ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 359

“In God We Trust” Signs Will Be Posted in Arkansas Classrooms Due to New Law

By Hemant Mehta

When public schools open up in Arkansas this year, they will all have to display the phrase “In God We Trust” in every library and classroom, provided that the signs are donated or contributions are made specifically for that purpose. The same rule will apply to all buildings funded by taxpayer dollars.

This unnecessary commercial for religion was passed earlier this year with House Bill 1980, which claimed to be about promoting the national motto (Patriotism!) even though this sort of thing is never about patriotism. The kids already say the Pledge of Allegiance. Is that not enough? Staring at a sign doesn’t make you more of an American.

If patriotism was the overriding concern, then schools would have signs saying “e pluribus unum” or something that actually unites us all. Instead, they’re alienating more than a third of young people who don’t belong to any traditional religion.

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Mummy autopsy reveals earliest known case of liver parasite

By Colin Barras

It might have been what the doctor ordered, but it didn’t do the patient much good. A 375-year-old mummified man discovered in South Korea had a parasitic liver infection caught by eating raw shellfish, which the man might have done on medical advice.

Jing Lee died in 1642 at the age of 63 and was buried in what is now Cheongdo. His body was remarkably well preserved when archaeologists unearthed it in 2014.

With permission from Jing Lee’s descendants, a team led by Min Seo at Dankook University College of Medicine, South Korea, CT-scanned the mummy. This revealed a strange lump on the man’s liver.

The team removed the lump and found it contained golden-brown eggs, each roughly 85 micrometres long. They identified them as belonging to a parasitic fluke, Paragonimus westermani. That means Jing Lee was suffering from hepatic paragonimiasis when he died. He is the oldest known case, say Seo and her colleagues.

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This ancient Babylonian tablet may contain the first evidence of trigonometry

By Ron Cowen

Trigonometry, the study of the lengths and angles of triangles, sends most modern high schoolers scurrying to their cellphones to look up angles, sines, and cosines. Now, a fresh look at a 3700-year-old clay tablet suggests that Babylonian mathematicians not only developed the first trig table, beating the Greeks to the punch by more than 1000 years, but that they also figured out an entirely new way to look at the subject. However, other experts on the clay tablet, known as Plimpton 322 (P322), say the new work is speculative at best.

Consisting of four columns and 15 rows of numbers inscribed in cuneiform, the famous P322 tablet was discovered in the early 1900s in what is now southern Iraq by archaeologist, antiquities dealer, and diplomat Edgar Banks, the inspiration for the fictional character Indiana Jones.

Now stored at Columbia University, the tablet first garnered attention in the 1940s, when historians recognized that its cuneiform inscriptions contain a series of numbers echoing the Pythagorean theorem, which explains the relationship of the lengths of the sides of a right triangle. (The theorem: The square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the square of the other two sides.) But why ancient scribes generated and sorted these numbers in the first place has been debated for decades.

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Kansan Fired From Republican Kris Kobach’s Office For Not Going To Church

By Joe Parton

A Kansas woman testified in federal court Tuesday that she believes she was fired from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach’s office because she did not go to church.

Courtney Canfield sued the secretary of state’s office and Assistant Secretary of State Eric Rucker, the man who hired her. Kobach is not named in the lawsuit.

On Tuesday, Canfield – who worked less than a year as an administrative assistant in the office in 2013 – testified she did not participate in the office’s after-hours Bible study group and objected to religious materials that were often passed around.

“I didn’t think it was appropriate for the workplace,” Canfield said.

Instead of being notified of her firing by her supervisor, Canfield received the news from her grandmother Margie Canfield, a Kansas Republican Party employee and longtime acquaintance of Rucker.

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Huh, Another Study Says Abstinence-Only Sex Ed Doesn’t Work

By Kaleigh Rogers

You know how sometimes you read a headline about a scientific study and the finding is so obvious you wonder “why did they even bother?” Enter: a comprehensive review of studies published Tuesday that found teaching teens only the “wait-until-marriage” kind of sex ed doesn’t work.

Try not to faint from shock.

What’s important here, though, is that researchers have been racking up data and evidence for decades showing that abstinence-only sex education isn’t effective. It not only fails to delay the age when teens first have sex, but also fails to reduce unintended pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted infections. Sadly, there is a need to continue this research because, in spite of all the evidence, some lawmakers still love abstinence-only sex education, and it’s common—and increasing—in schools across the United States.

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Wonky signals from distant stars could be sign of exocomets

By Jesse Emspak

The Kepler space telescope has seen thousands of exoplanets, and now we can perhaps add exocomets to the list. Potential evidence of comets has been found around two stars known as KIC 3542116 and KIC 11084727, both about 800 light years away.

Kepler finds planets by measuring the intensity of a star’s light over time. When a planet passes in front of its host star, an event called a transit, the light dims slightly. The “light curve” – a graph of the star’s brightness over several days – shows a symmetrical shape, with the light levels dropping and then rising again at equal rates.

This symmetry arises because both planets and stars are spherical, but the transits found by Andrew Vanderburg at Harvard University and his colleagues were asymmetrical, meaning that whatever made them was not a sphere. The team turned to comets as a possible culprit, because they release gas and dust from one side, creating long tails that stretch out into space.

“If you have a bunch of dust that you put in space, it will expand quickly outwards, not necessarily be symmetric,” says Vanderburg. You would see a steep dip in the star’s light, followed by an uneven rise.

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State Department Science Envoy Explains Why Trump Drove Him to Resign

By Annie Sneed

Energy researcher Daniel Kammen stepped down this week as a science envoy for the U.S. State Department. In a public resignation letter addressed to President Donald Trump, Kammen lambasted the president’s response to the recent violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also lamented what he called Trump’s overall “attacks on core values of the United States.” The first letters taken from each paragraph of Kammen’s letter spell the word “IMPEACH.”

Kammen is a professor of energy and director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a member of Scientific American’s board of advisors. He was one of eighteen scientists and engineers who have participated in the envoy program since the Obama administration established it, as part of an effort to develop scientific and technological partnerships with other nations in regions including the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In this position Kammen worked on energy and climate issues in Africa and the Mid-East.

In addition to citing Trump’s failure to denounce white supremacists in Charlottesville, Kammen said he felt the president’s actions and words had damaging consequences for his work as science envoy. “Your decision to abdicate the leadership opportunities and the job creation benefits of the Paris Climate Accord, and to undermine energy and environmental research are not acceptable to me,” Kammen wrote in his resignation letter. “Your actions to date have, sadly, harmed the quality of life in the United States, our standing abroad, and the sustainability of the planet.”

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I’m a founder of the Satanic Temple. Don’t blame Satan for white supremacy.

By Lucien Greaves

Soon after the violent white supremacist protests in Charlottesville this month, religious leaders and pious politicians began the usual drudgery of fitting the events into their preferred narratives.

Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) seized the opportunity to rail against secularism, declaring that the whole thing was but a symptom of a rampant evil that has been allowed to freely permeate public schools unmitigated by the moral corrective of compulsory Bible study. Some Christian leaders, such as Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., said little about the actual events in Charlottesville, but praised President Trump’s “bold” and “truthful” statement at his news conference three days after the protest, which claimed “many sides” were to blame and that all sides harbored some “very fine people.” American Family Radio host Bryan Fischer blamed Democrats.

But the consensus among Christian leaders was that Satan was at fault. As Evangelist Franklin Graham put it: “Shame on the politicians who are trying to push blame on President Trump for what happened in Charlottesville. … Really, this boils down to evil in people’s hearts. Satan is behind it all.” Premier Christianity, a popular news and culture blog “from a Christian perspective,” condemned both white supremacy and Trump’s equivocating response to it as “Satanic.” Similarly, Morgan Guyton, director of the NOLA Wesley Foundation, the United Methodist campus ministry at Tulane and Loyola universities in New Orleans, saw in Charlottesville a “manifestation of Satan’s power.” Russell Moore, president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, denounced white supremacy as “Satanism” and “devil-worship.”

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Football coach’s on-field prayer not protected by Constitution, appeals court rules

By Maura Dolan

A Christian football coach suspended for kneeling and praying on the 50-yard line after high school games lost a bid Wednesday to be reinstated and allowed to worship in front of students.

A three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that Bremerton, Wash., High School football coach Joseph A. Kennedy was serving as a public employee when he prayed in front of students and parents immediately after games, and the school had the right to discipline him.

The Bremerton School District, located in Kitsap County across Puget Sound from Seattle, serves about 5,057 religiously diverse students, the court said.

Kennedy, an assistant football coach there from 2008 to 2015, led students and coaching staff in locker-room prayers before and after most games and also prayed on the 50-yard line after games.

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A physicist explores the future of artificial intelligence

By Haym Hirsh

Whether it’s reports of a new and wondrous technological accomplishment or of the danger we face in a future filled with unbridled machines, artificial intelligence (AI) has recently been receiving a great deal of attention. If you want to understand what the fuss is all about, Max Tegmark’s original, accessible, and provocative Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence would be a great place to start.

The book’s goal is not to tell us what being human will look like in the years ahead, as the title might seem to suggest, but rather to give us the background necessary to understand where technology might lead the human species. In this it succeeds, bringing well-timed clarity to the sometimes muddled public view of AI that has emerged over the past few years.

When computer scientist John McCarthy gave the field its name in 1955, AI’s scholars grappled with the tantalizing prospect that computers might have the capacity to demonstrate broad human-level intelligence, something that is now increasingly called “artificial general intelligence” (AGI). Achieving AGI, however, proved difficult, and researchers were forced to strategically target more narrow tasks, focusing on problems such as understanding images, interacting with natural language, manipulating objects in the physical world, learning, and even playing games. The timeliness of Life 3.0 arises from the unprecedented number and range of successes seen in these areas in just the past few years and the ensuing publicity these successes have generated.

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You can also order a copy of Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence here.