ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 740
June 19, 2015
Ken Ham Hits Miley Cyrus Like A Wrecking Ball
Almost every day, I take time out to think about both Miley Cyrus and Ken Ham, usually in the same context. So imagine the joy that swelled in my heart upon seeing that Ham, who runs the Creation “Museum” in Kentucky and is trying to build a Noah’s Ark theme park there too, recently criticized Cyrus for an interview with Paper (nsfw) in which she mentioned Noah’s Flood:
Those people—the ones who believe that, say, Noah's Ark was a real seafaring vessel. “That’s [f*ing] insane,” she says. “We've outgrown that fairy tale, like we've outgrown [f*ing] Santa and the tooth fairy.
Later in the interview, discussing her sexuality, she commented:
I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn’t involve an animal and everyone is of age.
Well, that was too much for Ken Ham. Denying there was a real Noah’s Ark and being a libertine? Calling Noah’s Flood a fairy tale and being open-minded? Clearly a cutting response was warranted—nay, required. And here things took a turn for the strange...
Ham’s rejoinder:
Question for her: Why not involve an animal? On what basis does she decide that?
Okaaaay, then. Now, for most people, such questions do not come up on a regular basis. I’ve been to plenty of zoos and I can testify that not even once has the question entered my mind. (My ponderings are more along the line of “What would it sound like if that bratty kid standing on the railing fell into the tiger pit?”) But if such questions about animals did occur, reasonable people could think of many good responses. For example: “Ewwww!” But Ham has a more specific goal in mind:
Besides, if there’s no God and she’s just a result of evolution, then she is merely an animal anyway. And those she interacts with sexually are just animals—so why not any animals?
Those darn evolutionismists! There they go again saying that human beings are merely evolved animals. There they go again with their “geology,” claiming Noah’s Flood never occurred. There they go again with their default assumption that one can make principled moral decisions without consulting the Bible.
Miley Cyrus clearly makes Ken Ham mad, but not mad enough to be impolite—or to deter a potentially paying customer:
I do pray that Miley Cyrus will repent of her rebellion against the living “Ark” (Jesus Christ) and go through that door to be saved. I pray even Miley Cyrus might come to the Ark Encounter one day and have an encounter with Noah’s Ark…
Ken Ham has promoted visits by celebrities, such as the Duggar family (now in disgrace owing to allegations of sexual molestation in the family), and Bill Nye, whom he boasted once drove by the entrance to the Creation “Museum” and took a picture.
But a visit by Miley Cyrus and her entourage would surely be a unique event. Imagine a giant winking teddy bear rolling on wheels through the Creation “Museum” gates. As it approaches the entryway, its tongue rolls out like an airplane emergency ramp, and down slides a barely-clothed Cyrus and her retinue, complete with pink monkey furries, spilling together in a heap. Shocked parents shield the eyes of their children. Extracting herself, Cyrus exuberantly declares to the fleeing crowd: “I repent of my rebellion, and I’m ready to have an encounter with the Ark!” (Apparently stranger things have happened at her concerts.)
Before things got too unruly, though, someone should warn Ken Ham to make sure to remove the Creation “Museum”’s “millions of years” wrecking ball. 
Planet Smaller than Earth Located Over 200 Light Years Away
Photo credit:
Artist's rendition of the Kepler-138 system. Danielle Futselaar/SETI Institute
We think that most of the exoplanets out there in the universe are likely to be smaller than Earth. However, existing data doesn't support this. Since it's quite difficult to see small planets in the infinity of space, most exoplanets that we've so far observed are larger than Earth.
Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Has Begun, New Study Confirms
Photo credit:
How long before the rhino joins the list? Gerry Zambonini, CC BY-SA
We are currently witnessing the start of a mass extinction event the likes of which have not been seen on Earth for at least 65 million years. This is the alarming finding of a new study published in the journal Science Advances.
What We Really Know About Placenta-Eating
Join SciShow News as we explore why eating placenta doesn’t actually do very much. Injecting wastewater into the ground, on the other hand, seems to do quite a bit.
Hosted by: Hank Green
———-
Dooblydoo thanks go to the following Patreon supporters — we couldn’t make SciShow without them! Shout out to Justin Ove, Justin Lentz, David Campos, John Szymakowski, Peso255, Jeremy Peng, Avi Yaschin, and Fatima Iqbal.
———-
Like SciShow? Want to help support us, and also get things to put on your walls, cover your torso and hold your liquids? Check out our awesome products over at DFTBA Records: http://dftba.com/scishow
Or help support us by becoming our patron on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/scishow
———-
Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet?
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/scishow
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/scishow
Tumblr: http://scishow.tumblr.com
Instagram: http://instagram.com/thescishow
Sources:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-06/nu-etp060215.php
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00737-015-0538-8
http://www.nhs.uk/chq/Pages/2309.aspx?CategoryID=54#close
http://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aab1345
http://www.eurekalert.org/jrnls/sci/emb_scipak/pdf/weingarten150619.pdf
http://www.rrc.state.tx.us/about-us/resource-center/faqs/oil-gas-faqs/faq-saltwater-disposal-wells/
http://www.eurekalert.org/emb_releases/2015-06/uoca-cuu061515.php
June 17, 2015
Molesting Preacher Walks Free After Sheriff Says He Already Suffered a “Spectacular Fall from Grace”
Over the past few years, Walter Masocha (below), a former lecturer at Scotland’s Stirling University, became leader of the Agape for All Nations Church, a religion of his own creation.
And he used his authority to molest a young girl and assault another woman:
During the trial the schoolgirl now 16, said she regarded Masocha as her “spiritual father”, and like many people in the church called him “Dad”.
She said in late 2013 she was with other girls in an upstairs games room when Masocha came in and waved her over.
She said: “He placed his hand round my lower back, and moved his hand down until he got to my underwear, and he sort of pinged my underwear.
“He repeatedly pinged my underwear, ran his hand down my bottom, and grabbed and pinched my bottom.”
That’s not all:
Snapshots of Serengeti Wildlife Let Citizen Scientists Shine [Slide Show]
Monitoring an array of 225 cameras throughout Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park presented wildlife researchers with an enviable dilemma. They had captured millions of images of life on the African savanna over 18 months, including lions taking down zebras and bat-eared foxes chasing aardwolves. The time had come to classify the curious creatures in every photograph.
University of Oxford postdoc Alexandra Swanson and her colleagues found the solution in citizen science, tapping into a network of more than 28,000 registered volunteers who identified the animals in the photos with 96 percent accuracy. The resulting set of 322,653 wildlife photographs is now publicly available, thanks to the Snapshot Serengeti camera survey, a research project that has aggregated visual data on animal movements and spatial relationships across a survey area of 1,125 square kilometers.
Every image is catalogued according to the species it captures, along with information on location, time of day and observable behavior. Shot between 2010 and 2013, collectively they represent the first continuous systematic data on large predator and prey species in the Serengeti ecosystem across several years.
This study began when principal investigator Swanson—at the time a PhD candidate at the University of Minnesota—set up a network of camera traps to monitor how lions shared space with other Serengeti predators. “Based on the photographic evidence, we could see that hyenas and lions tended to follow each other in their search for food whereas species like the cheetah would almost always enter an area after the lions had left,” says Swanson, whose project is now part of Zooniverse, a suite of projects produced, maintained and developed by the Citizen Science Alliance and headquartered at Oxford's physics department. The researchers found these relationships were consistent across their survey area.
Swanson’s cameras operated continuously, 24/7, and when her team began checking memory cards they were inundated with images not just of predators but also of game herds, large birds and, occasionally, nothing. To manage the flood Swanson turned to her fellow doctoral candidate, Margaret Kosmala, to see whether she could automate image classification through a computer program. “I told her computer-vision research wasn’t there yet,” says Kosmala, whose undergraduate degree is in computer science. “But I was blown away by how attractive the images were. They were fun to look at, so I thought we could easily get 100 people to help us. That’s when we started thinking about how to develop a citizen science project.”
>>View a slide show of Serengeti wildlife
Swanson and Kosmala soon got help from Zooniverse to build snapshotserengeti.org, a digital interface for volunteers to help process camera-trap data. Within the first three days volunteers had gotten through all the photographs, and made over 1.3 million classifications. The site reached 10.8 million classifications and is still active today. Earlier this month the researchers published their results thus far on the open-access journal Scientific Data’s Web site. “This proves that citizen science is more than a tool for outreach and education, it’s a method for legitimate research,” Swanson says. “Our volunteers parsed through data that would have taken us years to unpack in a matter of daysand created a resource for further developments in both ecological and computer-vision research.” [Scientific American and Scientific Data are both part of Nature Publishing Group.]
Programmers need a large baseline data set with accurate information to establish rules for classification before they can automate computer recognition of visual information. This includes photos with correct identifications as well as properly classified images of moving foliage. By publishing their data under a creative commons license, the Snapshot Serengeti team hopes to provide that baseline for new programs and pave the way for citizen scientists to play bigger roles where the machines fall short. “We want to save human effort for the really hard problems,” Swanson says. “Ecologists are collecting more data than ever before and a lot of it goes unused, but if we can meet this need for tools to process data, it expands the range of questions we can ask [about an ecosystem].”
Sites such as Snapshot Serengeti can be expensive to build but Zooniverse plans to release an open-access platform soon that enables people to build their own citizen science Web sites based on the original source code. The platform is currently in beta testing, according to Swanson, and will be announced on Zooniverse.org when it goes live.
Meanwhile, the cameras are still rolling.
In memoriam: Anne Nicol Gaylor
JAC note: I never met Anne Nicol Gaylor, but knew of her through the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), for she, along with her daughter Annie Laurie Gaylor, whom I do know, were the founders of that estimable organization. Anne Nicol was a long-time critic of religion and a fighter for women’s rights—especially reproductive rights—and it was clear how much of her toughness, tenacity, and liberal activism were instantiated in her daughter and then the FFRF. When Anne Gaylor died on June 14, I wanted to put up an “in memoriam” post, but when reader Diane G., another Wisconsin resident, wrote me informing me of the death (which I already knew about), it was clear that she knew a lot more about Anne Nicol than did I. I therefore asked her to write a post for me, and she kindly complied. Here it is:
*******
In memoriam: Anne Nicol Gaylor, 1926-2015
by Diane G.
Gaylor: Religion is Sexist
Religion a crutch, freethinker says
Gaylor attacks columnist’s claim that the Bible ‘limits vengeance’
Anne Gaylor (who else?) battles pregame prayer
Anne Gaylor’s ‘almost used to’ death threats
Godless woman: the Good Book’s hazardous to your health
Government says atheist’s idea to label the Scriptures just like cigarettes is ABSURD!
Anne Gaylor wages war on Boy Scouts
Gaylor draws wrath of Christians
Gaylor fights ‘Year of Bible’
Activist atheist fights hard, wins
Anne Nicol Gaylor, pioneering feminist, freethinking activist, and principal founder of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, died Sunday at the age of 88. The above are actual newspaper headlines representing a small fraction of the publicity this very driven woman elicited over the last five decades. Women, Wisconsonites, Americans and humanity as a whole have lost one of our true heroes.
Anne, left, picketing the Wisconsin governer in the mid-90’s From http://ffrf.org/legacy/about/anne/tribute/tribute81.php (other photos also from this site)
Louisville programmer collaborates with controversial scientist Richard Dawkins
by David Serchuk
Louisville computer programmer has partnered with controversial scientist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins to resuscitate a suite of long-dormant computer programs Dawkins wrote decades ago. Canon’s goal is for these programs to help teach how evolution and genetic selection work, and to fight back against the evolution deniers dotting the American landscape.
The programs, called “The Blind Watchmaker,” illustrate how genetic mutations and variances create new varieties of life.
Canon tells IL he is working with Dawkins because even now, decades after the Scopes Monkey Trial, the theory of evolution remains under attack from creationists. He wants to help Dawkins — his intellectual hero — further the cause of rational, science-based thinking. For him, it means helping Dawkins revive long-dormant computer programs that illustrate how evolution and genetic selection work.
“We need every tool we can muster in the arsenal of demonstrating the truth of these ideas,” Canon said. “Evolution explains why we’re here … evolution has produced human brains capable of understanding how they came to be. There’s poetry there.”
The programs, in a nutshell, demonstrate the principles of evolution, including: heredity, mutation, and artificial selection. They allow users to essentially “breed” different kinds of life-forms, to illustrate how offspring, over time, differ from their ancestors. In short, the programs show a souped-up version of evolution.
Read the full article by clicking the name of the source located below.
Jesus ‘n’ Mo ‘n’ respect
Today’s Jesus and Mo came in the email with the caption “Something’s not quite right, but they can’t figure out what.” It’s a good strip.
Maybe it’s the barmaid’s next-to-last word. . .
This Font Simulates What It’s Like To Have Dyslexia
Photo credit:
Can you read this? Daniel Britton.
In the world of advertising, most campaign posters are designed to be read easily by anyone from a distance and at close range.
What marks graphic designer Daniel Britton’s font as distinct is that, when formed into complete sentences, the words are a challenge to read in order to emulate exactly how frustrating dyslexia can be.
Believing dyslexia to be misunderstood and under-researched, Britton designed the font and these images in his final year at university to raise awareness of the condition.
ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog
- ريتشارد دوكنز's profile
- 106 followers
