The tricky business of riding a bike

Anyone who has learned to ride a bicycle has experienced the feeling that one will never master it until suddenly, you get the hang of it and feel that sense of exhilaration as for the first time you cruise along without fear of falling. The bike now seems so stable that you cannot imagine why it took you so long to learn. But why it is so stable is not easy to understand. I have written before about how the stability of the humble bicycle is actually quite mysterious from a physics point of view.
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Sharp rise in religiously unaffiliated in the US

The Pew Research Center’s forum on Religion and Life today released its latest survey on the religious landscape in the US and they find that there are currently about 56 million religiously unaffiliated people in the US and they are the most rapidly growing group, jumping from 16.1% in 2007 to 22.8% in 2014. That is a huge increase. Non-Christian faiths showed a smaller increase over that same time period, from 4.7% to 5.9%. The big losers were Catholics (23.9% to 20.8%) and mainline Protestants (18.1% to 14.7%). Evangelicals have also dropped by about one percent.
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Why movements should not have spokespersons

Being an atheist does not carry with it any special wisdom. Just because one has seen clearly on one particular issue does not mean that one sees clearly on every issue. This is why it is never desirable for fledgling movements to be too closely identified with one or a small set of individuals because those people might say things on other issues that are unwelcome and yet all members of the movement get perceived as having the same views.
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The Mother’s Day charade

In another excellent piece on Last Week Tonight, John Oliver makes the point that the public veneration of motherhood in the US is really a sham because we and Papua New Guinea are the only countries that do not offer paid time off for having a child, and he describes the kinds of extraordinary measures that women have to do to cobble together the necessary time off after giving birth. The email that Tesla founder Elon Musk sent to an employee who merely missed one event in order to witness the birth of his child shows how little we actually value parenting.
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How the same-sex marriage verdict might turn out

Next month will bring the verdict by the US Supreme Court on the same-sex marriage case. Here is my entirely speculative narrative of what I think will happen, based on the hearings and my perceptions of the justices’ views. The fact that the US Supreme Court did not take up any of the challenges to same-sex marriage cases as long as US Appeals Courts across the country upheld them suggests to me that the Supreme Court was deeply split on what to do about this issue.
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Liberal Zionists on the gloomy future for Israel

These have not been easy times for the group known as liberal Zionists, those who support a two-state solution and envisaged an Israel that upheld democratic values and human rights and co-existed peacefully with a Palestinian state and its Arab neighbors. There was always a latent contradiction in the fact that any state that has an official religion and makes laws accommodating it necessarily undermines democracy but liberal Zionists felt that the influence of religion could be minimized and Israel could be Jewish state the same way that England has an official chirch.
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Conservative America’s new favorite mother

Today is Mother’s Day that, along with Father’s Day and Valentine’s Day and Sweetest Day and Secretary’s Day and who knows what else, are heavily promoted by businesses in order to get people to buy stuff out of guilt that if they don’t spend heavily on their mothers, that means they are not dutiful and caring children. It also enables some people to think that remembering their mothers on this day and sending her a gift or a card means that they can pretty much ignore her the rest of the year.
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