Bellah (2011), 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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Chaisson (2002), Eric J., Cosmic Evolution: The Rise of Complexity in Nature, Harvard University Press 2002 ' In Cosmic Evolution Chaisson addresses some of the most basic issues we can contemplate: the origin of matter and the origin of life, and the ways matter, life, and radiation interact and change with time. Guided by notions of beauty and symmetry, by the search for simplicity and elegance, by the ambition to explain the widest range of phenomena with the fewest possible principles, Chaisson designs for us an expansive yet intricate model depicting the origin and evolution of all material structures. He shows us that neither new science nor appeals to nonscience are needed to understand the impressive hierarchy of the cosmic evolutionary story, from quark to quasar, from microbe to mind.' 
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Kuhn (1996), Thomas S, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, U of Chicago Press 1962, 1970, 1996 Introduction: 'a new theory, however special its range of application, is seldom just an increment to what is already known. Its assimilation requires the reconstruction of prior theory and the re-evaluation of prior fact, an intrinsically revolutionary process that is seldom completed by a single man, and never overnight.' [p 7]  
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Polanyi (1966, 2009), Michael, and Amaryta Sen (foreword), The Tacit Dimension, University Of Chicago Press 1966, 2009 ' “I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell,” writes Michael Polanyi, whose work paved the way for the likes of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. The Tacit Dimension argues that tacit knowledge—tradition, inherited practices, implied values, and prejudgments—is a crucial part of scientific knowledge. Back in print for a new generation of students and scholars, this volume challenges the assumption that skepticism, rather than established belief, lies at the heart of scientific discovery.' 
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Alexandra Stevenson, She Witnessed Mao’s Worst Excesses. Now She Has a Warning for the World., ' In 1955, not long after Ms. Chen joined the Central Film Bureau, Hu Feng, a well-known Chinese Marxist writer, was detained for penning a report arguing that literature should allow for greater expressiveness. His words triggered a purge that rippled through Ms. Chen’s circle of friends and colleagues, some of whom were accused of being part of Mr. Hu’s “counterrevolutionary clique.” Then, unexpectedly, Mao began to welcome criticism of the party, urging a “hundred flowers to bloom,” a phrase meant to encourage people to speak up and criticize the party’s shortcomings. Feeling inspired, Ms. Chen began to write. But before she had a chance to finish, Mao started rounding up the critics who had dared to speak out, accusing them of producing “poisonous weeds” instead of “fragrant flowers.” Critics were executed or sent to labor camps for re-education. Petrified that her manuscript would reveal “poisonous” thoughts, Ms. Chen lit a match to it. “I scattered that manuscript like ashes,” she said.' back

Atheist Alliance Internationl, Who We are, 'Acting President & Operations Director Brian Kernick (Canada) president@atheistalliance.org operations.director@atheistalliance.org Languages: English Brian Kernick is an international property developer based in Canada. He is the President and founder of Greenview Developments in Calgary and brings extensive management experience to the AAI board. Brian was inquisitive as a child and found the answers to his questions about religion unconvincing, so he never really became a believer. He has been an atheist and humanist activist since 1999 when he joined an atheist group in Brisbane, Australia during a stint developing properties in that country. In 2018, he was part of a group that founded a new group in Calgary called “Atheist Society of Calgary”. He is an active member and has helped organize many events and he works to bring Atheist refugees into Canada. Brian says, “I want to make the world a better place where rationality and reason are revered instead of superstition. I want atheists around the world to feel safe to voice their opinions openly, without retribution and fear of punishment or death.” back

Betty Davis, Nasty Gal, Nasty Gal: Betty Davis : 4:37
Talkin Trash: Betty Davis : 4:43
Dedicated To The Press: Betty Davis : 3:42
You And I: Betty Davis : 2:45
Feelins: Betty Davis : 2:45
F.U.N.K.: Betty Davis : 4:21
Gettin Kicked Off, Havin Fun: Betty Davis : 3:09
Shut Off The Light: Betty Davis : 3:54
This Is It ; Betty Davis ; 3:28
The Lone Ranger: Betty Davis : 6:13
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Brigita Olubas, Woman, modernist, West Indian: the haunted life of Jean Rhys, ' More is, however, known about this family. The literary scholar Elaine Savory interviewed Ena Williams, one of the daughters. In 2003, Savory wrote that Ena told a very moving story of how, as a child, she was dressed up by her godmother, with whom she lived, every Sunday, so that she sat on the veranda of the house when the Rees-Williams family passed on their way to church. They always ignored her. She had Owen’s name but no other acceptance by Rhys’s white family. In 1936, during Rhys’s visit to Dominica with her husband Leslie, Ena Williams found her kind and generous, but she was also aware of Rhys as a renegade from respectable white society. How suggestive the story is. Such a knowing and necessary perspective on this writer, her family, and her Dominican connections. It offers a view from the island, a way of moving beyond the awkward fit of Jean Rhys’ years in England and Europe, the real matter of her deepest and most complex life.' back

Catherine Belton, Russia’s nuclear entity aids war effort, leading to calls for sanctions, ' Russia’s state nuclear power conglomerate has been working to supply the Russian arms industry with components, technology and raw materials for missile fuel, documents show, aiding Moscow’s deadly onslaught on Ukraine and leading to calls for the company, Rosatom, to be put under sanctions. . . . “Rosatom is known in the nuclear world as a civil nuclear company. That’s basically what its brand name is,” said Mark Hibbs, senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s nuclear policy program. . . . . . . Rosatom controls about 30 percent of the global market for uranium enrichment and 17 percent of the market for reactor fuel, and out of the approximately 450 nuclear power plants around the world, about 20 percent of them are Russian-designed, Hibbs said. Rosatom is currently working on 23 nuclear power units across the globe, including in India, Turkey and Egypt, with its foreign order book standing at $200 billion.' back

Claude Shannon (1949), Communication in the Presence of Noise, 'A method is developed for representing any communication system geometrically. Messages and the corresponding signals are points in two “function spaces,” and the modulation process is a mapping of one space into the other. Using this representation, a number of results in communication theory are deduced concerning expansion and compression of bandwidth and the threshold effect. Formulas are found for the maximum rate of transmission of binary digits over a system when the signal is perturbed by various types of noise. Some of the properties of “ideal” systems which transmit at this maximum rate are discussed. The equivalent number of binary digits per second for certain information sources is calculated.' [C. E. Shannon , “Communication in the presence of noise,” Proc. IRE, vol. 37, pp. 10–21, Jan. 1949.] back

Eleni Petrakou, Splitting the atomic scientists: how the Ukraine war ruined physics, ' According to sources at Cern, after the invasion of Ukraine some members objected to co-authorship with Russian institutes and even with individuals working for them (making up about 7% of the collaborators). Fedor Ratnikov, a Russian physicist, explains that no publication policy has satisfied the required two-thirds majority of the participating institutes in each collaboration. “We have Ukrainian collaborators for whom this question is naturally extremely painful. [But] most of my Ukrainian colleagues do not extend responsibility for the invasion to their colleagues from Russian institutes. I would say that some of my EU colleagues are much more radical ".' 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

Harmonices Mundi - Wikiedia, Harmonices Mundi - Wikiedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Harmonice Mundi (Harmonices mundi libri V)[1] (Latin: The Harmony of the World, 1619) is a book by Johannes Kepler. In the work, written entirely in Latin, Kepler discusses harmony and congruence in geometrical forms and physical phenomena. The final section of the work relates his discovery of the so-called "third law of planetary motion". back

James Webb Space Telescope - Wikipedia, James Webb Space Telescope - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The James Webb Space Telescope (often shortened to JWST) is a space telescope which conducts infrared astronomy. As the largest optical telescope in space, its high resolution and sensitivity allow it to view objects too old, distant, or faint for the Hubble Space Telescope. This will enable investigations across many fields of astronomy and cosmology, such as observation of the first stars, the formation of the first galaxies, and detailed atmospheric characterization of potentially habitable exoplanets.. back

Jeffrey Nicholls (1987), A theory of Peace, ' The argument: I began to think about peace in a very practical way during the Viet Nam war. I was the right age to be called up. I was exempted because I was a clergyman, but despite the terrors that war held for me, I think I might have gone. It was my first whiff of the force of patriotism. To my amazement, it was strong enough to make even me face death.
In the Church, I became embroiled in a deeper war. Not a war between goodies and baddies, but the war between good and evil that lies at the heart of all human consciousness. Existence is a struggle. We need all the help we can get. Religion is part of that help and theology is the scientific foundation of religion.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (2023), Cognitive Cosmology, ' My hope is to inspire our lives with a theology that identifies God and the Universe. If the Universe is divine, all our experiences are experiences of God. Theology can therefore become a discipline founded on evidence. Since we see just one consistent Universe, the scientific approach will lead theology toward unity as it has unified mathematics, physics and biology. The unification of theology is a step toward conscious global cooperation. Global human cooperation is a step toward respecting and caring for ourselves and Earth, our common home back

Jyanni Steffensen, Queering Freud : textual (re)configurations of lesbian desire and sexuality / Jyanni Steffensen., ' Examines contemporary textual constructions of lesbianism, and reconfigures psychoanalytic discourses on female homosexuality in a way more appropriate to the reading of representations of lesbian desire and sexuality in contemporary western culture. back

Large Hadron Collider - Wikipedia, Large Hadron Collider - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is the world's largest and highest-energy particle collider. It was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) between 1998 and 2008 in collaboration with over 10,000 scientists and hundreds of universities and laboratories, as well as more than 100 countries. It lies in a tunnel 27 kilometres (17 mi) in circumference and as deep as 175 metres (574 ft) beneath the France–Switzerland border near Geneva. The first collisions were achieved in 2010 at an energy of 3.5 teraelectronvolts (TeV) per beam, about four times the previous world record. After upgrades it reached 6.5 TeV per beam (13 TeV total collision energy, the present world record). At the end of 2018, it was shut down for three years for further upgrades.' back

Mihir A.Desai, The Crypto Collapse and the End of the Magical Thinking That Infected Capitalism, ' I have come to view cryptocurrencies not simply as exotic assets but as a manifestation of a magical thinking that had come to infect part of the generation who grew up in the aftermath of the Great Recession — and American capitalism, more broadly. For these purposes, magical thinking is the assumption that favored conditions will continue on forever without regard for history. It is the minimizing of constraints and trade-offs in favor of techno-utopianism and the exclusive emphasis on positive outcomes and novelty. It is the conflation of virtue with commerce.' back

Paici, Sherratt & Lee, On a tiny Australian island, snakes feasting on seabirds evolved huge jaws in a surprisingly short time , ' Our study, recently published in Evolutionary Biology, documents rapid evolution in tiger snakes (Notechis scutatus). In less than a century, these snakes evolved the ability to swallow whole seagull chicks, allowing them to survive on a tiny island. . . . The secret is a process called “phenotypic plasticity”, which is a phenomenon where an organism physically changes its body within its own lifetime to match the environment it is experiencing. Myriad examples exist: from water fleas (Daphnia) that can develop a spiky “helmet” in the presence of predators, to the tadpoles of some spadefoot toads (Spea), which morph from omnivore to carnivore bodies when exposed to environments packed with small prey (including other tadpoles!).' back

Philip Cox, Betty: They Say I'm Different, 'Betty Davis arrives on the '70s scene to break boundaries for women with her daring personality and outrageous funk music. She then, despite being banned and boycotted, goes on to become the first black woman to perform, write and manage herself. back

Robert M. Bellah - Wikipedia, Robert M. Bellah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' Robert Neelly Bellah (February 23, 1927 – July 30, 2013) was an American sociologist and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion. . . . .. I know from personal experience that Harvard did some terribly wrong things during the McCarthy period and that those things have never been publicly acknowledged. At its worst it came close to psychological terror against almost defenseless individuals. ... The university and the secret police were in collusion to suppress political dissent and even to persecute dissenters who had changed their minds if they were not willing to become part of the persecution.' back

Robert Neelly Bellah - Wikipedia, Robert Neelly Bellah - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Robert Neelly Bellah (February 23, 1927 – July 30, 2013) was an American sociologist, and the Elliott Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was internationally known for his work related to the sociology of religion.' back

Rory Finnin, Opinion | Why Crimea Is the Key to Peace in Ukraine , ' Europe and the United States should know well the urgency of a total defeat of the aggressor. In his address to Congress in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt pledged that, “no matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Now as then, only absolute victory will do. Only a defeated, demilitarized Russia and a fully liberated Ukraine — whole and integral within its internationally recognised borders — can promise long-term stability and an enduring peace.' back

Sheryll Cashin, Opinion | What MLK’s Final Campaign Tells Us About His Legacy , ' I recently reread the chapter from The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. on his Chicago campaign for “open housing.” In 1966, King moved his family into a tenement apartment in one of the poorest communities in Chicago, his entrée to northern agitation. King wanted to help organize a broad, nonviolent movement that would attack “ghetto” segregation and the systemic exclusion of Black Americans from white neighborhoods. For me, reading this chapter was a refreshing primer on King’s tactics for nonviolent social change.' back

Talia Schaffer, "A Wilde Desire Took Me": The Homoerotic History of Dracula, ' Recent treatments of Bram Stoker’s novel analyze its homoerotic desperation, unconscious desire, and deeply buried trauma. 1 Not one critic, however, has recognized that Stoker began writing Dracula one month after his friend, rival, and compatriot Oscar Wilde was convicted of the crime of sodomy. Wilde’s influence on Stoker has been neglected partly because much of Stoker’s biographical information has disappeared. 2 Without knowing of Stoker’s corrosive long-term relationship with Wilde, critics have lacked a context for analyzing Wilde’s effect: an earthquake that destabilized the fragile, carefully elaborated mechanisms through which Stoker routed his desires. Stoker’s careful erasure of Wilde’s name from all his published (and unpublished) texts gives a reader the impression that Stoker was airily ignorant of Wilde’s existence. Nothing could be further from the truth. The two men had an intimate and varied history lasting for at least twenty years, precisely of the sort whose permutations have been mapped in reliable precision by Eve Sedgwick.' back

Wilhemine Preussen, NATO membership for Ukraine would have prevented war, says Finland’s PM, ' Russia would not have invaded Ukraine had it been a member of NATO, Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said Tuesday, adding that was the primary motivation for her country’s application to join the military alliance. Marin said she was “sure” that Vladimir Putin would not have launched the invasion had Kyiv already been a member. “We can look down the history and ask ourselves the question, should Ukraine already be a member of NATO?” she told the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, adding that “then there wouldn’t be a war in Ukraine and this is why also Finland, Sweden is ratifying a NATO membership.” She added that in 2014 when Russia attacked Crimea, Europe and its allies should have acted more robustly. “We need to learn from this day,” Marin told the gathering of high-level politicians and business people in the Swiss Alps.' back