These before-and-after satellite photographs show the massive devastation wreaked by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

The new atheists are considered ‘bad’ atheists because of their clearly stated belief that all beliefs about god are without any foundation. They have been criticized by ‘good’ atheists (i.e., atheist accommodationists) for being too extreme.

I have said before that the accommodationists should actually thank the new atheists because few people like to be on the extremes of a public debate and the new atheists have greatly broadened the range of the views and made accommodationism part of the center and thus acceptable the religious community. In fact, religious moderates seem to just love accommodationists.

Randy Pelton, president of the Northeast Ohio Center for Inquiry, tells me that this phenomenon of the range of acceptable views being limited and the ways to expand it actually has been studied by the political science community and has the name of the Overton window. The Wikipedia article gives a passage from Anthony Trollope’s novel Phineas Finn which captures the idea:

“Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable;–and so at last it will be ranged in the list of those few measures which the country requires as being absolutely needed. That is the way in which public opinion is made.”

“It is no loss of time,” said Phineas, “to have taken the first great step in making it.”

“The first great step was taken long ago,” said Mr. Monk,–”taken by men who were looked upon as revolutionary demagogues, almost as traitors, because they took it. But it is a great thing to take any step that leads us onwards.”

Oddly enough, it appears that Glenn Beck has written a novel with that title. I have no idea what it is about.

The BBC plays video of the awesome power of the tsunami that hit Japan today, inflicting heavy casualties.

I will be talking to this group on Why atheism is winning (followed by a Q&A) on Saturday, March 5th at 7:30 pm.

More details can be found here.

The website Antiwar.com is holding its quarterly fund drive. This is an invaluable site for world news so if you can, please donate something.

Chaser is a border collie that not only can identify over a thousand objects by name, she even knows basic grammar and the three verbs paw, nose, and fetch, thus being able to distinguish what she was expected to do with each object. That is not all. She could also recognize categories, in other words common nouns. “She correctly follows the command “Fetch a Frisbee” or “Fetch a ball.” She can also learn by exclusion, as children do. If she is asked to fetch a new toy with a word she does not know, she will pick it out from ones that are familiar.”

Chaser will appear in the PBS show Nova on February 9.

Chaser learned one or two new words each day, requiring four or five hours of daily practice. That is some dedication. My own dog Baxter, while an eager learner, tends to call it a day after about fifteen minutes and go off and take a nap. “Everything in moderation” seems to be his motto.

I was intrigued to read that in order for her trainer to remember what he had called the thousand objects, he wrote the name of each on the object with indelible ink. It is, of course, possible that Chaser is so smart that she had learned to read, thus saving herself the trouble of learning the names of all the objects.

Let 2011 be the year in which justice and law begin to replace oligarchic rule.

(via Machine Like Us.)

As someone who grew up with English English and then came to the US, I have got used to the different spellings, especially the missing u in words like color and favor and honor. In general, American spellings make more sense, so switching to it was easy.

When it comes to the letter i, Americans also sometimes drop it, to say (for example) ‘aluminum’ instead of the English ‘aluminium’. But recently I have heard people drop the i in the word ‘verbiage’ to coin a new word ‘verbage’ which does not currently exist even in America, at least according to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary.

Also, unlike the u, which seems to be always dropped, the policy on i is not so consistent. I have heard people add i to the word mischievous to say ‘mischievious’, a word which also does not currently exist.

I am not one of those people who think that language should be unchanging. English is a rich language precisely because it grows by adding new words. But these are not new words but spelling variations on old ones and I was curious as to whether what I have heard is merely a regional idiosyncrasy or whether others have heard similar usages.