scientific advisory panels with anti-abortion "faith healers."

Recently, an obscure little club called the Traditional Values Coalition began combing through descriptions of projects supported by the National Institutes of Health and complaining to sympathetic congressmen about those they deemed morally "rotten," most of them studies of sexual behavior and AIDS prevention. The congressmen in turn launched a series of hearings, calling in institute officials to inquire who in the Cotton-pickin' name of Mather cares about the perversions of Native American homosexuals, to which the researchers replied, um, the studies were approved by a panel of scientific experts, and, gee, the Native American community has been underserved and is having a real problem with AIDS these days. Thus far, the projects have escaped being nullified, but the raw display of pious dentition must surely give fright to even the most rakishly freethinking and comfortably tenured professor. It's one thing to monkey with descriptions of Darwinism in a high-school textbook. But to threaten to take away a peer-reviewed grant! That Dan Dennett; he is something of a pompous leafblower, isn't he?

Yet the result of wincing and capitulating is a fresh round of whacks. Now it's not enough for presidential aspirants to make passing reference to their "faith." Now a reporter from Newsweek sees it as his privilege, if not his duty, to demand of Howard Dean, "Do you see Jesus Christ as the son of God and believe in him as the route to salvation and eternal life?" In my personal fairy tale, Dean, who as a doctor fits somewhere in the phylum Scientificus, might have boomed, "Well, with his views on camels and rich people, he sure wouldn't vote Republican!" or maybe, "No, but I hear he has a Mel Gibson complex." Dr. Dean might have talked about patients of his who suffered strokes and lost the very fabric of themselves and how he has seen the centrality of the brain to the sense of being an individual. He might have expressed doubts that the self survives the brain, but, oh yes, life goes on, life is bigger, stronger, and better endowed than any Bush in a jumpsuit, and we are part of the wild, tumbling river of life, our molecules were the molecules of dinosaurs and before that of stars, and this is not Bulfinch mythology, this is corroborated reality.

Alas for my phantasm of fact, Howard Dean, M.D., had no choice but to chime, oh yes, he certainly sees Jesus as the son of God, though he at least dodged the eternal life clause with a humble mumble about his salvation not being up to him.

I may be an atheist, and I may be impressed that, through the stepwise rigor of science, its Spockian eyebrow of doubt always cocked, we have learned so much about the universe.

Yet I recognize that, from there to here, and here to there, funny things are everywhere. Why is there so much dark matter and dark energy in the great Out There, and why couldn't cosmologists have given them different enough names so I could keep them straight? Why is there something rather than nothing, and why is so much of it on my desk? Not to mention the abiding mysteries of e-mail, like why I get exponentially more spam every day, nine-tenths of it invitations to enlarge an appendage I don't have.

I recognize that science doesn't have all the answers and doesn't pretend to, and that's one of the things I love about it. But it has a pretty good notion of what's probable or possible, and virgin births and carpenter rebirths just aren't on the list.

Is there a divine intelligence, separate from the universe but somehow in charge of the universe, either in its inception or in twiddling its parameters? No evidence.

Is the universe itself God? Is the universe aware of itself? We're here. We're aware. Does that make us God? Will my daughter have to attend a Quaker Friends school now?

I don't believe in life after death, but I'd like to believe in life before death. I'd like to think that one of these days we'll leave superstition and delusional thinking and Jerry Falwell behind. Scientists would like that, too. But for now, they like their grants even more.

Reprinted from The American Scholar 72, no. 2, Spring 2004. (c)Natalie Angier. By permission of the publishers.

Natalie Angier is a science reporter for the New York Times and author of Woman: An Intimate Geography, Natural Obsessions, and The Beauty of the Beastly. In 1991 she won a Pulitzer Prize for her science reporting.

Needles 'are best for back pain'

2007-09-26T08:12:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7011738.stm

Needles 'are best for back pain'

Acupuncture is said to release the body's vital energy

Acupuncture - real or sham - is more effective at treating back pain than conventional therapies, research suggests.

A German team found almost half the patients treated with acupuncture felt pain relief.

But the Archives of Internal Medicine study also suggests fake acupuncture works nearly as well as the real thing.

In contrast, only about a quarter who received drugs and other Western therapies felt better.

Acupuncture represents a highly promising and effective treatment option for chronic back pain

Dr Heinz Endres
Ruhr University Bochum

The researchers, from the Ruhr University Bochum, say their findings suggest that

the body may react positively to any thin needle prick - or that acupuncture may simply trigger a placebo effect.

One theory is that

pain messages to the brain can be blocked by competing stimuli.

Researcher Dr Heinz Endres said: "Acupuncture represents a highly promising and effective treatment option for chronic back pain.

"Patients experienced not only reduced pain intensity, but also reported improvements in the disability that often results from back pain and therefore in their quality of life."

Needles not manipulated

More than 1,100 patients took part in the study. They were given either conventional therapy, acupuncture or a sham version.

Although needles were used in the sham therapy, they were not inserted as deeply as in standard acupuncture. Neither were they inserted at points thought key to producing a therapeutic effect, or manipulated and rotated once in position.

After six months 47% of patients in the acupuncture group reported a significant improvement in pain symptoms, compared to 44% in the sham group, and just 27% in the group who received conventional therapy.

Dr James Young, of Chicago's Rush University, said: "We don't understand the mechanisms of these so-called alternative treatments, but that doesn't mean they don't work."

Acupuncture is based on the ancient Chinese theory that needles can be used to release the body's vital energy, or qi.

Conventional therapies tested in the study included painkillers, injections, heat therapy and massage.

It is estimated that as many as 85% of the population experiences back pain at some point, and the problem costs the NHS around £500m a year.

The study echoes the findings of two studies published last year in the British Medical Journal, which found a short course of acupuncture could benefit patients with low back pain.

Mike O'Farrell, of the British Acupuncture Council, said: "Through these controlled research findings demonstrating the effectiveness of acupuncture, we believe that both the medical health profession and members of the public will see the benefits of acupuncture as part of an integrated healthcare service."

listen to debate about Pros and cons of Acupuncture

Scientific Literacy and the Habit of Discourse

2007-09-25T06:21:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1681,n,n

Sunday, September 23, 2007

by Thomas W. Martin, Seed

Thanks to Mark for the link.

Reposted from:
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/09/scientific_literacy_and_the_ha.php

The First Prize Winner of the Second Annual Seed Science Writing Contest answers the question:
What does it mean to be scientifically literate in the 21st Century?

Twenty years ago, as a college freshman, I knew precisely what it meant to be scientifically literate. In fact, I held an objective measure in the palm of my hand, courtesy of E.D. Hirsch. His book, Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know was a bestselling paperback, and conveniently listed thousands of names, terms, and phrases with which every educated person—he informed us—should be familiar. After plodding through the entire list during the course of an afternoon, I smugly discovered I could easily define each item of scientific vocabulary. Fuzziness about literary examples such as "Aeschylus" caused me no discomfort, but

inability to rigorously describe "aerobic respiration" in the biochemical sense (not the superficial, then-popular Jane Fonda sense) would have induced severe nerdish embarrassment.

Today I teach science and its history at an honors college, and am naturally far less confident about how to measure scientific literacy. The students who enter our program possess not only the expected high SAT scores, but also perfect or near-perfect scores on a battery of Advanced Placement exams, particularly in the basic sciences.

A noticeable portion of those students also believe in the literal truth of certain ancient accounts of earth's history that, to put it bluntly, directly contradict mountains of well-established data from geology, climatology, and biology.

Without rehashing the ongoing culture wars surrounding this topic (and certainly without berating my own students), this serves as a useful place to begin tackling the notion of "scientific literacy."

We frequently hear the refrain that

if our nation simply raised the level of science courses, taught our children more subjects, and/or gave them more hands-on lab work, we could ensure the production of a citizenry capable of understanding an increasingly complex world.

They would then be prepared to make the difficult choices of the 21st century, etc. However,

my incoming students' technical mastery already exceeds what even the most rosy-eyed optimist could realistically dream for America (or the globe) as a whole.

In other words,

even if a citizenry were to achieve an impressive degree of scientific literacy—construed as raw conceptual competence—it would still be entirely possible for those same citizens to routinely subordinate scientific evidence to their own deeply-ingrained cultural suppositions.

More importantly,

the phenomenon of "evidence blindness"

is hardly restricted to inexperienced students, or even to ideological segments of the general population. To varying degrees, it can be found across the spectrum, including some very striking examples in the realm of professional science itself. As noted recently in Seed, leading disciplinary practitioners who feel threatened by unorthodox new findings will sometimes band together to suppress such information, with the explicit intention of blocking its appearance in the journals. While these luminaries undoubtedly convince themselves they are merely upholding the integrity of their fields, the truth is that they (in quintessentially human fashion) are often more interested in preserving cherished beliefs than in encouraging potentially disruptive discoveries.

Over the past few decades, growing evidence from cognitive science has revealed significant

limits on the ability of individuals to criticize their own viewpoints.

Even the most analytically gifted and experienced among us are susceptible to bias and self-deception to an extent that we (ironically enough) generally fail to appreciate.

As psychologist Daniel Gilbert puts it in his book Stumbling on Happiness,

"Each of us is trapped in a place, a time, and a circumstance, and our attempts to use our minds to transcend those boundaries are, more often than not, ineffective."

The reason science does manage to be astonishingly effective is not because large groups are automatically wiser or less prone to self-deception than individuals. History adequately demonstrates that, if anything, the opposite is more nearly the case.

Science works because its core dynamics—not its methods or techniques per se—are rooted in pitting intellects against one another. Science eventually yields impressive answers because it compels smart people to incessantly try to disprove the ideas generated by other smart people.

The goal of science is to find those ideas that can withstand the long and hard barrage of evidence-based argument. That lesson must be experienced anew by the members of each generation, irrespective of their careers.

Mastery of scientific concepts and theories is a necessary starting point, but it serves only as a prerequisite to joining the never-ending dialogue. Students must learn first-hand how to both imaginatively create new hypotheses and to dispassionately critique them. Many commentators have rightly implored us to make certain that young people encounter the "thrill" of discovery. While this is undeniably desirable,

it is arguably even more crucial that they experience the agony (if only on a modest scale) of having a pet hypothesis demolished by facts.

Several current presidential candidates have insisted that they oppose the scientific account of earth's natural history as a matter of principle. In the present cultural climate, altering one's beliefs in response to anything (facts included) is considered a sign of weakness.

Students must be convinced that changing one's mind in light of the evidence is not weakness: Changing one's mind is the essence of intellectual growth. By forcing students into evidence-based debates with one another, this mode of interaction, like any other, can become habitual. After being consistently challenged by their peers, most students eventually see that attempts to free themselves from facts are a hollow, and fundamentally precarious, form of "freedom."

In an era in which we tremble at offending the sensibilities of our neighbors, students must comprehend that it is not only possible but absolutely vital that we criticize each other's ideas firmly yet civilly. They must do this despite clear cases of prominent scientists falling into petty, acerbic (and therefore counterproductive) exchanges. The responsibility for fostering scientific literacy of this sort—that is, literacy construed as an ongoing commitment to evidence over preconception—falls upon all of us in our discussions both formal and informal, both public and private. When scientific celebrities fail to set a good example for students, it is especially incumbent upon the rest of us to set them back on the proverbial right track, rather than to reflexively hasten their derailment.

We do our children no favors by going easy on them—or, more to the point—allowing them to go easy on each other. Nature has a way of being far tougher. If we can create environments in which they can safely have small epiphanies in the light of evidence, they will be motivated to share those lessons. They will then be scientifically literate in the sense that scientific discourse will continue to endure and flourish. And that is the sense that ultimately matters.

—Thomas W. Martin is an Honors Faculty Fellow at Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ.

Christian Mythology

2007-09-23T10:08:00.001+01:00

reposted from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAb3hj7Eiec

An Effrontery Diacritical Mark

2007-09-23T08:52:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.daneandrade.com/2007/08/31/a-effrontery-diacritical-mark/ via http://mojoey.blogspot.com/2007/09/blogroll-update-seven-solitudes.html

who say "Our newest Atheist Blogroll member is The Seven Solitudes written by Dane Andrade. Dane has been kind enough to write an introduction to his outstanding new blog.

My name is Dane Andrade. I am the sole contributor to my personal blog at www.DaneAndrade.com. Raised in the deep south, and graduate of a University of Notre Dame, I am an agnostic atheist, future lawyer, and skilled orator and debater. I am the founder of the Secular Covenant, and the head administrator of Facebook's largest Non-religious community, "Atheists, Agnostics, and Non-religious", with over 10,000 members, many of which are active daily. I currently work for the government in Newport, Rhode Island, my background is in Psychology, Computer Engineering, and Theology. I am studying and saving for law school in the New England area.

Excerpt from Blog:

"Every human can be taught to explain how the sun is not a god,

Beautifull writing - a very talented writer - WASP

emphasis

An Effrontery Diacritical Mark

August 31st, 2007 by Dane Andrade

Thought has become an impedance. Like a debilitating disease who keeps its’ host alive long enough to spread to others, eating away at the core of function.

There is a never ending supply of floating radicals in the memesphere; mental flatulence, polluting the once thirsty and starving brain.

I muse about the impeccable stability of ignorance that is held up as ideal in this bloated society.

It has become a common tactic among indolent thinkers to flood peremptory reality and common sense with coercive stagnation. Reason is attacked, and the outer skin of rational inquiry is stripped clean of its’ flesh, gaping and flailing about like a tattered flag, ripped and stuck to a branch protruding from some distant mountainous terrain. Dialogue is not imbued or inspired by complete destruction of partially laid canon in thought, debate is not made stronger by philosophical gymnastics. I can see the problem, even feel its’ source, frothing from the depths of civilization; the potential Vesuvius of evolution.

New thought is forced to survive on two fronts, the regressive desires of fettered minds and aging defenders against progress; and the evolution of thought. The oldest ideas of our civilization have undergone the most strenuous and arduous of tests. Thousands of years of selection, and utterly unlike their natural, physical counterpart, the selection of thoughts hold no benefit.

The conceptual God is as useless now as it has ever been. The only resort for thinking otherwise is the liberal acknowledgment of the general deindividuation and stupidity of our population.

Religion has evolved for years, only sidestepping the inquiry of reason in so far as it needs to survive in the dullest forms.

Every attack is simply met with a calm response about the imaginary benefits of the belief, and the hapless half wits march on, as if a great truth has somehow been discovered.

Far worse than the constituents that make up the zombie horde of idiocy are the defenders of these people, the enablers that allow them their comforts. And at the very end of the spectrum, the leader. The priest, the preacher, the pastor; these people must always desire power, because the moral implications of their existence reach no farther than charlatans, at the first level of superficial greed.

I am usually a champion of certain aspects of human greed, but the visage of service, of charity, of prizes beyond human grasp in order to demand slavery in the guise of comfort and obtain it willingly from the collective masses is beyond my ability to stomach.

From the first tribal shaman to the stadium evangelical, humanity has been in servitude to the most willing master deceiver.

Nothing in this regard has changed, only that aforementioned evolution of thought defending them.

To fight them, humanity has forged within her loins men and women of extreme intellectual prowess, and so far their only contribution has been to pass the fight, the battle to the next generation of potential saviors. We are going to lose this battle.

I spoke of the impedance of thought, a reality, explaining how vast and powerful the defense against reason has become…

Every human can be taught to explain how the sun is not a god, the world is not flat, the earth is not 6,000 years old.

The arguments become more refined, beyond the reach of science, and while she was dragging humanity on her back, the horde slipped in behind her, ready to knock her down at one moment’s weakness, beat her ruthlessly, defining her personage, as if she were a subjective nameless adolescent. Unprotected, she will soon be defined to include that which is untenable. The very ideal of anti-science, becomes science. A transmutation of thought, the poisonous gas of supposed supernaturalism and dogmatic metaphysics injected into her veins like cement mix in a forest oasis.

We have gone from sun gods, to sky gods, to moon gods, to personable gods, to one god, to one spirit, to one personal god, to the closet thing to reality, a pantheistic, deistic god impotent to creation, and then, as if we were no longer able to offer the counter, violent regression towards primordial worship. Back to sun gods, back to cleverly hidden polytheism in the form of a triune, back to antediluvian myths, back to young earths, primitive geology, and ancestral ghost worshiping, back to blood sacrifice and cannibalism, back to tongue languages, and back to promises of paradise and eternal torment.

Using the very defense against these things, the last known vestigial vanguard against the total domination of the lapsing tit for tat equilibrium; science.

The very same people who must defend her become lost in a sudden maze of conflicts from the gathering hordes of atavism.

For society’s intellectuals to have to stop and explain something as simple as the age of earth, while the concept of an eternal place of fire goes unchecked is immeasurably improvident.

Happiness by Stephen Law

2007-09-23T08:26:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2007/09/happiness.html

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Happiness

Here’s a short introduction to some of the philosophical issues about happiness. We are going to look at three key questions:

Is happiness just about feeling good, or is there more to it than that?
Is feeling good always what motivates us? And:
Is increasing happiness always morally the right thing to do?

1. ANCIENT AND MODERN CONCEPTIONS OF HAPPINESS

Happiness is elusive – something we work hard to achieve, yet rarely seem to find. Indeed, as T.S. Elliot reminds us, the harder we strive to attain happiness, the more quickly it seems to recede over the horizon.

We see them everywhere, those trying desperately for happiness: pitifully chasing clouds of butterflies, laughing too loud, drinking too much, buying too much, working too hard; hating themselves.

Perhaps one of the reasons happiness is hard to achieve is that it’s not entirely clear what we are after. So let’s begin by asking: what is happiness?

Nowadays we tend to think of happiness as a more-or-less transitory feeling. Take the social scientist Richard Layard - he defines happiness as “feeling good”. But this is not the only possible conception of happiness. In fact happiness as Layard defines it is a comparatively modern notion. The ancients viewed happiness very differently.

According to Aristotle [384-322 BC], for example, happiness, or eudaimonia, is not a feeling. Rather it’s a feature of a complete life. It’s also a moral feature. A happy individual is one that has lived a life of virtue.

The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue… Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.

Those who are happy are those that have lived lives of good character.

To our modern ears, this sounds odd. Clearly, we no longer associate happiness with morality in quite the way the ancients did. Aristotle believed that a virtuous individual would thereby be a happy individual. This necessary connection between virtue and happiness is no longer assumed to exist.

The link between a virtue and happiness was partially severed by the Christian church, particularly during its more ascetic periods. A virtuous life may eventually bring the reward of happiness, it was thought. But in the next life, not this.

Indeed, some Christians have supposed that the more one suffers now, the better. Not only have they shunned worldly pleasures and preached abstinence, they have even, like St. Jerome, embraced self-flagellation or, like Origen, engaged in self-mutilation (Origen, an early Christian father, actually castrated himself).

Nowadays, we Westerners are more relaxed about seeking happiness in this life. But the link with morality that you find in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics has almost entirely been lost. The suggestion that the best way to achieve happiness is to live a virtuous life is rarely, if ever, made.

2. IS FEELING GOOD ALWAYS WHAT MOTIVATES US?

Let’s now turn to a rather different question: is happiness our ultimate aim in life? Many assume it is. The only reason we do anything, they say, is to make ourselves feel better, to maximize our own happiness. Richard Layard, for example, says that “From the various possibilities open to us, we choose whichever combination of activities will make us feel best.”

This psychological theory of why we do what we do is easily refuted.

Achieving a feeling of happiness and contentment is not always what motivates us.

Suppose, for example, that, after seeing the suffering of starving children on TV, you decide to give generously to a charity dedicated to helping them. Surely you’ve acted to increase the happiness of others, not yourself? “Not so” comes the reply. “The real reason you gave to charity was to make yourself feel better, to salve your own conscience and make yourself feel noble. So you see? Your motive for acting was to make yourself feel good.”

As an explanation for why anyone ever acts selflessly, this won’t do. Suppose I could offer you a magic pill that made you believe you had given generously to charity when in fact you hadn’t. Then you could both enjoy feeling happy about giving to charity, and also feel good about spending the cash. Would you take the pill? Of course not. Most of us would reject the pill and still to give to charity. Yet if feeling good were all we were after, taking the pill would be the obvious choice.

True, acting to help others does often make us feel happier. It doesn’t follow that making ourselves feeling happier is our motive for doing it. It’s reassuring to discover Layard is mistaken – that we aren’t quite as self-obsessed as he would have us believe.

3. IS MAXIMIZING HAPPINESS ALWAYS MORALLY THE RIGHT THING TO DO?

Now to another question concerning happiness: Is maximizing happiness always morally the right thing to do? Jeremy Bentham 1748-1832], the father of utilitarianism, famously declared that ‘The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation’. Utilitarianism, in its simplest form, says that the right thing to do in any given situation is to act to produce the happiest outcome - that which produces the most pleasure and the least pain.

Bentham himself developed a “felicific calculus” into which factors such as intensity and duration of pains and pleasures could be fed to calculate the right course of action.

Here’s a simple example of such a utilitarian calculation – should I steal that child’s sweets? Doing so might give me the pleasure of eating them. But it would deprive the child of the same pleasure and cause her considerable unhappiness to boot. So the right thing to do, on this simple utilitarian calculation, is not to steal the sweets.

The “happy-drug”

One glaring problem with the simpler forms of utilitarianism is that they seem prone to an obvious sort of counterexample. What if we could make everyone feel wonderfully happy by constantly injecting them with a happy-drug? Would that be the right thing to do, morally speaking?

No. Turning everyone into blissed-out drug zombies would be wrong. Making people “feel good” may be of some moral importance. But it’s not of overriding importance.

Higher and lower pleasures

One way in which a utilitarian might respond to this sort of counterexample is to distinguish between higher and lower pleasures. J.S. Mill (1806-1873) does precisely this. An intense, drug-induced reverie may be agreeable. But it produces a pleasure of a very shallow sort compared to, say, the pleasures of the intellect - which, according to Mill, include the appreciation of poetry and philosophical debate. Doping people up to the eyeballs may induce an intense sort of pleasure, but it deprives them of the opportunity to enjoy higher, more important pleasures. Which is why it would be the wrong thing to do.

This distinction between higher and lower pleasures may get the utilitarian off the hook so far as the “happy-drug” objection goes, but it strikes many (including Layard) as objectionably elitist and paternalistic. Is the pleasure of engaging in philosophical debate or listening to Mozart really superior to that of filling ones belly with chocolate ice-cream? Aren’t such distinctions mere snobbery?

Mill thought not. He argues that only those who have experienced both the higher and lower pleasures are in any position to judge which are best, and those who have had the luxury of experiencing both tend to prefer the higher.

But is this true? Actually, many of those in a position to enjoy both kinds of pleasure like to be seen to enjoy the higher while secretly over-indulging their taste for the lower.

Transplant case

Another classic counterexample to utilitarianism is the transplant case. Suppose you’re the doctor in charge of six patients. The first has a minor medical condition easily cured. The others have failing organs and will soon die without transplants. No replacement organs are available. But then you discover that the first patient can provide perfect donor organs. So you can murder the first patient to save the rest. Or you can cure the first and watch five die. What is the right thing to do?

A simple utilitarian calculation suggests you should kill one patient to save the rest. After all, that will result in five happy patients and only one set of grieving relatives rather than one happy patient and five sets of grieving relatives. Yet the killing of one patient to save the rest strikes most of us very wrong indeed.

What this case of brings out, it’s suggested, is that the right course of action is not always to maximize happiness. Indeed, it’s said that such cases demonstrate that human beings have certain fundamental rights, including a right to life, and that these rights ought not to be trampled, whatever the consequences for happiness.

Nozick’s Experience Machine

Here’s one last apparent counter-example to utilitarianism from the contemporary philosopher Robert Nozick. Suppose a machine is built that can replicate any experience. Plug yourself in and it will stimulate your brain in just the way it would be stimulated if you were, say, climbing mount Everest or walking on the Moon.The experiences this machine generates are indistinguishable from those you would get if you were experiencing the real thing.

For those of us that want to experience exotic and intense pleasures. this machine offers a fantastic opportunity. Notice it can even induce higher pleasures - the pleasure gained from engaging in a philosophical debate or listening to a Beethoven symphony need be no less intense for being experienced within a virtual world.

Many of us would be keen to try out this machine. But what of the offer permanently to immerse yourself in such pleasure-inducing world?

Most of us would refuse. Someone who has climbed Everest in virtual reality has not really climbed Everest. And someone who has enjoyed a month-long affair with the computer-generated Lara Croft has not really made any sort of meaningful connection with another human being.

The truth is we don’t just want to “feel happy”. Most of us also want to lead lives that are authentic. Someone who (like Truman in The Truman Show) had unwittingly lived out their whole life within a carefully controlled environment might subjectively feel content and fulfilled. But were they to be told on their deathbed that it had all been a carefully staged illusion - that there had been no real relationships, that their “achievements” had all been carefully managed - then they might well feel that theirs was, after all, a life sadly wasted.

Again, it seems that what Layard calls “feeling good” is not, ultimately, what’s most important to most of us. Nor, it seems, is arranging things to maximize the feeling of happiness always morally the right thing to do. Secretly plugging everyone into a deceptive, Matrix-like pleasure-inducing virtual world would surely be very wrong indeed.

4. THE CONSUMERIST MODEL OF HAPPINESS

To finish, let’s take a brief look at the link between happiness and consumerism. In section one we saw how our modern conception of happiness taken a subjective turn – focussing increasingly on “feeling good”, In fact it has also become increasingly consumerist. Often as not, the way in which we seek to feel good is by acquiring more stuff.

We Westerners have become significantly wealthier over the last fifty years or so. We own more colour TVs, microwaves, cars etc. then ever before. And yet we do not appear to be appreciably happier. The proportion of Americans describing themselves as “very happy” has remained about one third since the 1950s, despite their increasing affluence. Why is this?

The psychologist Paul Wachtel believes the explanation lies in a feature of human psychology known as adaptation. We have simply become accustomed to rising levels of affluence. In fact when affluence continues to increase, but not quite so sharply, people end up less happy and perceive themselves to be poorer than they were before.

In judging how well off we are economically… we assimilate new input to our ‘adaptation level’. For many Americans, having one or several color television sets, two or more cars… these and others features of their lives are experienced as the ‘neutral point’. They do not excite us or arouse much feeling. Only a departure from that level is really noticed.

The endless spiral of material acquisition cannot make us more content. Like a drug addict, we simply become accustomed to whatever we’re getting, cease to derive much pleasure from it, and start demanding even more. As a result, explains the philosopher Peter Singer,

once we have satisfied our basic needs, there is no level of material comfort at which we are likely to find significantly greater long-term fulfilment than any other level.

And of course, if the resources on which we’re drawing are finite, ever-rising levels of consumption are impossible to maintain.

Singer argues that we need fundamentally to rethink our attitudes to contentment and reject this consumerist model of happiness that is dragging us all to our doom. He may be right.

Main Conclusions

We’ve drawn three main conclusions:

1. Our modern conception of happiness as “feeling good” is not the only possible conception of happiness. Nor is it obviously the best conception. In losing sight of the ancient notion of happiness, might we have lost sight of something valuable?

2. Those like Layard, who believe we always act to make ourselves “feel good” are simply mistaken. Making ourselves “feel good” is not usually what’s most important to us.

3. Nor, it seems, is maximizing happiness always morally the right thing to do.

Atheist, Agnostic, and Non-Religious - 10,000 members on Facebook

2007-09-22T23:10:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2204609276

Apparently this is the largest Non-religious community on Facebook www.facebook.com

Name:	Atheist, Agnostic, and Non-Religious
Type:	Organizations - Community Organizations
Description:	Positive support and discussion for atheists, agnostics, freethinkers, the Brights, the secularists, and anyone who feels the pull of reason in need of a supportive group. Christians and other religious are welcome. However, this is a non-religious group, and any reference to your persecution or consistent trolling on here will end in your being banned. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason." --Christopher Hitchens "A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." --Albert Einstein "Atheism is not a philosophy; it is not even a view of the world; it is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, "atheist" is a term that should not ever exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non astrologer" or a "non-alchemist". We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs. An atheist is simply a person who believes that the 260 million Americans (87 percent of the population) claiming to "never doubt the existence of God" should be obliged to present evidence for his existence-and, indeed, for his BENEVOLENCE, given the relentless destruction of innocent human beings we witness in the world each day." --Sam Harris, "Letter to a Christian Nation" "Faith is a cop-out. It is intellectual bankruptcy. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits." --Dan Barker, former evangelist, author, critic "When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave. There was for me no master in all the wide world, not even in infinite space. I was free--free to think, to express my thoughts--free to live my own ideal, free to live for myself and those I loved, free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination's wings, free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope, free to judge and determine for myself . . . I was free! I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously faced all worlds." --Robert G. Ingersoll "Although the time of death is approaching me, I am not afraid of dying and going to Hell or (what would be considerably worse) going to the popularized version of Heaven. I expect death to be nothingness and, for removing me from all possible fears of death, I am thankful to atheism." --Isaac Asimov, "On Religiosity," Free Inquiry †† "You do not need the bible to justify love, but no better tool has been invented to justify hate." --Richard A. Weatherwax "but i choose to believe in christ being my savior because i have to...i think that qualifies for thinking outside the box" --Christian flamer, Carlos Rodriguez, 09/15/2006 "Remember then that there is only one important time, and that time is now. The most important one is always the one you are with. And the most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side. For these, my dear boy, are the answers to what is most important in this world. This is why we are here." --Jon J. Muth "I contemplate with sovereign reverence the act of the Whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church & State." -- Thomas Jefferson, 1802 letter to Danbury Connecticut Baptist Association "Why should I allow that same God to tell me how to raise my kids, who had to drown His own?" --Bertrand Russell "How can atheists sue God? It would be rather like me sueing the Easter Bunny." --Nameless British Fan of AANR, famed Facebook Christian Apologist, as written on "The Free Sandwich" thread Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ Atheists, Agnostics and Non-Religious (AANR) Official Forum and Blog: http://www.secularcovenant.com/ Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ-Φ Relevant Links: The Secular Web: http://www.infidels.org/ Defends and promotes a naturalistic worldview. Point of Inquiry: http://pointofinquiry.org/ The role of ideology in politics. Principia Cybernetica: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ Introduction to a paradigm based on evolutionary cybernetics. The Brights: http://www.the-brights.net/ Promotes rational, naturalistic discourse and activism. NoBeliefs.com: http://www.nobeliefs.com/ Skepticism leading to truth and fulfillment. Positive Atheism: http://www.positiveatheism.org/ Peaceful political outreach. An Atheist Manifesto: http://www.truthdig.com/dig/item/200512_an_atheist_manifesto/ Courtesy of Sam Harris. Understanding Evolution: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/ Fill out the gaps in your own knowledge, or refer a creationist friend. God's Debris: http://images.ucomics.com/images/pdfs/sadams/godsdebris.pdf Scott Adams gives a casual hint as to how primitive many conceptions of god are. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Mathematical cosmos: Reality by numbers

2007-09-21T19:37:00.001+01:00

reposted from: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg19526210.500-mathematical-cosmos-reality-by-numbers.html;jsessionid=MLFHPIJLJAGN

Mathematical cosmos: Reality by numbers

14 September 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Max Tegmark

Impossible things for breakfast, at the Logic Café
14 April 2007
The Big Questions: Will we ever have a theory of everything?
16 November 2006
The theory of everything: Are we nearly there yet?
30 April 2005
e: the mystery number
18 July 2007
Search New Scientist
Contact us

Web Links

Mathematical structures of the universe

WHAT is the meaning of life, the universe and everything? In the sci-fi spoof The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the answer was found to be 42; the hardest part turned out to be finding the real question. Indeed, although our inquisitive ancestors undoubtedly asked such big questions, their search for a "theory of everything" evolved as their knowledge grew.

As the ancient Greeks replaced myth-based explanations with mechanistic models of the solar system, their emphasis shifted from asking "why" to asking "how".

“100 billion number of stars in a typical galaxy”

Since then, the scope of our questioning has dwindled in some areas and mushroomed in others. Some questions were abandoned as naive or misguided, such as explaining the sizes of planetary orbits from first principles, which was popular during the Renaissance. The same may happen to currently trendy pursuits like predicting the amount of dark energy in the cosmos, if it turns out that the amount in our neighbourhood is a historical accident. Yet our ability to answer other questions has surpassed earlier generations' wildest expectations: Newton would have been amazed to know that we would one day measure the age of our universe to an accuracy of 1 per cent, and comprehend the microworld well enough to make an iPhone.

Mathematics has played a striking role in these successes. The idea that our universe is in some sense mathematical goes back at least to the Pythagoreans of ancient Greece, and has spawned centuries of discussion among physicists and philosophers. In the 17th century, Galileo famously stated that the universe is a "grand book" written in the language of mathematics. More recently, the physics Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner argued in the 1960s that "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences" demanded an explanation.

Here, I will push this idea to its extreme and argue that

our universe is not just described by mathematics - it is mathematics.

While this hypothesis might sound rather far-fetched,

it makes startling predictions about the structure of the universe that could be testable by observations. It should also be useful in narrowing down what an ultimate theory of everything could look like.

The foundation of my argument is the assumption that there exists an external physical reality independent of us humans. This is not too controversial: I would guess that the majority of physicists favour this long-standing idea, though it is still debated. Metaphysical solipsists reject it flat out, and supporters of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics may reject it on the grounds that there is no reality without observation (New Scientist, 23 June, p 30). Assuming an external reality exists, however, physics theories aim to describe how it works. Our most successful theories, such as general relativity and quantum mechanics, describe only parts of this reality: gravity, for instance, or the behaviour of subatomic particles. In contrast, the holy grail of theoretical physics is a theory of everything - a complete description of reality.

My personal quest for this theory begins with an extreme argument about what it is allowed to look like.

If we assume that reality exists independently of humans, then for a description to be complete, it must also be well defined according to non-human entities - aliens or supercomputers, say - that lack any understanding of human concepts. Put differently, such a description must be expressible in a form that is devoid of human baggage like "particle", "observation" or other English words.

In contrast, all physics theories that I have been taught have two components: mathematical equations, and words that explain how the equations are connected to what we observe and intuitively understand. When we derive the consequences of a theory, we introduce concepts - protons, stars, molecules - because they are convenient. However, it is we humans who create these concepts. In principle, everything could be calculated without this baggage: a sufficiently powerful supercomputer could calculate how the state of the universe evolves over time without interpreting it in human terms.

All of this raises the question: is it possible to find a description of external reality that involves no baggage? If so, such a description of objects in this reality and the relations between them would have to be completely abstract, forcing any words or symbols to be mere labels with no preconceived meanings whatsoever. Instead, the only properties of these entities would be those embodied by the relations between them.

This is where mathematics comes in. To a modern logician, a mathematical structure is precisely this: a set of abstract entities with relations between them. Take the integers, or geometric objects like the dodecahedron, a favourite of the Pythagoreans (see Diagram). This is in stark contrast to the way most of us first perceive mathematics - either as a sadistic form of punishment, or as a bag of tricks for manipulating numbers. Like physics, maths has evolved to ask broader questions.

Modern mathematics is the formal study of structures that can be defined in a purely abstract way. Think of mathematical symbols as mere labels without intrinsic meaning. It doesn't matter whether you write "two plus two equals four", "2 + 2 = 4" or "dos más dos igual a cuatro". The notation used to denote the entities and the relations is irrelevant; the only properties of integers are those embodied by the relations between them. That is,

we don't invent mathematical structures - we discover them, and invent only the notation for describing them.

So here is the crux of my argument. If you believe in an external reality independent of humans, then you must also believe in what I call the mathematical universe hypothesis: that our physical reality is a mathematical structure. In other words, we all live in a gigantic mathematical object - one that is more elaborate than a dodecahedron, and probably also more complex than objects with intimidating names like Calabi-Yau manifolds, tensor bundles and Hilbert spaces, which appear in today's most advanced theories. Everything in our world is purely mathematical - including you.

If that is true, then the theory of everything must be purely abstract and mathematical. Although we do not yet know what the theory would look like, particle physics and cosmology have reached a point where all measurements ever made can be explained, at least in principle, with equations that fit on a few pages and involve merely 32 unexplained numerical constants (Physical Review D, vol 73, 023505). So the correct theory of everything could even turn out to be simple enough to describe with equations that fit on a T-shirt.

Before discussing whether the mathematical universe hypothesis is correct, however, there is a more urgent question: what does it actually mean? To understand this, it helps to distinguish between two ways of viewing our external reality. One is the outside overview of a physicist studying its mathematical structure, like a bird surveying a landscape from high above; the other is the inside view of an observer living in the world described by the structure, like a frog living in the landscape surveyed by the bird.

One issue in relating these two perspectives involves time. A mathematical structure is by definition an abstract, immutable entity existing outside of space and time. If the history of our universe were a movie, the structure would correspond not to a single frame but to the entire DVD. So from the bird's perspective, trajectories of objects moving in four-dimensional space-time resemble a tangle of spaghetti. Where the frog sees something moving with constant velocity, the bird sees a straight strand of uncooked spaghetti. Where the frog sees the moon orbit the Earth, the bird sees two intertwined spaghetti strands. To the frog, the world is described by Newton's laws of motion and gravitation. To the bird, the world is the geometry of the pasta.

A further subtlety in relating the two perspectives involves explaining how an observer could be purely mathematical. In this example, the frog itself must consist of a thick bundle of pasta whose structure corresponds to particles that store and process information in a way that gives rise to the familiar sensation of self-awareness.

Fine, so how do we test the mathematical universe hypothesis? For a start, it predicts that further mathematical regularities remain to be discovered in nature.

Ever since Galileo promulgated the idea of a mathematical cosmos, there has been a steady progression of discoveries in that vein, including the standard model of particle physics,

which captures striking mathematical order in the microcosm of elementary particles and the macrocosm of the early universe.

The hypothesis also makes a much more dramatic prediction: the existence of parallel universes. Many types of "multiverse" have been proposed over the years, and it is useful to classify them into a four-level hierarchy.

The first three levels correspond to non-communicating parallel worlds within the same mathematical structure: level I simply means distant regions from which light has not yet had time to reach us; level II covers regions that are forever unreachable because of the cosmological inflation of intervening space; and level III, often called "many worlds", involves non-communicating parts of the Hilbert space of quantum mechanics into which the universe can in a sense "split" during certain quantum events.

Level IV refers to parallel worlds in distinct mathematical structures, which may have fundamentally different laws of physics.

Today's best estimates suggest that we need a huge amount of information, perhaps 10¹⁰⁰ bits, to fully describe our frog's view of the observable universe, down to the positions of every star and grain of sand. Most physicists hope for a theory of everything that is much simpler than this and can be specified in few enough bits to fit in a book, if not on a T-shirt.

“10 power of 57 - number of atoms in a typical star”

The mathematical universe hypothesis implies that such a simple theory must predict a multiverse. Why? Because this theory is by definition a complete description of reality: if it lacks enough bits to completely specify our universe, then it must instead describe all possible combinations of stars, sand grains and such - so that the extra bits that describe our universe simply encode which universe we are in, like a multiversal phone number. Thus, describing a multiverse can be simpler than describing one universe.

Pushed to its extreme, the hypothesis implies the level-IV multiverse. If there is a mathematical structure that is our universe, and its properties correspond to our physical laws, then each mathematical structure with different properties is its own universe with different laws. Indeed, the level-IV multiverse is compulsory, since these structures are not "created" and don't exist "somewhere" - they just exist. Stephen Hawking once asked, "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" For the mathematical cosmos, there is no fire-breathing required, since the point is not that a mathematical structure describes a universe, but that it is a universe.

The existence of the level-IV multiverse also answers a confounding question emphasised by the physicist John Wheeler: even if we found equations that describe our universe perfectly, then why these particular equations, not others? The answer is that the other equations govern parallel universes, and that our universe has these particular equations because they are statistically likely, given the distribution of mathematical structures that can support observers like us.

“80 number of stable chemical elements”

It is crucial to ask whether parallel universes are within the purview of science, or are merely speculation. They are not a theory in themselves, but rather a prediction made by certain theories. For a theory to be falsifiable, we need not be able to test all its predictions, merely at least one of them.

So here's a testable prediction: if we exist in many parallel universes, then we should expect to find ourselves in a typical one. Suppose we succeed in computing the probability distribution for some number, say the dark energy density or the number of dimensions of space, measured by a typical observer in a mathematical structure where this number has meaning. If we find that this distribution makes the value measured in our own universe highly atypical, it would rule out the multiverse, and hence the mathematical universe hypothesis.

Ultimately, why should we believe the mathematical universe hypothesis? Perhaps the most compelling objection is that it feels counter-intuitive and disturbing. I personally dismiss this as a failure to appreciate Darwinian evolution. Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic trajectories of flying rocks. Darwin's theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we look beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down.

We have repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support it: our intuition breaks down at high speeds, where time slows down; on small scales, where particles can be in two places at once; and at high temperatures, where colliding particles change identity. To me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. The point is that if we dismiss seemingly weird theories out of hand, we risk dismissing the correct theory of everything, whatever it may be.

If the mathematical universe hypothesis is true, then it is great news for science, allowing the possibility that an elegant unification of physics and mathematics will one day allow us to understand reality more deeply than most dreamed possible. Indeed, I think the mathematical cosmos is the best theory of everything that we could hope for: it would mean no aspect of reality is off-limits from our scientific quest to uncover regularities and make quantitative predictions.

However, it would also shift the ultimate question once again. We might abandon as misguided the question of which particular mathematical equations describe all of reality, and instead ask how to compute the frog's view of the universe - our observations - from the bird's view. That would determine whether we have uncovered the true structure of our universe, and help us figure out which corner of the mathematical cosmos is our home.

Max Tegmark is a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and scientific director of the Foundational Questions Institute

From issue 2621 of New Scientist magazine, 14 September 2007, page 38-41

Tory group wants Dept of Science

2007-09-21T07:43:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7004655.stm

Tory group wants Dept of Science

The report wants more universities to become world-class in science

A Department for Science should be established to raise the profile of the subject among politicians, voters and the media, a Tory task force has said.

Consideration should be given to extra laboratories in primary schools, while children should study design and technology until they were 16, it said.

It also called for top civil servants to take "scientific literacy" courses.

David Cameron called it a "constructive and effective" report. He must decide whether to adopt its ideas as policy.

The task force was chaired by Ian Taylor, who was a science minister the last time the Conservatives were in power.

Its report outlined nine objectives to help a future Tory government "put science at the heart of its plans to enhance the prospects of the UK becoming a sustainable and competitive knowledge-based economy".

We have made it very clear that a Conservative government would broaden the approach to science and technology, advancing innovation and raising the esteem of research

David Cameron, Conservative leader

It said there was an "overwhelming" case for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) to have a "single voice" in Whitehall.

In education, it recommended that the salaries of teachers of STEM subjects were increased permanently.

The student loans of these teachers should be paid off for them, over a five-year period, to encourage more people to go into the profession, it said.

And it called for the refurbishment of university science laboratories to "receive greater priority" when funding was allocated.

'Key to competitiveness'

To improve scientific literacy in the Civil Service, all newly appointed Permanent Secretaries and senior civil servants would sit a specially tailored course.

Such training would also be available for MPs and members of the European and Scottish Parliaments, plus the Welsh Assembly.

"The Conservative Party is acutely aware that science and engineering are key to our national competitiveness," Mr Cameron said.

"This substantial report sets out a constructive and effective way forward for these vital industries.

"We have made it very clear that a Conservative government would broaden the approach to science and technology, advancing innovation and raising the esteem of research."

The report is one of a series by task forces and policy groups set up by Conservative leader David Cameron to examine policy options for the party. Recommendations are not binding.

Iran Blocks Access To Google

2007-09-21T07:19:00.001+01:00

clipped from news.yahoo.com

TEHRAN (AFP) -
Iran has blocked access to the Google search engine and its Gmail email service as part of a clampdown on material deemed to be offensive, the Mehr news agency reported on Monday.

"I can confirm these sites have been filtered," said Hamid Shahriari, the secretary of Iran's National Council of Information.

He did not explain why the sites were being blocked. Google, Gmail and several other foreign sites appeared to be inaccessible to Iranian users from Monday morning.

Iran has tough censorship on cultural products and internet access, banning thousands of websites and blogs containing sexual and politically critical material as well as women's rights and social networking sites.

The rules are applied by Internet Service Providers who use filtering programmes to prevent access to the banned sites.

Iran is in the midst of one of its toughest moral crackdowns in years, which has already seen thousands of women warned for failing to obey Islamic dress rules.

Parallel universes make quantum sense

2007-09-21T07:05:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://space.newscientist.com/article/mg19526223.700;jsessionid=CMGIKHCNGNLD

Parallel universes make quantum sense

19 September 2007
Zeeya Merali

Quantum states undergo natural selection
30 June 2007
David Deutsch forecasts the future
18 November 2006
Taming the multiverse
14 July 2001
Max Tegmark forecasts the future
18 November 2006

Web Links

IF YOU think of yourself as unique, think again.

The days when physicists could ignore the concept of parallel universes may have come to an end.

If that doesn't send a shudder down your spine, think of it this way: our world is just one of many. You are just one version of many.

David Deutsch at the University of Oxford and colleagues have shown that

key equations of quantum mechanics arise from the mathematics of parallel universes. "This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science,"

says Andy Albrecht, a physicist at the University of California at Davis. In one parallel universe, at least, it will - whether it does in our one remains to be seen.

“This work will go down as one of the most important developments in the history of science”

The "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics was proposed 50 years ago by Hugh Everett,

a graduate student at Princeton University. Rather than apply one set of rules to the subatomic quantum world and another to the larger-scale everyday world, as physicists tend to do, Everett wanted to apply quantum mechanical equations to everything. This had some startling consequences.

According to quantum mechanics, particles do not have set properties before they are observed. Instead, particles are described by "wave functions" representing many mutually contradictory properties. It is only when an observer measures a property that the particle somehow settles into one of these multiple options. The paradox is exemplified by Schrödinger's cat - the famous thought experiment in which a cat in a box can be said to be both alive and dead. It is traditionally thought that the act of observation, opening the box to check the cat, is what forces it to settle into a state, living or dead.

If, as Everett argued,

quantum mechanics is applied to the whole universe, then it too should exist in a multitude of separate states. There would be a "multiverse" of parallel universes - one for every physical possibility. So when you open the box holding Schrödinger's cat, the universe splits, forming two new "yous" - one whose future involves viewing the live cat and the other who sees the dead cat.

Dismissed by the scientific establishment as ridiculous for decades, the many-worlds scenario may at last come in from the cold thanks to Deutsch's work.

The biggest criticism levelled at many worlds was that it seemed to make a puzzle about the outcomes of quantum experiments even worse.

Physicists can predict the probability of getting a certain outcome from a quantum experiment from the square of its wave function, according to the Born rule.

Nobody can explain why this rule works, it simply fits with experimental observations. The problem was there seemed to be no place for the Born rule in the multiverse. In fact, there didn't seem to be any space for any probabilities at all, says Deutsch.

"You toss a coin, but what does it mean to say that the probability of it coming up heads is 50 per cent?" Deutsch asks. "According to Everett, both outcomes must happen."

In the mid-1990s, Deutsch set out to put the uncertainty we see in quantum mechanical experiments back into the many-worlds scenario. Now, with additional work by Simon Saunders and David Wallace, also at Oxford, he believes they have succeeded. The trick is to examine a quantum experiment while excluding probability theory and accepting the many-worlds interpretation.

The multiverse has a branching structure, created as the universe splits into parallel versions of itself. The thickness of the branches can be calculated solely using deterministic equations, getting around the uncertainties usually associated with quantum physics. What the Oxford gang found is that the branching structure exactly reproduces the peculiar probabilities predicted by the Born rule. The branching also gives the illusion of probabilistic outcomes to measurements.

Deutsch believes this solves the problem of the origin of quantum probability once and for all. "Probabilities used to be regarded as the biggest problem for Everett, but ironically, they are now its most powerful success," he says.

"We've cleared up the obscurities and come up with a pretty clear verdict that Everett works," says Saunders, who is presenting the work with Wallace at the Many Worlds at 50 conference at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada, this week. "It's a dramatic turnaround and it means that people now have to discuss Everett seriously."

Albrecht agrees that the work will shake up physicists' worlds. "Many people are uncomfortable about the probabilities at the heart of quantum mechanics and attempt to get rid of quantum mechanics because of it," he says. "But this greatly amplifies the fundamental place of quantum mechanics in our understanding of the physical world."

David Papineau, a philosopher of physics at King's College London, says that he has been converted from scepticism about many worlds to belief, based on its potential to one day solve this puzzle of quantum probabilities. He adds, though, that the work by Deutsch, Wallace and Saunders must now be scrutinised. "It's an ambitious claim and so we have to be careful," he says. For Papineau, the problem is

whether a belief in parallel universes should affect the way we live our everyday lives

(see "Just another universe").

Max Tegmark at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has long been a fan of the many-worlds scenario. But while he believes the new work on probability should help convince physicists of its reality, it will never be enough to win over die-hard sceptics. "The critique of many worlds is shifting from 'it makes no sense and I hate it' to simply 'I hate it'," he says.

David Albert, a philosopher of physics at Columbia University, New York, is sceptical. He argues there is good reason to be wary because the Oxford group may be guilty of sleight of hand. "When you first hear about this you feel euphoric," he says. "But then you think, maybe this is too good to be true." He believes that it is irrelevant that Deutsch and his colleagues can show that branching universes give the illusion of probabilistic outcomes to measurements. What we really want to know, says Albert, is why this branching happens in the first place. "They have answered a question, but I think it's the wrong question," he says.

Wojciech Zurek at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico believes that the Born rule is exactly the right question to tackle. However, he believes that it can be answered without resorting to parallel universes. Zurek points out that Everett never used the term "many worlds" in his papers, and says that his work can be interpreted in less controversial ways.

Zurek is also inspired by Everett's ideas, particularly his insight that quantum mechanics must be applied to the entire universe rather than a limited quantum realm. He interprets this to mean that quantum entanglement - the process in which quantum particles can become inextricably linked and act in unison no matter how far apart they are - is a fundamental ingredient of quantum physics. Zurek has already used this property to explain why we see a single objective reality when we make a measurement of a quantum state (New Scientist, 30 June, p 18). Zurek says that entanglement can also be used to derive the Born rule (www.arxiv.org/abs/0707.2832).

"I could not have derived probability without using Everett," says Zurek, who is also presenting his work at the conference. "But at no point am I forced to assign equal reality to all other versions of the universe in the many-worlds scenario."

For Tegmark, the fact that many worlds is sparking such debate, 50 years after its conception, is a triumph in itself. He believes that physicists interested in quantum computing and cosmology are now warming to it. Will the majority be won over? "That depends on what parallel universe you live in," he says.

From issue 2622 of New Scientist magazine, 19 September 2007, page 6-7

Just another universe

Like Schrödinger's cat, you're locked in a box with a vial of poison gas. If a radioactive atom decays before someone opens the box to observe you, the gas will be released. According to the multiverse picture, in one future "you" will live, because the atom has not decayed, and in another "you" will die. So, should you be worried?

The issue of how we should feel and act when faced with a constantly splitting identity will be addressed by David Papineau of King's College London at a conference on the many-worlds scenario in Waterloo, Canada this week.

To start with, Papineau considers feelings of guilt and hope in the multiverse. Suppose that you are driving recklessly and narrowly avoid crashing into another car. "You might think 'lucky escape', but you should be feeling guilty about the passengers your other self has killed," says Papineau.

He also questions the use of hope. "You hope your football team will win a match, but that's meaningless - they both win and lose," he says.

Although each of our descendant selves is equally real, thankfully Papineau argues that their fates shouldn't affect our choices before we make them. We should be just as reluctant, or excited, about climbing into Schrödinger's box in the many-worlds picture, as we would be if we believed that only one outcome is actually realised.

Simon Saunders at the University of Oxford doesn't think that Papineau is wrong, but does think he is asking too much of us. "The multiverse will drive you crazy if you really think about how it affects your life, and I can't live like that," he says. His solution? "I'll just accept Everett and then think about something else, to save my sanity."

VOTE on the 'Faith smackdown': Richard Dawkins vs Francis Collins

2007-09-21T06:56:00.001+01:00

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1659,n,n

VOTE on the 'Faith smackdown': Richard Dawkins vs Francis Collins

by Wired Magazine

Reposted from:
http://www.wired.com/culture/geekipedia/magazine/geekipedia/faith_smackdown

Francis Collins vs. Richard Dawkins
Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project (and onetime atheist), rejects the notion that science is sufficient to disprove the existence of God. Biologist Richard Dawkins, aka Darwin's Rottweiler, insists that anyone who believes in an omnipotent creator is suffering a "delusion." Can the gloves of God defeat the punch of proof?

Click on the heads to score each round.

Click here to vote!
http://www.wired.com/culture/geekipedia/magazine/geekipedia/faith_smackdown

Misplaced Deity Sought By Christians

2007-09-21T06:49:00.001+01:00

clipped from www.turoks.net

So, I'm standing at a bus stop and they pull up. A car load of well meaning,
bible thumping nut cases that are just frantic! The middle aged professionally
dressed woman rushes forward...She takes my arm and with trembling voice,
she asks...."Have you found Jesus?" Her eyes plead with an urgency that is
out of proportion to a bus stop.

So calmly as I can muster, without being sarcastic, I reply, "You people
lost him, again?"

"What is wrong with you Christians? Every time I turn around you've lost
Him!" I hit her with a glare of accusation. "I mean really..." I take a measured
breath. "How do you expect to have anyone follow a deity that you can't even
find?"

"Of course, you Christians aren't much fun," I continue. By now they are
all out of the car. Befuddled, aghast, and at a loss for words. "Of course," I
offer trying to give them some defense for losing Jesus. "He could have left
due to religious differences. If I remember correctly, He was Jewish.

"Our Biotech Future" by Freeman Dyson

2007-09-18T01:05:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.edge.org/

In July, in an interesting and provocative essay in New York Review of Books entitled "Our Biotech Future", Freeman Dyson wrote:

The Darwinian interlude has lasted for two or three billion years. It probably slowed down the pace of evolution considerably. The basic biochemical machinery of life had evolved rapidly during the few hundreds of millions of years of the pre-Darwinian era, and changed very little in the next two billion years of microbial evolution. Darwinian evolution is slow because individual species, once established evolve very little. With rare exceptions, Darwinian evolution requires established species to become extinct so that new species can replace them.

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over. It was an interlude between two periods of horizontal gene transfer. The epoch of Darwinian evolution based on competition between species ended about ten thousand years ago, when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the main driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence which we call globalization. And now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.

It's clear from these developments as well as others, that we are at the end of one empirical road and ready for adventures that will lead us into new realms.zz

Spiritual Fraud -- Superstition and the Gullible -- a confession

2007-09-18T00:00:00.001+01:00

"No amount of evidence to the contrary, including confession by the fraud who performed the tricks, is good enough to sway the True Believer."

clipped from www.holysmoke.org

No matter how often the confidence scammers are exposed, those
who believe will happily continue to pay cold hard cash to be
deceived.

"The true-believer syndrome merits study by science.
What is it that compels a person, past all reason, to
believe the unbelievable? How can an otherwise sane
individual become so enamored of a fantasy, an
imposture, that even after it's exposed in the bright
light of day he still clings to it--- indeed, clings to
it all the harder?

"The true-believer syndrome is the greatest thing
phony mediums have going for them. No amount of logic
can shatter a faith consciously based on a lie."

No amount of evidence to
the contrary, including confession by the fraud who performed
the tricks, is good enough to sway the True Believer. If you
are among these poor souls, well, you have my sympathy, but you
must admit you "had it comming to you." After all, you
believe the impossible--- shouldn't you pay for such stupidity?

Spiritual Fraud -- Superstition and the Gullible -- a confession

2007-09-17T23:33:00.001+01:00

"No amount of evidence to the contrary, including confession by the fraud who performed the tricks, is good enough to sway the True Believer."

clipped from www.holysmoke.org

No matter how often the confidence scammers are exposed, those
who believe will happily continue to pay cold hard cash to be
deceived.

"The true-believer syndrome merits study by science.
What is it that compels a person, past all reason, to
believe the unbelievable? How can an otherwise sane
individual become so enamored of a fantasy, an
imposture, that even after it's exposed in the bright
light of day he still clings to it--- indeed, clings to
it all the harder?

"The true-believer syndrome is the greatest thing
phony mediums have going for them. No amount of logic
can shatter a faith consciously based on a lie."

No amount of evidence to
the contrary, including confession by the fraud who performed
the tricks, is good enough to sway the True Believer. If you
are among these poor souls, well, you have my sympathy, but you
must admit you "had it comming to you." After all, you
believe the impossible--- shouldn't you pay for such stupidity?

Airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god

2007-09-17T21:58:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://richarddawkins.net/article,1645,n,n

Airline sacrifices goats to appease sky god

by MSNBC

Reposted from:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20590374/

KATHMANDU - Officials at Nepal's state-run airline have

sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft,

the carrier said Tuesday.

Nepal Airlines, which has two Boeing aircraft, has had to suspend some services in recent weeks due to the problem.

The goats were sacrificed in front of the troublesome aircraft Sunday at Nepal's only international airport in Kathmandu in accordance with Hindu traditions, an official said.

"The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights," said Raju K.C., a senior airline official, without explaining what the problem had been.

Local media last week blamed the company's woes on an electrical fault. The carrier runs international flights to five cities in Asia.

It is common in Nepal to sacrifice animals like goats and buffaloes to appease different Hindu deities.

value of prayer = zero

2007-09-17T21:52:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://cectic.com/051.html

Swedish cartoon drawer in hiding

2007-09-17T21:40:00.000+01:00

reposted from:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6999652.stm

Swedish cartoon drawer in hiding

Lars Vilks (L) spoke to journalists the day before being whisked away

The Swedish cartoonist at the centre of a row over drawings of the Prophet Muhammad says police have taken him to a secret location for his own safety.

Lars Vilks said he was only able to pick up a few things when he returned from Germany at the weekend before police escorted him from his home.

The purported head of al-Qaeda in Iraq has offered $100,000 (£49,310) to anyone killing Mr Vilks.

Muslims regard visual representation of the Prophet as blasphemous.

Several Muslim countries have protested against the cartoon.

Mr Vilks said the Swedish secret services considered the threat against him as "very serious".

"The police guard was non-existent before this. It's 100% now," Mr Vilks said in a telephone interview with Associated Press agency.

"I can't live in my home, I've only been allowed to pick up some things."

Local laws

A man said to be the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, offered a reward for the murder of Mr Vilks in an audio message aired on the internet.

Nerikes Allehanda newspaper defended publishing the cartoon

The $100,000 (£49,310) reward would be raised by 50% if Mr Vilks was "slaughtered like a lamb", he said.

The cartoon showed the Prophet Muhammad's head on a dog's body and was published by Nerikes Allehanda newspaper on 18 August.

Many Muslims regard the dog as an impure animal.

But Ibrahim el-Zayat, of the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe, told the BBC that Muslims in the West had to live with the local laws on freedom of expression.

He said there were much more important issues to worry about, and praised the Swedish government for trying to defuse tensions.

This month, Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt met ambassadors from 22 Muslim countries over the issue.

Last year there were riots over Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, first published in September 2005 by the newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

Mocking The Faithful? Suck It, Jesus!

2007-09-17T09:16:00.000+01:00

reposted from:http://atheistrevolution.blogspot.com/2007/09/mocking-faithful-suck-it-jesus.html

Mocking The Faithful? Suck It, Jesus!

from Atheist Revolution by vjack

I think I can safely assume that everyone reading this has now heard about Kathy Griffin saying, "Suck it, Jesus" at the Emmy Awards. As expected, the self-appointed defenders of Christianity are up in arms, and many atheist bloggers are still laughing about it. American Atheists issued a statement condemning broadcasters for censoring Griffin's statement when they re-air the show. Something tells me that this will be yet another missed opportunity for some meaningful dialogue about the place of religion in our modern world.

I assume that Griffin's comments were intended to have a comedic effect in that she was making fun of the near universal tendency for celebrities to thank fictional beings during their acceptance speeches. She is hardly the first to call attention to this bizarre behavior or to mock it. The difference seems to be that she mocked it at the awards show and that her comments have been interpreted as mocking Jesus too.

Do I find her comments funny? Absolutely. I am disgusted with the celebrities and athletes who insist on thanking supernatural beings for their success, and I welcome those who would mock them. Their beliefs are both irrational and harmful; mockery is warranted. I am fully aware that believers are offended by such mockery. The thing is, they are practically begging for it when they continue to spew this nonsense. Pam, from Pam's House Blend sums it up perfectly:

I mean, c'mon, you believe that the Creator of all time, space, physics, and energy, who went to the trouble of engineering a Big Bang and shepherded tens of billions of years worth of cosmic thermonuclear reactions in order to create a life sustaining planet upon which He could create bodies to house souls and send His son to death by torture so you could go to Heaven forever even though you're a sinner by virtue of a fraud perpetrated by talking snake who offered a magical apple to a rib-woman, and you want to base our nation upon those principles and overturn 231 years of secular Constitutional rule, and YOU'RE offended by a D-list comedian saying "suck it, Jesus"?

The fact that such beliefs are religiously inspired does not make them exempt from criticism. As long as people are going to continue to restrict the liberties of others because of these beliefs and kill in service to these beliefs, mockery is not just permissible; it is mandatory.

If the decision to censor Griffin bothers you, here is something you can do about it.

Stephen Hawking Writing a SciFi Trilogy

2007-09-16T06:09:00.001+01:00

I will buy this set for sure - I love hard scifi

clipped from afp.google.com

Science should be 'as exciting as science fiction' says Hawking

CAMBRIDGE, England (AFP) — British astrophysicist Stephen Hawking revealed his desire on Monday to make "real science as exciting as science fiction" as he publicised a new book for children about the cosmos.

"George's Secret Key to the Universe", the first book in a planned trilogy, explains the workings of the solar system, asteroids, black holes -- one of Hawking's favourite topics -- and other celestial bodies with the help of a set of young heroes.

It will be released in French on Thursday, and in English a week later, and is set to be sold in 29 countries. The second book in the trilogy will be published next year.

"Our aim is to make real science as exciting as science fiction," Hawking said.

Asked about the choice facing the heroes in his book -- saving the world from global warming or finding another planet that is habitable for humans -- he said that, like George, he would opt to focus on both.

Review: Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton

2007-09-15T17:45:00.000+01:00

reposted from:http://stephenlaw.blogspot.com/2007/09/review-consolations-of-philosophy.html

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Review: Consolations of Philosophy by Alain De Botton

This review was published in The Mail on Sunday, back in 2000.

Was I too harsh?

Broken heart? Take some Schopenhauer. Frustrated? Try a little Seneca. Money-worries? Epicurus can help. In The Consolation of Philosophy, Alain De Botton takes a novel approach to popularizing philosophy, explaining how six different philosophers can help us in six of life’s darker moments. Consolations is tied to a new six-part Channel 4 TV series Philosophy: A Guide to Happiness, also written by De Botton. Given the hype and the link to a TV series, the book is likely to be a best seller. But how good an introduction to philosophy is it?

It does sound like a great idea. The market for self-help books is booming. And popularizing philosophy has become sexy, especially since the success of Sophie’s World. So why not mix the two together in one winning formula?

But can Seneca and Epicurus really help us with our woes? The trouble is, dispensing practical advice on life’s problems is not what philosophers do best, even when they do it at all - which is rarely.

Take Epicurus on money-matters. Epicurus points out that money can’t buy you happiness. Having great wealth won’t make you happy if you have no friends. And with good friends by your side you can still be happy even if you have few material possessions. All true, no doubt. But it’s hardly very deep, is it?

Or consider Seneca’s advice on dealing with feelings of frustration - one is less likely to feel frustrated if one lowers ones expectations to something more realistic. You don’t say.

Yet for those beset by money-problems or frustration, this platitudinous stuff is pretty much all Seneca and Epicurus have to offer. If you genuinely seek consolation and practical advice you would do better to ask Miriam Stoppard and Claire Rayner.

Readers new to philosophy might be forgiven for concluding that if this is what philosophers actually spend their time doing - writing comforting “guides to life” - and if, indeed, De Botton has provided us with six examples of the best they have to offer, then philosophy’s reputation has been vastly over-inflated.

That would be a shame.

Actually, philosophy really can enhance your day-to-day life, but not in the way De Botton suggests. Here’s how.

First,

those who have never really grappled with the big questions lead impoverished lives. Like goldfish that lack any sense of what lies beyond the glass wall of their bowl, they have no real sense of the great mysteries that lie beyond the boundary of their everyday lives.

Secondly, and more importantly,

those who have never taken a step back - who have lived wholly unexamined lives - are not just depressingly shallow, they are also potentially dangerous. To slip into the mental habits and unexamined assumptions of those around one is the mark of the moral sheep. And moral sheep are easily led astray.

Thirdly,

the intellectual skills that exposure to a little rigorous thinking about the big questions can foster are valuable. Being able to formulate a concise argument, follow a complex line of reasoning or spot a logical howler is always useful.

De Botton is to be applauded for trying to make philosophy accessible and relevant to the lay public. Certainly, Consolations makes for a largely effortless read. De Botton himself comes across as witty, affable, scholarly and disarmingly frank. The book is full of biographical details, historical asides and personal reminiscences, all of which help bring the sketches to life. As an easy introduction to what six philosophers have to say on six perennial personal problems, Consolations is undoubtedly a success.

But before you rush to buy it, be clear what this book is not. It is not much of an introduction to doing philosophy. Those who wish to exercise their thinking skills won’t get much of a workout. The six chapters are almost wholly descriptive. There is no critical engagement with any of the ideas presented. Indeed, we don’t even get much indication of whether De Botton himself agrees or disagrees with any of the six philosophers concerned. We are simply told what Socrates said about this and what Epicurus said about that.

My main concern about The Consolations of Philosophy is the false impression it gives - that Western philosophy actually aims, among other things, to console us and dispense practical advice.

Here’s a quote from review in Amazon that demonstrates just how deriously De Botton misleads his readers: “Philosophy is simply an old-fashioned term for what is now called self-help or counselling.” See what I mean?

Be warned - very, very few philosophers recognise this as the proper business of philosophy. Philosophy - like science - aims at truth. Sometimes the truth turns out to be consoling. But, often as not, the truth disturbs.

De Botton is at least partially guilty of dressing philosophy up as something it is not. He does so because he thinks this will make philosophy more palatable to the general public. Harmless enough, perhaps, so long as it is remembered that De Botton places centre-stage what philosophers actually do rather badly and pushes into the wings what they do well.

Dark matter clues in oldest stars

2007-09-15T15:51:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6993870.stm via http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/58641782-D2C7-46E6-8B4A-D904BB2BFF51/

Dark matter clues in oldest stars

By Liz Seward
Science reporter, York

Simulation: Warm dark matter would drive filamentary structures

A computer model of the early Universe indicates the first stars could have formed in spectacular, long filaments.

These structures, which may have been thousands of light-years across, would have been shaped by "dark matter".

Scientists know very little about this type of matter, even though it accounts for most of the mass in the cosmos.

The researchers told the British Association (BA) Festival of Science that their work could reveal the true nature of dark matter.

Liang Gao and Tom Theuns from Durham University, UK, also reported their findings in the journal Science.

Quick or slow

Astronomers believe that more than three-quarters of the matter in our Universe may be "dark". It does not reflect or emit detectable light, and so cannot be seen directly - but it does gravitationally pull on normal matter (the gas, stars, and planets we see in space).

It is this interaction that allows scientists to predict its existence - even if they cannot say what it is. Various types of exotic particle seem to be the favoured theory, with equally exotic names such as neutralinos, axions and gravitinos.

The new research, though, may give some clues as to dark matter's properties. Computer modelling suggests there is a link between the structures assumed by early stars and the temperature of the dark matter amongst them.

Tom Theuns, from Durham's Institute for Computational Cosmology, told the festival:

"What we found for the first time is that the nature of the dark matter is crucial to the nature of the first stars.

"In cold dark matter the particles move very slowly; in warm dark matter they move very quickly," he explained.

"We found that if the dark matter consists of these fast moving particles, then the first stars form in very long, thin filaments.

"The filaments have a length about a quarter the size of the Milky Way and contain an amount of matter and gas about 10 million times the mass of the Sun, so that provides a lot of fuel for many stars."

Exotic collection

Some of the stars that formed within the filaments would have had a relatively low mass, which is of interest to astronomers as they have a long lifespan and could still survive today.

Simulation: With cold dark matter, structures become clumpy

Dr Theuns added: "In stark contrast, what happens in (the simulation with) cold dark matter is very, very different.

"Here, the first stars formed in little lumps of dark matter, and just one star per dark matter lump. And these stars are probably very massive as well: 100 solar masses.

"Because these stars are so massive, they die very quickly; so you wouldn't find such stars in the Milky Way today," he said.

Scientists believe that the temperature of the dark matter indicates what kind of particles it is made of.

Observational pointers

The research team hopes answers could come from astronomers who are now scouring the skies to find signs of very old stars.

If dark matter is warm, then some of these very first stars may be in the Milky Way today.

However, detecting the massive stars formed in cold dark matter would require very powerful telescopes capable of "peering into the very distant Universe," Dr Theuns added.

"We don't know what the dark matter is, we don't know what the first stars are. If we bring these two problems together, when we know more about one, then we can say something about the other."

Quotations

2007-09-15T15:11:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.samharris.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8127

Teach Science, not Superstition! - hampsteadpete

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -Phillip K. Dick

"The differences between the Abrahamic religions are insignificant when compared to their similarities." - Carl Sagan

Francis Wheen's top 10 modern delusions

2007-09-15T14:45:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://books.guardian.co.uk/top10s/top10/0,6109,1140156,00.html via
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/Pharmacology/dc-bits/jurassic.html#edm1

Francis Wheen's top 10 modern delusions

Francis Wheen is a journalist and author of several books, including a highly acclaimed biography of Karl Marx. His collected journalism, Hoo-Hahs and Passing Frenzies, won the George Orwell prize in 2003.
Francis Wheen's new book, How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions, is published by Fourth Estate.
Buy How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World at Amazon.co.uk

1. "God is on our side"
George W Bush thinks so, as do Tony Blair and Osama bin Laden and an alarmingly high percentage of other important figures in today's world. After September 11 2001 Blair claimed that religion was the solution not the problem, since "Jews, Muslims and Christians are all children of Abraham" - unaware that the example of Abraham was also cited by Mohammed Atta, hijacker of the one of the planes that shattered the New York skyline. RH Tawney wrote in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism that "modern social theory, like modern political theory, developed only when society was given a naturalistic instead of a religious explanation". In which case modern social and political theory would now seem to be dead.

2. The market is rational
Financial sophisticates in the 21st century smile at the madness of the South Sea Bubble or the absurdity of the Dutch tulip craze. Yet only a few years ago they scrambled and jostled to buy shares in dotcom companies which had no earnings at all nor any prospect of ever turning a profit. To justify this apparent insanity, they maintained that such a revolutionary business as the internet required a new business model in which balance sheets were irrelevant. In short, they thought they had repealed the laws of financial gravity - until they came crashing down to earth.

3. There is no such thing as reality
Hence the inverted commas which postmodernists invariably place round the word. They see everything from history to quantum physics as a text, subject to the "infinite play of signification". But if all notions of truth and falsity cease to have any validity, how can one combat bogus ideas - or indeed outright lies? There is, for instance, a mass of carefully empirical research on the Nazi extermination of the Jews. As Professor Richard Evans points out, "To regard it as fictional, unreal or no nearer to historical reality than, say, the work of the 'revisionists' who deny that Auschwitz ever happened at all, is simply wrong. Here is an issue where evidence really counts, and can be used to establish the essential facts. Auschwitz was not a discourse."

4. We mustn't be "judgmental"
In 2002 the Guardian revealed that Christian fundamentalists had taken control of a state-funded school in Gateshead and were striving to "show the superiority" of creationist beliefs in their classes. When Jenny Tonge MP asked Tony Blair if he was happy that the Book of Genesis was now being promoted as the most reliable biology textbook, he replied: "Yes. . . In the end a more diverse school system will deliver better results for our children." This is the enfeebling consequence of unthinking cultural and intellectual relativism. If some schools start teaching that the moon is made of Swiss cheese or that the stars are God's daisy chain, no doubt that too will be officially welcomed as a healthy sign of educational diversity.

5. Laissez-faire capitalism is the prerequisite for trade and prosperity
The International Monetary Fund may say so, as it imposes Thatcher-style solutions all over the world, but its own figures tell a different story. Its report on The World Economy in the 20th Century", published in 2000, includes a graph - printed very small, perhaps in the hope that no one would notice - which shows that the pre-Thatcherite period between 1950 and 1973 was by far the most successful of the century. This was an era characterised by capital controls, fixed exchange rates, strong trade unions, a large public sector and a general acceptance of government's role in demand management. The average annual growth in "per capita real GDP" throughout the world was 2.9% - precisely twice as high as the average rate in the two decades since then.

6. Astrology and similar delusions are "harmless fun"
Those who say this never explain what is either funny or harmless in promoting a con-trick which preys on ignorance and anxiety. Yet even the Observer, Britain's most venerable and enlightened Sunday newspaper, now has a horoscope page.

7. Thin air is solid
Charles Leadbeater's book Living on Thin Air (1999), a starry-eyed guide to the "weightless economy", was described by Peter Mandelson as "a blueprint for what a radical modernising project will entail in years to come". The dustjacket also carried a tribute from Tony Blair, hailing Leadbeater as "an extraordinarily interesting thinker" whose book "raises criticial questions for Britain's future". Three years later, after the pricking of the dotcom bubble, industry secretary Patricia Hewitt admitted that "industrial policy in [Labour's] first term of office was mistaken, placing too much emphasis on the dotcom economy at the expense of Britain's manufacturing base...The idea of Living on Thin Air was so much hot air." Tactfully, she forgot to mention that the chief hot-air salesman had been her own leader.

8. Sentimental hysteria is a sign of emotional maturity
The psychotherapist Susie Orbach interpreted the 'floral revolution' outside Kensington Palace after Princess Diana's death as proof that we were "growing up as a nation". Will Hutton, radical social democrat and republican, said that the collective genuflection before a dead aristocrat showed that the British were "freeing ourselves from the reins of the past". The assumption is that emotional populism represents a new kind of collective politics. In fact, it is nothing more than narcissism in disguise.

9. America's economic success is entirely due to private enterprise
In the 19th century, the American government promoted the formation of a national economy, the building of railroads and the development of the telegraph. More recently, the internet was created by the Pentagon. American agriculture is heavily subsidised and protected, as are the steel industry and many other sectors of the world's biggest "free-market economy". At times of economic slowdown, even under presidents who denigrate the role of government, the US will increase its deficit to finance expansionary fiscal and monetary policies. But its leaders get very cross indeed if any developing country tries to follow this example.

10. "It could be you. . ."
This was the advertising slogan for the National Lottery, that monument to imbecility, which was introduced (fittingly enough) by John Major. And millions of British adults apparently believed it, even though the odds on winning the jackpot are 13m to one. It could be you. . . but it bloody well won't be.

Ten Bible Verses never preached on

2007-09-15T14:37:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://www.churchhopping.com/ten-verses-never-preached-on/ via http://richarddawkins.net/links

10. 2 Kings 2:23-24 NKJV

Then he went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up the road, some youths came from the city and mocked him, and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” So he turned around and looked at them, and pronounced a curse on them in the name of the LORD. And two female bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths.

Comments: George Costanza envokes the wrath of God.

9. Mark 14:51-52 NASB

A young man was following Him, wearing nothing but a linen sheet over his naked body; and they seized him. But he pulled free of the linen sheet and escaped naked.

Comments: Possibly the first streaker in history.

8. Deuteronomy 23:1 ESV

No one whose testicles are crushed or whose male organ is cut off shall enter the assembly of the Lord.

Comments: We can’t just be letting anyone in. We have to draw the line somewhere.

7. Genesis 38:8-10 NASB

Then Judah said to Onan, “Go in to your brother’s wife, and perform your duty as a brother-in-law to her, and raise up offspring for your brother.” Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so when he went in to his brother’s wife, he wasted his seed on the ground in order not to give offspring to his brother. But what he did was displeasing in the sight of the LORD; so He took his life also.

Comments: Not only do you have to carry the body out, but you have to mop the floor too.

6. 1 Samuel 18:25-27 ESV

Then Saul said, “Thus shall you say to David, ‘The king desires no bride-price except a hundred foreskins of the Philistines, that he may be avenged of the king’s enemies.’” Now Saul thought to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines. And when his servants told David these words, it pleased David well to be the king’s son-in-law. Before the time had expired, David arose and went, along with his men, and killed two hundred of the Philistines. And David brought their foreskins, which were given in full number to the king, that he might become the king’s son-in-law. And Saul gave him his daughter Michal for a wife.

Comments: How do you present a gift like that? Do you tie a bow on the box?

5. Exodus 4:24-25 NASB

Now it came about at the lodging place on the way that the LORD met him and sought to put him to death. Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin and threw it at Moses’ feet, and she said, “You are indeed a bridegroom of blood to me.”

Comments: I imagine the son was screaming in pain and Moses just kinda stared at it in disgust.

4. Ezekiel 16:17 NIV

You also took the fine jewelry I gave you, the jewelry made of my gold and silver, and you made for yourself male idols and engaged in prostitution with them.

Comments: What did she do with her gold and silver idols?

3. Ezekiel 23:19-20 NET

Yet she increased her prostitution, remembering the days of her youth when she engaged in prostitution in the land of Egypt. She lusted after their genitals as large as those of donkeys, and their seminal emission was as strong as that of stallions.

Comments: Can’t wait to hear this taught from a pulpit.

2. Judges 3:19-25 ESV

And Ehud reached with his left hand, took the sword from his right thigh, and thrust it into his belly. And the hilt also went in after the blade, and the fat closed over the blade, for he did not pull the sword out of his belly; and the dung came out.

Comments: Apparently the sword pierced all the way through and something unexpected came out the other side. The author felt this was a necessary detail to include.

1. Deuteronomy 25:11-12 NASB

If two men, a man and his countryman, are struggling together, and the wife of one comes near to deliver her husband from the hand of the one who is striking him, and puts out her hand and seizes his genitals, then you shall cut off her hand; you shall not show pity.

Comments: My question is why would she do this and were there any repeat offenders?

AAAS Panel: Communicating Science in a Religious America

2007-09-15T12:39:00.000+01:00

reposted from: http://scienceblogs.com/framing-science

AAAS Panel: Communicating Science in a Religious America

Posted on: September 14, 2007 12:43 PM, by Matthew C. Nisbet

For scienceblogs.com readers who have never been to an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, you are missing out on the world's greatest discussion of research and new ideas. In particular, I find that the meetings feature a one-of-a-kind forum for discussion of science and society issues, ranging from policy matters to public engagement. This year's meetings are in Boston, February 14-18. If the registration seems a bit pricey, believe me, it is well worth it to attend, plus you can build into the cost a year subscription to Science magazine.

At this year's meetings, I have organized a panel that addresses the science and religion nexus and the relationship to public engagement.

Titled Communicating Science in a Religious America,

the panel features Brown University biologist Ken Miller, Vatican astronomer Brother Guy Consolmagno, William & Mary anthropologist Barbara King, Kansas science standards chair Steve Case, and University of Wisconsin communication researcher Dietram Scheufele. The panel is moderated by David Goldston, former chief of staff for the House science committee, now a lecturer at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School and a columnist for Nature magazine.

As part of the panel, I will be presenting on the topic of

"The New Atheism and the Public Image of Science,"

a first paper based on a research project I am currently working on here at American University with the help of two graduate students.

Below is the synopsis for the full panel, time and date still to be set:

Over the coming decades, as society faces major collective choices on issues such as climate change, biomedical research, and nanotechnology, scientists and their organizations will need to work together with religious communities in order to formulate effective policies and to resolve disputes.

A major challenge for scientists will be to craft communication efforts that are sensitive to how religiously diverse publics process messages, but also to the way science is portrayed across types of media. In these efforts, scientists must adopt a language that emphasizes shared values and has broad appeal, avoiding the pitfall of seeming to condescend to fellow citizens, or alienating them by attacking their religious beliefs.

Part of this process includes "framing" an issue in ways that remain true to the science, but that make the issue more personally meaningful, thereby potentially sparking greater interest or acceptance.

With these themes in mind, the proposed

panel combines the insights of scientists who have been successful at engaging religious publics with the findings of researchers on how media messages and opinion-leaders shape the perspectives of citizens.

The panelists draw upon their experience working across the issues of evolution, climate change, stem cell research, and nanotechnology.

WASP

WASP (World Atheist Science People) transfer to HASSERS

The God FAQ

Debate between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ed Husain

Blair 'nutter' fear angers bishop

Divining pseudoscience

Gordon Moore tells how Moore's Law began and his predictions for chip development

Cloning using skin cells rather than stem cells

BHA - British Humanist Association - Science Vision

Onions 'cut heart disease risk'

You big, fat pile of bacteria

You big, fat pile of bacteria

Go ahead, roll in it. Revel in it. You're made of it. What, you prefer a meek, sterile world?

Mark Morford

Jury Awards Father $11M in Funeral Case

Jury Awards Father $11M in Funeral Case

by AP

'Thousands' pose UK terror threat

spoon bending fraud

On arguing with a believer

Noctilucent Clouds

The Great Carina Nebula

Shell shapes evolved to avoid 'turning turtle'

Shell shapes evolved to avoid 'turning turtle'

Synthetic life 'no terror threat'

Philosophy Matters: a review

Philosophy Matters: a review

Hillary brings up science, but will it stay in play?

Cellular Visions - the Inner life of a cell

Key gene work scoops Nobel Prize

Aurora, Stars, Meteor, Lake, Alaska

Astronomy Picture of the Day

appendix’s purpose

Scientists may have found appendix’s purpose

Seemingly useless organ may produce, protect good germs for your gut

Two Million Galaxies

Melyn Bragg - Antimatter

First Nontheistic Billboard

Friday, October 05, 2007

First Nontheistic Billboard

a Presidential Debate solely on the subject of science

A New Debate

by Matthew Chapman

George Carlin on God

Free Burma!

What can I do?

Free Burma!

Important Links

Information

Free Burma - Int'l Bloggers Day 04 Oct

International Bloggers' Day for Burma on the 4th of October

About "Free Burma!"

Spread the word

The Incas "fattened up" children for human sacrifice

Birds see magnetic fields

Questions for Christians, #1

Questions for Christians, #1

This about says it all to me by middle-aged-atheist

What is Science? What is Religion? by WASP

What is religion? What is Science?

Astronomy Picture of the Day - Milky Way

Astronomy Picture of the Day

Camelot is Only a Model: Scientific Literacy in the 21st Century

Sciences and pseudo-science at Think Humanism forum

About the British Humanist Association Science Group

My God Problem

My God Problem

by Natalie Angier

Needles 'are best for back pain'

Scientific Literacy and the Habit of Discourse

by Thomas W. Martin, Seed

Christian Mythology

An Effrontery Diacritical Mark

An Effrontery Diacritical Mark

Happiness by Stephen Law

Saturday, September 22, 2007

Happiness

Atheist, Agnostic, and Non-Religious - 10,000 members on Facebook

Mathematical cosmos: Reality by numbers

Mathematical cosmos: Reality by numbers