Promoting Science and Critical Thinking
UK Science is in deep trouble, a report from science and technology committee says that UK astronomy will have 50% less funding by 2014/15 than in 2005 …
MPs have warned that major cuts in research budgets and withdrawal from several major scientific facilities will endanger the UK’s international standing in astronomy and particle physics and its ability to inspire the next generation of scientists.
What exactly is Sharia? Ask a believer and you will be told that it is “God’s” law. Now, what makes this interesting is that if you attempt to drill down into the details, you make the fascinating discovery that there is no actual agreement on it. Modernists, traditionalists and fundamentalists all hold different views, as do adherents to different schools of Islamic thought and scholarship. Even when its the same school, if you look across different countries and cultures you find varying interpretations.
Apparently God can’t quite make up his mind.
A long term goal for many Muslims is to enforce Sharia, but without being able to nail it, you end up with a specific interpretation being the goal for those who pursue this.
Anyway, why am I babbling on about all this? Well, because of the latest news out from Iran. Here are the details …
The Fermi space telescope has yielded the most detailed gamma ray map of the sky – representing the Universe’s most violent and extreme processes.
The telescope’s newest results, as well as the map, were described at the Third Fermi Symposium in Rome this week.
There is a report of Alien abduction from about a month ago that I have just come across.
It concerns a chap who wandered into his garden in the middle of the night, and found that he had lost an hour. Apparently he really had lost an hour and had solid proof, his watch was one hour out of sync with the rest of the world, in fact he was quite astonished to discover that he had leap forward into the future. So he contacted the Ministry of Defence to report a UFO abduction.
The details read as follows:
It was an ”unseasonably mild” night in late October when the man from Barnes, south-west London, could not sleep so took to his garden with the drink. ”After a few moments I heard a distant roar of engines getting louder and louder,” he told the Ministry of Defence.
It just had to happen I guess, but the Washington Post called up Richard Dawkins and asked him for his thoughts on it all. Now least you have missed it by burying your head in the sandpit, Family Radio evangelist Harold Camping believes that he has calculated the exact date of the rapture: May 21, 2011. (yes just a few days away) While many are laughing at the suggestion, Camping’s followers are taking him seriously, bringing his message of impending doom to billboards and public spaces around the country. Richards reply is great, here is what he said …
Why is a serious newspaper like the Washington Post giving space to a raving loon? I suppose the answer must be that, unlike the average loon, this one has managed to raise enough money to launch a radio station and pay for billboards. I don’t know where he gets the money, but it would be no surprise to discover that it is contributed by gullible followers – gullible enough, we may guess, to go along with him when he will inevitably explain, on May 22nd, that there must have been some error in the calculation, the rapture is postponed to . . . and please send more money to pay for updated billboards.
Now that the concept of super injunctions is falling apart in the UK, I can reveal that I am not having an affair with Jeremy Clarkson. Also, it has now been disclosed that Clark Kent is Superman.
(OK, tongue placed firmly in cheek, but stick with me here, I have a skeptical point coming up later on)
Folks not in the UK might be wondering what this is about, so as a quick aside I better explain. In the UK if the press catch you doing something you should not have been doing (think shenanigans one night with a supermodel), you can take out a legal injunction to prevent publication. However, what can then happen is that the press can be a bit sneaky and report that there is an injunction in place that prevents them reporting something and so they name names without actually saying what happened. To prevent this, there is the concept of what is now known as a super-injunction to prevent them reporting on the very existence of the injunction. To do that costs about £50K.