ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 326
January 3, 2018
Egypt’s parliament in bid to ban atheism
By Shahira Amin
Egyptian security forces arrested Ibrahim Khalil, a 29-year-old computer science graduate, on Dec. 21, and prosecutors at the Dokki police station later interrogated him for five hours on accusations of “defaming religion.” He was ordered detained pending further investigations.
Khalil, who comes from a Christian family, is also accused of “administering a Facebook page that promotes atheism.”
“The Facebook page has been used to distort, defame and exploit the Quran. It was also found to contain comments questioning the existence of God,” chief of the Dokki prosecution office Hassan Ali was quoted as saying by the privately owned Youm7.
“During his interrogation by prosecutors, Khalil confessed to being an atheist and to creating the Facebook page to share his views on religion,” according to Youm7.
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January 1, 2018
The 100 best nonfiction books of all time: the full list
After two years of careful reading, moving backwards through time, Robert McCrum has concluded his selection of the 100 greatest nonfiction books. Take a quick look at five centuries of great writing.
Continue reading by clicking the name of the source below – and then feel free to share your own favorites here, along with a brief explanation of why you like them.
OPEN DISCUSSION – JANUARY 2018
This thread has been created for open discussion on themes relevant to Reason and Science for which there are not currently any dedicated threads.
Please note it is NOT for general chat, and that all Terms of Use apply as usual.
If you would like to refer back to previous open discussion threads, the three most recent ones can be accessed via the links below (but please continue any discussions from them here rather than on the original threads):
December 28, 2017
Louisiana superintendent refuses to stop illegally preaching to students — so now he’s getting sued
By Noor Al-Sibai
Despite blatantly breaking laws half a century old that prohibits schools from pushing religion on students, a superintendent in Louisiana’s Webster Parish refuses to stop doing exactly that.
In a Monday announcement, the American Civil Liberties Union said they are suing Webster Parish Schools and their superintendent Johnny Rowland for promoting Christianity at Lakeside Junior/Senior High School.
As the ACLU reports, the school day at Lakeside starts with a morning prayer over the PA, read either by teachers or by student “volunteers.”
“Nearly every Lakeside school event features an official prayer,” the report continues. “Graduation services are held in churches and often resemble religious services.”
Christy Cole, the mother of K.C., an agnostic Lakeside student, said that when her husband confronted Rowland (then the principal at Lakeside before his ), he was immediately rebuffed.
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Cracking the Brain’s Enigma Code
By Helen Shen
Brain-controlled prosthetic devices have the potential to dramatically improve the lives of people with limited mobility resulting from injury or disease. To drive such brain-computer interfaces, neuroscientists have developed a variety of algorithms to decode movement-related thoughts with increasing accuracy and precision. Now researchers are expanding their tool chest by borrowing from the world of cryptography to decode neural signals into movements.
During World War II, codebreakers cracked the German Enigma cipher by exploiting known language patterns in the encrypted messages. These included the typical frequencies and distributions of certain letters and words. Knowing something about what they expected to read helped British computer scientist Alan Turing and his colleagues find the key to translate gibberish into plain language.
Many human movements, such as walking or reaching, follow predictable patterns, too. Limb position, speed and several other movement features tend to play out in an orderly way. With this regularity in mind, Eva Dyer, a neuroscientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, decided to try a cryptography-inspired strategy for neural decoding. She and her colleagues published their results in a recent study in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
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Bangladeshi Atheist Blogger Faces Up To 14 Years for Hurting “Religious Feelings”
By David G. McAfee
An atheist blogger in Bangladesh was arrested at an airport on Monday, and he could get up to 14 years in prison because he “hurt religious feelings” with his social media posts criticizing Islam.
Immigration police detained 25-year-old blogger Asaduzzaman Noor, known as Asad Noor on Facebook and YouTube, at the Dhaka airport on Monday. Inspector Mohammad Shahidullah said hundreds of Muslims had staged demonstrations against Noor, which apparently is cause for prison time there.
‘The charge against him is that he hurt religious feeling[s] by mocking Prophet Mohammed and made bad comments against Islam, the prophet and the Koran on Facebook and YouTube,’ he said.
Noor is now facing up to 14 years in prison because a group of people were upset by his religious criticisms and rhetoric online. If I was arrested every time I offended some religious people, I wouldn’t be able to write this right now.
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Roy Moore files complaint to block Alabama Senate result
By Madison Park and Keith Allen
Roy Moore filed an election complaint on Wednesday, alleging potential voter fraud in Alabama’s special election and urged a delay in certifying the results.
Moore, a Republican, has refused to concede after losing the Senate race on December 12 to Democrat Doug Jones by more than 20,000 votes.
In its last-minute court battle to stop state officials from certifying Jones as the winner, the Moore campaign said certification should be delayed until a “thorough investigation of potential election fraud,” according to a press release.
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, however, told CNN’s “New Day” Thursday morning that he will certify Jones as the winner later in the day.</>
“Will this affect anything?” Merrill said, referring to Moore’s challenge. “The short answer to that is no.”
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December 27, 2017
Moon’s Supersonic Shadow Created Waves During the Solar Eclipse
By Laura Geggel
When the moon’s shadow zipped across the United States during the Great American Solar Eclipse this past August, the shadow traveled so fast it created waves in Earth’s upper atmosphere, a new study finds.
During a solar eclipse, the moon passes between the sun and Earth, casting its shadow in a narrow path across parts of the planet. Since the 1970s, researchers have suspected that the moon’s shadow, which travels at supersonic speeds during a solar eclipse, could create waves in the ionosphere— a part of Earth’s upper atmosphere that has electronically charged particles.
But they hadn’t been able to prove it until now, the researchers told Live Science.
Bow waves
Researchers suspected that the moon’s shadow could “make waves” because when the moon travels between the sun and Earth, its shadow blocks the sun’s energy, rapidly cooling the area beneath it. But because the shadow moves so quickly, anything in its wake is swiftly reheated. This sudden temperature change was thought to generate waves in “the atmosphere at altitudes where the ozone layer and water vapor efficiently convert solar [ultraviolet] radiation to heat,” the researchers wrote in the study.
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What Is ‘Water Memory’? Why This Homeopathy Claim Doesn’t Hold Water
By Rafi Letzter
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced Dec. 18 that it plans to crack down on dangerous or dishonestly advertised homeopathic products — a class of products that sellers claim treat diseases by delivering extremely diluted traces of the substances that cause those diseases in the first place. If certain homeopathic remedies become more difficult to access due to the crackdown, what will homeopathy users miss out on?
Homeopathy dates to the 1700s, according to a statement from the FDA, and relies on the idea of “like cures like” — that symptom-causing chemicals can, at low enough doses when mixed with water, treat the symptoms that those substances cause. In other words, a chemical that causes vomiting would be given at a very diluted concentration to treat vomiting. And the more diluted the substance, the more potent the beneficial effects, the thinking goes.
But is there any real science behind this idea?
The British Homeopathic Association (BHA)’s website acknowledges that homeopathic remedies might seem “implausible for many people,” because “the medicines are often — though by no means always — diluted to the point where there may be no molecules of original substance left.”
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North Carolina’s big school voucher problem
By Lauryn Higgins
In July of 2013, North Carolina governor Pat McCrory signed a state budget that included school choice vouchers for students and implemented a new program called the Opportunity Scholarship Program. At the time, North Carolina was the tenth state to implement a program that has now grown to 13 states and the District of Columbia.
The Opportunity Scholarship Program allows students in underserved public schools the chance to attend a private institution and receive an education with a grant of up to $4,200 a year, which is funded through tax-payer dollars. Kindergarten through twelfth grade students who come from a low-income, military or foster home family qualify for the scholarship.
At its conception, the program was well received. Darrell Allison, president of Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, said that “Thousands of our neediest students will have access to additional schools that could potentially best meet their needs. This was accomplished, in large part, due to the determination of legislators on both sides of the aisle and their willingness to roll up their sleeves and find a way to get it done. For that, we thank them.”
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