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Saturday, July 23, 2005
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9.45pm: Met 'regrets tragedy'· 2 arrests in south London· 500 call police over CCTV images
(Via Guardian Unlimited.)
5:41:25 PM 
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A terrific, true piece in the Guardian:
All religions are prone to [violence], given the right circumstances. How could those who preach the absolute revealed truth of every word of a primitive book not be prone to insanity? There have been sects of killer Christians and indeed the whole of Christendom has been at times bent on wiping out heathens. Jewish zealots in their settlements crazily claim legal rights to land from the Old Testament. Some African Pentecostal churches harbour sects of torturing exorcism and child abuse. Muslims have a very long tradition of jihadist slaughter. Sikhs rose up to stop a play that exposed deformities of abuse within their temples. Buddhism too has its sinister wing. See how far-right evangelicals have kidnapped US politics and warped its secular, liberal founding traditions. Intense belief, incantations, secrecy and all-male rituals breed perversions and danger, abusing women and children and infecting young men with frenzy, no matter what the name of the faith.
Enlightenment values are in peril not because these mad beliefs are really growing but because too many rational people seek to appease and understand unreason. Extreme superstition breeds extreme action. Those who believe they alone know the only way, truth and life will always feel justified in doing anything in its name. You would, wouldn't you, if you alone had the magic answer to everything? If religions teach that life after death is better then it is hardly surprising that some crazed followers will actually believe it.
The piece is about what's happening in England, but the government does even more to support, pay for, and push religion in the US. But if you come out and say this stuff, you get called an anti-religious bigot. As Bob Dylan said, "the naked truth is still taboo, no matter where it can be seen."
5:11:58 PM
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The New Scientist asks, "Has Huygens found life on Titan?" And the answer is, "let's wait and see." But what Huygens has found is very interesting and the speculation is tantalizing.
Titan's atmosphere is about 5 per cent methane, and Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffet Field, California, thinks that some of it could be coming from methanogens, or methane-producing microbes. Now he and Heather Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, have worked out the likely diet of such organisms on Titan.
They think the microbes would breathe hydrogen rather than oxygen, and eat organic molecules drifting down from the upper atmosphere. They considered three available substances: acetylene, ethane and more complex organic gunk known as tholins. Ethane and tholins turn out to provide little more than the minimum energy requirements of methanogenic bacteria on Earth. The more tempting high-calorie option is acetylene, yielding six times as much energy per mole as either ethane or tholins.
[snip - in which it is noted that if there are methanogens on Titan then hydrogen levels very near the surface would be depleted by three orders of magnitude when compared with hydrogen levels at higher levels of Titan's atmosphere]
One hope for testing their idea rests with the data from an instrument on Huygens called the GCMS, which recorded Titan's chemical make-up as the probe descended. It will take time to analyse the raw data, partly because hydrogen's signal will have to be separated from those of other molecules. "Eventually, I hope, we will have numbers for at least upper limits for hydrogen," says Hasso Niemann of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, principal investigator of the GCMS.
Go read the complete article. If there is life on Saturn's Titan, how did it get there? Did it originate on Titan or hitchhike there via an asteroid or comet? Abnormally interesting questions but they are a little premature.
(Via Abnormal Interests.)
4:38:19 PM
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Phyllis Diller was on Morning Edition this morning, and was very funny; great material, great timing. Give it a listen here.
She was talking about a movie she was in, The Aristocrats, by Penn Jillete and Paul Provenza, about the classic joke of that name. I hadn't ever heard this one. Happily, there's a great Wikipedia page about the joke. The page is highly recommended, unless you don't like filth.
3:22:03 PM
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© Copyright 2005 Steve Michel.
Last update: 8/1/2005; 9:49:41 AM.
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