Kenya is going through the most open, democratic election season in its history, but the NY Times has a story on how issues that were once tribal are becoming not just nationalized, but internationalized, as a Harvard-educated Christian candidate is being challenged by an Islamist in a local constitutency.
Update: Actually, now that the votes are in, and the election perhaps rigged, tribal-based rioting is the story in Kenya.
The majority of executions in the last year have taken place in one state
The rate at which Texas sentences people to death is not especially high given its murder rate. But once a death sentence is imposed there, said Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, prosecutors, state and federal courts, the pardon board and the governor are united in moving the process along. “There’s almost an aggressiveness about carrying out executions,†said Mr. Dieter, whose organization opposes capital punishment.
It seems like the political culture of Texas, not its juries, is what is determining the execution rate.
There seems to be a cowboy callousness in Texan culture. I’d like it to be some time before we have another president from that state.
US issues new warning on misuse of J&J pain patch | Reuters
Despite a July 2005 warning, the Food and Drug Administration “has continued to receive reports of deaths and life-threatening side effects after doctors have inappropriately prescribed the patch or patients have incorrectly used it,” the agency said.
The patch delivers a potent narcotic called fentanyl through the skin. The product was approved in 1990 for patients with persistent, moderate-to-severe pain and whose bodies are used to opioids. That means they have used another strong opioid pain medicine around the clock for a week or longer.
I don’t have kids, but if I did, I doubt I would have all the tools alone to instill them with moral values, and even if I did, they’d probably benefit from exposure to other perspectives. Sho here is humanist Sunday school.
Atheist parents appreciate this nurturing environment. That’s why Kitty, a nonbeliever who didn’t want her last name used to protect her kids’ privacy, brings them to Bishop’s class each week. After Jonathan, 13, and Hana, 11, were born, Kitty says she felt socially isolated and even tried taking them to church. But they’re all much more comfortable having rational discussions at the Humanist center. “I’m a person that doesn’t believe in myths,” Hana says. “I’d rather stick to the evidence.”
It aims to get at people’s unconscious views
EmSense was founded in California in 2004 by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop videogame controllers that could be operated by brain activity. It has since moved into market research, testing people’s subconscious reactions to video games and TV commercials. Earlier this year the company began running studies on presidential debates and presidential campaign ads in a bid to expand into politics.
Last Sunday at a San Francisco hotel ballroom, EmSense researchers fitted five volunteers, all undecided Republicans, with battery-powered headsets made of elastic and lined with bits of copper. As they watched the debate on a big screen, the wireless units, which the company calls “EmGear,” collected data on their skin temperature, heart rate, eye-blinking and brain activity and beamed them to a bank of computers. The data were run through a formula created by EmSense to identify whether a response was positive or negative.
I don’t know how this fits in with Turkey’s tradition of secularism. It’s reported that in Turkey Erol Karaaslan, the translator and publisher of Richard Dawkins’ atheist treatise The God Delusion may be charged with inciting religious hatred
Ali Eteraz has a thoughtful piece in the Guardian about the difficultly some Muslims have in facing up to problems in their religion.
Secular humanists have a problem with the Muslim response. They find it evasive. They wonder: why don’t Muslims just come out and admit that their book promotes misogyny, or their prophet was violent, or that their history has been marred by instances of violence? Secular humanists consider such acknowledgments the mark of true honesty. Everything else is just platitudes.
Yet, what is honesty to a secular humanist is psychological devastation to a believer. If a woman-respecting, non-violent, cool-headed Muslim says that he is a good person despite Islam, he would essentially be saying that Islam is irrelevant to his existence. A believer would never say that. He will chalk up his successes to his faith. He will insist that his faith galvanised every good thing in his life. If and when members of his faith engage in something detestable, he will say that “those extremists” got the faith wrong. This is why average Muslims insist that “Islam means peace” even though these days Islam has been linked to some pretty major instances of violence.
The Roman Catholic church took a great step forward when it came clean about some of the suffering it has caused (e.g. anti-Semitism. It hasn’t come clean across the board).
There is a brittleness to religion. It is difficult for traditionally religious people to admit their religion is imperfect, because it undermines the whole supposed truth which comes direct from God. If religion is wrong about one thing, it may be wrong about everything, and pretty soon, you may turn into a secular humanist!
Congratulations to Sam Harris on what may be his first professional publication as a neuroscientist, Functional neuroimaging of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty, in Annals of Neurology. The link requires authenticate, and may only work if you access it from, say, inside a university library.
(UPDATE: A reader has provided a link to a page on Sam Harris’ Web site where you can click on the pdf link, and it does not require authentication.)
Here are the results of Harris, the first author, and his co-authors, which touch on the part of the brain I’m most interested in, the anterior cingulate cortex, which is responsible for error detection and the unpleasantness of pain.
The states of belief, disbelief, and uncertainty differentially activated distinct regions of the prefrontal and parietal cortices, as well as the basal ganglia.
Belief and disbelief differ from uncertainty in that both provide information that can subsequently inform behavior and emotion. The mechanism underlying this difference appears to involve the anterior cingulate cortex and the caudate. Although many areas of higher cognition are likely involved in assessing the truth-value of linguistic propositions, the final acceptance of a statement as true or its rejection as false appears to rely on more primitive, hedonic processing in the medial prefrontal cortex and the anterior insula. Truth may be beauty, and beauty truth, in more than a metaphorical sense, and false propositions may actually disgust us.
These results seem consistent, and no doubt extend, the findings of Antonio Damasio on how emotions constrain decision-making.
Update: Time Magazine has a good take of Harris’ results.
A piece in the Jerusalem Post debunks the so-called miracle of Hanukkah, and adds interesting facts about the friction between Greeks and Jews at that time.
Harvard’s Sackler Museum has some astonishing reproductions of classical statues in color, as they were originally decorated. Check out the pdf
Our conception of the classic statues as being white marble evidently goes back to the Renaissance, when lost statues were recovered, with few traces of pain, and to Michelangelo. There are enough traces of color, however, for modern scientific mechanisms to identify hues and patterns–even a Trojan Paris in a harequin outfit.
Most people, including me, find the color a difficult adjustment. In some cases, the outcome seems cartoonish. However, particularly in cases of friezes seen at a distance, the color does bring out the shapes, and makes the scenes easier to comprehend.
It strikes me that, colored, the statues look more like Roman Catholic statuary. This suggests a continuity between ancient and medieval art.
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