Archive for May, 2008
Religion Vs. Science In My Local Bookstore
Recently the Pharyngula blog posted about a small prank involving moving all the books from the single religion bookshelf in their local bookstore to other areas in the store. In the comments, many of the southern readers couldn’t believe there was only one bookshelf in the store dedicated to religion. So I decided to snap some photos of what my local Hastings store (the only local store that could be called a bookstore) looks like. Here in Tullahoma, Tennessee, we obviously have a greater demand for Christian and Christian study books than science. I apologize in advance for the crummy photography. The staff started looking at me strangely.
Bad First Day
This is one of my all time favorite old Bob Newhart stand-up bits.
I Got Inspired
Every once in a while, I get inspired to create something. Sometimes it’s a music idea and sometimes it’s something more tactile. I was watching Brian Eno’s 77 Million Paintings last night and got a surge of inspiration. One of the combinations of art produced a silhouetted figure with various degrees of splatter art making up the insides. I didn’t get a screenshot of the Eno art but here are 3 small pieces inspired by it.
I’ve always liked working with the shapes of people without going into the details of those people’s appearances. I like leaving out things like facial expressions and emotional body language on purpose so you can focus on the overall common shapes and attributes that go along with those commonalities. I might do more of these but there’s a ‘tactile’ bug approaching me and I thing I’m going to be doing something more hands-on next.
Humanism In British Schools
The British Humanist Association have just launched a new website of various educational resources to help professionals teach Humanism in schools - maintaining their lead over America in the race to be a reasonable nation.
Similar to the AHA’s Kochhar Humanist Education Center, the BHA’s site offers toolkits, presentations, videos and official documentation on humanist views from the BHA.
The teachers’ area offers a number of easy to use online toolkits for teachers to use when wishing to explain the background to Humanism and its core values.
I smiled while browsing through their excellent library when I stumbled upon school worksheets for children with titles like “What Makes Us Special?” and “Using Reason And Evidence To Decide What Is True” and knowing there were no religious undertones behind them.
I think it’s great to see more of these resources popping up. There are a lot of very creative non-religious people out there and resources like these give those people the mental weaponry to create really great works of art and social statements.
Brian Eno On Evangelical Atheism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2shEwFjhzA4
Obama Winning The Non-Religious Vote
An interesting article at the Washington Post reveals that Obama has so far successfully won over non-religious voters in almost every state.
… of the 30 states where I could find comparable data, Obama won the “no religion” crowd an astonishing 26 times!
The author makes a good point regarding Obama’s seeming success with the non-religious minority while increasing the amount of religious rhetoric at the same time.
The secularists I speak with usually mention three arguments for ignoring his faith-based exuberance. The first–and most dubious–is that Obama is just pandering to crucial voting blocks and will regain his senses upon moving into the White House.
More plausibly, others suggest that his background as a student and scholar of constitutional law insures that he will never violate the sanctity of The Wall. Last, it is often remarked that Obama is a true liberal. Secularists, so I have been told, have little to fear from a true liberal.
You can throw me into the ’sanctity of The Wall’ group. While I don’t believe he’s just pandering to a religious crowd, I’m not that concerned with the increase in religious talk. The man can add injections of religious tonality to his speeches all day long for all I care as long as he doesn’t try to make the same injections into our legislature. And I don’t think he will. Which is why I, apparently like so many other non-religious people, support Obama.
Via: Washington Post
I Didn’t Want Your Crummy Cars Anyway
A small Ford dealership in Mojave California has decided to appeal to their community’s Christian majority by telling everyone else to sit down & shut up. Keiffe and Sons Ford have been running to following ad on at least one local radio station:
But did you know that 86% of Americans say they believe in God? Since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians, who believe in God, we at Keiffe & Sons Ford wonder why we don’t tell the other 14% to sit down and shut up. I guess maybe I just offended 14% of the people who are listening to this message. Well, if that is the case then I say that’s tough, this is America folks, it’s called free speech. None of us at Keiffe & Sons Ford are afraid to speak out. Keiffe & Sons Ford on Sierra Highway in Mojave and Rosamond, if we don’t see you today, by the grace of God, we’ll be here tomorrow.
Here’s a recording of the actual ad.
So far, Ford Motor Company doesn’t seem too concerned about their public image being tarnished. That might change if enough non-religious people call them (1-800-392-3673 between the hours of 8am and 5pm, local time, Monday through Friday. Hearing impaired callers with access to a TDD may contact us by calling 1-800-232-5952.) and express how this kind of advertising makes them feel. You could also call in to some of the local radio stations and express your concerns or build a little local news around it. Christians are very good at waving the ‘offended’ card in front of the news media’s face. Maybe we should try it.
Via: Pharyngula
Worth Mentioning This Week
With Memorial Day AND Towel Day both coming up, it’s been a very busy week at work and at home and the blog has suffered as a result. Here are some links worth mentioning that I most likely would have written blog posts about had I not been so busy.
- Mike the Mad Biologist posts about why Tenure is so important.
- The International Space Station (ISS) is visible in the sky all this week. Phil Plait has the scoop.
- The Texas State Board of Education is in very big trouble.
- The deepest living organisms on Earth have been discovered at temperatures reaching 100 °C.
- A new study shows some human traits aren’t so unique to humans after all.
More TN Bible Nonsense
Tennessee is on a roll this month. First we’ve got Bible Study in public schools and now we’ve got people wanting to build a Bible theme park in Rutherford County.
A developer wants to build what would be the country’s largest Bible-based theme park in Tennessee, depicting scenes such as the parting of the Red Sea. But the plan has created a deep divide among locals.
Some welcome the $200 million, 280-acre Bible Park USA project as a way to bring in much-needed revenue to Rutherford County, while others are concerned about making money off the Bible.
$200 million? Really? And they’re worried about making money off the Bible? You’ve got to be kidding me. Isn’t there somewhere that amount of money could be better applied? Like AIDS, cancer or disaster relief? I’m also quite sure the 280 acres could be better used for landfill.
Via: NPR
Animated Wall Painting by Blu
Large-scale street artist Blu made this animated wall painting and it’s awesome. It also looks like a fantastic high school art project for a city wanting to clean up an area’s graffiti.
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Click here if you don’t see the video above.
Sunday School For Humanists
The American Humanist Association announced the Kochhar Humanist Education Center (KHEC) last week during a Washington DC press conference. The center’s core focus is to develop the curriculum for a secular equivalent of Sunday schools. The center is already developing curriculum standards and has released the first bits of what is to become a massive online library of humanist and freethought literature. I only had time to quickly flip through the online library but instantly found quite a few excellent short reads on religion, history and philosophy.
I like the overall concept.
“Religious organizations have long had educational programs and institutions for passing on their values to each new generation. These have included Sunday schools, private religious schools and an abundance of resources for parents,” said Dr. Bob Bhaerman, education coordinator of the KHEC. “Now it’s time for nontheistic people–whether they call themselves humanists, atheists, agnostics or even identify with a more traditionally religious label–to more effectively share their values with future generations and deepen the understanding of those values among adults.”
I think this is one of those areas where we can definitely fill religion’s shoes. Their lessons focus on compassion, critical thinking, science, and human relationships for children and adults. I think the problem will come in the form of a lack of local support, funding and interest. I hope this initiative fares well and grows to massive proportions and I’d love to see programs like this in my own local town.
Via: American Humanist Association
Women Have No Emotions During Orgasm
Somehow I knew this. I never had the evidence to back up my claim, until now.
To better understand the science of sex, researchers are using PET scanners to map the areas in the brain that are excited during sexual encounters and orgasm. When comparing the results of men to those of women, the researchers uncovered somewhat counter-intuitive data. The scans for men showed an increase in emotional activity as well as a decline in vigilance and fear whereas the women’s scans showed no emotional activity at all during orgasm.
[In men] scientists also saw heightened activity in brain regions involved in memory-related imagery and in vision itself, perhaps because the volunteers used visual imagery to hasten orgasm. The anterior part of the cerebellum also switched into high gear. The cerebellum has long been labeled the coordinator of motor behaviors but has more recently revealed its role in emotional processing. Thus, the cerebellum could be the seat of the emotional components of orgasm in men, perhaps helping to coordinate those emotions with planned behaviors. The amygdala, the brain’s center of vigilance and sometimes fear, showed a decline in activity at ejaculation, a probable sign of decreasing vigilance during sexual performance.
To find out whether orgasm looks similar in the female brain, Holstege’s team asked the male partners of 12 women to stimulate their partner’s clitoris—the site whose excitation most easily leads to orgasm—until she climaxed, again inside a PET scanner. Not surprisingly, the team reported in 2006, clitoral stimulation by itself led to activation in areas of the brain involved in receiving and perceiving sensory signals from that part of the body and in describing a body sensation—for instance, labeling it “sexual.”
But when a woman reached orgasm, something unexpected happened: much of her brain went silent. Some of the most muted neurons sat in the left lateral orbitofrontal cortex, which may govern self-control over basic desires such as sex. Decreased activity there, the researchers suggest, might correspond to a release of tension and inhibition. The scientists also saw a dip in excitation in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, which has an apparent role in moral reasoning and social judgment—a change that may be tied to a suspension of judgment and reflection.
Brain activity fell in the amygdala, too, suggesting a depression of vigilance similar to that seen in men, who generally showed far less deactivation in their brain during orgasm than their female counterparts did. “Fear and anxiety need to be avoided at all costs if a woman wishes to have an orgasm; we knew that, but now we can see it happening in the depths of the brain,” Holstege says. He went so far as to declare at the 2005 meeting of the European Society for Human Reproduction and Development: “At the moment of orgasm, women do not have any emotional feelings.”
In all honesty, I’m a bit skeptical. I’m sure the act of being studied played a part in the results and I wonder if this was taken into consideration. That kind of ’stage fright’ or ‘performance pressure’ can play havoc on a person’s emotional state. Maybe their concentration on the job at hand shifted the balance of emotion and logic in favor of the latter.
Via: Scientific American
Think Singmaster Can Solve This One?
The Rubik’s Cube was fun and difficult. The Megamix just gave me headaches. Bring it all into the 4th dimension and you’ve got a puzzle only a physicist could love. Or someone with serious OCD.
But that’s what these developers did when they created a “a fully functional 120 Cell permutation puzzle” as a freeware game for Windows that requires .Net Framework 2.0 to run.
The Magic120Cell has a staggering 2.3 x 108126 possible permutations (that’s a really, really big number!) compared to the original’s 4.3 × 1011.
The developer’s say it’s solvable but I have my doubts it’ll be done anytime soon.
If you’re looking for a 4D Rubik’s Cube (or a Rubik’s Hypercube) you might check out the Magic Cube 4D.
Via: OgasaWalrus.com
I’m A Six On The Dawkins Scale
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins created a scale of points along the spectrum of humanity’s belief in God. The scale ranges from 1 (total belief in God) to 7 (total non-belief) with 4 being exactly 50/50.
I put myself in category 6 along with most of the atheists I know. I find it amusing how many people include themselves in category 1 with absolutely zero skepticism. They KNOW! Give me a break. It’s very difficult to know anything when it comes to really complex things. We can be 99% sure – like really, really positively sure about things, like gravity, but there’s always the chance we’ll discover something new. That’s the beauty of science. It’s assimilating new data as it comes in instead of relying on an ancient book written in the first century.
I liked Dawkins’ scale and wanted to do a little more than just write about it, so I created a set of 14 images (7 for light backgrounds and 7 for dark) that you can download and put on your blog to show where you stand on the scale. Some of the text on the images differs slightly from Dawkins’ but, I think, maintain the meaning. If you edit or improve the images, let me know in the comments and I may update the whole set.
On Omnipotence & Omniscience
Can omniscient God, who
Knows the future, find
The omnipotence to
Change His future mind? – Karen Owens
