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I envy fungi and bacteria
I, lpetrich, envy fungi and bacteria. Many fungi and bacteria are capable of living off very limited selections of biological molecules, sometimes only one kind at a time, like glucose (a simple sugar...
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Musings on Immanuel Velikovsky’s Theories
Immanuel Velikovsky (1895-1979) is best-known for his controversial notions about the recent history of the Solar System, but there’s a bit more to be said. He was born in Russia and he moved to...
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The Reason Rally
A week ago in Washington, DC was the big Reason Rally. It was a big atheist/freethought gathering in the Washington Mall in Washington, DC, and several noted atheist/freethought authors, bloggers, and...
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How good is your theory?
Ethan Siegel in How Good is Your Theory? Open Thread I : Starts With A Bang : Starts With A Bang, describes these levels of support, which I have numbered: 3: Scientific Law. Very well-supported...
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Rejected for a long time before being accepted
Some notable scientific hypotheses had been rejected for a long time before being accepted. Heliocentrism Atomism Meteorites as Extraterrestrial Rocks Geological Catastrophes Continental Drift Genes...
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Higgs particle discovered
Finally! At long last! This long-sought particle has been discovered, or at least some approximation of it. It’s the last remaining particle of the Standard Model, and it makes all the other ones...
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The Twilight of the Monarchies
I recently thought of that evocative phase to describe the decline of monarchy over the last few centuries, something that I’d blogged on here previously. It was inspired by Norse Ragnarok, the...
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North Korea: a monarchy, by any other name, …
The Mad Monarchist: Classifying North Korea The Mad Monarchist attempts to argue that North Korea is not really a monarchy, despite its first two leaders ruling for life and being succeeded by their...
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Atheism Plus
A new movement has emerged in atheist activism: Atheism Plus. Its advocates describe themselves as Atheists plus we care about social justice. Atheists plus we support women’s rights. Atheists plus we...
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Isaac Asimov on Science Fiction: the Reaction, not the Action
In “Future? Tense!” in his essay collection From Earth to Heaven (1965), Isaac Asimov wrote about the nature of science fiction. He noted that science-fictioneers are stereotyped either as indulgers in...
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Secularism without Guillotines or Gulags
This is a reference to two big villains of opponents of secularism, the French Revolution with its guillotines and Communism with its gulags. But in recent decades at least, several nations have had a...
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Types of Money
By money I mean a medium of economic exchange, something that can easily be exchanged for most other things. To illustrate, I will imagine that person A has item X and wants item Y, while person B has...
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Some Xian Fundies: No ET’s
David A. Weintraub has written a book, Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal With It?. Google Books gives us some snippets of it, and they include some other fundies’ arguments....
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The Drake Equation Revisited
The Drake Equation is an equation for estimating how many communicative civilizations there are in our Galaxy, by breaking the problem down into more tractable ones. It was proposed by astronomer Frank...
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The Drake Equation: Life
This is about Drake-equation factor fl, the number of Earthlike planets where life emerges, even very simple microbes. The origin of life continues to be an unsolved problem. But research has...
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The Drake Equation: Intelligence
Now to fi, the fraction of planet biotas that intelligent organisms emerge from. On our planet, at least, this emergence has turned out to be a long and complicated and winding path. The Last Common...
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The Drake Equation: Communication
Turning to fc, the fraction of biotas with intelligent species where at least one species becomes capable of interstellar communication. Some such species may be incapable of that, like cetaceans,...
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The Drake Equation: Lifetime
Finally, the lifetime of a communicating civilization: L. Its value is very conjectural, because there are several factors that can limit such a civilization’s lifetime. Wars Diseases Environmental...
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Updates of the Links
Some of the links on the left are to sites that are now dead or redirected. I have updated them in appropriate ways. Updated, because of new homes: The Beacon Library is now at Atheism at Wikia. All of...
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Some Creative Writing
Some time ago, I decided to do some thought experiments about various hypotheses, and I decided that the most convenient way to do that is to compose stories about them. Thus, my adventures into...
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