November 2009
What are you for?
Stephen Fry: The Church is very loose on moral evils, because, although they try to accuse people like me, who believe in empiricism and the Enlightenment, of what they call 'moral relativism,' as if it's some appalling sin, where what it actually means is 'thought.' They, for example, thought that slavery was perfectly fine. Absolutely OK.
Anne Widdecombe: As did all societies of the time!
Stephen Fry: And then they didn't. And what is the point of the Catholic Church, if it says, 'Well, we couldn't know better, because nobody else did'? Then what are you for!
1.18 TeV ! →
The LHC has broken an 8-year record by accelerating protons to 1.18 tera-electronvolts. The guys in the lab coats running the LHC hope to eventually get the system up to about 7 TeV.
The previous record was 0.98TeV at Fermilab’s Tevatron in Illinois.
Black Holes they are a coming.
Swiss vote to ban minarets →
Switzerland, the European country that launders drug money and waited until 1971 to give women the vote, will now ban the building of any new minarets on Mosques in the country. Bans are not in place for the architectural flights of fancy of other religious sects.
"Scientists hiding climate data" Really? Then what... →
Relclimate.org has set up a web page with lots of links referencing publicly available climate data sources.
Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream shop now open in Manly,... →
Was in a previous post but it’s worth repeating.
First neutrino events detected by J-PARC →
With all news focusing on the LHC it’s easy to forget that it is not the only new accelerator around.
Physicists of the newly built J-PARC accelerator in Japan have announced the first detection of neutrino events by their machine. Neutrinos interact only very weakly with matter and thus it makes it very hard to detect them. Further tests are scheduled for December with the machine to...
Microsoft's top developers prefer old-school... →
Jeffery Snover, Microsoft Distinguished engineer, jokes that programming is getting so abstract that developers will soon be able to “write programs through interpretative dance”.
Now you know why it’s called Visual Studio.
“You burn about a quarter of a pound of coal per charge of your lithium ion...”
– Professor Neal R. Armstrong, “Solar power from your windows, awnings, even clothing?” (via ScienceDaily)
How green is your iPod?
Prof Armstrong is now now calculating how much coal is burnt per tweet.
“The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science … We...”
– Richard Dawkings, from his introduction to “The God Delusion“ (via The Rise Of Atheism)
Belivers: $4.5m; atheists: nil →
The Australian Victorian state government has refused to help fund “The Rise of Atheism Convention” which will be held in March next year. However, the Victorian Government was quite happy to hand over $4.5 million, more than 16 times the amount being requested by the Atheist Convention, to the organisers of the Parliament of the World’s Religions.
The Australian Prime Mister,...
"Jesus did... something... for you!"
tiredofbeingignored:
cocknbull:
…and other lies told to children.
Dear Christian friend,
you keep telling me God and Jesus are the same person. I really don’t care — let’s pretend they’re one. It just makes it easier for me, ridiculing one imaginary moron instead of two. But doesn’t that mean Jesus’ sacrifice is utter bullshit? God put himself on Earth to have himself murdered to save the...
“Our house was small, and when you grow up with domestic violence in a confined...”
– Patrick Stewart (yes, Capt. Picard) - The Legacy of Domestic Violence (via The Guardian) (via tiredofbeingignored)
pikkutiikeri:
I love myself. I think. Or then it’s just Stockholm Syndrome.
“If the Catholic church were a secular institution in Ireland and had been found...”
– “Lied Without Lying” - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (via danielholter)
“I don’t think Atheists oppose something that doesn’t exist. They oppose the...”
– opparaics
Australian Christian Lobby over joyed with... →
That should be reason enough to question the Australian Federal Government’s Internet censorship plans.
1 tag
Indian nun claims sex is rife within Catholic... →
In her autobiography “Amen” Sister Jesme alleges that not only did priests and nuns break their vows of celibacy with each other but that they regularly forced novices to have sex with them.
1 tag
Catholic Church committed "evil after evil" →
Ireland’s Catholic Church hid sex abuse for decades.
“The world is beautiful, but has a disease called Man.”
– Friedrich Nietzsche (via fuckyeahexistentialism) (via siddman)
Things that can go and get fucked - an occasional...
isay:
One of the things that really gets to me is when I go to use the urinal in the men’s toilet at work only to be confronted by stray pubic hair in the bowl.
It’s not that fucking difficult people. Trim your fucking pubes.
Honestly, has porn never taught you anything?
Surely, you should be thankful? Now that there’s no more smoking indoors, and thus no cigarette butts in the urinal,...
Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis... →
Interesting article on the fallout from the “leaked” emails from climate change researchers in the UK and the reaction and response from the scientific community.
Enironmentalists for Nuclear Energy Australia →
Wikipedia losing volunteers →
Record number of volunteer editors are deserting Wikipedia, the main complaint seems to be new rules making it much more difficult to add and update pages.
Hoax-Slayer →
By day Brett Chistensen is a mild mannered father and a former caravan park cleaner, by night he signle-handlely smashes internet scams from the comfort of his home.
Check out his site Hoax-Slayer.com
Hero!
Splitting Time from Space—New Quantum Theory... →
New hypothesis suggests that at high energies time separates from space; Einstien came up with the concept of spacetime as an integerated whole.
If true it sems to fix a number of things; gravity works at the sub-atomic level, and there is no longer a need for Dark Matter as it is just an illusion crated by graviton fluctuations interacting with “normal” matter.
Cool, but a long...
“Evolution is almost universally accepted among those who understand it, almost...”
– Richard Dawkins (via friendlyatheist) (via jlamere)
“Science should be taught not in order to support religion and not in order to...”
– Steven Weinberg (via cocknbull)
“Religion. It’s given people hope in a world torn apart by religion.”
– Jon Stewart (via iamheathen)
The Evolution Readiness Project →
The ER project is working with school districts in Massachusetts, Missouri and Texas to introduce fourth graders to the concept of evolution by natural selection.
“Without evolution, biology isn’t really science—it’s just...”
– Mary Carmichale, “Why Evolution Should Be Taught to Younger Kids” (via Newsweek.com)