durbin

durbin's Journal

June 16, 2013

Your weekly science Geek video, thanks to Rachel Maddow's blog.

Your weekly science Geek video, thanks to Rachel Maddow.

Amazing Resonance Experiment!

Rachel's blog describes this experiment as follows:

his amazing video comes from the same guy who brought you the zig zag water video who clearly likes to illustrate the effects of sound with different media. This time around it's sand. Based on work originally done by Robert Hooke and Ernst Chladni in the 17th and 18th centuries, the video demonstrates the modes of vibration in a metal plate atop a tone generator. When the frequency of the tone generator equals a resonant frequency of the metal plate, the sand covering the plate is forced into patterns along the nodal lines (areas of zero vibration) between regions of the plate that are vibrating in opposite directions. At low resonant frequencies, there are only a few areas vibrating like this, but as the frequency increases, smaller and smaller areas on the plate start vibrating opposite to each other, creating more and more complex patterns. There is another version of this video where you can hear the tone actually being generated to make each pattern, but it comes with serious volume warning as the pitch goes high enough to cause hearing damage.

http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2013/06/16/18986378-week-in-geek-resonance-edition?threadId=3747573&commentId=76921177#c76921177

June 14, 2013

Atheism & the Joyful Life -- by Sean Faircloth, Richard Dawkins

This talk was sponsored by the Humanist Society of Western Australia and recorded at the University of Western Australia in Perth on April 2, 2013. Sean Faircloth is author of Attack of the Theocrats: How the Religious Right Harms Us All & What We Can Do About It which offers a specific plan for secular activism. as he does in this talk: http://bit.ly/11iGcX8 Faircloth is Director of Strategy & Policy with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason & Science. Faircloth served ten years in the Maine legislature and was elected Majority Whip by his colleagues in his last term. Faircloth successfully spearheaded over thirty laws.

June 14, 2013

What is prayer?

Is it an overt act, or an act of meditation, or both?

Do people who pray to whatever or under whatever belief system they claim to subscribe-to, do they find benefits from the act?

Can those acts of prayer be objectively measured, or is asking for such a critical scientific analysis of the act of prayer an unfair study?

Are there actual objective studies out there about the benefits of prayer and the people that engage in prayer? (If so, I am ignorant of all of them, so this is not an attempt to disprove or disapprove of prayer, just a simple question from not knowing.)

Is prayer a skill one develops over years? Can children pray? At what age should children be taught to pray? How does one teach a child or an adolescent or an adult to pray?

Are there requisite positions, attitudes, beliefs, or thoughts required for engaging in prayer?

Can one be religious, a member of a religion, and willfully not engage in any prayer? If so, which religions, and how does one abstain when others of the same religion engage in prayer?

Lots of questions, no answers from me. I'm simply curious as to what other people's thoughts are about the common human activity we call prayer and what it means to others, and how it is carried out.

June 13, 2013

More white people died than were born, GOP policies whittling them down

The hits for the GOP keep on coming.
Deaths exceeded births among non-Hispanic white Americans for the first time in at least a century, according to new census data, a benchmark that heralds profound demographic change.
There was still a net increase in non-Hispanic white people because of, ironically, immigration. But by railing against immigrants, Republicans are pissing those white people off too.
These developments were unexpected.

The disparity between deaths and births in the year that ended last July surprised experts. They expected that the aging white population would eventually shrink, as it has done in many European countries, but not for another decade or so.
So we're 10 years ahead of schedule of the extinction of the white race, or the "demographic winter" as the white supremacists see it. Boy will this give them reason to freak out even further! And you want more irony? Demographers speculate that the reason for the accelerated timeline is ... people have no money.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/13/1215957/-More-white-people-died-than-were-born-GOP-policies-whittling-them-down

June 12, 2013

Singer kicked out by parents for being gay wows America’s Got Talent

Singer kicked out by parents for being gay wows America’s Got Talent

Jonathan Allen, 20, has not seen his parents in two years, but it didn't stop him from giving an amazing audition
- See more at:

http://www.gaystarnews.com/article/singer-kicked-out-parents-being-gay-wows-america%E2%80%99s-got-talent120613

Full video there and here on Youtube

June 2, 2013

Atheists You Should Know

Atheists You Should Know

Please don't dismiss this in the first moment, with the slightly off-color humor. They are kind of raucus at moments, but happy to be "together" wherever in the world they are.

An interesting new entry into how some people are spreading the concepts of how people turn to atheism.

This is the first attempt at a Youtube channel showing people describing you they came to atheist thinking.

These folks would probably appreciate your response to this first effort at a dialogue between some folks, united only by the miracle of the internet. Perhaps this internet thing and chats like this are the way of the future for how atheism blossoms.

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Member since: Sun May 26, 2013, 01:43 PM
Number of posts: 73