How did heaven first end up in the sky and then nowhere?

One of the things that made me into a disbeliever in the existence of gods (and anything supernatural) was the fact that science seemed to have ruled out any location where such things might exist. The answer usually given that ‘God is everywhere’ but could not be detected seemed like a cop out. And the idea of dead people’s souls wandering around that could observe you but you could not contact (except through people with special powers) also seemed weird.

But during the time that I was a believer, I did struggle with the question of where a god and heaven could possibly be. In this article, Stephen Case explores how ideas about heaven have changed over the last two millennia.
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Changing times

Today at 2:00 am is when the US changed from Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time which required shifting clocks back by one hour. It is also the cue for many (including me) to grumble once again about this clock adjusting process that takes place twice a year. I went around changing all eight clocks last evening and then a few minutes later, there was a brief power cut, which meant that I had to again set the time on four clocks that are plugged in.

Not every part of the US changes times like this, with some staying on Standard Time all year round.

Exceptions include Arizona (except for the Navajo, who do observe daylight saving time in Navajo Nation), Hawaii, and the overseas territories of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the United States Virgin Islands.

I grew up near the equator where the amount of daylight stays pretty much the same throughout the year. and thus does not require fiddling around with clocks twice a year. But irritation with the practice is growing in the US and arguments for keeping one time throughout the year seem to becoming more frequent.
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The counter-intuitive appeal of the lottery

Every day I read reports of how the jackpot for the Powerball lottery, one of the many lotteries run by states in the US, keeps increasing in size. Under the system, if a drawing does not produce a winner, the jackpot rolls over with the value of the new bets added to the old. Currently the prize is about 1.2 billion dollars.

In an interesting article, Kathryn Schulz discusses the history of how the lottery became a ubiquitous presence in American life.

How this came to be is the subject of an excellent new book, “For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America,” by the historian Jonathan D. Cohen. At the heart of Cohen’s book is a peculiar contradiction: on the one hand, the lottery is vastly less profitable than its proponents make it out to be, a deception that has come at the expense of public coffers and public services. On the other hand, it is so popular that it is both extremely lucrative for the private companies that make and sell tickets and financially crippling for its most dedicated players.

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The danger of ‘long covid’

The WHO is warning that what is known as ‘long covid’, one feature of which is debilitating fatigue, is a serious issue that countries should start paying more attention to.

Long Covid is “devastating” the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of people, and wreaking havoc on health systems and economies, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) has warned as he urged countries to launch “immediate” and “sustained” efforts to tackle the “very serious” crisis.
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Covid has killed almost 6.5 million people and infected more than 600 million. The WHO estimates that 10% to 20% of survivors have been left with mid- and long-term symptoms such as fatigue, breathlessness and cognitive dysfunction. Women are more likely to suffer from the condition.
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Why we can say that some things do not exist

In two recent posts I discussed the question posed as to why there is something other than nothing and whether the question was even meaningful. The difficulty of showing that something does not exist is not confined to questions about the universe as a whole, it even applies to individual entities where you think it might be easier.

I got a text from a person I know and attached to it was a video of what looked like an organism consisting of the head and tail of a fish and, in between, the torso of a human being with arms behind its back and three pairs of breasts. This looked like it had been forwarded multiple times on social media and this person asked me if I thought it was real. I replied that it is safe to assume that anything seemingly bizarre that floats around the internet, and is not cited to a reputable news source along with supporting evidence, is a hoax. I did not tell him it was impossible that it was real because such a level of certainty implies omniscient knowledge on my part. But it is possible to be effectively certain that some things do not exist if one follows the logic of science.
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More about ‘nothing’

In response to the comments about my post about whether the question of why there is something other than nothing was meaningful, I thought I would link to an old post of mine titled Much ado about ‘nothing’ (I was quite pleased with myself for coming up with the title) that discussed the flak that erupted following the publication of the book by Lawrence Krauss that purported to explain why there is something rather than nothing. Krauss and Neil de Grasse Tyson do not come out well in that episode.

Since my post was from 2013, it is likely that many readers have not seen it before.

The long and tortured process by which scientific facts are created

It was reported yesterday that Bruno Latour, the philosopher of science and anthropologist, had died at the age of 75.

Latour was considered one of France’s most influential and iconoclastic living philosophers, whose work on how humanity perceives the climate emergency won praise and attention around the world.

A pioneer of science and technology studies, Latour argued that facts generally came about through interactions between experts, and were therefore socially and technically constructed. While philosophers have historically recognised the separation of facts and values – the difference between knowledge and judgment, for example – Latour believed that this separation was wrong.
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His groundbreaking books, Laboratory Life (1979), Science in Action (1987) and We Have Never Been Modern (1991) offered groundbreaking insights into, as he put it “both the history of humans’ involvement in the making of scientific facts and the sciences’ involvement in the making of human history”.

To put that into context, one of his most controversial assertions was the claim that Louis Pasteur did not just discover microbes, but collaborated with them.

In the mid-1990s there were heated debates between “realists”, who believed that facts were completely objective, and “social constructionists”, like Latour, who argued that facts were the creations of scientists.

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The problem of junk science used as evidence in courts

Because science and its associated technology have been so successful, there is a danger that anything that can be dressed up in the language of science can carry more weight that it merits.

One example is with the use of forensic science in court cases. The ability of modern scientific techniques that can analyze microscopic traces of items at crime scenes and link them to victims and perpetrators (DNA being a good example) has led to the ability to both convict the guilty and exonerate those falsely accused. TV police procedurals also lead to the impression that forensic science is very accurate and even judges can tend to give it greater credibility than it sometimes deserves.

This can result in new techniques being accepted as evidence even when the ‘science’ behind it has not been properly evaluated and is possibly useless, sometimes referred to as ‘junk science’. One example is the so-called science of bite marks.
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