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1. I now live in Salisbury, UK. 2. I've rewritten "The Commercialist Mass Media: The Bane of Human Cultural Evolution" by Vexen Crabtree (2009), and it now includes a list of the most popular newspapers along with notes on their quality and worth. I've written a large new section on democracy & the mass media. In short: Very few facts that appear in the news are checked, and much of the input in most news sources results from public-relations commercial material and industry lobby groups that often pretend to be grassroots citizen (or science) groups. It's worth reading for a general heads-up on the potential, hidden, sources of bias in the news. Its worse than you think! 3. I've written an introduction to "Anti-Religious Forces: Specific Factors Fuelling Secularisation" by Vexen Crabtree (2003), introducing secularism, modernism, science, multiculturalism, and individuals such as Prof. Paul Kurts and Prof. Richard Dawkins. 4. I'm off to Amphifest in Germany tomorrow.
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Off for another week's training tomorrow, right up North almost in Scotland. Setting off Sunday afternoon.
This weekend I've read an awesome edition of New Scientist; I've written so many notes on a great article on psychosomosis; including lots of notes on the "nocebo" effect. What's that then? If the "placebo" effect is generally positive body-healing then the nocebo effect is psychosomatic illness such as rashes, asthma and other bodily effects produced by mental anguish and expectation. So, with this usage, placebo and nocebo effects are the useful and counterproductive halves of psychosomosis in general.
I'm also writing up notes on Nick Davies' "Flat Earth News", which is about where global news comes from, and in particular, about the massive inaccuracy of newspapers and wire news. For example, only 12% of the basic, fundamental facts stated in newspapers are ever checked. There is a massive amount of PR material and activist-injected content, and copied material, which even in the best titles, gets straight into the paper or report without scrutiny.
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I've added a list of serious genetic diseases to my page on evolution, including Cystic fibrosis, Down's syndrome, Hemophilia, Huntingdon's disease, Muscular dystrophy, Sickle-cell anemia, Tay-Sachs disease and Thalassemia, to complement the list of inheritable personality disorders.
I also added a bit about dyslexia, which is closely linked with three genes. The genes involved include DCDC2, active in reading centres in the brain; and Robo1, which develops the corpus callosum connecting the two halves of the brain during foetal development.
The total picture is of a species that copes with multiple inherited dysfunctions. Many of our psychological ills result from the fact that our underlying psychological processes are leftovers from previous eras when life was much more simplistic and machiavellian. Prof Dietrich from the Philosophy Department at Binghamton University bemoans this history, stating that "it is a sad fact that much of our basic human psychology is built by evolution. These innate psychological capacities of ours are principally responsible for many of humanity's darkest ills. But in short, we abuse, discriminate, and rape because we are human"17. Genetic diseases are inherited or are made present from the moment of conception and do not result from any choice of lifestyle. Such random suffering is hardly the hallmark of a well-designed genetic system. Genetic diseases and undesirable personality traits afflict us because evolution is imperfect in its mechanism and blindly progresses down roads that can later turn out to be harmful.
Full page: "Evolution and the Unintelligent Design of Life: Inherited Traits, Genetic Dysfunction and Artificial Life" by Vexen Crabtree (2007) Tags: evolution
Current Location: Salisbury, UK
Listening To: "Little Suicide" by The Love Crave
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Monday means another week trekking through the black mountains in Wales at breakneck pace, with heavy backpacks. This is the second week of training, and then the week after it's the same story, but up near Scotland somewhere. Gorgeous scenary, great mountains... shame about the pain! I don't know if I will make it... I haven't recovered from the *last* week's training yet! Anyway, it means I will be mostly offline. I can do a limited about of Facebook-foo via my mobile phone. Going to try to write up 3-pages worth of notes from a book I just finished. That is, I have 3 pages of page-number references, and now I'm returning to each of those pages to write up notes on the content. If I can get it all noted down, then I can work on using the text next week on the laptop. The alternative is to take a book I've already read with me, which doesn't seem sensible. Good thing I can type fast! And working backwards, I spend nearly all of last week in our biggest server room plugged in to the back of a test network, running some scripts on some databases, without any sight of natural sunlight, natural air flow, and mostly alone apart from the occasional guy passing through to change backup tapes. This guy was more of an automaton than a real human though. Result: Yay, tests complete, so the scripts can be implemented on the live networks. Thankfully not by me as I'm away in Wales/Scotland for 2 weeks! Tags: books, fitness, wales
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Just skimmed a quote in an article on The Guardian website: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/may/03/internet-carbon-footprint"Soaring online demand stretching companies' ability to deliver content as net uses more power and raises costs. 'In an energy-constrained world, we cannot continue to grow the footprint of the internet … we need to rein in the energy consumption,' said Subodh Bapat, vice-president at Sun Microsystems, one of the world's largest manufacturers of web servers." I completely disagree! Given the massive carbon costs of air transport and petrol and its inefficient use in small engines, it is much better for centralized power stations to use the same resources to keep people at home on the Internet! Not only does online-addiction reduce people's carbon footprints in terms of travel, but, must surely help reduce crime rates and antisocial behaviour too. It keeps the masses mollified, allows the clever ones to do research from the safety of their own homes / libraries, etc, and in general makes the world less messy if more socializing is done electronically. Listening To: "The Creature" by Implant
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Firstly, from the National Secular Society: "Lillian Ladele, the Islington registrar who refused to conduct same-sex Civil Partnerships on religious grounds, has been refused leave to appeal against the decision of an Employment Tribunal that she did not suffer religious discrimination at work. She has also been ordered to pay costs. [...] Keith Porteous Wood, Executive Director of the NSS, said: "Religious campaigners are trying relentlessly to reverse hard-won equality rights or give religious employees carte blanche to exempt themselves from the laws and regulations that apply to everyone else. It was notable that while Miss Ladele drew the line at officiating at same-sex partnerships, her Biblical conscience seemed untroubled about conducting marriages for people who had been divorced". Islington was also battling against considerable odds. These cases are being fought with huge determination and massive funds from evangelical Christian groups. However, none of the cases have so far been successful, and the repeated failure begins to make this campaign to obtain special privileges for Christians at work look like bravado. The case of the family court judge in Sheffield who didn't want to deal with gay couples was thrown out, as was the case of the Relate counsellor who did not want to offer sexual counselling to gay couples. Nadia Eweida, the woman who sued BA because she claimed they had discriminated against her after she wore a cross over her uniform, also lost her case. Far from being a victim, Ms Eweida was described by the Employment Tribunal as a nightmare employee who made unreasonable demands, unfounded accusations and was insulting to her colleagues when they didn't share her religious beliefs. Strathclyde Fire and Rescue Service should have taken a leaf out of Islington's book and fought a case brought against them by a Catholic firefighter who refused to provide fire safety literature to gay people. Instead of seeing the case through, the Council settled out of court. Last week Andrea Minichiello Williams, a lawyer who is behind the Christian Legal Centre — one of the primary groups bringing these actions — sent out an appeal to supporters asking for more money. She said that the group couldn't continue beyond the end of March unless considerable new funding was forthcoming." And secondly, from The Guardian: " A cross to bear The results of a Christian worker's employment tribunal have been published: BA may not have been quite as prejudiced as they seemed. "She was portrayed in the press as a victim of cruel religious discrimination - a poor persecuted Christian who had been "banned" by British Airways from wearing a simple cross at work. And all this while her Muslim and Sikh colleagues were parading about in hijabs and turbans. The Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Tony Blair came out in her defence. The Daily Mail took up the cudgels on her behalf. One hundred MPs spoke out in her favour. Bishops demanded a boycott of BA. Evangelical Christians went into paroxysms of righteous fury. At last - here was proof that they were innocent victims of Christianophobia - as practised by our very own national airline. An open and shut case, you might think. Nadia Eweida was a Christian martyr, pure and simple. But hang on a moment. The employment tribunal, to which she complained, has just published its judgment, and it tells a rather different story. Not only did it kick out all her claims of religious discrimination and harassment, it also criticised her for her intransigence..." Article continues.
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Sometimes, the world of religions can still astound me with its mind-boggling fictions. Check out this description of the Seven Root Races (including the populatio of Atlantis, of course):  “Theosophists have always taken Atlantis for granted, and to the myth have added a second one - the myth of Lemuria. This name was originally proposed by a nineteenth-century zoologist for a land mass he thought must have existed in the Indian Ocean, and which would account for the geographical distribution of the lemur. Madame Blavatsky, the high priestess of theosophy, adopted the name and wrote in some detail about the "Third Root Race" that she believed flourished on the island.
According to Blavatsky, five root races have so far appeared on the planet, with two more yet to come. Each root race has seven "sub-races," and each sub-race has seven "branch races." (Seven is a mystical number for theosophists.) The first root race, which lived somewhere around the North Pole, was a race of "fire mist" people - ethereal and invisible. The Second Root Race inhabited northern Asia. They had astral bodies on the borderline of visibility. At first, they propagated by a kind of fission, but eventually this evolved into sexual reproduction after passing through a stage in which both sexes were united in each individual. The Third Root Race lived on Lemuria. They were ape-like giants with corporeal bodies that slowly developed into forms much like modern man. Lemuria was submerged in a great convulsion, but not before a sub-race had migrated to Atlantis to begin the Fourth Root Race.
The Fifth Root Race, the Aryan, sprang from the fifth sub-race of the Atlanteans. At the present time, according to theosophists, the Sixth Root Race is slowly emerging from the sixth sub-race of Aryans. This is happening in Southern California where, in Annie Besant's words, the "climate approaches most nearly to our ideal of Paradise." [...] After the Seventh Root Race (which will develop from the seventh sub-race of the sixth root race) has risen and fallen, the earth cycle will have ended and a new one will start on the planet Mercury.”
"Fads & Fallacies in the Name of Science" by Martin Gardner (1957), p168
No more as fantastical as Genesis' account of creation, and no more crazy than general occultism, and as confusingly nonsensical as religious stories in general, it somehow still manages to astound me, just a little bit, that people who come up with these ideas somehow manage to stop laughing at themselves long enough to write books, and that other people humour them by publishing them! Current Location: Monchengladbach, Germany
Listening To: "Just a Girl" by No Doubt
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