Interesting Stuff Thread

expectationlost

trinity scholars refusing to stand for prayers before their evening meal http://trinitynews.ie/scholars-in-controversy-over-refusal-to-stand-for-latin-prayers/ archaic all round

kylith

Secretary to the Fellows Frank Bannister added that “Grace is a propriety or protocol, a tradition which, inter alia, is a sign of respect for the head of High Table. It has absolutely no religious significance (indeed many people sit for grace in other circumstances).”

How can he claim that praying before and after meals has no religious significance?

swampgas

kylith wrote: »

How can he claim that praying before and after meals has no religious significance?

He's probably a cultural Catholic.

joseph brand

Scene from 'True Detective'. (Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson)

"If the only thing keeping a person decent is the xpectation of divine reward, then brother, that person is a piece of ****."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RfUj09pWfM

joseph brand

Lottery winners become more right-wing.

First up, Andrew Oswald and Nattavudh Powdthavee test the effect of wealth on political attitudes by looking at people who got richer, not through their efforts or inheritance, but by winning the lottery. Sure enough, lottery winners become more right-wing. Maybe that’s not surprising, but in case you had any doubts about whether to be a cynic, this should dispel them.

Even more interesting is the effect on political attitudes: lottery winners also became more likely to praise the current, unequal distribution of income.

Think about that for a minute. You might imagine that a self-made man, reasoning from his own experience, might come to the conclusion that people get what they deserve. But here are people who demonstrably, by design, got rich(er) through pure chance, having nothing to do with their talents or efforts. Yet their increased wealth nonetheless convinces them that society is fair. Presumably a big enough lottery win would turn them into Tom Perkins.

Set a beggar on horseback, and he'll ride to the devil.

Does this mean that if I ever win the Lotto, I'll become a homophobic, racist bigot with a deep admiration for the Royal family and the Vatican (different cheeks of the same ar$e) ?

Sulla Felix

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/12/the-last-taboo-atheists-politicians-100901.html?#.Uv3GHYW_9u0

On Real Time with Bill Maher last August, Maher asked his guest, newly retired Rep. Barney Frank, if he felt liberated now that he was a private citizen. Frank said he did, since he no longer gets phone calls saying someone screwed something up and he has to “unscrew it.” Maher pressed on, saying, “You were in a fairly safe district. You were not one of those congresspeople who have to worry about every little thing. You could come on this show and sit next to a pot-smoking atheist, and it wouldn’t bother you.” Frank shot back: “Which pot-smoking atheist were you talking about?” Then he pointed back and forth to Maher and himself.


The audience loved it. Maher doubled over in laughter and delight. But while few seemed to care about Frank’s pot-smoking admission, atheists across the country—myself included—were disappointed that he hadn’t acknowledged his lack of religious belief sooner, when it could have made a real difference. We were left wondering why a man who served 16 terms in Congress and who bravely came out as gay all the way back in 1987 felt the need to hide his atheism until he was out of office. Was it really harder to come out as an atheist politician in 2013 than as a gay one 25 years ago?


Incredibly, the answer might be yes.

Nothing particularly new but interesting to see a real life example.

Kivaro

"Protecting life against all possible dangers and keeping it safe... is clearly stipulated in verse 4/29 of the Holy Quran: Do not kill yourselves or one another... There is a possibility that an individual who travels to [the] planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death.​"

More fascinating information about this fatwa (love that word) here:
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/national/fatwa-forbids-muslims-suicidal-mars-missons/ndYNB/

Pherekydes

I wonder is there a fatwa against taping explosives around your midriff and going into a public place and detonating them? I guess not.,

Brian Shanahan

Kivaro wrote: »

"Protecting life against all possible dangers and keeping it safe... is clearly stipulated in verse 4/29 of the Holy Quran: Do not kill yourselves or one another... There is a possibility that an individual who travels to [the] planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death.​"

More fascinating information about this fatwa (love that word) here:
http://www.ajc.com/news/news/national/fatwa-forbids-muslims-suicidal-mars-missons/ndYNB/

Of course this fatwa ignores the fact that the best way for protecting human life in the long run is to establish an off-world colony. Way to doom the human race Islam!

Sulla Felix

Pherekydes wrote: »

I wonder is there a fatwa against taping explosives around your midriff and going into a public place and detonating them? I guess not.,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatwa_on_Terrorism

"Terrorism is terrorism, violence is violence and it has no place in Islamic teaching and no justification can be provided for it, or any kind of excuses or ifs or buts."

Muslims are a little bit like the Daily Mail though. One day eating oranges cures cancer and blowing up innocents is a-ok, the next oranges actually cause early onset dementia and if you detonate a bomb you're going to hell.

robindch

Kivaro wrote: »

"Protecting life against all possible dangers and keeping it safe... is clearly stipulated in verse 4/29 of the Holy Quran: Do not kill yourselves or one another... There is a possibility that an individual who travels to [the] planet Mars may not be able to remain alive there, and is more vulnerable to death.​"

If this ruling prevents fundamentalist islamics from infecting another planet with their foolishness, then I for one, fully support them.

joseph brand

Gem found on Australian sheep ranch is the oldest known piece of Earth, scientists find

Scientists using two different age-determining techniques have shown that a tiny zircon crystal found on a sheep ranch in Western Australia is the oldest known piece of our planet, dating to 4.4 billion years ago.
Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience on Sunday, the researchers said the discovery indicates that Earth's crust formed relatively soon after the planet formed and that the little gem was a remnant of it.

They used a technique known as atom-probe tomography that was able to identify individual atoms of lead in the crystal and determine their mass, and confirmed that the zircon was indeed 4.4 billion years old.
To put that age in perspective, the Earth itself formed 4.5 billion years ago as a ball of molten rock, meaning that its crust formed relatively soon thereafter, 100 million years later. The age of the crystal also means that the crust appeared just 160 million years after the very formation of the solar system.

The discovery that the zircon crystal, and thereby the formation of the crust, dates from 4.4 billion years ago suggests that the planet was perhaps capable of sustaining microbial life 4.3 billion years ago, Valley said.
"We have no evidence that life existed then. We have no evidence that it didn't. But there is no reason why life could not have existed on Earth 4.3 billion years ago," he added.
The oldest fossil records of life are stromatolites produced by an archaic form of bacteria from about 3.4 billion years ago.

Cabaal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjncr7DeRHU

robindch

Turns out that Alan Alda, somebody I'd never associated before with science, runs/set up/contributes to a Center for Communicating Science.

Amongst other things, they run a competition for people to answer a complex question in a simple fashion. This year, the question is "What is Color"?

In 2012, the question was "What's a flame" and here's the winning answer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ymAXKXhvHI

MrPudding

From Sky Never miss:

Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey Season 1
(coming 2014)

Over three decades after Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos: A Personal Journey' offered a stunning exploration of the universe, the team behind the iconic series reunite to create this successor to Sagan's masterpiece, transporting viewers across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest scale.

I bit more about it here:

http://natgeotv.com/uk/cosmos-a-spacetime-odyssey/about

MrP

Sulla Felix

robindch wrote: »

Turns out that Alan Alda, somebody I'd never associated before with science, runs/set up/contributes to a Center for Communicating Science.

Amongst other things, they run a competition for people to answer a complex question in a simple fashion. This year, the question is "What is Color"?

In 2012, the question was "What's a flame" and here's the winning answer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ymAXKXhvHI

He hosted a Scientific American magazin/tv show for 12 years from the nineties into the naughties. Still does some work for them.
This is a podcast interview with him, makes for good listening.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/alan-aldas-human-spark-10-01-07/

Yeah, I had been reading Scientific American I guess for almost about 50 years—pretty much every issue and pretty much every article—and I went from not having any idea what I was reading to getting a little bit more of a sense of a language; and it was to me like learning a new language. It really helped me get away from magical thinking into a kind of thinking based on evidence, and was really grateful to the magazine for that.

Mark Hamill

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKA4w2O61Xo

Interesting video that actually explains why science approaches things the way it does.

oscarBravo

I highly recommend the "Black Swan" book he mentions.

TheChizler

oscarBravo wrote: »

I highly recommend the "Black Swan" book he mentions.

Just said feck it and ordered it off the Book Depository there. Better be good!

Brian Shanahan

TheChizler wrote: »

Just said feck it and ordered it off the Book Depository there. Better be good!

If its the Nassim Nicholas Taleb book, I don't like his style of writing. But the underlying ideas are very interesting.

Sulla Felix

Courtesy of bnt in Cool Pics, "if the moon were only a pixel"..

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=89322473&postcount=1

endacl

Sulla Felix wrote: »

Courtesy of bnt in Cool Pics, "if the moon were only a pixel"..

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=89322473&postcount=1

endacl

Sulla Felix wrote: »

Courtesy of bnt in Cool Pics, "if the moon were only a pixel"..

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=89322473&postcount=1

Your post reminded me of this one, which I'd imagine has probably come up before. Probably many times!

http://htwins.net/scale2/

What gets me about this 'scale of things' link is the fact that there's more to 'the left' of human scale than there is to 'the right'. It's a lot farther down to the smallest measurement than it is up to the biggest! That gave me a bit of a brain itch the first time I thought about it. Also interesting is the fact that we meet a stellar object before we've even got beyond the scale of countries. Context is king!



Keeping things parochial - stellarwise - I've always liked this one too....

Worth watching till the end, if only for some always-cool Blade Runner tunage.

Hotblack Desiato

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-26466674

Sixteen killed in Manchester by hospital superbug

...
KPC which causes urinary tract infections and pneumonia in sick patients is resistant to Carbapenems, the last major group of antibiotics to work against multi-drug resistant bacteria.

...

Patients in London, Southampton, Birmingham and Shropshire are being asked to send in faeces samples so the spread of the disease can be mapped.

:eek:

Sulla Felix

endacl wrote: »

Your post reminded me of this one, which I'd imagine has probably come up before. Probably many times!

http://htwins.net/scale2/

What gets me about this 'scale of things' link is the fact that there's more to 'the left' of human scale than there is to 'the right'. It's a lot farther down to the smallest measurement than it is up to the biggest! That gave me a bit of a brain itch the first time I thought about it. Also interesting is the fact that we meet a stellar object before we've even got beyond the scale of countries. Context is king!



Keeping things parochial - stellarwise - I've always liked this one too....

Worth watching till the end, if only for some always-cool Blade Runner tunage.

xkcd have a good log scale toon that helped me

endacl

^^

* head explodes *

Brian Shanahan

endacl wrote: »

^^

* head explodes *

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrb2Oc6naDI

Cabaal

http://www.opposingviews.com/i/society/gay-issues/southern-states-watch-most-gay-porn-america

Who watches the most gay porn in the U.S.? Surprisingly, it’s not the states with the most liberal views. According to new findings, there is more gay porn viewing in states where same-sex marriage is illegal, particularly in the south.

Turtwig

They have to get their same-sex impressions from somewhere. The bible is rather lacking on the details.

KyussBishop

This is pretty interesting - in among all of the anti-pylon woo, there are some good arguments against them:
"Powerlines disturb animal habitats by appearing as disturbing flashes of UV light invisible to the human eye"
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/powerlines-disturb-animal-habitats-by-appearing-as-disturbing-flashes-of-uv-light-invisible-to-the-human-eye-9187631.html

So, this is what some animals see from pylons and such:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bafB7QwVw6I