Easter Atheist Sermon: Til death do us part

Millions of people will be worshipping eternal life today. That’s what Easter is all about. Stripped of all gravitas and ceremony, that’s what this boils down to: we want to live forever, or at the very least much longer. Religion and death walk hand in hand, and will continue to do so until death does them part. We can’t blame death on religion, but sometimes we can blame religion for a death. Here for example is a news report about witches being burned alive in Kenya. Warning: it leads to another link which will scar you. [Read more…]

How do supermassive black-holes grow so super and massive?

At the heart of most galaxies lurks a black super giant, a massive black hole, usually about two percent of the mass of the entire galaxy it rules. These objects seemed to have evolved very early in the cosmos. Some are so energetic they can be seen powering quasars across billions of years of time and space. But scientists only know one way for a black-hole to form, and those objects have only a few solar masses. How do they get to a million or a billion times that? [Read more…]

The crazy drama going on back in the USSR and why we are paying for it

According to Russian media, Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin was hospitalized for exhaustion. At the same time he checked in with a bandaged head, in itself an unusual symptom for over work, Aleksander Paramonov, Deputy Head of Star City was fingered as possibly being involved in incident that led to the hospital visit. No one’s talking on the record, but word is Popovkin got smacked in the head by a bottle during a drunken brawl over his choice for Roscosmos spokesperson, the nubile 27 year-old former model, uh-huh, shown next to him above. [Read more…]

Are the Koch Brothers the real anti-Christ?

Obama should stay out of the free market and focus instead on controlling the free market! If that header makes no sense, welcome to the wonderful wacky world of religio-conservative politics. Where consistency and logic take a back-seat to anything that might benefit poor downtrodden zillionaires and multinational corporations, err, I mean multinational people, you know, the non-alive kind of “people” that happened to be publicly owned by shareholders … [Read more…]

And I thought I had it bad: The lure of virtual currency

Chinese prisoners were forced into 'gold farming' – building up credits on online games such as World of Warcraft.

I’ve been bummed that I have to work with a painful autoimmune-vision condition, one that would resolve much faster if I didn’t have to stare at teeny-tiny text in fine detail all day. Woe is me! Then I see this piece below, which helps put things in perspective:  [Read more…]

They don’t call it “eye” ritis for nothing

Actually the medical term is Iritis, as in inflammation of the iris, and mine’s caused by an autoimmune disorder called Anklyosing spondylitis. It’s like a super arthritis which attacks soft tissue on top of the usual aches and pains in the joints. AS is genetic, there is one main marker (HLA-B24) and one or two others have been found in the last few years. Some researchers think the genes for autoimmune disorders like AS may have been greatly favored at various points in human history, when any resistance to epidemic disease gave an individual a leg up. If not for modern medicine, my case would have at least blinded me by now and have me halfway to crippled. But from an evolutionary viewpoint, it’s better to survive long enough to sire offspring and go blind in your 30s, than to die as a child from TB or the Black Death. [Read more…]

Spring heat wave settles in on US and Canada

A huge, lingering ridge of high pressure over the eastern half of the United States brought summer-like temperatures to North America in March 2012. Image courtesy NASA/EO.

A spring heat wave shattered records across the US and Canada this month and some researchers worry it could be a symptom of sizzling summers and active hurricane seasons for the next few years. And that could be just the tip of the vanishing iceberg: [Read more…]

Nomad planets could be traveling at near warp speeds

Artist's conception of a Jupiter-size rogue planet with the edge on disk of a spiral galaxy in the background. Image via the Wiki

Call it planet Crank. A study slated to be published in the Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society finds that not only are nomad planets possible, under ideal conditions some of them could be ejected from the heart of large galaxies at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light: [Read more…]