Richard Carrier provides evidence claimed missing from The God Delusion The video is embedded as permitted by Hambone Productions and all view-counts acrue to them. You may be wondering what you might do to make a difference as an individual? We believe that in making yourself publicly noticeable through non-aggressive signs of heresy, the faithful will approach you, and question you. These actions present an opportunity for you to explain why science, reason and logic are necessary to overcome superstition and myth. Whether you earn and display your own PhD In Heresy diploma , or wear heretical apparel, people will want to know why you are unafraid of god's wrath. I try to avoid telling them what I think of their religion, and instead, ask them politely what topics they believe separate us beyond faith. It is more effective if you don't attempt to change their mind, nor refute their religious dogma. Frequently, they take down information regarding recommended authors and books, and not infrequently, maintain contact. {*style:<b> </b>*}
Quantum time travel: Black hole not required - physics-math - 22 November 2010 You don't need to set the universe in a spin to see time travel in action – so what happened when a photon with a quantum gun went back to kill itself? CHATTING about time travel in a room overlooking a verdant quadrangle at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology seems strangely appropriate. The building dates from 1916 and looks its age: the high ceilings, echoing corridors and musty offices with heavy wooden doors have changed little in that time. If it weren't for a computer screen in the corner, the room's interior could almost date from that time. The office belongs to Seth Lloyd, one of the world's leading theorists on quantum mechanics.
A tale of customer service, justice and currency as funny as a $2 bill - Page 2 March 08, 2005|By MICHAEL OLESKER PUT YOURSELF in Mike Bolesta's place. On the morning of Feb. 20, he buys a new radio-CD player for his 17-year-old son Christopher's car. He pays the $114 installation charge with 57 crisp new $2 bills, which, when last observed, were still considered legitimate currency in the United States proper. The $2 bills are Bolesta's idea of payment, and his little comic protest, too. For this, Bolesta, Baltimore County resident, innocent citizen, owner of Capital City Student Tours, finds himself under arrest. Finds himself, in front of a store full of customers at the Best Buy on York Road in Lutherville, locked into handcuffs and leg irons. Finds himself transported to the Baltimore County lockup in Cockeysville, where he's handcuffed to a pole for three hours while the U.S. Have a nice day, Mike. "Humiliating," the 57-year old Bolesta was saying now. What we have here, besides humiliation, is a sense of caution resulting in screw-ups all around.
How to create temperatures below absolute zero - physics-math - 01 December 2010 ABSOLUTE zero sounds like an unbreachable limit beyond which it is impossible to explore. In fact there is a weird realm of negative temperatures that not only exists in theory, but has also proved accessible in practice. An improved way of getting there, outlined last week, could reveal new states of matter. Temperature is defined by how the addition or removal of energy affects the amount of disorder, or entropy, in a system. Negative-temperature systems have the opposite behaviour. Creating negative-temperature systems to see what other "bizarro world" properties they might have is tricky. This has already been done in experiments in which atomic nuclei were placed in a magnetic field, where they act like tiny bar magnets and line up with the field. Because the nuclei can only flip between two possible states - parallel to the field or opposite to it - this set-up offered only limited possibilities for investigation. More From New Scientist Promoted Stories Recommended by
Plutocracy Now: What Wisconsin Is Really About Illustration: Jason Schneider Read more: The 10 richest members of Congress, CEO pay vs. American worker pay, and more infographics on the new gilded era. IN 2008, A LIBERAL Democrat was elected president. Landslide votes gave Democrats huge congressional majorities. Eight years of war and scandal and George W. Or so it seemed. The first is this: Income inequality has grown dramatically since the mid-'70s—far more in the US than in most advanced countries—and the gap is only partly related to college grads outperforming high-school grads. Second, American politicians don't care much about voters with moderate incomes. Click here for more infographics on America's plutocracy.It doesn't take a multivariate correlation to conclude that these two things are tightly related: If politicians care almost exclusively about the concerns of the rich, it makes sense that over the past decades they've enacted policies that have ended up benefiting the rich. How did we get here?
Topologist Predicts New Form of Matter Back in 1970, a young physicist working in the Soviet Union made a counterintutive prediction. Vitaly Efimov, now at the University of Washington in the US, showed that quantum objects that cannot form into pairs could nevertheless form into triplets. In 2006, a group in Austria found the first example of such a so-called Efimov state in a cold gas of cesium atoms. That’s puzzling. Today, Nils Baas at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology makes another startling prediction. Behind this strange result is a branch of mathematics called topology, the study of shape. A useful example to consider is the famous Borromean ring shown above left. A key point here is that the circles in a flat 2 dimensional plane cannot form a Borromean ring. It turns out that there is formal mathematical analogy between the Borromean ring and the strange triplets of cesium that Efimov predicted. And it’s not just the bonds between atoms that are effected. How might this stuff behave?
Fox News reporter appears to have lied about being ‘punched’ by protester By Stephen C. WebsterTuesday, March 1, 2011 13:51 EDT Fox News has been making a lot of hay about one of their reporters allegedly being “punched” by a protester in Madison, Wisconsin. Turns out, that didn’t happen. Mike Tobin, reporting from amid the massive demonstration on Friday, claimed that one of the protesters “punched” him in the arm. In both cases, supporting evidence for these claims was not broadcast — yet still, Tobin’s reports have been widely cited across conservative blogs that seem eager to depict union workers as hateful and violent. What’s worse, Tobin’s allegation that he was assaulted might have slipped past without rebuttal were it not for a camera-equipped bystander, who captured the scene. Turns out, someone merely touched his shoulder, as evidenced in the video below. That was apparently enough for him to later declare that even after being “punched, he was just too nice of a guy to press charges. This video is from LiveLeak, published March 1, 2011. Stephen C.
Delayed choice quantum eraser A delayed choice quantum eraser, first performed by Yoon-Ho Kim, R. Yu, S.P. Kulik, Y.H. Shih and Marlan O. Scully,[1] and reported in early 1999, is an elaboration on the quantum eraser experiment that incorporates concepts considered in Wheeler's delayed choice experiment. The experiment was designed to investigate peculiar consequences of the well-known double slit experiment in quantum mechanics as well as the consequences of quantum entanglement. The delayed choice quantum eraser experiment investigates a paradox. Delayed choice experiments have uniformly confirmed the seeming ability of measurements made on photons in the present to alter events occurring in the past. Introduction[edit] In the basic double slit experiment, a beam of light (usually from a laser) is directed perpendicularly towards a wall pierced by two parallel slit apertures. Which-path information and the visibility of interference fringes are hence complementary quantities. Figure 1. Delayed choice[edit]
Bias at Fox News? The Bill Sammon memos - latimes.com Love it or hate it, Fox News has shaken up the media establishment and achieved financial success by airing the views of strident conservative pundits. Yet while the network has never made any bones about the political slant of opinion shows hosted by the likes of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, executives often claim that its news coverage is "fair and balanced." A memo revealed this week by the liberal watchdog group Media Matters calls that into question. The first time Media Matters unveiled a leaked e-mail from Bill Sammon, Fox News' Washington managing editor, it was hardly worthy of mention. On Dec. 9 the group's website revealed that Sammon had instructed reporters to avoid the phrase "public option" when referring to a proposed government-sponsored healthcare plan. Liberal bloggers were furious, but few mainstream journalists could muster much outrage. But a second intercepted missive from Sammon is quite a bit more troubling.
How Quantum Suicide Works" A man sits down before a gun, which is pointed at his head. This is no ordinary gun; it's rigged to a machine that measures the spin of a quantum particle. Each time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the quantum particle -- or quark -- is measured. Depending on the measurement, the gun will either fire, or it won't. Nervously, the man takes a breath and pulls the trigger. Go back in time to the beginning of the experiment. But, wait. This thought experiment is called quantum suicide.
Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory KANSAS CITY, KS—As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday in this embattled Midwestern state. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed, and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling. Rev. Gabriel Burdett explains Intelligent Falling. "Things fall not because they are acted upon by some gravitational force, but because a higher intelligence, 'God' if you will, is pushing them down," said Gabriel Burdett, who holds degrees in education, applied Scripture, and physics from Oral Roberts University. Burdett added: "Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. Founded in 1987, the ECFR is the world's leading institution of evangelical physics, a branch of physics based on literal interpretation of the Bible.
Einstein's sceptics: Who were the relativity deniers? - physics-math - 18 November 2010 When people don't like what science tells them, they resort to conspiracy theories, mud-slinging and plausible pseudoscience – as Einstein discovered "THIS world is a strange madhouse," remarked Albert Einstein in 1920 in a letter to his close friend, the mathematician Marcel Grossmann. "Every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political affiliation." Einstein's general theory of relativity, published in 1915, received an overwhelming public response - not all of it positive. Many of today's physicists and astronomers (not to mention science journalists) continue to receive this kind of mail.
Best ever image from a neodymium rare-earth magnet Jamie Condliffe, reporter (Image: Linden Gledhill/Cognisys) Is it a robo-hedgehog? A Lady Gaga headpiece? Ferrofluids are colloidal mixtures - where one substance is microscopically dispersed evenly throughout a carrier fluid - containing magnetic nanoparticles. In this image a small drop of ferrofluid is placed within a magnetic field created by a neodymium iron-boron rare-earth magnet. Ferrofluids are being used in experimental cancer treatments called magnetic hyperthermia, and are the basis for a new breed of shape-shifting telescope lenses.