Council for Secular Humanism
Astrometry
Branch of astronomy involving positioning and movements of celestial bodies Astrometry is a branch of astronomy that involves precise measurements of the positions and movements of stars and other celestial bodies. It provides the kinematics and physical origin of the Solar System and this galaxy, the Milky Way. History[edit] The history of astrometry is linked to the history of star catalogues, which gave astronomers reference points for objects in the sky so they could track their movements. In the 10th century, Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi carried out observations on the stars and described their positions, magnitudes and star color; furthermore, he provided drawings for each constellation, which are depicted in his Book of Fixed Stars. James Bradley first tried to measure stellar parallaxes in 1729. Being very difficult to measure, only about 60 stellar parallaxes had been obtained by the end of the 19th century, mostly by use of the filar micrometer. Applications[edit] Statistics[edit]
Sikivu Hutchinson
Sikivu Hutchinson is a secular humanist activist involved in the promotion of atheism, skepticism, and social justice issues such as feminism. She holds a Ph.D. in performance studies from New York University and has taught courses on women's studies, cultural studies, urban studies, and education at UCLA, the California Institute of the Arts, and Western Washington University. Her essays have been published in a number of magazines and online venues including Social Text, California English, Black Agenda Report, American Atheist Magazine, New Humanist, and richarddawkins.net. She is also a commentator for the Pacifica radio stations KPFK (Los Angeles) and WBAI (New York) and a contributor to Freethought Blogs' Black Skeptics blog.[1] [edit] Moral Combat In 2011, Hutchinson published Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars. [edit] Godless Americana Godless Americana, published in 2013, is an exploration of recent social trends in religion. [edit] Publications
An Atheist Manifesto
Update: (2/08/2006 1:35 p.m. EST) Read Sam Harris’ additional arguments about The Reality of Islam Editor’s Note: At a time when fundamentalist religion has an unparalleled influence in the highest government levels in the United States, and religion-based terror dominates the world stage, Sam Harris argues that progressive tolerance of faith-based unreason is as great a menace as religion itself. Harris, a philosophy graduate of Stanford who has studied eastern and western religions, won the 2005 PEN Award for nonfiction for The End of Faith, which powerfully examines and explodes the absurdities of organized religion. Truthdig asked Harris to write a charter document for his thesis that belief in God, and appeasement of religious extremists of all faiths by moderates, has been and continues to be the greatest threat to world peace and a sustained assault on reason. An Atheist Manifesto Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. No. Continued: The Nature of Belief
Book of Fixed Stars
Astronomical text by Abd-al-Rahman Al Sufi The Great Bear. The familiar seven stars of the "Big Dipper", recorded by Ptolemy, are visible in the rump and tail, but notice they occur as a mirror-image of what we actually see because Al Sufi provided two images of each constellation, one as we see it in the night sky and one as seen here on a celestial globe. The image is from the copy in the Bodleian Library, the oldest copy extant. Historical Context[edit] The interest in cataloging the stars also stems from the nature of worship in Islam. Contents[edit] The book was thoroughly illustrated along with observations and descriptions of the stars, their positions (copied from Ptolemy's Almagest with the longitudes increased by 12° 42' to account for the precession), their magnitudes (brightness) and their color. Al-Sufi's results, as in Ptolemy's Almagest, were set out constellation by constellation. Composition[edit] Introduction[edit] Chapters[edit] Ptolemaic constellations[edit] Influence[edit]
Massimo Pigliucci
Pigliucci. Massimo Pigliucci is a biologist turned philosopher, formerly specializing in ecology and evolution and currently holding a post as a philosopher of biology at the City University of New York, Lehman College.[1] He was born in Monrovia, Liberia, raised in Rome, and eventually emigrated to the United States. [edit] Rationally Speaking Pigliucci writes for the Skeptical Inquirer and hosts the blog Rationally Speaking and a podcast of the same name along with Julia Galef. [edit] Evolutionary theory and creationism [edit] Debating creationists Pigliucci has laid the smackdown on a number of prominent creationists, including Duane Gish (a total of five times!) [edit] Extended Synthesis and Pigliucci's view of evolution Pigliucci is a proponent of approaches to evolutionary theory that have come to be known as the "Extended Synthesis," which he distinguishes as being not a replacement of the "Modern Synthesis," but merely a modification (albeit a rather major one) to it. [edit]
Why Atheism?
Just about everyone is an atheist when it comes to other gods — the gods that other people believe in or that nobody believes in anymore. I’m an atheist about all gods because there's no reliable evidence for any god, or even for Jesus. There is also extensive evidence that Jesus and all gods are fictional characters — myths created mainly by people who had little understanding of how our universe operates. We all like myths and other stories, but we don't have to believe them. Let’s start with a quick experiment. Drop one coin and watch it fall. If you were to the release third coin, what do you think would happen? Our understanding of the world around us, and our abilities to predict what will happen are based on naturalism — the basis of science. To be explicit, modern science relies on methodological naturalism. In “Cosmos” Neil deGrasse Tyson explained the basic rules of science. Dr. OK, let’s do another experiment. Galileo and Empirical Science Why God(s)? Why am I doing this? Dr.
Omicron
Letter in the Greek alphabet Omicron (;[1] uppercase Ο, lowercase ο, όμικρον) is the 15th letter of the Greek alphabet. This letter is derived from the Phoenician letter ayin: Use In addition to its use as an alphabetic letter, omicron is occasionally used in technical notation,[citation needed][dubious ] but its use is limited since both upper case and lower case (Ο ο) are indistinguishable from the Latin letter "o" (O o) and difficult to distinguish from the Arabic numeral "zero" (0). Mathematics The big-O symbol introduced by Paul Bachmann in 1894 and popularized by Edmund Landau in 1909, originally standing for "order of" ("Ordnung") and being thus a Latin letter, was apparently viewed by Donald Knuth in 1976[3] as a capital Omicron, probably in reference to his definition of the symbol (capital) Omega. Greek numerals More generally, the letter omicron is used to mark the fifteenth ordinal position in any Greek-alphabet marked list. Astronomy Medicine Character encodings References
