UK bans teaching of creationism as science in schools

The UK is kind of a mess when it comes to church-state separation. Because they don’t have anything like our Establishment Clause to set boundaries on how much the government can be involved with religion, those decisions are essentially political ones. So while the British public is far less overtly religious than people in the US, their government funds religious schools even when they teach in quite a sectarian way. Meanwhile their current prime minister David Cameron and before him the odious and unctuous Tony Blair both make public statements of their religion, with the former saying that England is a Christian country.
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These people were wrong, wrong, wrong

Now that the architects of the Iraq invasion are crawling out of the woodwork trying to justify their actions, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has provided a useful service by compiling a list of some of the most egregious statements made by three of the worst culprits for misleading America back then when they thought that what they had was a glorious little war.
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Yo

I swear that I am falling farther and farther behind in my attempts to understand new tech fads. I already mentioned my mystification with the appeal of Google Glass. But that is nothing compared to what I think about the new Yo app. What does this free app do? If you and your friends download this app onto your iPhones or Android devices, then this app sends the simple message ‘Yo’ to each other. That’s it.
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Science answering the important questions

In addition to studying questions like what causes diseases and what is the origin or life and the universe, science also on occasion investigates important questions like why is it that the cord of your earphones get tangled up if you lay them down for even a second? It is easy to dismiss this as just one’s imagination but physicists find that this is a real effect and that the spontaneous formation of knots has an explanation.
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The ghastly doctrine of original sin

If there is one Christian doctrine that I think is deeply pernicious, it is that of original sin. For those unfamiliar with it, it essentially says that the first sin was committed by Adam and Eve when they disobeyed god and ate fruit from the tree of knowledge. This act resulted in them being banished from the Garden of Eden and became the ultimate cause of all the suffering in the world today. Thanks, Adam and Eve!
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Using caution with preventive treatments

The trouble with research in the medical sciences is that much initial work is based on correlations and it is often hard to pin down definitively the causal relations between them. This can lead to health recommendations that later get nullified or even reversed when some hitherto unsuspected third factor is discovered to play a role in creating the correlation. This problem is especially prevalent when it comes to preventive health treatments designed to head off some future problem, where reversals of recommendations can happen frequently. This can be very disconcerting for health-conscious people who may well feel confused by the conflicting advice.
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The mysterious appeal of Google Glasses

Most people have likely heard of Google Glass, a device that looks like a pair of glasses that apparently enables the wearer to be connected to the internet all the time. It also allows them to record what is going on around them but because the glasses are unobtrusive, the people in their vicinity may not know they are being recorded and this has apparently led to angry confrontations with those who feel their privacy is being invaded.
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Trading places

There has been a lot of angst in the US, generated by those who want to discredit anything that president Obama does, about whether exchanging US serviceman Bowe Bergdahl for five prisoners being held in Guantanamo was a good trade for the US. Cartoonist Ted Rall suggests that we should not ignore the possibility that a similar debate may be going on amongst the people in Afghanistan as to whether they were the ones who got a raw deal.