The Atheist Avalanche

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clipped from www.washingtonmonthly.com Last September Richard Dawkins published The God Delusion and Sam Harris published Letter to a Christian Nation. In January Victor Stenger published God: The Failed Hypothesis. This month Christopher Hitchens is out with God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. I'm curious: have I just not noticed books like this before? Or is it really true that there's a sudden avalanche of popular books extolling the virtues of atheism? (Or, in any case, denigrating organized religion.) Is there any particular reason for this?

Foremost expert in climatology debunks "global warming" hysteria

This guy says the global warming hysteria is nonsense: Reid A. Bryson holds the 30th PhD in Meteorology granted in the history of American education. Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology—now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences—in the 1970s he became the first director of what’s now the UW’s Gaylord Nelson Institute of Environmental Studies. He’s a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor—created, the U.N. says, to recognize “outstanding achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment.” He has authored five books and more than 230 other publications and was identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.

clipped from www.wecnmagazine.com “Before there were enough people to make any difference at all, two million years ago, nobody was changing the climate, yet the climate was changing, okay?” “All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.” Little Ice Age? That’s what chased the Vikings out of Greenland after they’d farmed there for a few hundred years during the Mediaeval Warm Period, an earlier run of a few centuries when the planet was very likely warmer than it is now, without any help from industrial activity in making it that way. What’s called “proxy evidence”—assorted clues extrapolated from marine sediment cores, pollen specimens, and tree-ring data—helps reconstruct the climate in those times before instrumental temperature records existed.

Fibonacci spirals in nature

clipped from physorg.com Scientists find clues to the formation of Fibonacci spirals in nature While the aesthetics and symmetry of Fibonacci spiral patterns has often attracted scientists, a mathematical or physical explanation for their common occurrence in nature is yet to be discovered. Recently, scientists have successfully produced Fibonacci spiral patterns in the lab, and found that an elastically mismatched bi-layer structure may cause stress patterns that give rise to Fibonacci spirals. The discovery may explain the widespread existence of the pattern in plants. Patterns that evolve naturally are generally an optimized configuration for an assembly of elements under an interaction,” Cao explained to PhysOrg.com. “We conjecture that the Fibonacci spirals are the configuration of least elastic energy.

Monkey see, monkey sue: Austrian activists want chimpanzee declared a ’person’

clipped from www.cbc.ca In some ways, Hiasl is like any other Viennese: He indulges a weakness for pastry, likes to paint and enjoys chilling out watching TV. But he doesn't care for coffee, and he isn't actually a person - at least not yet. In a case that could set a global legal precedent for granting basic rights to apes, animal rights advocates are seeking to get the 26-year-old male chimpanzee legally declared a "person." Hiasl's supporters argue he needs that status to become a legal entity that can receive donations and get a guardian to look out for his interests. "Our main argument is that Hiasl is a person and has basic legal rights," said Eberhart Theuer, a lawyer leading the challenge on behalf of the Association Against Animal Factories, a Vienna animal rights group. "We mean the right to life, the right to not be tortured, the right to freedom under certain conditions," Theuer said. "We're not talking about the right to vote here."

Map of Online Communities

clipped from imgs.xkcd.com