Wed, October 10th

Join us at the Barnes & Noble in Har Mar Mall in Roseville at 7pm, Wednesday, October 10 for a fun evening. The Atheist Voices of Minnesota will be featured for an authors’ event and we would love to see a room full of occupied seats!

Six of the book authors will read and/or discuss their essays and then be available to take questions from attendees. The featured authors are Norman Barrett Wiik, Stephanie Zvan, Robin Raianiemi, Tim Wick, Kori Hennessy, and August Berkshire. The host will be Eric Jayne. After the one hour (maybe an hour and a half) event some of us will gather at the Old Chicago restaurant for social time.

The event is currently being promoted inside the Har Mar Barnes & Noble store with posters and complimentary bookmarks. It’s also featured on their website. Books will be available for purchase at the Barnes & Noble store.

This will be another great opportunity to promote Atheist Voices of Minnesota and the Minnesota Atheists organization. All net proceeds from the sale of Atheist Voices of Minnesota go directly to Minnesota Atheists. This charitable book is the result of a collaborative effort by nearly 50 atheists. It is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and other booksellers, and directly through the Minnesota Atheists online store. It’s also available for Kindle and Nook.

By making constant but weak measurements of a quantum system, physicists have managed to probe a delicate quantum state without destroying it – the equivalent of taking a peek at Schrodinger’s metaphorical cat without killing it.

The story is at the New Scientist.

This is not something you see every day:

… well, unless you live in Mala Mala or someplace.

You know, there’s a pretty good chance that Justin Vacula is an OK guy. Really, that’s probably true of all of the SlymePitters. Hell, I used to count Abbie Smith among my eFriends, back when the two of us shared certain views about stuff going on at Scienceblogs.com, such as being unimpressed with the Drama of Pepsipocalypse.

But, Justin and some (or all?) of the self-described SlymePitters do not share the modern feminist view of society and politics that underlies a majority of secular, skeptical, atheist, and related activism, or that is found fairly widely among that community. Some other guys probably started out that way too, but after listening to their fellow community members have seemingly embraced modern thinking on civil rights and equality. But the SlymePitters didn’t. They drew a line and dug in and refused to even consider crossing it, and from that entrenched position they have spent some 15 months or so continuously and systematically bullying a handful of women and a couple of men who stood up to them. But this is not to say that these people don’t actually believe in equality or civil rights of some kind. They probably do. They are just doing it wrong. Very, very wrong. They are savable, changeable, they can learn. But as long as that does not happen, what they do is unacceptable and I would even say unforgivable. A “second chance” is always an option, but only after one disavows oneself of the Slyme and admits one’s role in making other people’s lives miserable. And apologizes. A lot.

Anyway, none of that is the point off this blog post. The point of this blog post is to acknowledge the fact that the frequency of misogynistic creeps in our community is low. This needs to be openly acknowledged and understood for several reasons. First, it can help their victims to feel better, less threatened, and be less concerned, perhaps, because their oppressors are a tiny and insignificant group. Second, it can help organizations like the SCA to understand that this particular part of the community…the misogynists and haters…are a tiny minority. Third, it can help, perhaps, deflate the egos of the active members of the SlymePit so that they will dry up and blow away. And by that I mean quiet down for a while, lick their wounds, rethink their approach, change, and come back for their second chances.

The hypothesis stated as the title of this post is well supported by the latest turn of events.

Justin Vacula, who had been appointed by the Secular Coalition of America as one of its state unit leader, and who is also a long-standing and highly active member of the SlymePit, has seen fit to resign from that position following an outcry of outrage from the community that he was ever invited or allowed into this position.

Justin did his resignation wrong, of course. Instead of simply acknowledging differences of opinion and backing out without much comment, or even (unthinkably, I’m afraid) admitting that he has not been a good member of this community and indicating how badly he feels about his horrid behavior, he produced a whinging accusatory screed that kinda sorta maybe admitted that he could have done some things differently but mainly blamed everybody else. For stuff. It’s not entirely clear what.

Anyway, the thing that seems to have lead to Justin’s resignation was a petition to the SCA to drop Justin, at Change.org, and started by Stephanie Zvan. (See this for an update.) A lot of people signed that petition. Also, another petition started by a fellow SlymePitter, also at Change.org, allowed for the possibility for supporters of Justin to chime in and show that a big portion of this community liked him and wanted him to stay in his SCA position. Hardly anybody signed that one. The difference between the two may have mattered, even to him, to clueless, self absorbed unobservant uncritical him.

So, I made this histogram:

The hypothesis is not rejected.

The whole point of being indoors is to get out of the elements, so it is a little strange that we bring miniature suns inside, take off most or all of our clothing, and irradiate ourselves on purpose. But we (well, some, not all of us) do and the result seems to be an increased risk of disease. This just out:

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blockquote>Indoor tanning and non-melanoma skin cancer: systematic review and meta-analysis
Results 12 studies with 9328 cases of non-melanoma skin cancer were included. Among people who reported ever using indoor tanning compared with those who never used indoor tanning, the summary relative risk for squamous cell carcinoma was 1.67 (95% confidence interval 1.29 to 2.17) and that for basal cell carcinoma was 1.29 (1.08 to 1.53). No significant heterogeneity existed between studies. The population attributable risk fraction for the United States was estimated to be 8.2% for squamous cell carcinoma and 3.7% for basal cell carcinoma. This corresponds to more than 170?000 cases of non-melanoma skin cancer each year attributable to indoor tanning. On the basis of data from three studies, use of indoor tanning before age 25 was more strongly associated with both squamous cell carcinoma (relative risk 2.02, 0.70 to 5.86) and basal cell carcinoma (1.40, 1.29 to 1.52).

Conclusions Indoor tanning is associated with a significantly increased risk of both basal and squamous cell skin cancer. The risk is higher with use in early life (<25 years). This modifiable risk factor may account for hundreds of thousands of cases of non-melanoma skin cancer each year in the United States alone and many more worldwide. These findings contribute to the growing body of evidence on the harms of indoor tanning and support public health campaigns and regulation to reduce exposure to this carcinogen.

source

For three decades, the National Center for Science Education(NCSE) has focused most of its efforts on defending the teaching of evolution in the classroom. Increasingly, however, the teachers its executive director, Dr. Eugenie Scott, hears from are under fire for teaching global warming. So much so that in January, the organization formally added a climate initiative to its efforts to support the teaching of science. Scott spoke on August 6, 2012 in Minnesota, sponsored by the Will Steger Foundation and the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs, where she was joined by Steger.

How Religion and Science Interact and the Issue of Evolution

A featured speaker at Westminster College’s 2012 Symposium on Religious Experience in a Global Society, Dr. Eugenie Scott, Executive Director of the National Center for Science Education (Oakland, California), discusses religion, science and evolution. Almost 80 years after the Scopes trial, the debate over the teaching of evolution continues to rage. There is no easy resolution—It is a complex topic with profound scientific, religious, educational, and legal implications. Dr. Scott discusses the nature of the evolution-creationism debate and the important religious and scientific aspects of the conflict and argues that evolution must be the foundation of scientific inquiry in the United States today.

Dr. Scott, a former university professor, has been both a researcher and an activist in the creationism/evolution controversy for more than 25 years and has addressed many components of this controversy, including educational, legal, scientific, religious, and social issues. She holds eight honorary degrees, from McGill, Rutgers, Mt. Holyoke, the University of New Mexico, Ohio State, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Colorado College, and the University of Missouri-Columbia. Scott is the author of Evolution vs. Creationism and co-editor, with Glenn Branch, of Not in Our Classrooms: Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong for Our Schools.

You’ll recall when Pennsylvania House Republican Leader Mike Turzai was filmed admitting that the voter ID law he ushered in for that state was designed to make sure Obama lost there to Mitt Romney (see below). Pennsylvania is sort of a swing state, but Obama winning there would not have shocked anyone even from the perspective of a few months ago before Romney started “running” for president (and by “running” I mean “stumbling”). Since then, all three states that have voter ID laws in place to bias the election towards Republican candidates have seen a backlash against this atrocious insult to our democracy, and as a result, Obama will win in all three of those states, and other Democrats will do well.

And now, this: Judge Puts Pennsylvania Voter ID Law On Hold Through Election. From NPR:

A judge is basically “postponing Pennsylvania’s tough new voter identification requirement, ordering that it not be enforced in the presidential election,” The Associated Press writes.

But in a ruling that’s rather difficult to follow if you’re not very familiar with the case, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson also says he “will not restrain election officials from asking for photo ID at the polls; rather, I will enjoin enforcement of those parts of Act 18 which directly result in disenfranchisement.”

I look forward to expert commentary that will help us all understand this.

Last week’s edition of Skeptically Speaking (two Sunday’s ago) is now available as a podcast download.

This week, we’re looking at film and video as an exciting, engaging way to communicate science to the public. Guest host Marie-Claire Shanahan spends the hour with independent film-maker and former BBC video journalist Brady Haran, and artist and filmmaker Henry Reich, creator of the Minute Physics YouTube series. They’ll discuss the promise and pitfalls of telling science stories in moving pictures.

Go here to get the podcast.

Meanwhile, we await last Sunday’s interview with David Dobbs about Naomi Wolf’s book on the Vagina.

By now you’ve probably read the story of Leo Traynor’s troll. The very short version: Leo, and later his wife, were stalked on the internet by a horrid troll; the horrid troll eventually started to leave horrid objects with messages at Leo’s house; The troll was baited and investigated by an IT expert who could identify him as a teenager that lived not far from Leo; Leo got in contact with the teen-troll’s parents, arranged a meeting, forgave him, and the troll seemed kinda sorry.

I think that’s a great story and I hereby doff my hat to Leo. But, I have two gripes I want to make. Well, one gripe about some of the commenters on Leo’s post, and the second, more of a question for Leo that may or may not be followed by a gripe. Continue reading Did Leo Traynor's Troll Have Other Victims?? →