While playing catch up with Planet Atheism, I saw this Google advert at the foot of the page:

100% accurate astrologer... teehee!

“100% accurate” and “astrologer” are to my mind not two items that should appear in any sentence that makes any kind of sense, but I’m willing to allow someone claiming such things to try to demonstrate it, especially when I don’t have to pay for their woo 100% accurate predictions.

“Jenna”’s credentials appear to quite impressive indeed:

I do like the discovers precise dates & times bit, but I tried sending the form without any information apart from my email address, but apparently she’s not psychic enough to already know my name, gender, date of birth, occupation and marital status.

If you’re sceptical and bored and looking for some woo to experiment on feel free to give “Jenna” a whirl.

Starting next week, Channel 4 in the UK is screening a three-part documentary series on the scientific legacy of Charles Darwin, hosted by our old friend Richard Dawkins.

Digiguide describes the series:

In 1859, English naturalist Charles Darwin published his masterpiece On the Origin of Species. In it Darwin put forward his theory - that everything on this planet has evolved by natural selection rather than by God or a higher being. The book caused outrage at the time, but radically changed perceptions of our existence.

Nearly 150 years later, Darwin’s theory remains controversial, despite overwhelming evidence backing it up. Richard Dawkins — ethologist, scientist and one of Britain’s best-known atheists … — examines the theory in our programme of the week, The Genius of Charles Darwin. A strong three-parter, Dawkins retraces Darwin’s journey aboard The Beagle and re-examines the evidence of the natural world, showing how the ongoing process of sex, suffering and death drives evolution on as the fittest survive and the weakest perish. But although the evidence seems irrefutable, Dawkins has some tough critics to convince — a class of intelligent but sceptical British teenagers. Can he convince them that Darwin’s theory is true?

Screenings on Channel 4 and S4C

Watch clips from the series

Update: There’s also a BBC Radio 4 interview with Dawkins about the series available on his web site.

As reported in today’s The Telegraph, a sikh teenager who was excluded from school after refusing to take off a religious bangle has won her discrimination case at the High Court.

Sarika Watkins-Singh, 14, was reprimanded for breaking the “no jewellery” rule at Aberdare Girls’ School in South Wales last year.

In court, she said wearing the slim steel bracelet was as important to her as it was to the England cricketer Monty Panesar.

Sarika, who is Punjabi-Welsh, claimed she was the victim of unlawful discrimination when she was first taught in isolation and finally excluded last November.

The school, at which Sarika was the only Sikh among 600 girls, does not permit jewellery other than wristwatches and ear studs.

But Mr Justice Silber ruled that the bangle - known as the kara - was a symbol of her Sikh faith and not a piece of jewellery.

He said that the school was guilty of indirect discrimination under race relations and equality laws.

Right. That’s it. Fuck it.

I have a religion. It’s a lack-of-faith-based “faith”, and it’s called “Realityism”. It doesn’t have any gods, but it does have beliefs (based on good evidence). I will hereby quote the entirety of the scripture of Realityism here:

The Big Bumper Book of Realityism

Chapter 1

¹ The cosmos, and everything in it, simply is.

² The universe, and everything in it, are the tacit and explicit symbols of your “faith”. ³ Carry any symbols that you want to, to demonstrate your acceptance of your “faith”. ⁴ Nobody can tell you that you are wrong in your choice of symbol - it is they who are wrong.

⁵ Let reality, through evidence, be your guide.

⁶ Enjoy life.

There. Dead easy to remember and live by.

I wonder what my choice of symbol can be. I’ve always fancied a ninja outfit. But that’s not enough, I really need to show people how sincere I am in my “faith”. I know, why not something like sikhs do with their knives kirpan’s or this kid does with her jewellery symbol.

What I choose to carry won’t be jewellery or a weapon either, it’ll be a symbol just like these people have. And I will of course be free to carry it where something very very similar might otherwise be prohibited in a secular environment. But, of course, as a symbol, it’s completely different, isn’t it?

What do you mean to say that I can’t carry a 30″ blade or a crossbow or a shotgun in public? They’re not weapons, you heathen, they’re SYMBOLS! Don’t you understand, it was recently ruled in the High Court that one can happily flout societal norms when “faith” is involved?

DON’T OPPRESS ME OR MY RELIGION!

Source: The Telegraph: Sikh teenager wins bangle discrimination case.

/hattip: Pharyngula

Google have now released their Wikipedia competitor, Knol, where a “knol” is defined as:

…an authoritative article about a specific topic.

knol.google.com

Taking a look through a few of the articles (e.g. infertility, diarrhea (sic), athlete’s foot to get a feel for the place, some of them read more like layperson¹-friendly entries into journals.

The content does appear to be of a good quality, and topics don’t seem as narrowly defined as they do in Wikipedia. I do think, perhaps, it would behove article maintainers to not only make the article friendly in terms of language to non-specialists, but also make it presentable: the layout of some of the articles is, frankly, attrocious.

At the moment, most of the articles appear to deal with medical topics, although I’m sure that when those who are passionate about their areas of expertise are aware of Knol (especially if they have a bit of an ego) it’ll quickly fill up with some good quality content.

From the articles I’ve taken a look at I get a sense that there’s a lot more personality behind this than Wikipedia has; someone human, someone that actually cares, has written this. Wikipedia—at least the English version that I’m most familiar with—always gave me the impression, with it’s strict NPOV philosophy (which I do appreciate on one level), that it was written for and by emotionless alien robots who want nothing but facts, facts, facts. Knol seems far more personal, almost as if there’s advice being given, not just information.

One of the issues that I can see immediately is that referring to Knol articles is a pain. Look at this URL:

http://knol.google.com/k/nikki-levin/athletes-foot-tinea-pedis/saclI5Bh/f9HbJg#

That’s what people see in their address bar in their browser, and are going to want to send to people and say “hey! check this out!”. But the URLs are, frankly, shite. What’s that crap in the last two fragments at the end? And why the need for the persistent /k at the front? Yeah, I know that Wikipedia does this with /wiki, but it doesn’t make any damned difference if everything has it, does it? The sooner they sort this out, the better.

I’ve yet to take an in-depth look at Knol, but I’m going to spend a little time doing so today, and keep my eye on it in the future. It does though have a long way to go before even dreaming of catching up with Wikipedia. But it looks interesting, and any easy way of getting the mainstream public interested in knowing rather than ignoring (or simply making shit up) is good in my book.

Personally, I can’t wait to see who they come up with² as ‘experts’ (and their “authoritative” articles) when it comes to those topics that we know and love.

1. of reasonable intelligence [↩]
2. actually, who puts themselves forward and takes on the rôle—it’s all self–propelling, as Wikipedia is [↩]

Christopher Hitchens lets loose with a bit more of that fighting talk that he’s (in)famous for in his article Losing Sight of Progress: How Blind Salamanders Make Nonsense of Creationists’ Claims over at Slate Magazine.

Khaled Diab over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free has written a really interesting article that I can’t find much fault with: Contemplating God-free zones.

Caveat: the comments, as always, are something of a different matter.

It never occurred to me that islamic dating could be so fraught with indecision…

/hattip: PhotoBasement

I think there might be a deeper truth to this…

More excellent cartoons over at See Mike Draw.

Stephen “dogshit” Green, who I mentioned in an earlier post having lost his private suit against the BBC et al for ‘blasphemy’ and was considering bankrupty has set up a petition to try to shame the BBC into waiving the costs he was ordered to pay by the court.

Another petition has since arisen against his petition to show support for the BBC and friends in not having the licence fee payer have to pay for Green’s ridiculous and frivolous action.

At the time of writing, Green’s petition had 1051 signatories (which includes a large number of messages *not* in support of him), and the anti-petition has 579 signatures.

Go and sign (BBC licence fee payers only).

/hattip New Humanist blog

It’s struck me that, as a secularist, I should be concerned with the current crisis within the anglican church, even though it seems at first glance to be simply a tiff between members of the same club who disagree about the rules as set down by a long absent founder. Which, frankly, it is.

My main reasoning here is that, as a bloc, these types of christians would be more effective as a unified force when demanding specific additional entitlement of the state than as two or more sub-cults. As it stands, anglicans, with their especial relationship to the machinery of state in the UK, currently enjoy more particular privileges when compared to any other cultural sub-group.

This isn’t surprising when the UK is actually a de jure anglican theocracy even if it is, in more practical terms, a secular democracy.

Should the anglicans split into, say, two factions — one of a liberal persuasion and one of a more fundamentalist and bigoted creed — that would to my mind significantly weaken the tenacious hold that they have over the established government than they enjoy at present while together. This in turn would also weaken their ‘right’ to demand the maintenance of, or additions to, the privileges they already hold, and would very likely lead to some or all of those privileges being eventually removed, just as the rest of us mere mortals are constrained.

However, the anglicans seem hell-bent on trying to keep themselves as a single entity, to the extent of having signed up the evangelical faction as a ‘church within a church’.

What this means is that they will be able to maintain the incommensurate grip on the state that they already possess and, as they do at present, be further able to express their shared prejudices in the public sphere with more authority than they deserve, while only having to squabble over, as they have done for centuries (and I’d wager for centuries hence), the internal rules of their cult which otherwise doesn’t affect John Q Public.

I support a split in the anglican church, because I’d rather see two churches, a smaller one of a liberal attitude, and another smaller one of bigotry and intolerance, rather than one large bigotry-tolerating church with a state-provided leg-up to power that allows them to make life difficult for the rest of us, especially those of us that don’t subscribe to the baseless and most fundamental claims of their dogma and, it seems, one of the few things they otherwise agree on: the magic man of yore.

Well, it’s a possibly.

A study to be published in August’s Journal of Archaeological Science by Danish archaeologists describes how monks engaged in copying biblical and other religious texts may have been poisoned by mercury in a red ink used in illustrating these manuscripts.

Since the monks, who were buried in the cloister walk of the Cistercian Abbey at Øm, did not have these diseases but contained mercury in their bones, scientists believe the monks were either contaminated while preparing and administering medicines, or while writing the artistic letters of incunabula, or pre-1500 A.D. books.

Kaare Lund Rasmussen, a University of Southern Denmark scientist at the Institute of Physics and Chemistry, suspects that ink used in the abbey’s scriptorium was the culprit.

He told Discovery News “it is very human to lick the brush, if one wants to make a fine line.”

Even today “one should really not touch, or much less rub, the parchment pages of an incunabulum,” Lund Rasmussen said, adding that mercury “was used in the first place because cinnabar (a type of mercury) has this bright red, beautiful color.”

Source: Discovery Channel

When the robotic revolution jihad comes, it’s probably going to be islamic, if this video is anything to go by.

/’alfinched from IslamicTube (yeah, that’s what I thought)

A while back, I received a press release spam¹ from someone on behalf of a chap that goes by the name Victor Senchenko. Senchenko wrote a book, which he has self-published, and sent me the spam trying to get me to buy it.

As (hopefully) with most people, I don’t generally tend to buy things from spam emails, but this one was particularly interesting as it seems to have been addressed directly to me and hence, presumably, sought to appeal to my vanity in being a “freethinker”. However, instead of taking Senchenko up on his kind offer to buy his wares, I wrote a blog post. Normally I wouldn’t give such credence to spam, but I had had a bit to drink that evening.

I made a rather lack-lustre comment, and thought no more of it, but it seems that Senchenko has taken it upon himself to know me better than I know myself and takes great pains, and in no undercertain terms, to tell me about me. However, the appeal to vanity of the original spam is well gone and this email seeks to shame me into buying his book.

I should thank you for publishing my initial Press Release emailed to you by the volunteers on my media team.

It is also the same guys who had just recently trawled across your site again, bringing your commentary to my attention. Because of that, on 12-6-08 you were sent another Press Release: this one giving a different perspective of the same intent: to provide confirmation that gods not only do not physically exists [sic], but that they are not even physically required by all that physically exists to physically exist.

I was indeed sent another press release. This time I just marked it, rightly, as spam². Again I thought no more of it. I was hoping that Google Mail’s spam filter would take care of the rest. Apparently it hasn’t.

Now, as a human, you may feel that you have all the right to scorn information sent to you, simply because you feel that you don’t have to examine it for yourself before you publicly reject it. The frightening element of this is that you actually present yourself as an intellectual liberal freethinker, while being the very opposite: a repressive rejecter: nothing more than an intellectual coward, who tolerates no unusual claims, simply because they are unusual claims. So listen to your prejudices, Nullifidian – a person having no faith or religious belief – when given an opportunity to gain knowledge that you are right than [sic] gods do not exist:

“Yeah, I didn’t give him the satisfaction of a link. So sue me.

“Frankly, this sounds more like a scientologist than anything else but, then again, even without the Xenu nonsense, I think they’re barking.

“Oh, and guess what? I’m very probably not going to buy his book, even with the rather tempting reward of a refund of the cover price for his generous offer. Fancy that.”

Fancy what? No doubt, you were so proud of yourself when you expressed these sentiments. Simply because you were so pissed – by your own words – your lack of conscious rational prevented you from recognizing that which you had always have been seeking.

I have a right to accept or reject anything that I see fit. Usually I try to have a good reason for rejecting things, and things being advertised by spam raise red flags to me. Pride had nothing to do with it.

I do not present myself as an intellectual liberal freethinker, I present myself as a concerned citizen. Whatever attitude Senchenko seeks to impose on me, I reject unless I explicitly claim it for myself. I consider myself as liberal (in terms of liberty over tyranny) when compared to social norms. I don’t consider myself an intellectual, but I do consider myself someone who values thinking.

Seeking? What have I been seeking? Proof that gods do not exist? If Senchenko really thinks so, he doesn’t know me anywhere near as well as he thinks he does. And, even in my state of mild to moderate intoxication (rather than being so pissed as Senchenko claims) I was still able to read and write quite coherently.

After all, did you ever presume that proof of god non-existence would come from current science? Pigs would fly first. For current science – especially physics – are the stream of the most delusionary [sic] fabrications that continue to dupe humanity – including you – in believing that ‘time’ physically exists; that ‘dominant males’, such as kings and emperors, have a god given right to rule, because gods, supposedly, gave them that right to rule. Should you consider me currently naïve, just consider Mugabe’s claim that “only god can oust him”. Then consider the same current situation over the rest of this planet.

No, I didn’t presume that proof of god non-existence would come from current science. And apparently Senchenko thinks that I think “time” physically exists (I don’t) and that kings have a ‘right to rule (I’m a [small 'R'] republican).

Senchenko doesn’t know me at all…

Frankly, I’m embarrassed for you, atheisrt [sic], for you are the worst example of humanity: that which pretends to be the best of human understanding, but which, in actual fact, is nothing but a sham, a fraud, a liar.

Oh, really? What exactly have I lied about? Please, Senchenko, tell me, and I’ll retract it if it isn’t true. If it is true, then I’ll expect an apology for this libel.

By your own admission, you had not bothered to read the book in question, prior to mocking it. If this is what you were taught to assess knowledge – and I know it was not – then you had failed the first test of any basic principle of knowledge acquisition: examine it for yourself first-hand, if possible. For only then – and only then – can you possibly make an informed judgment. The key word here is: ‘informed’. Instead you chose to show your lack of professionalism of any scientist: to mock in ignorance. A shameful and undignified behavior, to be chastised by any pedagogue.

No, I freely admit to not having read Senchenko’s book. This isn’t really surprising: I haven’t read most of the books ever written, and indeed I still have about fifteen books on my bookshelf that I have still to read. Does Senchenko expect me to drop everything to read his?

And, apparently, I’m now an unprofessional scientist.

You had chosen to belittle the knowledge offered to you, without personally assessing it. An act of an ignorant intellectual cowardice.

Senchenko seems to be under the mistaken apprehension that I belittled his claimed knowledge. I didn’t belittle it as I have no knowledge of it. However, his spam made claims that I am dubious of, and it was because, and only because, I was unwilling to trust Senchenko and his spam that I refused to partake of his offer. However, more on this below.

Senchenko should, of course, have sent his spam press release to the relevant news agencies and journals, not to a lowly and relatively obscure blogger. They have vastly more resources available and experience to investigate his claims.

Are you now going to retract? Or are you going to read the book, and then, having become INFORMED, either still crap on it, INFORMEDLY (an absolute right you shall have, with me being the brunt of it), or acknowledge that you had learned all that current humans do not know, just as the Press Release claims?

I really don’t have any idea as to what I am supposed to retract. My refusal to promoted his spam with a link? My opinion that it reads like a Scientology manual? My refusal to buy his wares? I will retract none of these.

The choice is yours, of course. But do understand this most seriously: my site is more than capable of exposing intellectual cowards. I have no fears of exposing people like you for being what you are: a gutless crow; an intellectual coward.

Now then, buddy, you think I’m being harsh? I dare you to post all this on your blog. I have no problem of doing the same on my site, even if you don’t.

While I’m not Senchenko’s buddy, especially when he has then threatened to “expose” me, I have accepted his challenge by publishing his email in full.

Of course, you may choose to read the book for yourself and inform me of this fact. In which case I shall reserve my online judgment of your attitude until you can provide an INFORMED opinion of the book, which I promise to post in full.

Kind regards,
Victor Senchenko

Kind regards? What an interesting choice of closure.

Senchenko, if you’re reading this, I call your bluff. I’ve posted this email in full.

And, if you really want me to read your book, I have a counter offer: send me a copy of the book and I will read it with as much rigour as I’m able. Should I be so convinced then I will undertake to pay you the full cover price and write a fair review of the book. If I’m not convinced, then I shall return the book to you and write a fair review of the book.

As you appear to be so very confident that you have the knowledge and arguments that the rest of us are not party to, shall we put the onus of risk onto you and place the mantle of trust onto me? It seems only fair, don’t you think?

1. defined as unsolicited commercial email [↩]
2. still defined as unsolicited commercial email [↩]

I don’t actually read Icelandic (and apparently it’s rather difficult to learn) but I’m reliably informed that this photograph is legitimate, and not ’shopped or staged.

Svarthöfði á vegum félagsmanna í Vantrú

In other Icelandic news, the first gay couple has married in a church.