Atheists with too much time on their hands

Ranks of atheists grow, get organized | csmonitor.com

Some 15 percent of Americans claim no religious affiliation, up from 8.2 percent in 1990, according to Trinity College's American Religious Identification Survey, released in March. Also, the American Humanist Association claims 20,000 financial supporters. That marks a doubling from five years ago, says spokeswoman Karen Frantz.

Yeah, fine, knock yourselves out. But it's this bit of silliness that's the reason for this post:

In Florida, atheists are pioneering a new ritual: de-baptism. Since last year, American Atheists' Florida state director Greg McDowell has been donning a mock clerical robe and officiating at services where family and friends come to watch the baptized renounce their baptisms.

The events spoof baptisms by using blow-dryers in the place of baptismal waters. They culminate in certificates for the "de-baptized" and letters to churches requesting that the names of those de-baptized be removed from baptismal rolls.

Sounds just like a bit of silly publicity seeking, I suppose, but the article notes that there is a bit of a split in the non-belief movement as to the value of ritual:

In some ways, the lack of structure or ritual has been a defining characteristic of atheist groups. McGowan notes that many atheists bristle at ritual because it feels too religious or superstitious. American Atheists' Mr. Silverman insists, "there are no rituals with us."

But America's 27 Ethical Societies, which attract many nontheist attendees to their humanist "platforms," or services, see growing interest in rituals, ranging from children's education to weddings, according to membership chairman Thomas Hoeppner.

Through ritual, "you build up not just common intellectual values, but the emotional and personal connection with people," says Mr. Hoeppner, a member of the Ethical Humanist Society of Chicago. "That's what it's all about."

Rituals need tradition behind them to make them compelling, so deliberately created new ones always seem a bit, um what's the word I need? - naff is the best one that comes to mind.

We like to consider all possibities...

Scientists try to stop schizophrenia in its tracks

Interesting story on schizophrenia "prodrome" - the early symptoms of possible coming psychosis:

In the prodrome, people can see and hear imaginary things or have odd thoughts. But significantly, they understand these experiences are just illusions, or they have a reasonable explanation.

In contrast, people with psychosis firmly cling to unreasonable explanations instead. When someone interprets an odd halo of light over a bedroom doorway as an urgent message from a dead relative, "that's when they have gone over to the psychotic side," said Dr. Thomas McGlashan, a Yale University psychiatry professor.

Either that or they are misinterpreting a message from the Mysterons.

Sunspot uncertainties

Is the Sun Missing Its Spots? - NYTimes.com

Not a bad summary of what is known and not known about sunspots, sunspot cycles, and the weather.

In all cases, the answer seems to be: not very much. For example:

With better telescopes on the ground and a fleet of Sun-watching spacecraft, solar scientists know a lot more about the Sun than ever before. But they do not understand everything. Solar dynamo models, which seek to capture the dynamics of the magnetic field, cannot yet explain many basic questions, not even why the solar cycles average 11 years in length.

Predicting the solar cycle is, in many ways, much like predicting the stock market. A full understanding of the forces driving solar dynamics is far out of reach, so scientists look to key indicators that correlate with future events and create models based on those.

Who would have thought that a rotating ball of gas big enough to burn your eyes out if you're not careful is still that hard to understand?

Balcony fears re-enforced

Lawyer victim of 'skylarking' tragedy - Yahoo!7 News

This is a pretty awful story, of the type that you think might only appear in the movies:

The 41-year-old was "skylarking" when he fell, it has been reported.

Mr Catts fell 17 storeys and landed on the fifth floor landing of The Sebel Suites hotel at 11.45pm on Thursday night, in an accident witnessed by his wife of eight months, Katrina...

It is believed Mr Catts' wife tried to save him as he clung to the balcony railing before his fall.

Well, I get a little nervous being on any apartment balcony more than a few stories high, so the idea of "skylarking" on one 22 floors up is fairly foreign to me. I don't mind heights per se; I just don't like being near the edge of a drop that it would take little effort to fall over. (Time for more self disclosure: years ago, I once explained to a Catholic girl I was dating that I don't like the idea that I could have a sudden un-controllable urge to jump over the rail. She said she felt exactly the same way. Maybe it's a residual Catholic fear of temporary possession, or something!)

Not your average summer camp

Gaza campers stage 'Schalit abduction' at ceremony | Jerusalem Post

According to Israeli defense officials, more than 120,000 Palestinian children are spending the summer in Hamas-run camps. In addition to religious studies, the children undergo semi-military training with toy guns.

At a recent summer camp graduation ceremony, the children put on a show reenacting the June 2006 abduction of Schalit. Present was Osama Mazini, a senior Hamas political leader, who is in charge of the Schalit negotiations with Israel on behalf of the terrorist group.

The article has a photo of the cute little guys re-enacting the kidnapping of Schalit. (By the way, I assume Schalit has not undergone Stockholm syndrome, otherwise he would have been on display.)

Only 10% here

Microbes ‘R’ Us - Olivia Judson Blog - NYTimes.com

I'm not feeling very topical today, so just some more unusual facts from the New York Times:

The typical human is home to a vast array of microbes. If you were to count them, you’d find that microbial cells outnumber your own by a factor of 10. On a cell-by-cell basis, then, you are only 10 percent human. For the rest, you are microbial. (Why don’t you see this when you look in the mirror? Because most of the microbes are bacteria, and bacterial cells are generally much smaller than animal cells. They may make up 90 percent of the cells, but they’re not 90 percent of your bulk.)

A bit of mutilation for a Monday

Sexual mutilation, madness and the media

This appeared a couple of weeks ago in Peter Stothard's blog in The Times: a fairly lengthy account of controversy in the 1860's in England about a London surgeon who did clitoridectomy as a "cure" for mental illness.

His practice was written up in The Times, which brought the issue into the open, and led to an investigation. The anti-clitoridectomy faction of medical opinion won the day.

A remarkable story.

A useful post

Andrew Bolt does one of those useful "remember what they used to say" posts about Labor and "jobs snobs".

He also points us to an article in The Australian about how bad the figures are for the world being able to achieve the goal of 450ppm CO2. It would seem, essentially, that everyone may as well stop pretending it can be achieved.

When your co-worker strips...

...it's probably because he is Japanese, and having to put up with a fairly remarkable government idea:

Takashi Kadokura used to strip down to his underwear when working late because of the heat.

"We couldn't concentrate on our work," said Kadokura, 37, then an economist for Dai-ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. "The air conditioning was set at 28 degrees and we weren't allowed to change it."

The experience led Kadokura to question the government's Cool Biz policy, which recommends companies set air conditioners at 28 degrees to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Kadokura says sweaty offices lead to lower productivity, and estimates the policy reduced economic growth in 2008 by ¥653 billion, or 0.13 percent of the gross domestic product of ¥497.4 trillion

More details in the Japan Times: Cool Biz said to undermine productivity

Changes in Christianity

There are two posts of interest at the First Things blog about the changing demographics of Christianity:

* first, Episcopalians, despite (or, more accurately in my view, because of) their progressive reputation are dwindling. First Things quotes from another blog these figures:

In a historic shift, more people are now attending Assemblies of God churches on weekday nights than worship in Episcopal Churches on Sunday mornings.

Average mid-week evening attendance at Assemblies of God churches is now 756,263, according to the denomination’s official statistics.

Average Sunday attendance, among Episcopalians, is 727,822.

In the past 45 years, Episcopal Church membership has dropped from 3.4 million in 1964 to 2.1 million in 2007. At the same time, the inclusive membership in the Assemblies of God has skyrocketed, from 572,123 in 1964 to 2.9 million in 2008.

* Secondly, this post, looking at world-wide changes in Christianity, contains lots of surprising figures, such as this:

This past Sunday it is possible that more Christian believers attended church in China than in all of so-called “Christian Europe.”...

This past Sunday more Anglicans attended church in each of Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda than did Anglicans in Britain and Canada and Episcopalians in the United States combined...

For several years the world’s largest chapter of the Jesuit order has been found in India, not in the United States, as it had been for much of the late twentieth century.

On the same issue, John Micklethwait, editor of The Economist, had been doing the media rounds in the last month or two promoting his recently co-authored book "God Is Back", which argues that religion is indeed catching on in lots of new countries. (I think he views the house church movement in China as particularly big.) There's an interesting, even if not sympathetic, review of the book in the New Statesman.

The toughest job

Readers will recall that I am making my way through the surprisingly enjoyable book "Life and Leisure in Ancient Rome". This weekend, it was the chapter about slavery, and I have to say that I did not realise that things could be as tough as this:

"They were bound to promote their master's welfare at every turn, because there was no limit to the punishment which he could inflict on them if he was dissatisfied; and they were encouraged to preserve his life by the strongest of all imaginable deterrents; if he was murdered, the whole of his slave-household were put to death without even the formality of a trial, on the grounds that, since they had not prevented the murder as they should have done, they were all accessories after the crime. ...

In AD 61, stung by a personal grievance, a slave of the City Prefect Pedanius Secundus killed his master; the whole vast slave household of four hundred slaves was executed..."

The book points out that this prompted a riot in Rome (people were by this time starting to think the law was - literally, I suppose - a bit of an overkill), and that:

"...despite C. Cassius' eloquent protest that society would collapse if the slaves were not killed, a number of senators had doubts and troops had to be fetched in before the executions could take place."

Talk about your hard nosed conservatives!

Things did improve later for slaves, with Hadrian restricting those who could be killed to those slaves near their murdered master at the time of his death.

But the book also makes the point that well treated slaves were often very loyal to their master.

By the time of Christianity, despite the church institutionally accepting slavery, individual Christians often, at the moment of their conversion, freed their slaves. A good way to mark a conversion, I think.

Look to the skies

Consulting with clouds: A clear role in climate change

Interesting story on new research on clouds and their likely future role in global warming. The news doesn't sound great:

Using observational data collected over the last 50 years and complex climate models, the team has established that low-level stratiform clouds appear to dissipate as the ocean warms, indicating that changes in these clouds may enhance the warming of the planet.

Furthermore, this is something that a lot of current models don't show this, apparently:

...most of the state-of-the-art climate models from modeling centers around the world do not reproduce this cloud behavior. Only one, the Hadley Centre model from the U.K. Met Office, was able to reproduce the observations. "We have a long way to go in getting the models right, but the Hadley Centre model results can help point us in the right direction," said co-author Burgman, a research scientist at the University of Miami.

Together, the observations and the Hadley Centre model results provide evidence that low-level stratiform clouds, which currently shield the earth from the sun's radiation, may dissipate in warming climates, allowing the oceans to further heat up, which would then cause more cloud dissipation.

Presumably, poor modelling of cloud behaviour could have something to do with the recently reported study that CO2 alone did not account for anywhere near enough warming at PETM, 55 million years ago. Skeptics took the uncertainty from that study as encouragement. People like me took as more of a sign that we should be uneasy that warming from CO2 could be at the high end of the current estimates due to poorly unstood feedbacks.

Really necessary?

BBC NEWS | Technology | Wireless power system shown off

This wireless electricity technology that's been talked about from time to time looks ready to actually take off.

I don't quite understand why it has appeal: sure, you can do with a few less electricity cables around the house, but get to have many more magnetic fields too.

They are saying magnetic fields are not dangerous to humans. I don't know enough about biology to know, but I would have thought most people would take a cautious attitude towards it.

Besides, I thought magnetised iron had been found not only in bird brains, but human too? (Yep, my memory is correct.) Maybe people who use this system will become completely hopeless at sensing direction (since magnetite in birds was believed to be related to their navigation skills.)

Wasn't there was a Heinlein short story (or novella?) in which the health of the human species was being weakened gradually by wireless power system?

You heard this caution here first, or last, or somewhere in between.

Research for the future

Experiments Show 'Artificial Gravity' Can Prevent Muscle Loss In Space

....researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston have conducted the first human experiments using a device intended to counteract this effect — a NASA centrifuge that spins a test subject with his or her feet outward 30 times a minute, creating an effect similar to standing against a force two and half times that of gravity. Working with volunteers kept in bed for three weeks to simulate zero-gravity conditions, they found that just one hour a day on the centrifuge was sufficient to restore muscle synthesis.

One of the interesting things about long term colonies on the Moon or Mars would be whether the people (or especially, a baby conceived in low gravity) would weaken sufficiently so as to find it impossible to return to Earth.

Maybe just low gravity is enough to provide sufficient muscle tone, but no one will know until we can go there. I imagine mouse or rat breeding on the Moon would be a very interesting experiment.

There was a made-for-TV movie I half watched a few years ago about a Helium 3 mining colony on the moon. In it, a woman fell pregnant, but was spending some time each day in a centrifuge type device to make sure the foetus was used to higher gravity. (I think she was returning to earth to actually give birth.)

It may turn out to have been quite accurate.

Reality fat, and comedy woes

Next on TV: A family of 300-plus folks, heavy girlfriends and, yes, Ruby

Disturbing news of new American reality TV concept:

TLC has ordered six episodes of a show titled, "One Big Happy Family," chronicling the life of an obese North Carolina family: dad, 340 pounds; mom, nearly 400 pounds; and two teenagers, 330 and 340 pounds each.

There's also a overweight dating show on Fox.

Will this trend soon be on Australian TV? Was "The Biggest Loser" an imported concept?

It's all academic to me, I guess, since I don't think there has ever been a reality TV show that I have been able to watch for more than 10 minutes.

The only problem is that surely "reality TV" draws resources away from worthwhile drama, comedy, and other creativity in TV. I mean, with the demise of Scrubs, there is not a sitcom worth watching. (Maybe 30 Rock, which I have never seen due to its odd scheduling here.)

As for the current alleged successes in TV comedy:

Two and a Half Men: a half-clever concept (playing on Charlie Sheen's real life playboy image,) but humour based on wildly promiscuous lifestyles wear thin after a very short time if that is the only joke that exists about a major character. (Having it as a raison d'etre of a more minor character is fine - the whole show doesn't revolve around them.) So I can't warm to this show, and always feel a little queasy when young actors are partaking in double entendre and other low brow humour.

How I Met your Mother: can't get into it. Seems weak and convoluted.

State of the Union: not a sitcom, but Tracey Ullman's latest sketch show. I've always thought she is very talented, with shows that feature a pretty appealing eccentricity. But - she's got too much control now, it seems, and the language and some of the skits are in very poor taste. (We don't really need jokes about ejaculate in a woman passenger's hair, do we?)

The Chaser's War on Everything: haven't cared much for it for a long time, due to its inability to know where to draw the lines between clever, stupid and tasteless. Should have ended about midway last season.