I don’t care what his next movie is about. I’ll pay to go see it.
I notice who’s doing the interview: Libertarians. Screw ’em.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I don’t care what his next movie is about. I’ll pay to go see it.
I notice who’s doing the interview: Libertarians. Screw ’em.
I shall have to turn on my television Sunday evening (7 or 8pm, depending on where in the US you are). Stephen Hawking will be on the Discovery Channel to answer the question, “Is There a Creator?” — I’m pretty sure he’s going to answer “no.”
He also tersely answers a few questions online.
Q: First, we wonder if you could comment on why you are tackling the existence of God question?
A: I think Science can explain the Universe without the need for God.
Q. What problems you are working on now, and what do you see as the big questions in theoretical physics?
A: I’m working on the question, why is there something rather than nothing, why are the laws of physics what they are.
If that last bit has you curious, here’s a teaser:
Essentially on “Is There A Creator?,” Hawking notes that on the sub-atomic scale, particles are seen in experiments to appear from nowhere. And since the Big Bang started out smaller than an atom, similarly the universe likely “popped into existence without violating the known laws of Nature,” he says. Nothing created the universe, so in his view there was no need for a creator. That is his explanation for “why there is something rather than nothing.”
I shall have to turn on my television Sunday evening (7 or 8pm, depending on where in the US you are). Stephen Hawking will be on the Discovery Channel to answer the question, “Is There a Creator?” — I’m pretty sure he’s going to answer “no.”
He also tersely answers a few questions online.
Q: First, we wonder if you could comment on why you are tackling the existence of God question?
A: I think Science can explain the Universe without the need for God.
Q. What problems you are working on now, and what do you see as the big questions in theoretical physics?
A: I’m working on the question, why is there something rather than nothing, why are the laws of physics what they are.
If that last bit has you curious, here’s a teaser:
Essentially on “Is There A Creator?,” Hawking notes that on the sub-atomic scale, particles are seen in experiments to appear from nowhere. And since the Big Bang started out smaller than an atom, similarly the universe likely “popped into existence without violating the known laws of Nature,” he says. Nothing created the universe, so in his view there was no need for a creator. That is his explanation for “why there is something rather than nothing.”
A member of the Australian parliament, Fred Nile, has been pushing an interesting cost-saving measure. You know how Australian schools are saddled with chaplains and religious instruction? Well, he wants to keep that nonsense and kill the ethics classes that students can take as a secular alternative.Seems backwards to me, but then he is presumably a Christian, and so is perverse and backward by nature.
So Charlie Fine wrote an op-ed defending the ethics courses. Fine is 11 years old, and smarter than a member of parliament.
The facts show that only 33 per cent of the world is Christian, and in NSW a quarter of children choose not to attend lessons on theological scripture. I think it is possible to be non-religious and a good person.
By all means, Mr Nile, you go out and be as Christian as you want; I respect that entirely. But that does not give you and your supporters the right to attempt to shape a future generation of adults in your mould – that is a religious conservative.
Your views are out of step with modern society, so I would ask you to reconsider your actions and continue to allow parents and children a choice in their classrooms.
There’s a poll with the opinion piece. I guess Charlie Fine is very persuasive.
Where do you stand on ethics classes in schools?
For them
92%
Against them
8%
Oh, sure, you can go vote on the poll too, but I think Charlie has it all well in hand.
I told you all the batty creationists were crawling out of the woodwork to crow over Xiaotingia‘s redefinition of Archaeopteryx‘s status as a victory for their ideology, when it really isn’t. Now another has joined the fray: Vox Day, creationist and right-wing lunatic. He makes a lot of crazy, ignorant claims in this short passage that I’ll answer one by one.
Oh, this is beautiful. Bill Nye (the Science Guy!) is being interviewed by a Fox News talking head who asks a surprisingly dumb question: Nye is talking about a volcano found on the moon, so he asks, “Does it go anywhere close to the climate change debate on earth?…we haven’t been up there burning fossil fuels.”. Bill Nye’s eyebrows shoot up, he pauses very briefly, and you can see him recalibrating his brain so he can answer as he would to a perky little 5 year old. It’s wonderfully amusing, and he does give a very good answer.
Scum of the earth. Parts of Michele Bachmann’s district contain the most smug, pious, conservative rat-buggering jerks on the planet (like Marcus Bachmann and his anti-gay “clinic”, for instance). And the symptoms are beginning to show: the Anoka-Hennepin school district, part of Bachmann’s domain, home of the Elmer Gantry-wannabe Bradley Dean, is also the epicenter of an epidemic of teen suicides, 9 in the last two years. These are kids who were bullied for being gay, or suspected of being gay, or not fitting in to the their inbred little community (and who would want to?), and the school district has been acquiescing to pressure from religious groups to maintain a policy of intolerance and even demonization of gays.
As civil rights groups have pushed the Minnesota school district to do more to increase tolerance of LGBT students, conservative religious groups fought to keep them away from public schools. After Samantha’s suicide and several others, students in Anoka-Hennepin schools participated in the Day of Silence. The event, organized by the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network, encourages kids to remain silent for the day in recognition of the effect of anti-gay bullying and harassment. In response, religious activists took up the “Day of Truth,” an event championed by the “ex-gay ministry” Exodus International that’s usually held the day before the Day of Silence. Students who participated were encouraged to engage their classmates in discussions of homosexuality from a Christian perspective.
Fifteen-year-old Justin Aaberg appears to have been one of the targets of this initiative. One day last year Justin came home and told his mom, Tammy, that another student had told him he would to go to hell because he was gay. “That did something to his brain,” she says. He hanged himself in his bedroom last summer. Only after his suicide did Tammy learn that the Parents Action League had reportedly worked with area churches to hand out T-shirts promoting the “Day of Truth” to students at his high school (which is also Bachmann’s alma mater). The students were also instructed to “preach to the gay kids,” Aaberg says. (No one from the Parents Action League responded to a request for comment.)
You would think that Christians, who claim to have the moral high ground in everything, would recognize that driving kids to suicide is not ethical behavior. Unfortunately not; it’s part of their agenda. If they can’t convert them to their sanctimonious faith, it’s just as good to have them dead.
Will the school district change its policies? I doubt it. The churches dictate what is allowed.
Over the course of the last few weeks, I have dragged myself through George R. R. Martin’s latest, A Dance with Dragons, the fifth book in his Game of Thrones series.
I’m done. No more. I’m not reading any of his books any more.
It’s terrible. Martin has taken the concept of the pot-boiler to an extreme — it’s a novel where nothing happens other than continual seething, roiling turmoil. He whipsaws the reader through a dozen different, complex story lines where characters struggle to survive in a world wrecked by civil war — one other problem is that I’d hit a chapter about some minor character from the previous four books, and struggled to remember who the heck this person is, and why I’m supposed to care — and again, nothing is resolved. Well, not quite: major characters are brutally killed, if they’re male, and graphically and degradingly humiliated into irrelevance if they’re female. I guess that’s a resolution, all right — perhaps the last book will be a lovingly detailed description of a graveyard, draped with naked women mourning?
And all the death and destruction accomplishes nothing. It doesn’t further the plot, it doesn’t change any situations.
There is still a mysterious, supernatural menace lurking beyond the great wall to the North; but don’t worry about them, they do absolutely nothing in the entire book. That’s the problem with the undead: inertia. They just kind of lie there.
The expatriate princess with the dragons was supposed to be a great threat, promising invasion. She decides to hole up in one city and dither with palace intrigues for the whole book, while everything falls apart around her. She takes a lot of baths, though, and I felt like her primary role in Martin’s mind is to provide nude scenes for the HBO serialization. The dragons? Pffft. Random SFX carnage.
The dwarf ping-pongs about from place to place, commenting cynically. We’re supposed to care about what imaginary continent he’s on in this chapter, or what city or boat or troop of rapscallions he finds himself in now. I didn’t.
There’s a war going on, you know, and one of the kings in this multi-sided conflict is marching his army off to attack a castle. In a snowstorm. Which leads to the army being mired down and starving. For the entire last half of the book. Those chapters would have benefited greatly if they’d just been left blank and white (blizzard, get it?)
In his afterword, Martin complains about how his last book “was a bitch. This one was three bitches and a bastard.” I can sympathize. Writing over a thousand pages of dull, dragging, incestuously self-referential, soap-opera style narrative in which nothing happens must have been a torment. I understand he’s committed to writing at least two more of these overblown pop fantasy novels, but I don’t think he’s at all committed to bringing anything to a conclusion. George R. R. Martin has successfully penned himself into a lucrative writerly hell of his own creation. I have a recommendation that would spare him some pain: stop now. Roll around happily in your money, and enjoy a prosperous retirement. It’s not as if anyone expects anything to ever be resolved in your fantasy world, so just ending it now is the same as ending it at book #7. Or book #1, for that matter. I’ve reached an end that is as satisfying as anything I expect from this story, which is not satisfying at all.
Is anyone surprised that Bill O’Reilly slavishly defends Rupert Murdoch? Of course not — I’m pretty sure his employers have tattooed the word “tool” somewhere on his anatomy. You might be surprised at the stupidity of his rationale…wait, no, you won’t be. Nothing the “tide goes in, tide goes out” man says could be unexpectedly inane.
I give up. There’s nothing surprising here. Bill O’Reilly brings in a stooge from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, and they sit around whining about the fact that the NY Times has been reporting on the NewsCorp scandals…because it’s a British affair. Who cares what goes on in other countries? So what if NewsCorp is based in America, it’s just a bunch of foreigners. Why does the NY Times go on and on about irrelevant stuff going on outside our borders?
OK, since it’s an entirely foreign affair, let’s kick Rupert Murdoch out of the country and seize all of his holdings and put them in American hands.
There’s a Sarah Palin “documentary” out, called The Undefeated, and it’s a weird example of conservatives trying to create a new alternative reality again. First, she was defeated: notice that it isn’t Vice President Palin. Second, the professional reviewers are all panning the movie — it’s a hagiographic mess. But the crazies on the right must salvage the reputation of the movie, for great honor.
The tactic they’ve chosen is to claim that it has tremendous grass roots appeal and that audiences have been flocking to it. Right-wing bloggers have been shouting that “‘The Undefeated’ Roars to Big Opening Day…Theaters Sell Out From Atlanta to Orange County!”
Which is hilarious. It opened on ten (10!) screens, and they’re desperately comparing it to Transformers and Harry Potter, the two big blockbusters playing now.
I’m finding it wonderfully encouraging. If you really want a negligible flop in the world of popular media, make it about right-wing heroes like Ayn Rand or Sarah Palin. I wonder if the makers sold 25,000% of the profits to investors before it opened?
