Yikes, my sites Koantum Matters, AntiMatters, and This Quantum World got hacked. While I was waiting for the restore transfers to finish, I went through my feeds and found a few items worth recording (more to come).
This is from a New York Times opinion piece:
The Neural Buddhists
By DAVID BROOKS | May 13, 2008
…my guess is that the atheism debate is going to be a sideshow. The cognitive revolution is not going to end up undermining faith in God, it’s going to end up challenging faith in the Bible…
[agreed]
In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts…
[right on the money]
In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other.
[Are they???]
That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation.
These movements are bound to happen, but I see science playing a rather marginal role in this.
Change of topic. Neha Grey has collected some of The Most Absurd Laws from Around the World. Did you know it is illegal (in the UK) to die in the Houses of Parliament? (The reasoning behind this is that technically anyone who dies within the walls of Parliament is automatically granted a Royal state funeral.)
Change of topic. First it was the bees and now it’s the bats. From Cosmos Online:
Bats fall prey to mysterious killer
by John Pickrell and Claire Thomas | 13 May 2008
Thousands of hibernating bats in the U.S. have been found dead or dying due to an unknown disease. Experts have noted similarities to the colony collapse disorder, which has ripped through North American bee populations. Since March 2008, the bat malady has spread to afflict colonies in at least 25 caves and mines across the north-eastern states, says the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). The agency has issued a call for wildlife workers to keep a careful watch for ‘white-nose syndrome’ as the killer has been dubbed.
“Hibernating bats are dying by the tens of thousands in the north-eastern United States and a growing circle of top scientists is anxiously trying to figure out why,” said a statement from Bat Conservation International (BCI) a NGO based in Austin, Texas… Whatever the cause, bat numbers are dropping fast, with losses of around 90 per cent reported in some colonies. This is of major concern in species where the female only produces one pup a year, said a statement from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The loss of bats from the ecosystem could also cause an ecological upheaval, since the mammals each eat many thousands of flying insects in the summer.
