Link List

Spencer Mulesky guest posts on the Friendly Athiest:

The highest respect one can pay to another’s idea is to scrutinize it and explain what might be wrong.

Just writing this down to remember it now.

Mac McClelland recently did some investigative warehouse job reporting in the mid west for Mother Jones. I worked at a place like this for ten years. My wife and I got to know each other while applying price labels to CD orders for Hastings, Borders Books and Music, and Amazon when they first started selling music back in the 90s. This was before the Internet really killed the brick and mortar stores, but we still had an 80% turnover rate, worked 10 to 12 hour days 6 to 7 days a week, and were under similar pressure to make our numbers. I still have nightmares about bending over 10,000 times a day.

I made it out to the IT department by the time they implemented all the totes, scanners, conveyers and really ramped up production, though. Picking and shipping large 1,000 to 10,000 item orders requires much less logistics than millions of 1 to 3 item orders.

This article hits a little too close to home for me. I think it may have soiled my day.

His modesty is as charming as his nerdery.

And once again, we’ve reached the point where I’m out of words. Our puny brains, evolved to count the number of our fingers and toes, to grasp only what’s within reach, to picture only what we can immediately see — balk at these images.

But… we took them. Human beings looked up and wondered, looked around and observed, looked out and discovered. In our quest to seek ever more knowledge, we built the tools needed to make these pictures: the telescopes, the detectors, the computers. And all along, the power behind that magnificent work was our squishy pink brains.

Oh, and wholly crap! I 150,000 megapixel image of 1 billion stars!!!

Gallop State of the State poll results for 2011:

Gallup classifies 40% of Americans nationwide as very religious -- based on their statement that religion is an important part of their daily life and that they attend religious services every week or almost every week. Another 32% of Americans are nonreligious, based on their statement that religion is not an important part of their daily life and that they seldom or never attend religious services. The remaining 28% of Americans are moderately religious, because they say religion is important but that they do not attend services regularly or because they say religion is not important but still attend services.

The 2008 Gallop State of the States poll found that 65% of Americans identified as very religious.

Richard Dawkins in the Washington Post

How have we come to the point where reason needs a rally to defend it? To base your life on reason means to base it on evidence and logic. Evidence is the only way we know to discover what’s true about the real world. Logic is how we deduce the consequences that follow from evidence. Who could be against either? Alas, plenty of people, which is why we need the Reason Rally.

Jessica Winter in the TIMES Ideas opinion section:

You see, like most women, I was born with the chromosome abnormality known as “XX,” a deviation of the normative “XY” pattern. Symptoms of XX, which affects slightly more than half of the American population, include breasts, ovaries, a uterus, a menstrual cycle, and the potential to bear and nurse children. Now, many would argue even today that the lack of a Y chromosome should not affect my ability to make informed choices about what health care options and lunchtime cat videos are right for me. But others have posited, with increasing volume and intensity, that XX is a disability, even a roadblock on the evolutionary highway.

Brilliant. Infuriating. Inspiring.

UPDATE: Yes, my title is intended to be taken sarcastically like the article to which it links. I apologize if that wasn’t clear.

Don Pettit from low earth orbit:

The fatalist in me accepts the inevitable Zero-G result of landing jelly side “down,” so I decided to make sure the probability would always be 100%. Realizing that the bread is merely a vehicle for conveying peanut butter and honey, I decided to spread it on both sides. In weightlessness, it’s easy to balance your slice on its edge so that it can be parked on the galley table without any fuss.

Kate Ravilious for NewScientist:

Biologists have resurrected a 30,000-year-old plant, cultivating it from fruit tissue recovered from frozen sediment in Siberia.

A two-hour podcast of the Rally to Defend Free Expression, put on by the One Law for All campaign is available for download. Speakers include Richard Dawkins, AC Grayling, and Maryam Namazie reading a statement by the Jesus and Mo creator, among many others.

One Law for All is an effort to stop Sharia law from being enforced in Britain and the greater UK by the growing Muslim population. If you value free speech, and are not male and/or Muslim, you might enjoy listening to these speeches.

Sam Harris is incredibly good with analogies. So good that it may be difficult for his audience to get to the actual point of his piece, which is how to better empathize with followers of religious dogma for a better understanding of the difficulty instilling rational thought, and not a public service message about how bad campfires are for you.

This seems to be the case at The Friendly Atheist, anyhow.