ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 578

The long history of Muslims and Christians killing people together

Photo credit: Battle of Vienna 1683 by Jerzy Kossak

By Ishaan Tharoor

In 1683, a vast Ottoman army camped outside the gates of Vienna. For centuries thereafter, the siege and final decisive battle that took place would be cast as a defining moment in a clash of civilizations — that time the forces of Islam were halted at the ramparts of Christendom.

Yet look just a little bit harder, and that tidy narrative falls apart. The Ottoman assault had been coordinated in league with French King Louis XIV. And perhaps more than half of the soldiers seeking to capture the Austrian capital were Christians themselves. There were Greeks, Armenians, Hungarians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Serbs, all fighting alongside Arabs, Turks, Kurds and others in the Ottoman ranks.

One of the main figures joining the Turkish campaign was Imre Thokoly, who was a Protestant born in what’s now Slovakia and an avowed Hungarian nationalist. Tens of thousands of Hungarian peasants who were angry at the rapacious behavior of the Catholic Church, and the imperial Habsburg dynasty in Vienna had rallied to Thokoly’s banner. His alliance with the Ottomans enabled the rapid Turkish march toward the Austrian capital.

It reflected, writes British academic Ian Almond in his 2009 book “Two Faiths, One Banner: When Muslims Marched With Christians Across Europe’s Battlegrounds,” how “little use terms such as ‘Muslim’ and ‘Christian’ are to describe the almost hopelessly complex web of shifting power-relations, feudal alliances, ethnic sympathies and historical grudges” that shaped much of European history.

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How Human Do We Want Our Robots To Be?: A Future Tense Event Recap.

Photo credit: New America

By Jacob Brogan

When we imagine a roboticized future, we tend to think in terms of conflict, telling ourselves stories about android assassins and killer computers. But on Jan. 20, 2016, Future Tense convened a group of experts to discuss a different set of dangers: those that might arise from living at peace with robots. The important question, the panelists suggested, isn’t whether robots will want to kill all humans—it’s how human we want those robots to be.

Slate’s Lily Hay Newman, who served as moderator for the event, noted early on that we haven’t talked much about what it’ll be like to live side-by-side with mechanized beings. Though self-driving cars—not to mention robot butchers—seem to be on the verge of large-scale deployment, we’ve given relatively little thought to what will happen as we incorporate such creations into our ordinary lives. How might robot nannies affect children’s development? What will it be like to dance with a robot?

The central issue may come down to what Christine Rosen, senior editor of the New Atlantis, called “the Stepford Wife problem,” which she described as the probability that we’ll end up with emotional attachments to our robots. But Woodrow Hartzog, a law professor at Samford University and the owner of a Roomba nicknamed Rocko, argued that there’s nothing wrong with developing an emotional attachment to a robot. Still, issues do arise, he said, when we trick ourselves into believing that those non-human entities can reciprocate our affection. In other words, we should worry less about killer robots than deceptive ones, whether their deceptions arise by accident or design.

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2 Abortion Foes Behind Planned Parenthood Videos Are Indicted

Photo credit: Ralph Barrera/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated Press

By Manny Fernandez

A grand jury here that was investigating accusations of misconduct against Planned Parenthood has instead indicted two abortion opponents who made undercover videos of the organization.

Prosecutors in Harris County said one of the leaders of the Center for Medical Progress — an anti-abortion group that made secretly recorded videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood officials trying to illegally profit from the sale of fetal tissue — had been indicted on a charge of tampering with a governmental record, a felony, and on a misdemeanor charge related to purchasing human organs.

That leader, David Daleiden, 26, the director of the center, had posed as a biotechnology representative to infiltrate Planned Parenthood affiliates and surreptitiously record his efforts to procure tissue for research. Another center employee, Sandra Merritt, was indicted on a felony charge of tampering with a governmental record. The record-tampering charges appeared to involve their use of fake identification.

Abortion opponents claimed that the videos, which were released starting in July, revealed that Planned Parenthood was engaged in the illegal sale of body parts — a charge that the organization has denied and that has not been supported in numerous congressional and state investigations triggered by the release of the videos.

On Monday, the Harris County district attorney, Devon Anderson, said in a statement that grand jurors had cleared Planned Parenthood of any wrongdoing.

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Massive Space Telescope Is Finally Coming Together

Photo credit: Chris Gunn/NASA

By Geoff Brumfiel

This week, NASA is set to reach a milestone on one of its most ambitious projects. If all goes to plan, workers will finish assembling the huge mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope — an $8 billion successor to the famous Hubble telescope.

“So far, everything — knock on wood — is going quite well,” says Bill Ochs, the telescope’s project manager at Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The massive mirror is being built in a facility that’s essentially a giant, ultra-clean gymnasium. NPR can’t go inside for risk of contamination, but I meet crew chief Dave Sime at an observation deck where we can see the mirror below. Sime works for the contractor Harris Corp., and he’s normally in there assembling it. When he is, he has to wear a white suit that covers every inch of his body.

“The only thing exposed is your eyes,” he says. (Spacecraft assembly pro tip, he adds: To use your cellphone in the clean area, try a Bluetooth headset under your protective clothing.)

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Why do sperm whales wash up on beaches?

Photo credit: Getty Images

By BBC News Magazine

Five sperm whales have washed up in England. They are thought to belong to the same all-male pod as 12 others that were found dead around the Netherlands and Germany last week. But what caused this mass death, asks Claire Bates.

Sperm whales are deep-sea mammals that tend to live and hunt at a depth of around 3,000m. While females and their young stick to the tropics, males range further afield and are regularly spotted around Iceland, Norway and Shetland.

However, they quickly run into trouble if they enter the North Sea. This is because it lies on the European continental shelf, where the seafloor is only 200m down at its deepest point.

Sperm whales rely on sonar to navigate. They send out sound pulses, which bounce back off distant surfaces, helping them to form a clear picture of their underwater world. This doesn’t work on a shallow sandy seabed, like Britain’s, and whales quickly become disorientated.

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Record hot years near impossible without manmade climate change – study

Photo credit: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images

By Damian Carrington

The world’s run of record-breaking hottest years is extremely unlikely to have happened without the global warming caused by human activities, according to new calculations.

Thirteen of the 15 hottest years in the 150-year-long record occurred between 2000-14 and the researchers found there is a just a 0.01% chance that this happened due to natural variations in the planet’s climate.

2015 was revealed to have smashed all earlier records on Wednesday, after the new study had been completed, meaning the odds that the record run of heat is a fluke are now even lower.

“Natural climate variations just can’t explain the observed recent global heat records, but manmade global warming can,” said Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and one of the research team.

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Isis targeting Europe for Paris-style attacks, says EU police chief

Photo credit: Christian Hartmann/Reuters

By Kim Willsher and Peter Walker

Islamic State is actively focusing its attention on conducting large-scale attacks in Europe similar to those last year in Paris, the head of the EU’s law enforcement agency has said.

Rob Wainwright, the head of Europol, the Hague-based organisation that coordinates EU policing efforts over terrorism and organised crime, said Isis had “developed a new combat-style capability to carry out a campaign of large-scale terrorist attacks on a global stage, with a particular focus in Europe”.

His comments, at a meeting of interior ministers in Amsterdam, came as France’s interior minister said Islamist terrorists had planned to attack another concert in Paris and carry out a mass killing in the streets of the capital.

Bernard Cazeneuve was defending the government’s decision to maintain a state of emergency imposed after the shootings and bombings across Paris on 13 November, which left 130 people dead, including 89 at the Bataclan concert hall. Isis claimed responsibility.

Cazeneuve said that since last spring the country’s intelligence services had foiled 11 terrorist attacks, some of which had been ordered by the Islamic State attackers behind the Paris atrocities.

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NUT leaders ‘colluding to undermine anti-terror policies’

Photo credit: The Telegraph

By Andrew Gilligan

Leaders and activists of Britain’s biggest teachers’ union are colluding with Islamic extremists to undermine policies aimed at preventing terror attacks.

Private emails leaked to the Telegraph show that Rob Ferguson, a senior National Union of Teachers (NUT) activist in heavily-Muslim Newham, east London, is working with Mend, an extremist front group, and Cage, the notorious organisation which backed the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil) killer known as “Jihadi John”.

Mr Ferguson is orchestrating a campaign with Mend to discredit Prevent, the Government initiative which aims to spot signs of radicalisation in young people. A member of the NUT’s ruling national executive, Alex Kenny, and Ian Hale, the NUT’s assistant secretary in Newham, are also involved.

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This Guy Defies Death To Demonstrate Physics Law

Physics





Photo credit:

NRK Viten/YouTube screenshot

Physicist Andreas Wahl would feel truly at home among the world’s dying breed of “mad scientists.”

This Interactive Graph Predicts How And When You Are Most Likely To Die

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

DeepGreen/Shutterstock

The statistics on death are always more captivating than they should be. But examining the data doesn’t have to be the morbid pastime of a serial killer; the statistics can also provide some interesting insights into health, medicine, genetics, diet, and a whole bundle of social factors.