vol VII: Notes

2015

Notes

Sunday 27 December 2015 - Saturday 2 January 2016

[Notebook: DB 79: Galileo Wins]

[page 177]

Sunday 27 December 2015

Getting into scientific theology: trying to sort the details into a logical order, a process of imagination like identifying and sequencing the operations to place a heavy beam in a tall building given the requirements of safety and efficiency. In the end the book might be seen as a annotated bibliography od a set of websites that form a physical layer of this essay.

As i stand here putting on my jumper I am prompted by an image of the messa the wildlife have made in the shed by ripping up a bag of rubbish. I must bring a new rubbish bag to clean up. And visit my neighbour to get her to remove a tiny splinter from my eyelid that I got grasscutting yesterday, and so my mental life goes on, composing this while thinking of those histories, a sequence of actions or processes.

[Scientific theology] 1: Divine_dynamics; 2 Imagining_god; 3 :Limits to Mathematics.

A tradeoff between manoucreability and stability. In my youth I felt pressure to believe the Catholic story 'unto death' and to see martyrdom for 'the faith' as the epitome of behaviour. I was never that convinced, and in fact espoused the healthier scientific line that a belief is a hypothesis whose credibility rests on evidence, As it became clearer that there is no contemporary evidence for the Catholic story except rather dubious miracles

[page 178]

it became easier to question Church doctrine, although the loss of faith was accompanied by considerable pain. I had staked my life on heaven and it took me quite a while to let it go. Now at Christmas time fifty years later I can see some of the social value in commonly held false beliefs. Their falsehood consists in being inconsistent with reality. Insofar as they are consistent with reality there can be no objection, they simply go beyond reality by establishing useful social constructs. We may say the same about genotypes which have been filtered by selection to be consistent with physics and chemistry and exploit it to give us life. The revision of religion must keep its social benefits while refounding it on the true nature of the world as fas as we know it, which is considerably further than our early ancestors. Care not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Watching Swan Lake a fantasy built on a foundation of reality, music, costume and human physiology. A sequence of moves at all scales from the initial singularity up. Tchaikovsky

Play, ventures into the zone of incompleteness, vs work, where we try to stick to the complete and computable.

The transfinite memory space has already got the structure that establishes its existence, layer upon layer of permutation.

The transfinite network is an unbounded set of stories (processes) beginning from the smallest p —> not-p — p. [I love you:I don't; I do] leading up to the life of the universe, all drivin by the divinity containing the observable fixed points. The elements in the network are all acts, [ending in a fixed point] modelled by our logical computations .

[page 179]

Momentum - persistance of state - memory. Corporeal dynamics.

Music operates in time alone and drives dance in 4D.

Monday 28 December 2015

Consciousness: the internet is self documenting.

The problem is always authenticity, ie being true to reality, using the resources provided by reality in safe, prudent and appropriate manner, My worst problems are probably my car and my love of meat, although my ageing teeth are helping me to give up meat. From the point of view of these notes, however, I need an authentic mathematical model to explain theology. The general drift seems clear, we go from spaces, like manifolds that can be investigated in detail on their properties following from their axioms, explored, documented and where possible proven, to the 'axiom free' starting point, the God of Aquinas (and many others) actus purus and omnino simplex. There is nothing to be said about these but that they are required by their consistency to develop a transfinite set of fixed points and are required to do it in time because all possibility cannot be realized simultaneously, as we know from the fact that only one ordering of the natural numbers, viewed as a countably infinite and physically represented set, can exist at a time and so one must be annihilated to create another. We like to see this as a consequence of the fact that there is only a countable infinity of deterministic processes, ie turing machines, which we understand to be a constraint on the variety of quantum mechanical eigenfunctions. We can convert eigenfunctions into Turing machines by considering the ordering of the elements of vectors in Hilbert space, multiplying possible vectors in the same way as ordinal numbers multiply cardinal numbers.

[page 180]

The need for a scientifically authentic model of God seems to be growing with the increased activity of the provocateurs of religious war like Cruz and Trump. America sees itself as a fearful and isolated nation whose only answer to its fears d to aggressively attack the un-American world. We imagine this to be due to the fact that a lage part of the population sees Christianity as vacuous and belongs to the much broader church of secularism / reality is divine. Leigh Sales, Paul Krugman

Each set of axioms defines a mathematical space, ie it is a set of processes that can be logically expanded (by [combination and] permutation) to give a new layer in the mathematical network. Layering is local, rather like the hierarchy of fibre bundles attached to each point in the classical space-time manifold. Fiber bundle - Wikipedia

The transfinite network is a formal structure that cannot be realized at once due to the limited number of physical events (conservation of energy) available in any time interval. We link this somehow to the countability of natural numbers and turing machines by the fact that true communication must be discrete. In a way scientific theology must be an exploration of the mathematics of the transfinite network. Since we establish the idea of symmetry with repsect to complexity we can say all there is to be said about the global properties of the transfinite network in terms of fine engineered networks.

Why does the number of foxed points in the divine dynamics increase? Because a) Cantor's theorem b) is implemented by the unbounded dynamics of God, of which only the computable fraction is deterministic enough and predictable enough to be the subject of science [the search for truths correct over a significant volume of space-time]. The rest are unpredictable 'acts of God'.

[page 181]

Stable name Scientific Theology, publication name An Essay on ST

I am beginning to think that in my old age I am recovering the secure and gung ho personality I had as a child before the Church put the fear of Hell into me, and so started a career devoted to reforming it. These day I think I am talking to the secular scientific community rather than the Church, urging them (and me) to recapture what the Church took from them when it stole God for its own political advantage.

It took Einstein almost seven years to get over the idea that coordinates needed to have immediate metrical meaning. It took me about 30 years to abandon the idea that God is a mysterious invisible other. Now, 20 years later, this idea is becoming quite fleshed out in my mind and ready for a bit of evangelization and testing. Have said this often, but one day someone might listen and my idea of the divine universe will begin to propagate.

Tuesday 29 December 2015

The right wing is a very small and ancient space in comparison to the expanding left, which explains their propensity for violence, their space is so small that there is no room for two right wing ideologies like Christian and Islamic idealism [extremism]. The opposite, captured in the theory of peace, is the enormous transfinite space available to those who let creativity flow. A theory of Peace, 1987

We can use music [sound] to model any superposed system. Although superposition can exist formally, the constraints of conservation laws require that superposition be a sequence in time rather than a parallel structure in space.

[page 182]

Wednesday 30 December 2015

A tree is a subset of a network rooted in an individual source in the network. So we may think of a network as a superposition of trees. My place in the human network is defined by all the other people I communicate with.

Communication: the playwright boils an imagined drama down into a fixed text. The director and the actors expand the text to produce something like the imagine drama in human form. I am trying to formalize my new God, using Thomas as an example, and, that done, can begin preaching, that is trying to reproduce the formalism in human language and derive physical and political guidance from it. One purpose of reducing the story to formalism is to isolate the political element in all our activities so as to produce a text which is politically and ideologically neutral, ie politics and ideology are no part of the formalism Here we try to take advantage of the fact that mathematics and logic are universal languages that do not have to be translated and so lose nothing in translation.

Patti Smith M Train page 25: 'Without noticing, I slip into a light but lingering malaise. Not a depression, more like a fascination for melancholia, which I turn in my hand, as if it were a small planet, streaked in shadow. Impossibly blue. Smith

I am hanging onto formalism tightly, hoping it will lead to a credible story, ripe for expansion and embellishment.

Why do I do this? I just do it. It is self expression like the ligands on the outside of a cell, proclaiming interior structure. Cellular communication (biology) - Wikipedia

Differentiable manifolds have no intrinsic measure of distance

[page 183]

even though they are continuous and differentiable, so that they can be deformed metrically but not topologically. Can we think of NAND as a differential operator, taking two inputs, corresponding to f(x) and f(x+Δx), and one output, the NAND of the two fs. Differentiable manifold - Wikipedia

Smith page 79: 'The world is everything that is the case.' Wittgenstein [the world for us is everything that we know to be the case] Wittgenstein: Tractatus, Anat Biletski and Anat Matar

Thursday 31 December 2015

What is the problem?: power entrenching itself by preaching falsehood, eg fossil fuel industry and global warming, simple physics and metrology that they refuse to understand or accept because power is most important to them. Suzanne Goldberg: Exxon knew of climate change in 1981 . . .

Power vs reality: a matter of rates of change. We do not like to demolish old structures until we can see a clear benefit, and 'the establishment' tends (naturally) to maintain the old structures that give them advantage. Our principal competition is among ourselves and we tend to take the environment into account as only a secondary matter. Immediate gratification is what we like best.

Friday 1 January 2016

Part of me thiks it is rather narcissistic publishing all my theological theories on the net. Maybe so. One motivation is to have a searchable database of the ideas that led to my present position. The other is to demonstrate the breadsth (or lack of it) of my search for a new approach to theology, particularly the physical side of it.

Smith page 193: '—All writers are bums, I murmured. May I be counted among you one day.'

[page 194]

Saturday 2 January 2016

Smith 208: '—Oh Mama ,sometimes I feel like a new tree.'

2015: 5200 visitors, 42500 pages, 8886 visits, 71 seconds
2008 1141 visitors, 65120 pages, 20244 visits, 212 seconds.

Theology and physics: Newton, Einstein . . .

I am sitting here waiting for inspiration, after having made a length comment to Commonweal.

Comment to Commonweal:

. . . I was a member of the Domincan Order for five years from 1963-1968. I can recall no mention of sexuality at all. I was eventually asked to leave and my solemn vows were annulled. The leaving process involved a couple of years of intense discussion with the Master of Studies. The result of this was that I was found to have views contrary to 4 of the 24 theses proposed by Pope Pius X and 'safe directive norms' for a philosophy acceptable to the Church. I saw those theses then, as now, as relics of antiquity. Physics has come a long way since Aristotle. For the Church, everything revolves around the Aristotelian axiom (accepted by Aquinas) that no potential can actualize itself (see canon 252). This is the core of Thomas' arguments for the existence and nature of God, built on Aristotle's argument for the first unmoved mover. Since the time of Galileo, however, it has become increasingly clear that potential and actuality are equivalent. We see this in the pendulum, converting potential energy to kinetic energy and back again. From this and other considerations I came to the firm conclusion that the Catholic differentiation between God and the Universe is false. I see it now as a political tool dreamt up by rulers like Moses to bolster their regal claim to divine right. By making God a mysterious secret, they can make it say whatever they want. It seems ludicrous to maintain that the universe is the puppet of some invisible, omniscient, omnipotent being which has given the Catholic Church moral and intellectual control of humanity. The fundamental problem with the Church is that it uses a fictional 'history of salvation' to justify the propagation of dangerous misinformation about the reality of human existence. From my point of view, the Church is doomed unless it begins to base its theology on evidence, rather than prophetic dreams. This requires it to accept that the universe is divine and all experience is experience of God. Its false doctrines include the idea that women are dangerous untermensch, that we do not really die and that our post mortem condition depends on how closely we toe the Church line. In short, the whole thing is a racket based on the natural human fear of death. This is not to deprecate the work of believers who take the injunction to love their neightbours sincerely. It is the corporate entity that needs reform, and with luck the sexual abuse issue, like the indulgences of old, may be powerful enough to motivate the needed change. We must replace an authoritarian monarchy with a scientific democracy.

I feel free to say these things now first because all my teachers and many of my contemporaries are dead, and second because the Australian Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse has revealed what was going on around me in my youth. The Commission has revealed a priest, one of my teachers (also deceased) as a notorious pedophile. My respect for the Church as an organization has dropped to zero. The most gigantic ripoff ever, a forest of deception. Paul Blaschko

Comment to The Conversation:

I am overjoyed to see science encroaching on traditional theological and religious territory, but I see some babies going out with the bathwater. It would seem that many think that we have to get rid of theology and religion entirely, rather than simply reforming both areas on more realistic grounds. I am inclined to think that they will be always with us. All we need is something like the paradigm change that converted alchemy into chemistry. Theology is a traditional theory of everything. The Bible, our principal Western theological classic, begins with the creation and ends with the final recreation of a world which we might all agree is difficult. Religion is the practical implementation of theology. Theology and religion go together like science and technology, like biology and medicine. Our current crop of theologies is largely fiction. Science is also based on fictions, we call them hypotheses. The game is to formulate testable hypotheses and test them. Theology can become a science if it hypothesizes that its subject, God, is observable, ie reject the ancient tradition that god is an invisible mystery. The invasion of theology by scientists can then be easily accomplished when scientists begin exploring the hypothesis that the universe is all that exists, ie there is no need for an outside puppetteer. If this is so, the universe itself plays all the roles of God and all our experience is experience of God - in religious terms, revelation. Particularly, our own intelligence is conscious instance of the universal intelligence that creates us. Developments in quantum information theory suggest that ultimately theories of everything will be psychological rather than physical. We need to understand the psychology of god if we are to live with it. Russell Blackford

I walk in God. Insofar as our own intelligence is part of the Universe we can say that the universe is at least locally intelligent, and when we begin to examine the foundations of our intelligence and compare it to the global creativity of the universe, we can see that our minds are just local instances of a global process of encoding and decoding messages.

Copyright:

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Further reading

Books

Click on the "Amazon" link below each book entry to see details of a book (and possibly buy it!)

Cantor, Georg, Contributions to the Founding of the Theory of Transfinite Numbers (Translated, with Introduction and Notes by Philip E B Jourdain), Dover 1955 Jacket: 'One of the greatest mathematical classics of all time, this work established a new field of mathematics which was to be of incalculable importance in topology, number theory, analysis, theory of functions, etc, as well as the entire field of modern logic.'  Amazon   back

Feller, William, An Introduction to Probability Theory and its Applications, John Wiley 1968 From preface to first edition: 'It is the purpose of this book to treat probability theory as a self-contained mathematical subject rigorously, avoiding non-mathematical concepts. At the same time, the book tries to describe the empirical background and to develop a feeling for the great variety of applications. This purpose is served by many special problems, numerical estimates and examples . . . '  Amazon   back

Keneally, Thomas, Australians: Origins to Eureka: Volume 1, Allen & Unwin 2009 'The way this book works: In this book I have tried to tell the stories of a number of Australians from the Pleistocene Age to 1860. The people whose tales are told here exemplify the major aspects and dynamisms of the Australian story. For each one I chose to write about, I could have chosen a dozen, a hundred, or in some cases, thousands more. This history therefore sets out to characterise Austraiia, and above all, individual Australians, in a manner that gives insight into the most significant aspects of the periods I deal with without exhaustively and thus cursorily engaging with every major actor. . . . 'back

Khinchin, Aleksandr Yakovlevich, Mathematical Foundations of Information Theory (translated by P A Silvermann and M D Friedman), Dover 1957 Jacket: 'The first comprehensive introduction to information theory, this book places the work begun by Shannon and continued by McMillan, Feinstein and Khinchin on a rigorous mathematical basis. For the first time, mathematicians, statisticians, physicists, cyberneticists and communications engineers are offered a lucid, comprehensive introduction to this rapidly growing field.'  Amazon   back

Kolmogorov, A N, and Nathan Morrison (Translator) (With an added bibliography by A T Bharucha-Reid), Foundations of the Theory of Probability, Chelsea 1956 Preface: 'The purpose of this monograph is to give an axiomatic foundation for the theory of probability. . . . This task would have been a rather hopeless one before the introduction of Lebesgue's theories of measure and integration. However, after Lebesgue's publication of his investigations, the analogies between measure of a set and mathematical expectation of a random variable became apparent. These analogies allowed of further extensions; thus, for example, various properties of independent random variables were seen to be in complete analogy with the corresponding properties of orthogonal functions ... '  Amazon   back

Nin, Anais, and Gunther Stuhlmann (Editor and Introduction), The Diary of Anais Nin: Volume I 1931-1934, Harvest Books 1969 Amazon customer review: '... It was only after submerging myself in the history of this volume that I came to realize this: the linear history of this diary does not really matter; the accusations that Anais Nin lied about her life are immaterial. Anais Nin had a beautiful way with words and she was a master of crafting an image, of creating a persona. She was not truly the person she portrays in this volume, which she edited with Gunther Stuhlmann. But this is a beautiful and unique piece of literature that paved the way for many future artists, particularly female writers (Alice Walker has praised her work as profoundly liberating, and I can't help but think Maya Angelou took a cue from Anais Nin's concept of the continuous autobiographical novel). I have come to believe that it is not the possibility that she lied about her life that has upset so many people (some of whom refer to this as a "liary"), but that a woman should have such control over her own portrayal all the while defying so many of society's conventions. Anais Nin may not have truly been the woman she portrays in this or future volumes, but it is the woman she wanted to believe she was - wanted the world to believe she was. I find that quite revealing, as revealing as any diary should be.' Andrew Parodi  Amazon   back

Smith, Patti, M Train, Knop 2015 'Patti Smith's newest memoir engages the reader from the first page. Her breathtakingly beautiful prose about her life, her books, her travels, her relationships, and her innermost thoughts transports you to places you wish you'd shared with her. It's a rare book that I know I will begin reading again and again as soon as I finish the last word. Like JUST KIDS and "Horses," she captivates her audience. With her rich life and zest for intellectual searches and connections, I wish she were a personal friend. For a few hours, sharing her words in print, she can be. Don't miss her latest gift to us! ' Cheryl Mueller  Amazon   back

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and David Francis Pears, Brian McGuinness, Bertrand Russell , Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge 2001 'This as a most imortant book containing original ideas on a large range of topics, forming a coherent system, which, whether or not it be, as the author claims, in its essentials the final solution of the problems dealt with, is of extraordinary interest and deserves the attention of all philosophers.' Frank Ramsey, 'Critical Notice of L Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus', Mind, XXXII, no 128 (October 1923) pp 465-78.   Amazon   back

Links

Anat Biletski and Anat Matar, Ludwig Wittgenstein (Standofrd Encyclepoedia of Phiosophy), 'Considered by some to be the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein played a central, if controversial, role in 20th-century analytic philosophy. He continues to influence current philosophical thought in topics as diverse as logic and language, perception and intention, ethics and religion, aesthetics and culture.' back

Cellular communication (biology) - Wikipedia, Cellular communication (biology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Cellular communication is an umbrella term used in biology and more in depth in biophysics and biochemistry to identify different types of communication methods between living cells. Some of the methods include cell signaling among others. This process allows millions of cells to communicate and work together to perform important bodily processes that are necessary to survival. Both multicellular and unicellular organisms heavily rely on cell-cell communication.' back

Differentiable manifold - Wikipedia, Differentiable manifold - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematics, a differentiable manifold is a type of manifold that is locally similar enough to a linear space to allow one to do calculus. Any manifold can be described by a collection of charts, also known as an atlas. One may then apply ideas from calculus while working within the individual charts, since each chart lies within a linear space to which the usual rules of calculus apply. If the charts are suitably compatible (namely, the transition from one chart to another is differentiable), then computations done in one chart are valid in any other differentiable chart.' back

E.J. Dionne Jr., For 2016, lets keep on arguing, 'Liberals love to throw Edmund Burke quotes at conservatives. I’m no exception. Still, Burke is right that “rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.” The signs are that the rage and frenzy levels will be even higher than usual in 2016. Can’t we at least try to contain them? But by all means, let’s keep arguing. Argument is, or at least ought to be, inherently educational. And we can agree on this: Calling out views you abhor is one of the hallmarks of liberty.' back

Fiber bundle - Wikipedia, Fiber bundle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In mathematics, and particularly topology, a fiber bundle (or, in British English, fibre bundle) is a space that is locally a product space, but globally may have a different topological structure. Specifically, the similarity between a space E and a product space B × F is defined using a continuous surjective map π: E → B that in small regions of E behaves just like a projection from corresponding regions of B × F to B. The map π, called the projection or submersion of the bundle, is regarded as part of the structure of the bundle. The space E is known as the total space of the fiber bundle, B as the base space, and F the fiber.' back

Gaia hypothesis - Wikipedia, Gaia hypothesis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Gaia hypothesis, also known as Gaia theory or Gaia principle, proposes that organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet.. . . The hypothesis was formulated by the scientist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. While early versions of the hypothesis were criticized for being teleological and contradicting principles of natural selection, later refinements have resulted in ideas highlighted by the Gaia Hypothesis being used in subjects such as geophysiology, Earth system science, biogeochemistry, systems ecology, and climate science.' back

George Williams, The growing assault on our democratic rights, 'First, an extraordinary number of Australian laws now infringe basic democratic standards. All up, I found 350 such laws in areas as diverse as crime, discrimination, anti-terrorism, consumer law, defence, migration, industrial relations, intellectual property, evidence, shipping, environment, education and health. The scale of the problem is much larger than might be thought, and extends well beyond a few well-known examples.' back

Guardian staff and agencies, Pope accepts resignation of Australian bishop accused of being evasive at inquiry, 'An Australian bishop accused of protecting himself and the Catholic church at the child abuse royal commission has resigned. The pope has accepted Brisbane auxiliary bishop Brian Finnegan’s resignation upon his reaching the retirement age, the Vatican’s press office has announced. Finnegan, 77, was accused of not being candid about his knowledge of paedophile priests in a bid to protect himself and the church during his December evidence to the child abuse royal commission’s inquiry into the Ballarat diocese.' back

J D Bernal, The World, The Flesh & the Devil, An Inquiry into the Future of the Three Enemies of the Rational Soul back

Jeff Sparrow, Mal Brough may lose his job over Ashbygate. He should have lot it over the intervention, 'Arrernte elder Rosalie Kunoth-Monks’s description of what the intervention meant in her home community of Urapuntja is sadly typical: [S]oldiers in uniform, the police and public servants arrived, and we were ushered up to the basketball stadium and we were all told that we were now under the intervention. We don’t have access to newspapers, a lot of us we don’t have access to TV, a lot of us were going along our normal way, living at home, and just doing the normal everyday things but on the day that they landed it was incredible. We really thought we were going to be rounded up and taken, because John Howard had made the statement and Mal Brough of course carried it out, that we were now under the intervention.' back

Leigh Sales, Can Ted Cruz become the next president of the Unived States?, 'LEIGH SALES, PRESENTER: In the US presidential race, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump may be getting all of the headlines, but close behind him in the race is Texan Senator Ted Cruz. His most notable suggestion so far is that Islamic State should be carpet bombed. Senator Cruz is the only Republican who's refused to criticise Donald Trump publicly and that's helping propel him into a winning position in the all-crucial Iowa caucuses - that's the first state to vote on the Republican nominee. As North America correspondent Michael Vincent reports, the support of Southern evangelical Christians could give Senator Cruz a winning edge.' back

Paul Blaschko, Inside the Seminary: Is There is a Reason to Be Worried About Formation, 'And even if the alleged psychological abnormality of celibacy explains why a particular priest commits abuse, it does nothing to explain the equally or more troubling fact that large numbers of non-abusing priests and bishops have been willing to ignore, or in many cases cover up, the actions of those who did. The critique of celibacy alone cannot explain why priests systematically shirked their moral duty to report such crimes, or why bishops chose to assign and reassign serial child molesters to unsuspecting parishes. It does not account for the systemic nature of the church’s failed response to the abuse of children, and this is at least partly what makes these scandals so heinous.' back

Paul Krugman, Doubling Down on W, ' . . . you might have expected the debacle of George W. Bush’s presidency — a debacle not just for the nation, but for the Republican Party, which saw Democrats both take the White House and achieve some major parts of their agenda — to inspire some reconsideration of W-type policies. What we’ve seen instead is a doubling down, a determination to take whatever didn’t work from 2001 to 2008 and do it again, in a more extreme form.' back

Ross Douhat, Cracks in the Liberal Order, back

Rukmini Gallimachi, ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape, 'QADIYA, Iraq — In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.' back

Russell Blackford, Against accomodationism: How science undermines religion, 'There is currently a fashion for religion/science accommodationism, the idea that there’s room for religious faith within a scientifically informed understanding of the world. Accommodationism of this kind gains endorsement even from official science organizations such as, in the United States, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But how well does it withstand scrutiny? Not too well, according to a new book by distinguished biologist Jerry A. Coyne.' back

Staff and agencies (Guardian), Novel about Jewish-Palestinian love affair is barred from Israeli curriculum, 'A novel about a love affair between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian man has been barred from Israel’s high school curriculum, reportedly over concerns that it could encourage intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews. The rejection of Dorit Rabinyan’s novel Borderlife, which was published in 2014, created an uproar in Israel, with critics accusing the government of censorship.' back

Stephanie Kirchgaesser, Ready for jail, woman at the heart of the latest Vactican scandal, 'Flanked by her well-known defence lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, the devout Catholic came across as a wounded – if self-proclaimed – martyr who insists she is innocent of all the allegations but is willing to go to jail if the Vatican court finds her guilty. “I took an oath of loyalty to that state, and that means accepting their rules, even if they are wrong. It’s a monarchy, it’s not a liberal state,” she said. “The pope is not just a head of state, he is the head of my religion, he is God on Earth. If they find that I am guilty, I must go, I have no choice.” . . . She called the Vatican a “sacred monster”, meaning it is untouchable.' back

Suzanne Goldberg, Exxon knew of climate change in 1981, email says - but it funded deniers for 27 more years, '“Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia,” Lenny Bernstein, a 30-year industry veteran and Exxon’s former in-house climate expert, wrote in the email. “This is an immense reserve of natural gas, but it is 70% CO2”, or carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change.' back

Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake, '"The Swan Lake: ACT I. Scene 1: Valse" by Victor Fedotov, Mariinsky Theatre Symphony Orchestra back

Todd C Frankel, Their 1996 clash shaped the gun debate for years. Now they want to reshaoe it, 'Twenty years ago, these two men were enemies on opposite sides of the nation’s gun debate. Their distrust was so deep and well known, they were warned to avoid each other. Back then, Jay was Rep. Jay Dickey (R-Ark.), the National Rifle Association’s self-described point man on the Hill. And Mark was Dr. Mark Rosenberg, a champion of gun-violence research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. back

Zachary feinstein, In 'Star Wars' Was the Death Sar Too Big to Fail?, 'As a financial engineer, I have another concern: the economic repercussions for the “Star Wars” galaxy. In a recent working paper, I brought the analysis of financial systemic risk to bear on this question. I found that the resulting financial crisis would cause a serious galactic depression of astronomical proportions — so large, in fact, that it suggests the rebel victory might have been a pyrrhic one.' back