httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxlPVSAnWOo
Part of a series of videos on YouTube – A Tribute to Carl Sagan.
Posted every Wednesday at 12:30pm AusEST
Make it OK over at http://make-everything-ok.com/.
Over at New Statesman is a collection of reasons some prominent people do not believe in God or Gods; contributors include human rights activists, authors, psychologists, broadcasters, philosophers, journalists, and scientists in various fields such as biology, neurology, and physics.
Here’s one from Maryam Namazie
Human rights activist:
I don’t remember exactly when I stopped believing in God. Having been raised in a fairly open-minded family in Iran, I had no encounter with Islam that mattered until the Islamic movement took power on the back of a defeated revolution in Iran. I was 12 at the time.
I suppose people can go through an entire lifetime without questioning God and a religion that they were born into (out of no choice of their own), especially if it doesn’t have much of a say in their lives. If you live in France or Britain, there may never be a need to renounce God actively or come out as an atheist.
But when the state sends a “Hezbollah” (the generic term for Islamist) to your school to ensure that you don’t mix with your friends who are boys, stops you from swimming, forces you to be veiled, deems males and females separate and unequal, prescribes different books for you and your girlfriends from those read by boys, denies certain fields of study to you because you are female, and starts killing indiscriminately, then you have no choice but to question, discredit and confront it – all of it. And that is what I did.
Read the rest here.
Tim provides the audience with a bit of Comedy, and plays a short ditty on Ron open minded:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5y0_Pp0AAw
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Empirical Evidence is often spoke about, but it appears to me, at least with the people I have had to explain it to, that many don’t know what is meant. In scientific use the term empirical refers to the gathering of data using only evidence that is observable by the senses or in some cases using calibrated scientific instruments.
Simply, Empirical Evidence is gained through observations and measurements.
The XKCD comic demonstrates this; Had he simply answered yes, this would have been a hypothesis not supported by evidence, though by being married, the guy/bald woman can answer the question that was posed with surety.
The folks over at Helios are raking it in with their homeopathic water. That’s right, water diluted in water.
At £51 a liter, it equates to about $78 for us Aussies. It is revealing about the nature of homeopathic manufacturers, given the homeopathic community often rants about the profits made by “Big Pharma”, despite large chunks of that profit being used towards developing new and better medicines.
There is little evidence to show that Helios actually produces any of these remedies in accordance with homeopathic “tradition”. They may use some of the crazier methods like emptying the vials and refilling them over and over, or having a platform shake a container with their initial ingredient then replacing that container with water, or – they may not even waste their time doing anything at all.
It’s possible Helios are simply selling blank pills and supplying spring water rather than tap water.
It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if they were.
Update: @MLOCallaghan from Nerditorial was kind enough to bring these Homeopathic Ear Wax Drops to my attention:
At £44.39 for 10mL, that brings the cost of 1L of these ear drops to £4438. For us Aussies, that’s $6,869/L
Water at that price should be criminal.
Seen on someone’s email signature:
If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas.
-George Bernard Shaw
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyOHJa5Vj5Y
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