1. New Zealand man sells his soul to 'Hell'

Comment #203784 by Simonw on July 3, 2008 at 3:00 pm

Legally selling your soul more than once is probably fine, as long as you don't claim to have only one soul in any of the contracts. Some ancient egyptians believed we were composite beings with multiple souls.

The buyer might assume you have only one soul, but if so ask him to prove his assertion.

Caveat Emptor. I know of no defects on any of my souls - so they clearly are also of merchantable quality. All major credit cards accepted.

2. It can be right to discriminate against the religious

Comment #202409 by Simonw on July 1, 2008 at 1:02 pm

I don't see how wearing a head scarf impacts your ability to cut anyones hair but your own. I'd far rather people espousing medieval religious opinions were cutting people's hair, than say repairing nuclear power stations (don't worry about the leaks - god will take care of us).

I personally find the current religious discrimination in the UK very offensive. With state schools (none of them secular!), able, if they choose, to discriminate against pupils on the basis of their parents religion (religious guilt by association?) or lack of.

As such I think folks need to be careful for what they wish.

Pick people for their ability to do the job. Beliefs irrelevant to the task at hand aren't appropriate criteria for selecting employees, and insisting anyone with different beliefs to yours is wrong is the height of arrogance. Most people have some pretty wacky, even blatantly incorrect beliefs, including most atheists.

There is a proverb about the wise man surrounding himself with other intelligent folk who disagree with him, whose details I've forgotten, and it was probably some religious text anyway....

3. New discovery proves 'selfish gene' exists

Comment #197732 by Simonw on June 22, 2008 at 2:58 pm

Can someone refresh my memory on bee sexual behaviour as well.

I was fairly sure that some female honey bees don't reproduce in some sort of "elective" fashion, or through suppression by the Queen.

In that they can become fertile when the queen is absent, or under other circumstances. I seem to remember that the behaviour is the kind of complex mess you'd expect from evolution (or a noodle-ly creator god). Of course that might just be our sexually sophisticated European honey bees, other genera of honey bees may behave differently.

I remember thinking at the time that someone had spent a LONG time watching honey bees VERY closely, in figuring out the complexity of bee reproduction - I guess some people like honey even more than I do.

It is all a lot more complex than one queen - lots of men who do nothing - which is the simplified version we got taught at school. Which is both rather boring, and so far from the magnificent truth that I felt short changed when I learnt more.

4. Hints of 'time before Big Bang'

Comment #189670 by Simonw on June 7, 2008 at 12:13 am

"The second law cannot be escaped, but Professor Carroll pointed out that it depends on a major assumption - that the Universe began its life in an ordered state."

The second law only requires that it was a "more ordered state", semantics I guess if the beginning was the "most orderly state", but I guess it will become clear when we know more.

Imagine the early universe as a vertical tube of ping pong balls where the tube is one ping pong ball wide. This is highly orderly but boring state - now take the tube away (or expand its diameter rapidly) and watch the ping pong balls.

If the Universe was created from another, then the term "Universe" may not represent a closed system, and applying the second law of thermodynamics may be inappropriate. Really people try and get too much out of a subject mostly invented to explain the (in-)efficiency of steam engines.

5. Stupid flies live longer: study

Comment #189525 by Simonw on June 6, 2008 at 12:15 pm

Only a handful of species seem to have plumped for intelligence as their niche.

Of those only our own has differentiated itself from the other species by developing such a sophisticated culture (at least with creating physical representations of that culture). Note many human like species are already extinct, at least one of which (Homo Erectus) had larger cranial capacity.

I'd have thought flies were a key example where less is more, since having a brain, and flying it around, must be even more energy intensive than say floating it around inside a whale.

On the other hand it is worth pondering how intelligent we are as a species. If IQ measures intelligence, then I'm fairly unusual, but it didn't stop me putting the cheese in the cupboard instead of the fridge a couple of days ago. So on finding stored food I'm only slightly outperforming the local squirrels (who admittedly are surprising clever, although they fall down on road crossing ability).

6. Does Time Run Backward in Other Universes?

Comment #184362 by Simonw on May 24, 2008 at 7:24 pm

I'm with Mitchell.

My theoretical physics degree didn't go so well. But the article is terribly written. I suspect there may be good science behind it, but if so it was all lost in the simplification that took place for appearing in SciAm.

Sure time asymmetry is an interesting property of the Universe, but it may simply be the Universe evolving in the most probably direction.

My rule of thumb is never to trust anyone who talks about entropy, who doesn't start of by defining the borders of the systems they are talking about, and supplying some equation to explain how entropy increased or decreased in each system.

For example describing the early universe as uniform, and then claiming it had low entropy, seems contradictory. A gas evens out in a given volume so that it is evenly spread, which represents a high entropy state. I'm sure the author had something particular in mind, but he didn't convey it to me.

7. Six 'uniquely' human traits now found in animals

Comment #184105 by Simonw on May 23, 2008 at 4:00 pm

Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert

Chapter 1, paragraph one, starts with a long disclaimer about psychologists who write sentences starting "The human being is the only animal that....", and how they come to regret it, before he goes on to write one like that himself. Great read.

I think the phrase we need is humans are specialized, not special. We are different from the other great apes, but if we weren't that different we'd probably never have wandered off far enough to become a distinct species.

8. These dim-wits believe in anything but God

Comment #181581 by Simonw on May 17, 2008 at 3:00 pm

Those posting from abroad need to understand just how discriminatory the education system is in the UK is.

I've just written to the council complaining that a job advert to be a head teacher stated that it would be "preferable" is the appointee was a Christian. The people who select the appointee are legally allowed to discriminate if their school is "religious", which can mean anything from the building being owned by the church to a mention of "Anglican" in the founding documents. All these employees are state employees, but they are given preference in appointment if they are Christians.

35% of primary schools and 17% of secondary schools have a religious affiliation, almost all are Anglican or Catholic. These schools can discriminate against children (or parents of children) who don't subscribe to their particular faith in admissions by preferring those of the same faith. They can sack teachers whose conduct doesn't live up the the requirements of their faith. Almost all the teaching staff in these institutions are local government employees, not paid for by the church, all the equipment is supplied by the tax payer. In some cases the school building are owned by the church or charity involved and it may make a contribution (often as low as 10%) to the upkeep of the building. The CofE can't actually afford this, but in many cases has managed to retain influence and control through inertia over schools it no longer contributes to.

So whilst I agree some religious education is helpful in explaining cultural and philosophical facts, you might consider who is appointing these teachers (in many cases a board dominated (and required to be so) by local Anglician or Catholic clergy) before becoming too obsessed with the idea that comparative religion lessons will wean them off Christianity.

My local primary school has a "prayer box", but I don't think the purpose of it is to show pupils that praying to the big fairy in the sky doesn't work.

9. British Airways takes beef off the menu to avoid offending Hindus

Comment #178237 by Simonw on May 11, 2008 at 1:39 am

Call me crazy but mad cow/hoof-and-mouth outbreaks here have kinda driven me away from British beef...

Ah but is it rational?

Last year new variant CJD killed 5 people in the UK, most probably infected before current controls on Beef were introduced since this is the tail end of the curve.

Typically we lose over 100 people a year to food poisoning with Campylobacter or Salmonella. The predominant sources of infection by these organisms being exposure to raw chicken, or under cooked chicken. I believe seafood is a source of Campylobacter.

Human "foot and mouth" disease has been suspected in two people, ever, as far as I know in the UK.

UK Beef is probably one of the safest now, although farm animal welfare could be improved.

Me I ate steak tartare at the peak of the mad cow epidemic, although I had to go to France. Tastes disgusting - don't bother unless you really like pepper. Probably dicing with food safety there, but I was probably more at risk of bacterial and parasitic disorders than mad cow disease.

10. How to reconcile Richard Dawkins?

Comment #173170 by Simonw on April 30, 2008 at 1:24 pm

The "root of all evil" is a mistranslation.

The biblical quotation (1 Timothy 6:10) may be better translated as; "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" (New International Version).

It would be equally silly to think religion is the root of ALL evil, which is I guess why Dawkins wasn't keen on the title.

Time for this atheist to stop quoting the bible.

11. Religion a figment of human imagination

Comment #172544 by Simonw on April 29, 2008 at 5:36 pm

I know dogs and cats dream.

I'm fairly sure this is another world, not so different from the ones I dream of, but furrier.

I have no idea if Dolphins believe in god, until we learn to communicate with them properly no one will know.

I'm minded to invent a theory, that says any theory starting with "humans are the only animal that..." is wrong, but I believe someone already beat me to it.

12. Mount Vernon schools to hire investigator in Bible case

Comment #169439 by Simonw on April 26, 2008 at 5:12 am

"... and Easter is the day that everyone found out actually he wasn't sacrificed at all"

How does that explains the bunny and the eggs then?

Easter is a festival probably descended (amongst other things) from the Persian New Year festival. Which involves hiding sweets and spring cleans, and predates the purported birth of Christ by at least 6 centuries.

Easter is just one of a number of festivals left over from the old new year (spring solstice). I doubt in truth that they have one common origin, as items from various cultures have been mixed up over the centuries.

Sure the Christians hijacked it, but please don't spread their version of events. People celebrated in the spring in a recognizable Easter celebration before Christ was born. People will probably welcome the arrival of spring long after Christ is forgotten.

13. Judge orders La. school district to stop Bible giveaways

Comment #168330 by Simonw on April 25, 2008 at 3:07 am

Bah - hand out "The Science of Discworld" I and II, kids probably won't read Dawkins as readily as Pratchett (et al)....

The problem with Dawkins recent work is it makes claims about God or lack of them.

'Climbing Mount Improbable' only has a couple of references to god. Whilst it is a good book, and the final chapter on Fig Wasps is great, I'm not sure it is the best such book, and certainly not for the average youngster.

Indeed the story of Fig Wasps is even more complex and intriguing than Dawkins's extensive coverage. I believe it also omits to mention that the first evidence of human cultivation involves self fertile fig trees, which is kind of a sad note in the story of fig wasps but perhaps this part of the story needs to be told more urgently than ever before.

14. Yoko Ono, Filmmakers Caught in 'Expelled' Flap

Comment #162825 by Simonw on April 17, 2008 at 2:09 pm

I seem to remember the Blair Witch Project, or some other low production budget film about that time, cost about 6 times more to get copyright licences for, than the entire production budget.

It might be cheaper to use the material without licenses, and hope only a few rights holders sue.

The story is quite amusing, but the copyright system may have grown into a monolith that is stunting creativity (as well as creationists).