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dicindioha

Why coal-fired power handouts would be an attack on climate and common sense | Environment | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ck-on-climate-and-common-sense

shared by dicindioha on 08 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • The coal industry knows that to stop runaway climate change all coal-powered generators need to close Australia joined 174 countries and the European Union in 2015, signing the Paris agreement. In doing so, Australia agreed to do its part in keeping the global temperature rise “well below” 2C.
  • According to data from the Office of the Chief Economist, the demand for coal-generated electricity has dropped by more than 15% in the past eight years.
  • Coal is now the most expensive form of new power. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, the cost of energy from a new coal power plant would be $134-$203/MWh. That’s more expensive than wind, solar or highly efficient combined-cycle gas (costing $61-$118/MWh, $78-$140/MWh and $74-$90/MWh, respectively).
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The only people who still think we need the old-fashioned sort of “baseload power” that coal provides – power that is always running regardless of whether you need it – are those in the coal industry.
    • dicindioha
      dicindioha on 08 Feb 17
       
      This claim seems a bit extreme, saying that the only people still interested in coal are in the coal industry. It might be true, but I also feel as if some people do not think of where their power source comes from.
  • In the short term, that can be gas. But, in the longer term, to stop runaway climate change, that service will need to be supplied by renewable sources such as battery storage, hydro, solar thermal with storage or geothermal.
  • “As the world’s largest coal exporter, we have a vested interest in showing that we can provide both lower emissions and reliable baseload power with state-of-the-art, clean, coal-fired technology.”
  • dicindioha on 08 Feb 17
     
    This article is really interesting because I think it goes to show that there is still some side of the global warming/climate change argument that is making progress. As we learned today, it is important to walk that middle line between over-skepticism and gullibility. Here people recognize that coal emissions are bad, and countries are taking a stand to try and lower that. It does make me wonder though what the future with coal holds, and if one day, we really will resort to renewable energy. It seems increasingly important. One more interesting thing I found was the use of the graphs to support the information, for graphs used to seem to me something people trust, but now I realize we have survival instincts associated even with data, and I wonder if some people would remark this as "fake news."
Javier E

Burke's Corner: Science, philosophy and humility - Hawking rejects all three - 0 views

burkescorner.blogspot.com/...ophy-and-humility-hawking.html

science religion humility metaphysics

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • In his failure to exercise modesty in his pursuit of scientific knowledge, Hawking makes a particularly startling claim - that "philosophy is dead". From Plato and Aristotle to Maimonides and Aquinas to Kant and Hegel, Hawking dismisses how the human mind across cultures and millenia has reflected on transcendence and humanity's place in a vast universe. Hawking's lack of humility before this endeavour is staggering. In her Absence of Mind, Marilynne Robinson rightly states that this approach to science excludes "the whole enterprise of metaphysical thought", despite metaphysical reflection being a defining characteristic of the human experience.
  • mathematician Eric Priest compares Hawking's claims with the humility that should be at the core of the pursuit of scientific knowledge:As a scientist, you are continually questioning, rarely coming up with a definitive answer. The limitations of your own knowledge and expertise together with the beauty and mystery of life and the universe often fill you with a sense of profound humility. Thus, unequivocal assertions are not part of a genuine scientific quest.
Javier E

Government sacks Roger Scruton after remarks about Soros and Islamophobia | Politics | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...al-islamophobiad-soros-remarks

philosophers islamophobia anti-Semitism uk

shared by Javier E on 10 Apr 19 - No Cached
  • In an interview with the New Statesman, the rightwing philosopher was unrepentant about his views on George Soros, the Hungarian-American philanthropist, who is frequently cited in antisemitic conspiracy theories and attacked by Hungary’s rightwing prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
  • “Anybody who doesn’t think that there’s a Soros empire in Hungary has not observed the facts,” Scruton told the magazine
  • Scruton, who has been a friend of Orbán for more than 30 years, denied that he was antisemitic or Islamophobic. He said Islamophobia had been “invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue”.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The interview prompted Labour to repeat its call from five months ago for Scruton to be sacked after it emerged that he had described Jews in Budapest as part of a “Soros empire”.
  • “His claim that Islamophobia does not exist, a few weeks after the devastating attack in Christchurch, is extremely dangerous, and his defence of the prejudice stoked by Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary is appalling.”
kushnerha

BBC - Future - Will emoji become a new language? - 2 views

www.bbc.com/...ll-emoji-become-a-new-language

bbc language emoji psychology grammar

shared by kushnerha on 19 Feb 16 - No Cached
  • Emoji are now used in around half of every sentence on sites like Instagram, and Facebook looks set to introduce them alongside the famous “like” button as a way of expression your reaction to a post.
  • If you were to believe the headlines, this is just the tipping point: some outlets have claimed that emoji are an emerging language that could soon compete with English in global usage. To many, this would be an exciting evolution of the way we communicate; to others, it is linguistic Armageddon.
  • Do emoji show the same characteristics of other communicative systems and actual languages? And what do they help us to express that words alone can’t say?When emoji appear with text, they often supplement or enhance the writing. This is similar to gestures that appear along with speech. Over the past three decades, research has shown that our hands provide important information that often transcends and clarifies the message in speech. Emoji serve this function too – for instance, adding a kissy or winking face can disambiguate whether a statement is flirtatiously teasing or just plain mean.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • This is a key point about language use: rarely is natural language ever limited to speech alone. When we are speaking, we constantly use gestures to illustrate what we mean. For this reason, linguists say that language is “multi-modal”. Writing takes away that extra non-verbal information, but emoji may allow us to re-incorporate it into our text.
  • Emoji are not always used as embellishments, however – sometimes, strings of the characters can themselves convey meaning in a longer sequence on their own. But to constitute their own language, they would need a key component: grammar.
  • A grammatical system is a set of constraints that governs how the meaning of an utterance is packaged in a coherent way. Natural language grammars have certain traits that distinguish them. For one, they have individual units that play different roles in the sequence – like nouns and verbs in a sentence. Also, grammar is different from meaning
  • When emoji are isolated, they are primarily governed by simple rules related to meaning alone, without these more complex rules. For instance, according to research by Tyler Schnoebelen, people often create strings of emoji that share a common meaning
  • This sequence has little internal structure; even when it is rearranged, it still conveys the same message. These images are connected solely by their broader meaning. We might consider them to be a visual list: “here are all things related to celebrations and birthdays.” Lists are certainly a conventionalised way of communicating, but they don’t have grammar the way that sentences do.
  • What if the order did matter though? What if they conveyed a temporal sequence of events? Consider this example, which means something like “a woman had a party where they drank, and then opened presents and then had cake”:
  • In all cases, the doer of the action (the agent) precedes the action. In fact, this pattern is commonly found in both full languages and simple communication systems. For example, the majority of the world’s languages place the subject before the verb of a sentence.
  • These rules may seem like the seeds of grammar, but psycholinguist Susan Goldin-Meadow and colleagues have found this order appears in many other systems that would not be considered a language. For example, this order appears when people arrange pictures to describe events from an animated cartoon, or when speaking adults communicate using only gestures. It also appears in the gesture systems created by deaf children who cannot hear spoken languages and are not exposed to sign languages.
  • describes the children as lacking exposure to a language and thus invent their own manual systems to communicate, called “homesigns”. These systems are limited in the size of their vocabularies and the types of sequences they can create. For this reason, the agent-act order seems not to be due to a grammar, but from basic heuristics – practical workarounds – based on meaning alone. Emoji seem to tap into this same system.
  • Nevertheless, some may argue that despite emoji’s current simplicity, this may be the groundwork for emerging complexity – that although emoji do not constitute a language at the present time, they could develop into one over time.
  • Could an emerging “emoji visual language” be developing in a similar way, with actual grammatical structure? To answer that question, you need to consider the intrinsic constraints on the technology itself.Emoji are created by typing into a computer like text. But, unlike text, most emoji are provided as whole units, except for the limited set of emoticons which convert to emoji, like :) or ;). When writing text, we use the building blocks (letters) to create the units (words), not by searching through a list of every whole word in the language.
  • emoji force us to convey information in a linear unit-unit string, which limits how complex expressions can be made. These constraints may mean that they will never be able to achieve even the most basic complexity that we can create with normal and natural drawings.
  • What’s more, these limits also prevent users from creating novel signs – a requisite for all languages, especially emerging ones. Users have no control over the development of the vocabulary. As the “vocab list” for emoji grows, it will become increasingly unwieldy: using them will require a conscious search process through an external list, not an easy generation from our own mental vocabulary, like the way we naturally speak or draw. This is a key point – it means that emoji lack the flexibility needed to create a new language.
  • we already have very robust visual languages, as can be seen in comics and graphic novels. As I argue in my book, The Visual Language of Comics, the drawings found in comics use a systematic visual vocabulary (such as stink lines to represent smell, or stars to represent dizziness). Importantly, the available vocabulary is not constrained by technology and has developed naturally over time, like spoken and written languages.
  • grammar of sequential images is more of a narrative structure – not of nouns and verbs. Yet, these sequences use principles of combination like any other grammar, including roles played by images, groupings of images, and hierarchic embedding.
  • measured participants’ brainwaves while they viewed sequences one image at a time where a disruption appeared either within the groupings of panels or at the natural break between groupings. The particular brainwave responses that we observed were similar to those that experimenters find when violating the syntax of sentences. That is, the brain responds the same way to violations of “grammar”, whether in sentences or sequential narrative images.
  • I would hypothesise that emoji can use a basic narrative structure to organise short stories (likely made up of agent-action sequences), but I highly doubt that they would be able to create embedded clauses like these. I would also doubt that you would see the same kinds of brain responses that we saw with the comic strip sequences.
caelengrubb

Social Media Effects on Teens | Impact of Social Media on Self-Esteem - 0 views

childmind.org/...social-media-affects-teenagers

shared by caelengrubb on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • In fact, experts worry that the social media and text messages that have become so integral to teenage life are promoting anxiety and lowering self-esteem.
  • The other big danger that comes from kids communicating more indirectly is that it has gotten easier to be cruel. “Kids text all sorts of things that you would never in a million years contemplate saying to anyone’s face,”
  • For one thing, modern teens are learning to do most of their communication while looking at a screen, not another person.
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  • Learning how to make friends is a major part of growing up, and friendship requires a certain amount of risk-taking. This is true for making a new friend, but it’s also true for maintaining friendships. When there are problems that need to be faced—big ones or small ones—it takes courage to be honest about your feelings and then hear what the other person has to say
  • But when friendship is conducted online and through texts, kids are doing this in a context stripped of many of the most personal—and sometimes intimidating—aspects of communication
  • A survey conducted by the Royal Society for Public Health asked 14-24 year olds in the UK how social media platforms impacted their health and wellbeing. The survey results found that Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram all led to increased feelings of depression, anxiety, poor body image and loneliness.
  • “Girls are socialized more to compare themselves to other people, girls in particular, to develop their identities, so it makes them more vulnerable to the downside of all this.” She warns that a lack of solid self-esteem is often to blame. “We forget that relational aggression comes from insecurity and feeling awful about yourself, and wanting to put other people down so you feel better.”
  • . Teenage girls sort through hundreds of photos, agonizing over which ones to post online. Boys compete for attention by trying to out-gross one other, pushing the envelope as much as they can in the already disinhibited atmosphere online.
  • Another big change that has come with new technology and especially smart phones is that we are never really alone. Kids update their status, share what they’re watching, listening to, and reading, and have apps that let their friends know their specific location on a map at all times.
  • Offline, the gold standard advice for helping kids build healthy self-esteem is to get them involved in something that they’re interested in
cvanderloo

St Patrick's day: why so many US presidents like to say 'I'm Irish' - 0 views

theconversation.com/ts-like-to-say-im-irish-157181

ireland UK USA biden trump kennedy presidents government

shared by cvanderloo on 17 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Biden is the most strongly identified Irish-American in the White House since John F Kennedy, the only other Catholic president.
  • rish nationalist sentiments run high in the US, especially among its large diaspora. US presidents frequently indulge these views, at least symbolically. But, in practical terms, they have had little impact on the US-UK relationship.
  • More than 30 million people in the US – about one in ten Americans – identify as “Irish”.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • there are over six times as many people in the US who claim to be Irish in the US as those living in the Republic of Ireland itself.
  • If measured by when their last ancestor left Ireland, Joe Biden is no more Irish than Barack Obama
  • Perhaps the most dramatic example of this was shown by Jimmy Carter, who – on St Patrick’s Day 1976 – marched down Fifth Avenue in New York wearing a badge emblazoned with the slogan “England, get out of Ireland”.
  • With Donald Trump being the exception, nearly every president of the last half-century has identified as “Irish”, even when the evidence of such a link has been tenuous.
  • In spite of this, US presidential administrations have sought a more balanced approach. The US considers the UK to be one of its most valuable and important strategic partners. US presidents work closely with British governments, while also offering symbolic affirmation for Ireland.
  • While Biden’s personal affinities are clear, we should expect him to follow his predecessors in placing US security interests before Irish nationalist affections.
jmfinizio

Opinion: UK decision to delay second Covid-19 vaccine dose is dubious - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

opinion science research covid19 cnn

shared by jmfinizio on 13 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The second dose of both vaccines can now be given up to 12 weeks after the first dose
  • Similar proposals about delaying the second dose have been discussed in the US,
  • the FDA does not support changing the vaccine administration protocol initially set forth
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • how can the public trust the right decisions were made
  • how can the public trust the right decisions were made
  • How can knowledgeable independent healthcare professionals endorse those decisions when they are not privy to the process?
  • Pfizer vaccine to have a 90% short term efficacy, and a single dose of the Oxford vaccine to have a 70% short term efficacy.
  • Would confidence in the vaccine be reduced by multiple reports of vaccine failures among at-risk individuals
  • Perhaps the UK could consider instead other ways to conserve vaccine supplies that may be safer than the delayed second dose option.
  • Also, for people who have recovered from Covid-19 a single vaccine dose may indeed be sufficient to boost their antibodies to high levels
aprossi

US Coronavirus: Now that new Covid-19 variants are circulating everyday activities are more dangerous, expert says - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

CNN.com knowledge research Covid-19 Vaccine technology education

shared by aprossi on 26 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Everyday activities are more dangerous now that new Covid-19 variants are circulating
  • (CNN)Health officials are "extremely" worried about the new Covid-19 variants that have been detected in the US and what they could mean over the coming months, one expert said Monday night.
  • CDC officials have also said another variant -- called B.1.1.7 and first spotted in the UK -- has been detected in more than 20 states.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • with 42 states reporting downward trends
  • Moderna says its vaccine protects against some variants
  • The good news, Fauci told CNN in a separate interview Monday, is that current Covid-19 vaccines are likely to be effective against the new variants.
  • Moderna said Monday its vaccine created antibodies that neutralized Covid-19 variants first found in the UK and South Africa
  • So far, about 19 million people -- nearly 6% of the US population -- have received at least the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine, according to CDC data. More than 3.3 million are fully vaccinated.
  • 100 million shots administered in the President's first 100 days in office.
  • Kentucky has used about 88% of their first doses
katherineharron

This Michelin-starred restaurant was closed by coronavirus. Now it's feeding vulnerable people - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • Every restaurant and pub in the United Kingdom has been ordered to close as the country seeks to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. On the outskirts of Birmingham, one award-winning restaurant is riding out the crisis by assisting people in need and accepting help from German supermarket chain Aldi.
  • The UK government has since pledged to pay 80% of employee wages during the crisis, but at the time Aldi's intervention was a "miracle" for Hampton Manor. "That was a huge moment of relief for us," said James Hill.
  • "It's advertised as one-for-one model but in reality we'll probably give out more meals than we are selling," said James Hill. "The goal is to encourage people to support their community by buying from us," he added.
sanderk

Global economy will suffer for years to come, says OECD - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...business-52000219

economy education Knowledge research

shared by sanderk on 28 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • The world will take years to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has warned.Angel Gurría, OECD secretary general, said the economic shock was already bigger than the financial crisis.
  • The world will take years to recover from the coronavirus pandemic, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has warned.Angel Gurría, OECD secretary general, said the economic shock was already bigger than the financial crisis.He told the BBC it was "wishful thinking" to believe that countries would bounce back quickly.
  • Mr Gurría said a recent warning that a serious outbreak could halve global growth to 1.5% already looked too optimistic.
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  • While the number of job losses and company failures remains uncertain, Mr Gurría said countries would be dealing with the economic fallout "for years to come".
  • "Even if you don't get a worldwide recession, you're going to get either no growth or negative growth in many of the economies of the world, including some of the larger ones, and therefore you're going to get not only low growth this year, but also it's going to take longer to pick up in the in the future,"
  • the reason is that we don't know how much it's going to take to fix the unemployment because we don't know how many people are going to end up unemployed. We also don't know how much it's going to take to fix the hundreds of thousands of small and medium enterprises who are already suffering
  • Mr Gurría called on governments to rip up borrowing rules and "throw everything we got at it" to deal with the crisis.
  • However, he warned that bigger deficits and larger debt piles would also weigh on heavily indebted countries for years to come.
  • Mr Gurría said that just weeks ago, policymakers from the G20 club of rich nations believed the recovery would take a 'V' shape - with a short, sharp drop in economic activity followed swiftly by a rebound in growth."It was already then mostly wishful thinking," he said.
  • It's going to be more in the best of cases like a 'U' with a long trench in the bottom before it gets to the recovery period. We can avoid it looking like an 'L', if we take the right decisions today."
krystalxu

The 10 Most Controversial Psychology Studies Ever Published - Research Digest - 0 views

digest.bps.org.uk/...chology-studies-ever-published

psychology brain science research science

shared by krystalxu on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The pair argue, on the basis of their own BBC Prison study and real-life instances of prisoner resistance, that people do not yield mindlessly to toxic environments. Rather, in any situation, power resides in the group that manages to establish a sense of shared identity.
  • The original studies have attracted huge controversy, not only because of their ethically dubious nature, but also because of the way they have been interpreted and used to explain historical events such as the supposedly blind obedience to authority in the Nazi era. Haslam and Reicher have again been at the forefront of counter-arguments.
  • because those attempting a replication lack the necessary research skills, make statistical errors, or fail to perfectly match the original research design.
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  • They later claimed that Merritte was neurologically impaired, which if true would only add to the unethical nature of the original research.
tongoscar

What scientists know so far about the effects of coronavirus on children | Jonathan Ball | Opinion | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...irus-children-studies-carriers

shared by tongoscar on 24 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • These were the groups initially urged to socially distance themselves. But we’re beginning to see that coronavirus can make some younger people seriously ill.
  • Compared to other European countries, the UK was slow in closing schools – waiting until there had already been 104 deaths due to coronavirus to take action. Studies from China showed children were rarely diagnosed with novel coronavirus, and therefore presumably had little role in the spread of the disease.
  • Like many of my colleagues, I could see no obvious reason why children weren’t being infected: this was a virus spread by the respiratory route, not through a process unique to adults. If significant numbers of children were infected and suffered very minor cold-like symptoms, then their potential to spread the virus was immense.
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  • The current coronavirus is different. In more than 85% of confirmed cases symptoms can go undetected or be easily confused with the common cold of mild flu. Its biggest weapon – the thing that has, according to one study, allowed it to spread so easily – is this ability to cause mild disease in the majority of people it infects. When you can’t easily tell if someone has a cold or coronavirus, case identification and infection control are far more difficult.
  • Judging from past pandemics, school closures can be an effective way to reduce the spread of a virus – particularly when they form part of a larger programme of social distancing measures. Every school day, children congregate en masse, often in close proximity, and then return home, taking with them any new infection they’ve picked up. Intuitively, reducing this cycle should help slow the virus.
Javier E

UK mathematician wins richest prize in academia | Mathematics | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...prize-in-academia-breakthrough

math prize randomness

shared by Javier E on 11 Sep 20 - No Cached
  • Martin Hairer, an Austrian-British researcher at Imperial College London, is the winner of the 2021 Breakthrough prize for mathematics, an annual $3m (£2.3m) award that has come to rival the Nobels in terms of kudos and prestige.
  • Hairer landed the prize for his work on stochastic analysis, a field that describes how random effects turn the maths of things like stirring a cup of tea, the growth of a forest fire, or the spread of a water droplet that has fallen on a tissue into a fiendishly complex problem.
  • His major work, a 180-page treatise that introduced the world to “regularity structures”, so stunned his colleagues that one suggested it must have been transmitted to Hairer by a more intelligent alien civilisation.
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  • After dallying with physics at university, Hairer moved into mathematics. The realisation that ideas in theoretical physics can be overturned and swiftly consigned to the dustbin did not appeal. “I wouldn’t really want to put my name to a result that could be superseded by something else three years later,” he said. “In mathematics, if you obtain a result then that is it. It’s the universality of mathematics, you discover absolute truths.”
  • Hairer’s expertise lies in stochastic partial differential equations, a branch of mathematics that describes how randomness throws disorder into processes such as the movement of wind in a wind tunnel or the creeping boundary of a water droplet landing on a tissue. When the randomness is strong enough, solutions to the equations get out of control. “In some cases, the solutions fluctuate so wildly that it is not even clear what the equation meant in the first place,” he said.
  • With the invention of regularity structures, Hairer showed how the infinitely jagged noise that threw his equations into chaos could be reframed and tamed.
yelpreviews57

Buy Verified PayPal Account - UK - 0 views

medium.com/...ed-paypal-account-ecb0496c2cfe

buy canadian vefieid paypal accounts uk verified us usa account reddit new old for sale verfieid

shared by yelpreviews57 on 07 Jul 23 - No Cached
  • yelpreviews57 on 07 Jul 23
     
    No! We provide personal and business both of accounts. We use personal documents for personal account verification. And we use business documents for business PayPal account verification. We don't use fake documents for verification. We use USA/UK/CA original citizen documents. That's why our all-verified PayPal accounts you can use till minimum 2 years without getting any problem.
Javier E

AI could end independent UK news, Mail owner warns - 0 views

www.thetimes.co.uk/...ews-mail-owner-warns-7fz80n2bb

AI threat inaccuracies culture research technology

shared by Javier E on 18 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Artificial intelligence could destroy independent news organisations in Britain and potentially is an “existential threat to democracy”, the executive chairman of DMGT has warned.
  • “They have basically taken all our data, without permission and without even a consideration of the consequences. They are using it to train their models and to start producing content. They’re commercialising it,
  • AI had the potential to destroy independent news organisations “by ripping off all our content and then repurposing it to people … without any responsibility for the efficacy of that content”
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  • The risk was that the internet had become an echo chamber of stories produced by special interest groups and rogue states, he said.
  • The danger is that these huge platforms end up in an arms race with each other. They’re like elephants fighting and then everybody else is like mice that get stamped on without them even realising the consequences of their actions.”
  • there are huge consequences to this technology. And it’s not just the danger of ripping our industry apart, but also ripping other industries apart, all the creative industries. How many jobs are going to be lost? What’s the damage to the economy going to be if these rapacious organisations can continue to operate without any legal ramifications?
  • Rothermere revealed that DMGT had experimented with using AI to help journalists to publish stories faster, but that it then took longer “to check the accuracy of what it comes up” than it would have done to write the article.
  • Javier E on 18 Nov 23
     
    Rothermere revealed that DMGT had experimented with using AI to help journalists to publish stories faster, but that it then took longer "to check the accuracy of what it comes up" than it would have done to write the article.
Javier E

Can Political Theology Save Secularism? | Religion & Politics - 0 views

religionandpolitics.org/...tical-theology-save-secularism

religion capitalism liberalism god secularism politics theology

shared by Javier E on 23 Sep 12 - No Cached
  • Osama bin Laden had forced us to admit that, while the U.S. may legally separate church and state, it cannot do so intellectually. Beneath even the most ostensibly faithless of our institutions and our polemicists lie crouching religious lions, ready to devour the infidels who set themselves in opposition to the theology of the free market and the messianic march of democracy
  • As our political system depends on a shaky separation between religion and politics that has become increasingly unstable, scholars are sensing the deep disillusionment afoot and trying to chart a way out.
  • At its best, Religion for Atheists is a chronicle of the smoldering heap that liberal capitalism has made of the social rhythms that used to serve as a buffer between humans and the random cruelty of the universe. Christian and Jewish traditions, Botton argues, reinforced the ideas that people are morally deficient, that disappointment and suffering are normative, and that death is inevitable. The abandonment of those realities for the delusions of the self-made individual, the fantasy superman who can bend reality to his will if he works hard enough and is positive enough, leaves little mystery to why we are perpetually stressed out, overworked, and unsatisfied.
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  • Botton’s central obsession is the insane ways bourgeois postmoderns try to live, namely in a perpetual upward swing of ambition and achievement, where failure indicates character deficiency despite an almost total lack of social infrastructure to help us navigate careers, relationships, parenting, and death. But he seems uninterested in how those structures were destroyed or what it might take to rebuild them
  • Botton wants to keep bourgeois secularism and add a few new quasi-religious social routines. Quasi-religious social routines may indeed be a part of the solution, as we shall see, but they cannot be simply flung atop a regime as indifferent to human values as liberal capitalism.
  • Citizens see the structure behind the façade and lose faith in the myth of the state as a dispassionate, egalitarian arbiter of conflict. Once theological passions can no longer be sublimated in material affluence and the fiction of representative democracy, it is little surprise to see them break out in movements that are, on both the left and the right, explicitly hostile to the liberal state.
  • Western politics have an auto-immune disorder: they are structured to pretend that their notions of reason, right, and sovereignty are detached from a deeply theological heritage. When pressed by war and economic dysfunction, liberal ideas prove as compatible with zealotry and domination as any others.
  • Secularism is not strictly speaking a religion, but it represents an orientation toward religion that serves the theological purpose of establishing a hierarchy of legitimate social values. Religion must be “privatized” in liberal societies to keep it out of the way of economic functioning. In this view, legitimate politics is about making the trains run on time and reducing the federal deficit; everything else is radicalism. A surprising number of American intellectuals are able to persuade themselves that this vision of politics is sufficient, even though the train tracks are crumbling, the deficit continues to gain on the GDP, and millions of citizens are sinking into the dark mire of debt and permanent unemployment.
  • Critchley has made a career forging a philosophical account of human ethical responsibility and political motivation. His question is: after the rational hopes of the Enlightenment corroded into nihilism, how do humans write a believable story about what their existence means in the world? After the death of God, how do we account for our feelings of moral responsibility, and how might that account motivate us to resist the deadening political system we face?
  • The question is what to do in the face of the unmistakable religious and political nihilism currently besetting Western democracies.
  • both Botton and Critchley believe the solution involves what Derrida called a “religion without religion”—for Critchley a “faith of the faithless,” for Botton a “religion for atheists.”
  • a new political becoming will require a complete break with the status quo, a new political sphere that we understand as our own deliberate creation, uncoupled from the theological fictions of natural law or God-given rights
  • Critchley proposes as the foundation of politics “the poetic construction of a supreme fiction … a fiction that we know to be a fiction and yet in which we believe nonetheless.” Following the French philosopher Alain Badiou and the Apostle Paul, Critchley conceives political “truth” as something like fidelity: a radical loyalty to the historical moment where true politics came to life.
  • But unlike an evangelist, Critchley understands that attempting to fill the void with traditional religion is to slip back into a slumber that reinforces institutions desperate to maintain the political and economic status quo. Only in our condition of brokenness and finitude, uncomforted by promises of divine salvation, can we be open to a connection with others that might mark the birth of political resistance
  • This is the crux of the difference between Critchley’s radical faithless faith and Botton’s bourgeois secularism. Botton has imagined religion as little more than a coping mechanism for the “terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability,” seemingly unaware that the pain and vulnerability may intensify many times over. It won’t be enough to simply to sublimate our terror in confessional restaurants and atheist temples. The recognition of finitude, the weight of our nothingness, can hollow us into a different kind of self: one without illusions or reputations or private property, one with nothing but radical openness to others. Only then can there be the possibility of meaning, of politics, of hope.
markfrankel18

Jesus wept … oh, it's bad plumbing. Indian rationalist targets 'miracles' | World news | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...india-blasphemy-jesus-tears

science knowledge religion

shared by markfrankel18 on 25 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • When water started trickling down a statue of Jesus Christ at a Catholic church in Mumbai earlier this year, locals were quick to declare a miracle. Some began collecting the holy water and the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni began to promote it as a site of pilgrimage.So when Sanal Edamaruku arrived and established that this was not holy water so much as holey plumbing, the backlash was severe. The renowned rationalist was accused of blasphemy, charged with offences that carry a three-year prison sentence and eventually, after receiving death threats, had to seek exile in Finland.
anonymous

Free will debate: What does free will mean and how did it evolve? - 0 views

www.slate.com/..._how_did_it_evolve.single.html

free will human sciences natural scions

shared by anonymous on 03 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Many scientists cannot imagine how the idea of free will could be reconciled with the laws of physics and chemistry. Brain researchers say that the brain is just a bunch of nerve cells that fire as a direct result of chemical and electrical events, with no room for free will
  • Scientists take delight in (and advance their careers by) claiming to have disproved conventional wisdom, and so bashing free will is appealing. But their statements against free will can be misleading
  • Free will means freedom from causation.” Other scientists who argue against free will say that it means that a soul or other supernatural entity causes behavior, and not surprisingly they consider such explanations unscientific.
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  • There is a genuine psychological reality behind the idea of free will. The debate is merely about whether this reality deserves to be called free will.
  • Our actions cannot break the laws of physics, but they can be influenced by things beyond gravity, friction, and electromagnetic charges. No number of facts about a carbon atom can explain life, let alone the meaning of your life. These causes operate at different levels of organization.
  • Free will cannot violate the laws of physics or even neuroscience, but it invokes causes that go beyond them
  • Self-control furnishes the possibility of acting from rational principles rather than acting on impulse.
  • If you think of freedom as being able to do whatever you want, with no rules, you might be surprised to hear that free will is for following rules. Doing whatever you want is fully within the capability of any animal in the forest. Free will is for a far more advanced way of acting
  • That, in a nutshell, is the inner deciding process that humans have evolved. That is the reality behind the idea of free will: these processes of rational choice and self-control
  • Self-control counts as a kind of freedom because it begins with not acting on every impulse. The simple brain acts whenever something triggers a response: A hungry creature sees food and eats it
  • Our ancestors evolved the ability to act in the ways necessary for culture to succeed. Free will likely will be found right there—it’s what enables humans to control their actions in precisely the ways required to build and operate complex social systems.
  • Understanding free will in this way allows us to reconcile the popular understanding of free will as making choices with our scientific understanding of the world.
grayton downing

The Stereotypes About Math That Hold Americans Back - Jo Boaler - The Atlantic - 2 views

www.theatlantic.com/...281303

stereotypes math americans teaching

shared by grayton downing on 12 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Mathematics education in the United States is broken. Open any newspaper and stories of math failure shout from the pages: low international rankings, widespread innumeracy in the general population, declines in math majors. Here’s the most shocking statistic I have read in recent years: 60 percent of the 13 million two-year college students in the U.S. are currently placed into remedial math courses; 75 percent of them fail or drop the courses and leave college with no degree.
  • We need to change the way we teach math in the U.S., and it is for this reason that I support the move to Common Core mathematics.
  • One of the reasons for these results is that mathematical problems that need thought, connection making, and even creativity are more engaging for students of all levels and for students of different genders, races, and socio-economic groups. This is not only shown by my research but by decades of research in our field.
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  • ways of working are critical in mathematical work and when they are taught and valued, many more students contribute, leading to higher achievement
  • mathematics education we suffer from the widespread, distinctly American idea that only some people can be “math people.” This idea has been disproved by scientific research showing the incredible potential of the brain to grow and adapt. But the idea that math is hard, uninteresting, and accessible only to “nerds” persists. 
  • harsh stereotypical thinking—mathematics is for select racial groups and men. This thinking, as well as the teaching practices that go with it, have provided the perfect conditions for the creation of a math underclass.
  • online platform explaining research evidence on ability and the brain and on good mathematics teaching, for teachers and parents. The course had a transformative effect. It was taken by 40,000 people, and 95 percent said they would change their teaching or parenting as a result.
  • does not simply test a mathematical definition, as the first does. It requires that students visualize a triangle, use transformational geometry, consider whether different cases satisfy the mathematical definition, and then justify their thinking.
  • There is a good reason for this: Justification and reasoning are two of the acts that lie at the heart of mathematics. They are, in many ways, the essence of what mathematics is.  Scientists work to prove or disprove new theories by finding many cases that work or counter-examples that do not. Mathematicians, by contrast prove the validity of their propositions through justification and reasoning.
  • The young people who are successful in today’s workforce are those who can discuss and reason about productive mathematical pathways, and who can be wrong, but can trace back to errors and work to correct them.
  • American idea that those who are good at math are those who are fast. Speed is revered in math classes across the U.S., and students as young as five years old are given timed tests—even though these have been shown to create math anxiety in young children. Parents use flash cards and other devices to promote speed, not knowing that they are probably damaging their children’s mathematical development
  • The fact of being quick or slow isn't really relevant
  • gives more time for depth and exploration than the curricula it has replaced by removing some of the redundant methods students will never need or use.
Javier E

The World Wide Web, by the Numbers - Megan Garber - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...261982

internet international web world

shared by Javier E on 05 Sep 12 - Cached
  • Only one in three people, the BBC notes in its reading of the report, are using the web globally. And for Africa, the ratio drops to a mere one in six. Furthermore, the report finds, approximately one in three countries face moderate to severe restrictions on web access. So while the economic costs of access are keeping billions of people away from web connectivity, Berners-Lee notes, "growing suppression of free speech, both online and offline, is possibly the single biggest challenge to the future of the web."
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