June 2011
I hate it when you just realize something you've known for a long time.
The thing I like about Atheism as a label is that it is a conclusion, not a foundation.
Yeah!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
HAHAH
Present me the chance - I can grow
May 2011
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It once seemed very reasonable to think of the Universe as beginning just a little before our collective memory is obscured by the passage of time and the illiteracy of our ancestors. Generally speaking, that’s hundreds or thousands of years ago. Religions that purport to describe the origin of the Universe often specify—implicitly or explicitly—a date of origin of roughly such vintage, a birthday for the world.
If you add up all the “begats” in Genesis, for example, you get an age for the Earth: 6,000 years old, plus or minus a little. The universe is said to be exactly as old as the Earth. This is still the standard of Jewish, Christian, and Moslem fundamentalists and is clearly reflected in the Jewish calendar.
But so young a Universe raises an awkward question: How is it that there are astronomical objects more than 6,000 light-years away? It takes light a year to travel a light-year, 10,000 years to travel 10,000 light-years, and so on. When we look at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, the light we see left its source 30,000 years ago. The nearest spiral galaxy like our own, M31 in the constellation Andromeda, is 2 million light-years away, so we are seeing it as it was when the light from it set out on its long journey to Earth—2 million years ago. And when we observe distant quasars 5 billion light-years away, we are seeing them as they were 5 billion years ago, before the Earth was formed. (They are, almost certainly, very different today.)
If, despite this, we were to accept the literal truth of such religious books, how could we reconcile the data? The only plausible conclusion, I think, is that God recently made all the photons of light arriving on the Earth in such a coherent format as to mislead generations of astronomers into the misapprehension that there are such things as galaxies and quasars, and intentionally driving them to the spurious conclusion that the Universe is vast and old. This is such a malevolent theology I still have difficulty believing that anyone, no matter how devoted to the divine inspiration of any religious book, could seriously entertain it.
” —Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot - A Vision of the Human Future In Space: Chapter 3)
Another Godless Goddess: IL Catholic Group Quits Adoptions →
helvetebrann.tumblr.com
Catholic Charities of the diocese of Rockford, Ill., will cease providing adoption and foster care services because the state will not exempt it from serving gay couples when the civil unions law goes into effect.
One Catholic Charities affiliate in Illinois has announced it will cease providing adoption and foster care services because the state will not exempt it from serving gay couples.
The Catholic Charities office of the diocese of Rockford made the announcement Thursday after the state legislature failed to pass a bill that would have added the exemption to the new Illinois civil unions law,Catholic News Service reports. There is no word on whether the state’s five other dioceses will follow suit.
The Catholic Conference of Illinois had sought the exemption in the form of an amendment to an unrelated bill dealing with electoral ethics. The bill passed the state senate Wednesday without the amendment attached, and it had already cleared the house. The amendment would have allowed faith-based agencies to refer gay and unmarried straight couples elsewhere.
Anthony Martinez, executive director of the Civil Rights Agenda, an LGBT advocacy group, issued a statement calling the Rockford diocese’s move “a sad display of bigotry by Catholic Charities, and their bigotry will now be harming the children in their care.” He added, “It is equally sad that they would invoke ‘freedom of religion’ as they make this announcement. That freedom is granted only when the religious agency is not funded by taxpayer dollars, and they are well aware of that. Luckily, the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services has been anticipating this move and has a contingency plan in place.”
Ridiculous and very sad. Basically, because you want to be a bigot, you’re going to stop helping children who are in desperate need of help.
What horrible people.
I’d rather post funny or happy things on my blog, but I can’t not reblog this. Disgusting.
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It'ssss.... FUNKY JELLY
The last two sleepovers I’ve been at consisted of watching shoperotic and anime. Good times.
Hello Future: World's First Commercially Available QUANTUM COMPUTER! →
gizmodo.com
Firstly, thanks to DVK for the link.
This is honestly so mindblowing that I hardly know where to begin - or even have words to describe this! I hope we all realize that with this innovation, we’re looking at the dawn of a new age. And it would be simple-minded to think that this is merely another computer innovation, like newer iPhones or faster processors. This is much more. This is opening a door to new computing capabilities never before imagined. And with that, changes to our understanding of the universe, technology, and the structure of society as powerful as our metamorphosis has been over the last 100 years.
To quote from Ray Kurzweil (from an earlier RCS post):
“It has been said that quantum computing is to digital computing as a hydrogen bomb is to a firecracker. This is a remarkable statement when we consider that digital computing is quite revolutionary in its own right. The analogy is based on the following observation. Consider (at least in theory) a Universe-sized (non-quantum) computer in which every neutron, electron, and proton in the Universe is turned into a computer, and each one (that is, every particle in the Universe) is able to compute trillions of calculations per second. Now imagine certain problems that this Universe-sized supercomputer would be unable to solve even if we ran that computer until either the next big bang or until all the stars in the Universe died - about ten to thirty billion years. There are many examples of such massively intractable problems; for example, cracking encryption codes that use a thousand bits, or solving the traveling-salesman problem with a thousand cities. While a very massive digital computer (including our theoretical Universe-sized computer) is unable to solve this class of problems, a quantum computer of microscopic size could solve such problems in less than a billionth of a second.” (my emphasis)
In short, this is pretty big news.
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“There’s been a lot of talk lately about how close we are to quantum computing for the masses. Now, Canadian company D-Wave claims to have done it with their D-Wave One…
The D-Wave One represents the successes the D-Wave engineers have reached in the area of quantum annealing, as shown in a paper they submitted to Nature. Even though D-Wave is spare in the details department, the computer’s 128-qubit processor is designed to tackle heavy-duty optimization and complex number theory problems. Conventional general-purpose computers will continue to outpace it in other areas, but this particular area of supercomputing could see AI taken a big step forward…”
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p.s. Lockheed Martin, the high-tech security and defense company, bought one. here. (Also a good link for a bit more info.)
And just to be clear, this computer has major limitations, but like the earliest computers or cell phones, it’s just a matter of time before we see massive improvements. And if Kurzweil is right about his “law of accelerating returns”, it may be a lot sooner than we’d think.
Now I have to marry millionaire :/
Very interesting news—I’ll be standing by until the price comes way, way down:-)
Numbers 31: 1-18
Black, black, black and white
I searched "god" in Tumblr and, in the span of about two minutes of skimming, was told more than five times in different ways that I'm going to hell.
im sorry that it has to be that way. that sucks but i hope it gets better soonish.
Thanks, anon. Me too.
do you ever smoke crack on occasion?
Only when I’m quoting Tyrone Biggums