"natural theology > notes > 2017 > Sunday 12 February"

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Bellah, Robert N., Religion in Human Evolution, Harvard University Press 2011 'Religion in Human Evolution is a work of extraordinary ambition—a wide-ranging, nuanced probing of our biological past to discover the kinds of lives that human beings have most often imagined were worth living. It offers what is frequently seen as a forbidden theory of the origin of religion that goes deep into evolution, especially but not exclusively cultural evolution. How did our early ancestors transcend the quotidian demands of everyday existence to embrace an alternative reality that called into question the very meaning of their daily struggle? Robert Bellah, one of the leading sociologists of our time, identifies a range of cultural capacities, such as communal dancing, storytelling, and theorizing, whose emergence made this religious development possible.'
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Birnbaum, Pierre, and Jane Marie Todd (translator), The Anti-Semitic Moment: A Tour of France in 1898, Hill and Wang 2002 From Library Journal 'This is an impressive example of "microhistory" that should be welcomed by specialists in French history and politics. Birnbaum (politics and philosophy, Sorbonne), a prolific authority on French Jewry, documents a sensational episode in French history-the ferocious wave of anti-Semitism that gripped the nation in the wake of the Dreyfus affair. Drawing exhaustively from local archives, Birnbaum breaks new ground in re-creating the hysteria of the time-the demonstrations, parades, speeches, songs, press accounts, and other diatribes that rocked the French body politic in the seminal year of 1898 over the treason trial of a Jewish officer, Capt. Alfred Dreyfus. The author, whose rich examples include evidence from all over France, concludes that demonstrations in large cities and little towns probably attracted hundreds of thousands of people and represented a new kind of popular politicization. This timely and disturbing study raises critical issues of interest to scholars of French history and politics: how anti-Semitism intersected with reactionary politics and the diverse ideological passions of the time, how French Jews reacted and defended themselves, and how the forces of order nonetheless prevailed. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.' Marie Marmo Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., N.J. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Christie, Agatha, Death on the Nile, William Morrow Paperbacks 2011 Amazon.com Review .Hercule Poirot is perhaps Agatha Christie's most interesting and endearing character; short, round, and slightly comical, Poirot has a razor-sharp mind and puts unlimited trust in his "little grey cells." Those little cells come through for him every time, enabling Poirot to solve some of the most baffling mysteries ever conceived. In Death on the Nile, Poirot, on vacation in Africa, meets the rich, beautiful Linnet Doyle and her new husband, Simon. As usual, all is not as it seems between the newlyweds, and when Linnet is found murdered, Poirot must sort through a boatload of suspects to find the killer before he (or she) strikes again.'
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Einstein, Albert, and Robert W Lawson (translator) Roger Penrose (Introduction), Robert Geroch (Commentary), David C Cassidy (Historical Essay) , Relativity: The Special and General Theory, Pi Press 2005 Preface: 'The present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of relativity to those readers who, from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in the theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics. ... The author has spared himself no pains in his endeavour to present the main ideas in the simplest and most intelligible form, and on the whole, in the sequence and connection in which they actually originated.' page 3
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Jisheng, Yang, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2012 'An estimated thirty-six million Chinese men, women and children starved to death during China’s Great Leap Forward in the late 1950’s and early ‘60’s. One of the greatest tragedies of the twentieth century, the famine is poorly understood, and in China is still euphemistically referred to as the “three years of natural disaster.” As a journalist with privileged access to official and unofficial sources, Yang Jisheng spent twenty years piecing together the events that led to mass nationwide starvation, including the death of his own father. Finding no natural causes, Yang lays the deaths at the feet of China’s totalitarian Communist system and the refusal of officials at every level to value human life over ideology and self-interest.'
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Pais, Abraham, 'Subtle is the Lord...': The Science and Life of Albert Einstein, Oxford UP 1982 Jacket: In this . . . major work Abraham Pais, himself an eminent physicist who worked alongside Einstein in the post-war years, traces the development of Einstein's entire ouvre. . . . Running through the book is a completely non-scientific biography . . . including many letters which appear in English for the first time, as well as other information not published before.'
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Links

Basil S Hetzel, International Journal of Epidemiology: Commentary: Fromiodine deficiency in Papua New Gu8inea to a global programme of prevention, 'Our research work in New Guinea [at this time, I was Professor and Head of the University of Adelaide, Department of Medicine at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH), Woodville SA.] carried out in collaboration with the Papua New Guinea (PNG) Public Health Department of what was then a Territory under Australian colonial administration, eventually led to a global UN programme for the elimination of brain damage due to iodine deficiency.' back

Benjamin Wittens, Malevolence Tempered by Incompetence: Trump's Hrifying Executive Order on Refugees and Visas, '. . . it’s a very dangerous thing to have a White House that can’t with the remotest pretense of competence and governance put together a major policy document on a crucial set of national security issues without inducing an avalanche of litigation and wide diplomatic fallout. If the incompetence mitigates the malevolence in this case, that’ll be a blessing. But given the nature of the federal immigration powers, the mitigation may be small and the blessing short-lived; the implications of having an executive this inept are not small and won’t be short-lived.' back

Coral Davenport, E.P.A. Workers Try to Block Pruitt in Show of Defiance, 'WASHINGTON — Employees of the Environmental Protection Agency have been calling their senators to urge them to vote on Friday against the confirmation of Scott Pruitt, President Trump’s contentious nominee to run the agency, a remarkable display of activism and defiance that presages turbulent times ahead for the E.P.A. Many of the scientists, environmental lawyers and policy experts who work in E.P.A. offices around the country say the calls are a last resort for workers who fear a nominee selected to run an agency he has made a career out of fighting — by a president who has vowed to “get rid of” it.' back

David Leonhardt, The Struggle Inside the Wall Street Journal, back

Elizabeth Farelly, Health of all on line as Davids fight gene giants, back

Gareth Hutchins, Turnbull ignored advice that renewable energy was not to blame for SA blackouts, 'Malcolm Turnbull’s decision to link last year’s blackout in South Australia to the state’s high renewable energy target was made directly against confidential public service advice. Freedom-of-information documents reveal a senior bureaucrat at the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet was so concerned about the spreading of misinformation in the immediate aftermath of last September’s SA storm that she emailed officials in the Departments of Environment and Agriculture asking for help.' back

Gravitational time dilation - Wikipedia, Gravitational time dilation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Gravitational time dilation is an actual difference of elapsed time between two events as measured by observers differently situated from gravitational masses, in regions of different gravitational potential. The lower the gravitational potential (the closer the clock is to the source of gravitation), the more slowly time passes. Albert Einstein originally predicted this effect in his theory of relativity and it has since been confirmed by tests of general relativity.' back

Hector Tobar, Latino Americans Pity You, President Trump, 'Of such ugly people, my mother, a Guatemalan-born United States citizen, says, “Hay que tenerles lástima” (“We must pity them”). Their hatred is born of ignorance and an inner inferiority, whereas we are confident in our existence. Like our Muslim immigrant brothers and sisters, we are survivors with roots in distant places. We speak more than one language. We know something about the suffering of the world, and so we know how truly great this country is. We believe that humility, persistence and perspective are our greatest strengths.' back

Jilian Schwedler, If Trump or Congress Decides the Muslim Brotherhood is a Terrorist Oganization, Brace for the Blowback, 'Efforts to lump these diverse Muslim Brotherhood affiliates with violent groups like the Islamic State and al-Qaeda ignore this rich history. They also ignore the fact that many groups have become fragmented in the post-uprising period, some harshly repressed by authoritarian regimes while others continue to function legally. In July 2013 the Egyptian military overthrew the government of Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammed Morsi—that country’s first-ever democratically elected president—and outlawed the organization as a terrorist group.' back

Jo McDonald, Where artmeets industry: protecting the spectacular rock art of the Burrup Peninsula, 'Murujuga, also known as the Burrup Peninsula, on the mid-west coast of Western Australia, is a special place. Home to over one million Indigenous engravings on piles of ancient boulders, the landscape is of great cultural significance to the Ngarda-Ngarli – people speaking Ngarluma, Injabarndi, Mardudunhera, Yaburara and Wong-Goo-Tt-Oo languages. Some of this rock art, or petroglyphs, may demonstrate the first use of this arid landscape by people arriving over 45,000 years ago, when these hills were more than 100 km from the coast. Others show us the bountiful lifestyle of hunter-fisher-gatherers along this coastline before the arrival of historic explorers, pastoralists, pearlers and miners.' back

Kathleen McPhillips, Royal commission hearings show Catholic Church faces a massive reform rask, back

Marcus Strom, CSIRO error put 30,000-year-old indigenous rock art at risk, 'A former assistant divisional chief at CSIRO, Dr John Black, has said the organisation's advice to government and industry about safe atmospheric acid levels on the Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia is built on a "house of cards". . . . And the author of a report upon which the CSIRO relied to give its advice said the advice was "just plain wrong". . . . However, Johan Kuylenstierna of the Stockholm Environment Institute said the CSIRO was misusing his research to support unsuitable advice about atmospheric acid levels.' back

Mona Hanna-Attisha, Will We Lose the Doctor Who Would Stop the Next Flint>, 'FLINT, Mich. — Eighteen months ago, as a pediatrician here, I discovered that the untreated tap water corroding the city’s plumbing was poisoning our children with lead. State officials called my science faulty and accused me of creating hysteria. But I was right and persisted, and with brave parents, pastors, journalists and scientists demanded answers until this continuing public health disaster was finally acknowledged. An entire city, with about 10,000 young children, was unnecessarily exposed to lead, a neurotoxin that causes irreversible brain damage.' back

Nick Cohen, How the lunatic fringe conquered world politics, 'I cannot think of any prime minister in British history who has behaved more cynically on a great issue of state. But her example shows that leaders cannot just be cynics. They have to do more than merely manipulate their crazies. They must creep to them and become like them. So we have the spectacle of Donald Trump’s furious tweets against the judges who have struck down his immigration bans. On the one hand, it is a cynically calculated strategy. Trump will be able to blame any terrorist attacks on the US judiciary, although no one who understands terrorism believes his edicts would save a single life. But at the same time his accusations of treason, his anti-Muslim bigotry and his contempt for the rule of law match the craziness of his supporters. He both manipulates them and is one of them.' back

Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem - Wikipedia, Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'In the field of digital signal processing, the sampling theorem is a fundamental bridge between continuous-time signals (often called "analog signals") and discrete-time signals (often called "digital signals"). It establishes a sufficient condition for a sample rate that permits a discrete sequence of samples to capture all the information from a continuous-time signal of finite bandwidth.' back

Paul Krugman, Ignorance is Stregth, 'What we’ve seen instead over the past three weeks is an awesome display of raw ignorance on every front. . . . We see this on legal matters: In a widely quoted analysis, the legal expert Benjamin Wittes described the infamous executive order on refugees as “malevolence tempered by incompetence,” and noted that the order reads “as if it was not reviewed by competent counsel at all” — which is a good way to lose in court.' back

Richard Sandomir, Raymond Smullyan, Puzzle-Crreating Logician, Dies at 97, 'Raymond Smullyan, whose merry, agile mind led him to be a musician, a magician, a mathematician and, most cunningly, a puzzle-creating logician, died on Monday in Hudson, N.Y. He was 97. His death was confirmed by Deborah Smullyan, a cousin. Professor Smullyan was a serious mathematician, with the publications and the doctorate to prove it. But his greatest legacy may be the devilishly clever logic puzzles that he devised, presenting them in numerous books or just in casual conversation.' back

Ruby Hamad, Why it's not enough to counter fear of Sharia law by insisting that Islam is 'feminist', 'There is a battle for the soul of Islam. And it is vital that Muslims acknowledge the dangers – and equally vital that the likes of Lambie accept that in this battle liberal Muslims are not the enemy. They are the key to Islam's future and the hope that it can once regain the progressive nature that made it so appealing to early Muslim women who flocked to hear and accept the prophet's radical revelations. back

Sarah Knapton, Salmonella flags cancer to immune system we injected into tumours, scientists find, 'The team discovered the possibility while working on unrelated research in which they noticed that the bacteria that attacked shellfish produced a protein called FlaB that caused a strong immune response. That led them to genetically modify the common salmonella bacteria so that it, too, would produce the protein - and spur the immune system into action.' back

Tanveer Ahmed, Losing your religion has a link with disorders, 'A draft of the new classification system for psychiatry is now public. Rarely has a set of dry guidelines from Washington DC caused such consternation. Outlets from The New York Times to the Hindustan Times heralded its arrival. You would think it was the work of the World Bank or International Monetary Fund, not a bunch of shrinks.' Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/losing-your-religion-has-link-with-disorders-20120221-1tloj.html#ixzz1n3wFw4Fo back

Thanu Padmanabhan, The Power of Nothing, The vacuum state of the electromagnetic field is far from trivial. Amongst other things it can exert forces that are measurable in the lab, in a curious phenomenon known as the Casimir effect. back

Wojciech Hubert Zurek, Quantum origin of quantum jumps: breaking of unitary symmetry induced by information transfer and the transition from quantum to classical, 'Submitted on 17 Mar 2007 (v1), last revised 18 Mar 2008 (this version, v3)) "Measurements transfer information about a system to the apparatus, and then further on -- to observers and (often inadvertently) to the environment. I show that even imperfect copying essential in such situations restricts possible unperturbed outcomes to an orthogonal subset of all possible states of the system, thus breaking the unitary symmetry of its Hilbert space implied by the quantum superposition principle. Preferred outcome states emerge as a result. They provide framework for the ``wavepacket collapse'', designating terminal points of quantum jumps, and defining the measured observable by specifying its eigenstates. In quantum Darwinism, they are the progenitors of multiple copies spread throughout the environment -- the fittest quantum states that not only survive decoherence, but subvert it into carrying information about them -- into becoming a witness.' back

vol VII: Notes

2017

Notes

Sunday 12 February 2017

Monday 13 February 2017

Tuesday 14 February 2017

Wednesday 15 February 2017

Thursday 16 February

Friday 17 February 2017

Saturday 18 February 2017

Further reading

Books

Links