Supernatural Waste Watchers
Für ein naturalistisches Weltbild frei von übernatürlichen und mystischen Elementen
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Amazon.com - The Evidence for Evolution
Amazon.co.uk - The Evidence for Evolution
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Worth reading - you'll see why it's posted on rd.net, but I won't put the spoiler here
I still fondly remember the day my father told me, "Hey, I just got a letter from Joseph Heller."
Now, my father wasn't a big reader and rarely wrote letters, much less to authors. But when I went through a phase in high school of constantly carrying Catch-22 around and quoting from it and writing things like, "There was only one catch and that was catch-22" in magic marker on phone booths in the supermarket parking lot where I worked as a shopping cart retriever (superdistinguished summer job!), my father asked to borrow my copy and, to my surprise, became an instant fan.
I guess it shouldn't have been so surprising. He had served as a wartime second lieutenant and was fond of quoting to me and my sister such profound military maxims as, "There's a right way, a wrong way and the army way." (Which meant: Do things my way, right or wrong.)
And I think he was impressed when I stumped him with what I would later come to think of as Joseph Heller's hilarious refutation of Kant's Categorical Imperative.
There's a scene in the World War II novel when some officer or other reproves the novel's anti-hero, Capt. Yossarian, for trying to escape another of the ever-escalating number of dangerous bombing missions he's ordered to fly.
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God’s Blog – Paul Sims – The New Yorker
2 Aug2011
Via WEIT
UPDATE: Pretty pleased with what I’ve come up with in just six days. Going to take tomorrow off. Feel free to check out what I’ve done so far. Suggestions and criticism (constructive, please!) more than welcome. God out.
COMMENTS (24)
Not sure who this is for. Seems like a fix for a problem that didn’t exist. Liked it better when the earth was without form, and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.
Going carbon-based for the life-forms seems a tad obvious, no?
The creeping things that creepeth over the earth are gross.
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From Harry Potter to Game of Thrones, fantasy series are big hits. But are we in a bubble?
A little over a decade ago, I picked up a book at a used bookstore. On the cover, a lone rider crossed a snow-swept field on a black horse. A raven flew above the man's shoulder and a snow-covered castle loomed off in the background. By all accounts it was as generic an illustration as any other fantasy book at the time. I had never heard of it before, but it had a catchy title: A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin.
After reading the prologue I couldn't put it down. I read the first chapter standing in the bookstore. By the end of the second I knew it would be a late night. A Game of Thrones, I could tell already, was going to be different, and it was going to be good.
Shortly after reading the first book, which was originally published in 1996, and its sequel A Clash of Kings, the third book in the series was published. A Storm of Swords came out in October of 2000, and was the most gripping of the books to date. Although it was longer than all three Lord of the Rings books combined, I read it over the weekend.
It was five years before the fourth book, A Feast for Crows was released in October of 2005. Six more years passed before the fifth book, A Dance with Dragons, was published last month.
Much has changed in the fantasy market between my long weekend of reading in 2000 and the publication of Martin's latest book: Fantasy, it seems, has gone mainstream. And as the genre has become more and more popular, pushing book sales and spawning film franchises, you have to wonder: Are we in a fantasy bubble?
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The Air Force has suspended a training course for nuclear missile launch officers that used Bible passages and religious imagery to teach them about the ethics of war.
The course had apparently been taught by chaplains at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California for more than 20 years, but officials pulled the plug after an article from the liberal Web site Truthout.org appeared online last week.
The group obtained a PowerPoint presentation used in the course that referenced religious figures including Abraham, John the Baptist and Saint Augustine. The presentation also said that there are “many examples of believers engaged in wars in the Old Testament” and “no pacifistic sentiment in mainstream Jewish history.”
David Smith, a spokesman for the Air Force’s Air Education and Training Command, said that the program had initially been designed to “help folks understand why we’re doing what we’re doing. In the missile launch industry, it takes a certain mindset to be able to walk in the door and say, yes, I can do that.”
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In 1990, Terri Schiavo suffered a heart attack that left her in a persistent vegetative state. She came out of her coma but severe brain damage left her unresponsive with no detectable brain activity. Trapped in a state of “wakeful unconsciousness”, her condition triggered a lengthy legal battle between her husband, who wanted to end her life support, and her parents, who wanted to keep her alive. The debate over Schiavo’s moral rights raged for the better part of a decade, and the arguments were filled with people who claimed that her condition was a “fate worse than death”.
The phrase reflects a curious tendency to view people in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) as being deader than dead. Kurt Gray from the University of Maryland has found that people, especially religious ones, tend to think of PVS patients as having less mental capacity than a corpse.
Together with Anne Knickman and Daniel Wegner from Harvard University, Gray asked 201 volunteers to read an account of a car accident. The protagonist – David – either lived, died or entered into a PVS. “David’s entire brain was destroyed, except for the one part that keeps him breathing,” the third description read. “So while his body is still technically alive, he will never wake up again.’’
Gray asked the volunteers to rate how strongly they agreed with six statements about David’s state of mind. The results clearly showed that people see PVS patients as being more dead than dead. The volunteers were more likely to agree that dead David, compared to his PVS counterpart, could influence the outcome of situations, know right from wrong, remember the events of his life, have emotions and feelings, be aware of his environment, and have a personality.
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Last week I got to spend time in the NBC studio where they record Meet The Press — re-decorated for this occasion in a cosmic theme, with beautiful images of galaxies and large-scale-structure simulations in the background. The occasion was a special panel discussion to follow a Stephen Hawking special that will air on the Discovery Channel this Sunday, August 7. David Gregory, who usually hosts MTP, was the moderator. I played the role of the hard-boiled atheist; Paul Davies played the physicist who was willing to entertain the possibility of “God” if defined with sufficient abstraction, while John Haught played the Catholic theologian who is sympathetic to science.
The Hawking special is the kick-off episode to a major new Discovery program, called simply Curiosity. I predict it will make something of a splash. The reason is simple: although most of the episode is about science, Hawking clearly goes all-in with “God does not exist.” It’s not a message we often hear on American TV.
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Have a great idea for a scientific app but lack the coding skills to develop it? We’d like to hear it!
Submit your app idea by August 10th (12pm PDT) and we’ll present it to the developer community, who have the skills to make your dream app a reality. Ten (10) randomly selected winners will receive a PLoS t-shirt (Terms and Conditions apply).
Apps will be created by mining PLoS and Mendeley APIs and will have the potential to make your life easier and science more open. Here are just a few of the possibilities:
- Mine PLoS articles for statistically relevant words or phrases using the Solr API
- See how many people are reading your papers and how you compare to other researchers on Mendeley with ReaderMeter
- Determine the top papers read by researchers in particular subject areas in both Mendeley and the PLoS journal family
How To Submit Your App Idea:
- Complete the form at the Binary Battle App Idea Submission site OR
- Tweet your idea with the hashtag “#binarybattle” OR
- Leave a comment on this blog post with your idea and an email address
If you’re a developer, you may wish to enter your completed app into the Binary Battle by September 30th, 2011.
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