ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 292

Here’s What’s Needed for Self-Flying Taxis and Delivery Drones to Really Take Off

By Larry Greenemeier

Amazon, Uber and other tech giants want to fill the skies with small autonomous aircraft ferrying packages and people from place to place. For that to happen, these robotic drones—also called unmanned aircraft systems (UASs)—need an air traffic control system to keep them from crashing into buildings, human-piloted aircraft or one another. NASA is developing a UAS Traffic Management (UTM) network with several other organizations that the group plans to finish testing next year. Uber, in particular, has a lot riding on the UTM’s success—the ride-sharing company made several announcements last week to promote its proposeduberAIR taxi service. Big questions remain, however, as to whether and when any monitoring and management system will be able to handle the expected volume of large self-flying aircraft, which will be traveling great distances to deliver everything from pizzas to passengers.

Uber is onboard with NASA, at least. The company announced at its Elevate aviation conference in Los Angeles on May 8 and 9 it had signed an agreement to provide NASA with details and data about the inaugural uberAIR service it has planned for Dallas–Fort Worth. In return, the agency will use Uber’s data to make computer simulations of small passenger-carrying aircraft flying over the Texas Metroplex during peak air traffic times. Uber will analyze those simulations to help plan air taxi management in the already crowded skies over Dallas as well as Los Angeles and Dubai—the other cities hoping to start testing uberAIR by 2020.

Uber is targeting urban areas that have a population of more than two million people and a density of more than “2,000 people per square mile,” according to documents on Uber’s Web site. The cities must also have a large and dispersed layout that allows air taxis “to offer significant time-saving benefits at speeds of” 240 to 320 kilometers per hour. The company also points out flights will go from “node to node rather than point to point,” meaning there will be specific—rather than random—pickup and drop-off sites.

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Nevada Lt. Gov. Candidate Pushed Scientology on Former Employees, They Say

By Hemant Mehta

Usually, when we talk about Republican politicians promoting religion, we’re talking about the Mike Pences of the world pushing their Christianity anywhere they can.

In Nevada, however, Brent Jones, a former assemblyman and current candidate for lieutenant governor, is apparently the subject of multiple lawsuits from employees of his bottled water company because, they say, he pushed Scientology on them.

Riley Snyder of the Nevada Independent has more:

… Jones and the parent company of Real Water, Affinitylifestyles.com, have been targeted in several discrimination lawsuits by former employees, including one centered on claims that the former lawmaker required her and other new employees to watch videos with Scientology undertones that promoted the controversial system of religious beliefs founded by writer L. Ron Hubbard.

While one district judge ruled in Jones’ favor and Jones himself denied these allegations, there’s plenty of evidence that Scientology propaganda made its way into training courses for staffers.

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For many evangelicals, Jerusalem is about prophecy, not politics

By Diana Butler Bass

(CNN) As I watched Donald Trump announce that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and move our embassy to that city, I could only think of one thing: my high school youth group Bible study.

I know that sounds odd. Especially coming from a liberal Episcopalian like me. But there you have it. The President makes a world-important declaration about global politics, and an absurdly apocalyptic thought arises, “Jerusalem? The Last Days must be at hand!”

When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I attended a “Bible church,” a nondenominational congregation that prided itself on a singular devotion to scripture. We read the Bible all the time: in personal Bible study and evening Bible classes. We listened to hour-long Sunday morning sermons. For us, the Bible was not just a guide to piety. It also revealed God’s plan for history. Through it, we learned how God had worked in the past and what God would do in the future.

Central to that plan was Jerusalem, the city of peace, and the dwelling place of God. It was special to the Jews because it was the home of Abraham and David. It was special to us because it was where Jesus had died and risen. We believed that ultimately, Christ would return to Jerusalem to rule as its king. We longed for this outcome — and we prayed that human history would help bring about this biblical conclusion.

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Why Trump’s new CDC director is an abysmal choice

By Laurie Garrett

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has a new boss, Dr. Robert Redfield, who ignited controversy because of his dubious qualifications for the job and the over-the-top salary offer that came with it. Initially slated to earn $375,000 a year, Redfield faced questions from Democrats, led by Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, and last week agreed to work for $209,700 instead.

“Dr. Redfield did not want his compensation to become a distraction from the important work of the CDC and asked that his salary be reduced,” Caitlin Oakley, spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, said Tuesday night.

Redfield’s original salary was unusually, astoundingly high. Redfield’s boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar makes only $175,300, and most scientists and physicians working in HHS make less than $170,000 a year.

I scrutinized nearly 1,000 pages of payroll listings at the Department of Health and Human Services, and found few CDC employees who earn more than $150,000 annually. Some make considerably more than that, thanks to Title 42, a policy that gives federal agencies flexibility on salary limits in order to lure outstanding scientists and other professionals into government work.

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Mike Pence Says More Americans Believe In God Now Because Donald Trump Is President

By David Badash

Vice President Mike Pence delivered the commencement address to graduating students at a small, private, ultra-conservative Christian college in Michigan Saturday afternoon. Many consider the former Indiana governor a devout Catholic, and his speech certainly supported that perception.

The Vice President told the Hillsdale College graduating class that because Donald Trump is now president, more Americans believe in God.

“Faith in America is rising again because President Trump and our entire administration have been advancing the very principles that you learned here in the halls of Hillsdale College,” Pence said. “The principles that have always been the source of America’s greatness and strength.”

“Facts are facts,” Pence also insisted. “Faith is rising across America.”

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Family of suicide bombers kills at least 7 in Indonesia church attacks

By Alex Horton

A trio of Sunday church bombings in Indonesia that killed at least seven people were carried out by members of the same family, police said.

Six suicide bombers targeted three Christian churches during services in Surabaya, the country’s second-largest city. The bombers were a family of six, police said, including daughters ages 12 and 9 accompanied by their mother. Two sons, ages 18 and 16, carried out one of the attacks on a motorcycle, and the father used an SUV for his attack.

All six family members died in the coordinated bombings, which wounded at least 40 people, police said, including on-duty police officers. The Islamic State militant group asserted responsibility for the attacks, according to the SITE Intelligence Group.

President Joko Widodo visited the scene of the attacks. He said the “cowardly actions” of the attackers were “very barbaric and beyond the limit of humanity,” the Associated Press reported.

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How the religious right is shrinking itself: Overzealous Christianity is driving people away

By Amanda Marcotte

he story of the religious right and political power seems a straightforward one: White evangelicals, by using religious guilt and white identity politics, have organized in a way that allows them to punch above their weight. Only about one in four Americans identify with this group, and yet they control the Republican Party and played a huge role in electing Donald Trump president. In effect, they have gotten their hands on the levers of power.

But does the religious right’s apparent success have unintended consequences? For years now, some political scientists have argued that there’s a backlash effect to all this conservative Christian organizing: It’s causing many people, especially young people, to get fed up with religion and quit altogether. Last year, for instance, Robert P. Jones of the Public Religion Research Institute told Salon that it’s “young, white people leaving Christian churches that is driving up the number of religiously unaffiliated Americans.”

Now there’s more evidence that Jones is right: By organizing politically, the Christian right may be winning elections in the short term, but it’s also driving people out of the pews, which is likely to lead to long-term defeat.

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Radar reveals North Korea’s nuclear test moved a mountain

By Mark Zastrow

When North Korea detonated its most recent nuclear weapon deep inside its mountain test site, the peak’s flanks heaved up and outwards by a few metres, according to a detailed reconstruction of the event and its aftermath.

The analysis is the first to combine satellite radar images with seismic data to track the effects of the blast on 3 September 2017 at Mount Mantap. It also found that the explosion — which created a seismic disturbance registered at magnitude 6.3 — caused the top of the mountain to sink by about half a metre. The work is published on 10 May in Science1.

“I have mapped surface displacement from many geodynamic processes such as earthquakes, volcano eruptions, landslides, but I have never seen such a large displacement caused by human activity,” says study co-author Teng Wang, a remote-sensing and geodesy researcher at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

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IL Elementary School Principal Promotes Christianity in Flyers to Staff

By Hemant Mehta

This is the kind of flyer that La Harpe Elementary School (Illinois) Principal Lila McKeown hands out to teachers at staff meetings

That’s a lot of Jesus for one public school…

The Freedom From Religion Foundation says there are plenty of other examples of religious propaganda where this came from, and they’re calling on McKeown to stop it before a lawsuit needs to be filed. In a letter to Superintendent Dr. Ryan Olson, attorney Ryan Jayne writes:

As a government entity, La Harpe Elementary is constitutionally prohibited from promoting or endorsing religion… When Principal McKeown regularly promotes Christianity to teachers, and distributes passages from the bible at official district-sponsored events, employees will conclude that their government employer is endorsing religion over nonreligion and Christianity over all other faiths.

FFRF also notes that McKeown allows the Gideons to distribute bibles to students during the school day, which is absolutely illegal. (Passive distributions outside instructional time may be fine, but if you want to allow that, you better be ready for Satanists to offer some coloring books, too.)

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Americans With No Religion Greatly Outnumber White Evangelicals

By Ed Kilgore

It’s relatively well-known that the portion of the U.S. population with no religious affiliation has been steadily increasing recently. And for those paying attention to research, it’s also been obvious for a while that conservative evangelicals were beginning to lose “market share” after years of mocking their mainline Protestant cousins of “dying” because of insufficiently rigorous theology and moral strictures.

But now comes a new set of data from years of polling by ABC News and the Washington Post that puts these trends together in a way that might bust some old preconceptions. Between 2003 and 2017, the percentage of adult Americans professing “no religion” grew from 12 percent to 21 percent. And at the same time, the portion of the population made up by white evangelicals dropped from 21 percent to 13 percent. Indeed, the white evangelical population dropped even faster than the white non-evangelical population (which shrank from 17 percent to 11 percent), and the two groups are converging in size.

Among younger Americans, the trends are even starker. In 2003, only 19 percent of adults under 30 professed “no religion.” That percent rose to 35 percent in 2017. That’s compared to only 22 percent who identify with any sort of Protestantism.

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