The Fallacy of God and Art

Picture yourself given the following question: A woman becomes pregnant. She has tuberculosis and the father has syphilis. As a result she has already had four miscarriages. In fact, their only surviving child is deaf and intellectually impaired. You, as a doctor, are asked to decide whether they should terminate the current pregnancy. Yes, it [...]

How I Became an Atheist, by Roger

Since many of you would be wondering where I had gone by now, I thought I’d show some life signs. So let us not waste time and get down to business…
Now that Tyson has opened his heart for us by sharing his transition of thought on religion, I feel compelled to do the same. I [...]

Which Christmas?

Christmas is just around the corner, and I of course wish you a merry one. However, it makes me shudder when someone talks about the Christian christmas. Christoper Hitchens expresses some strong argumentns in a recent article The moral and aesthetic nightmare of Christmas, and while I share the sentiment it is not entirely fair [...]

Science as a New Cultural Tradition

I was watching Richard Dawkins dialog with Aubrey Manning (approx. 50 minutes long) the other day and some of the points they discussed made me think.
Many of the traditions we practice have religious orgins, which of course needn’t be bad in itself. Obviously, tradition and ritual have a place in building solidarity and socializing individuals. [...]

Cassini

It is time to visit space again. This might be old news to some, but in 2004 – 2005 the Cassini–Huygens spacecraft reached Saturn after traveling roughly 3.2 billion kilometers over a period of seven years. Apart from performing 76 fly-bys of Saturn and 45 fly-bys of the moon Titan the Huygens probe was also [...]

How Conservatives are Liberals

Last saturday Jerry Springer, the notorious talkshow host and former Democratic mayor of Cincinnati, held a 30 minute speech at the Clinton School of Public Service. The speech mainly addressed the income gap between rich and poor and the lacking healthcare system. There is also a shorter excerpt from the speech on youtube.
The speech and the Q&A [...]

Condorcet, a modern voting system

I would like to continue the discussion of voting. One of Tyson’s previous posts illustrated the flaws of the electoral system, particularly the differences in “power” that residents of different states have. The winner-take-all system employed by most states also makes third parties effectively irrelevant. In order to gather electoral votes a third party would [...]

On Tour with Hubble

We’ve all seen the spectacular images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Truly, the beauty space competes with the most talented artists. But what are we really seeing?
While searching the web I came across the HubbleSite’s image tour, a set of interactive flash sequences which describe key features of well known Hubble photos. And knowing what you [...]