#0043 RRS Newsletter for August 13, 2007
Good day to you all! I have decided to introduce yet another new feature, in the Community section I will be posting a new "Victim of Religion" story in each new edition highlighting a different case of the atrocities that religious fervor can bring about. These will be stories about individuals, people who may not get much press otherwise.
I would also like to plug a new site that was brought to my attention recently by one of the regulars in the stickam chat room, Atheist Rescources is an awesome site!
I would also like to remind you all about the Content Submission contest being held here on the RRS site. You could win some great prizes for your essays, articles, or other atheist inspired writings. I am also still looking for your de-conversion stories to post in this newsletter, if you wish to share it.
Thanks for reading, if you have any comments or suggestions you can reach me directly HERE. Or on Myspace HERE.
Stay rational,
Jack
and the RRS MI team
Table of Contents
Click HERE to find your local affiliate!
Rational Response Squad News
Rooks Intro to History class, Powerpoint presentations now available!
Essay contest! Win Prizes!
Science News
Early Modern Human Skull Includes Surprising Neanderthal Feature
Coelacanth Fossil Sheds Light On Fin-to-limb Evolution
Perseid Meteor Shower to Peak This Weekend
New, "Luminous" Galaxies Are a Wild Bunch
Religion
What the World Thinks of God Part 1-9
Pastor's prostitute takes on new role
At least three killed in church shooting
Pastor charged with assault at boot camp
The Origins of Christmas (video)
Government
The Army Knew Iraq … About 60 Years Ago
Iraq's Arms Bazaar
Cohen joins House impeachment process
50 arrested at Washington sit-in
Community
Atheist Blood Drive
Atheists for Autism Research Charity!
Religious Victim of the day
Unreasonably superstitious
Entertainment
Maher on American pride
Bullshit episode on Icons
Christopher Hitchens on the Daily Show
"Passive" by: a perfect circle
Rooks Intro to History class, Powerpoint presentations now available!
The Powerpoint Presentations for the RRS Academy Intro to Classical and Modern History, presented by Rook, are now available for download for anyone who wishes to do so. Special thanks go to Jason Hoblin on this.
Essay contest
****UPDATE 7-22-07 CONTEST EXTENDED. GREYDON SQUARE CATEGORY ADDED. OTHER CHANGES AND PRIZES AWARDED. PLEASE REVIEW AGAIN AND SUBMIT SOMETHING!!!****
NOTE: DUE TO ERROR IN LINKS AND LOW SUBMISSIONS, THIS CONTEST HAS BEEN EXTENDED TO MARCH 15TH, 2008.
IF YOU HAVE A QUESTION READ EVERYTHING FIRST, CLICK LINKS! COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS SHOULD BE POSTED PUBLICLY IN THIS THREAD FOR THE BENEFIT OF ALL PARTICIPANTS! PLEASE DISTRIBUTE THE INFORMATION OF THIS SUBMISSION DRIVE FREELY.
The Rational Response Squad is proud to announce a call to action for content submissisions. We have been blown away by the positive feedback we've received from the freethinking community. Thanks to everyone who has placed a banner, or our player on your website and helped spread the word in some manner. We've received many great written submissions of thoughts and views, but had no place to put them, so we've created a guideline to help you, help us. The categories in which we need submissions are listed below, send us your best material. Your writings will be added to our library of articles, essays, and debunkings. We're hoping to build one of the largest and diverse free libraries of rational thoughts on the internet. Please post everything publicly on our forum so it's there for all RRS members to access who are working on this project. In addition to hosting everything in a free web archive, we may also compile views into a free e-book or a book for sale to generate money for activist projects. Not that you need a reward to share your views with others, but as a thank you we'll be awarding prizes to as many of the top participants as we can. Prizes will be awarded based on effort put in and quality of writing.
We've put the categories in order of need and may alter the order later as submissions come in.
Prizes will be awarded MARCH 15TH, 2008, but you can continue to submit content well after MARCH 15TH, 2008.
Read the whole list of rules, prizes and submission categories HERE!
A reminder
The next RRS MI meeting will be held on Thursday, August 30th, topic still to be determined. I would like to get some people together for an outing to the Detroit Science Center for the "Universe Within" exhibit as well. It will be on a Friday, just not sure when yet. Admission is $20. I will keep you posted.
Early Modern Human Skull Includes Surprising Neanderthal Feature
Science Daily — In 1942, a human braincase was found in Romania during phosphate mining. The skull’s geological age has remained uncertain. Now, new radiocarbon analysis appearing in the August issue of Current Anthropology directly dates the skull to approximately 33,000 years ago, placing it in the Upper Paleolithic.
Though this braincase is in many ways similar to other known specimens from the period, the fossil also presents a distinctly Neanderthal feature, ubiquitous among Neanderthals, extremely rare among archaic humans, and unknown among prior modern humans.
“The mosaic is most parsimoniously explained as the result of a modest level of admixture with [Neanderthals] as modern humans dispersed across Europe,” write Andrei Soficaru (Institutul de Anthropologie, Romania), Catalin Petrea (Institutul de Speologie, Romania), Adiran Dobos (Institutl de Arheologie, Romania), and Erik Trinkaus (Washington University, St. Louis). “Given the reproductive compatibility of many closely related species and the culturally mediated nature of mate choice in humans, such admixture should neither be rare nor unexpected.”
Known as the Cioclovina 1 neurocranium, the skull is one of a very small number of European early modern humans securely dated prior to ca. 28,000 before present. It is unusual in its preservation, showing little signs of external abrasion and no carnivore damage to the bone. The person’s age-at-death was probably somewhere in the 40’s, “best considered mature, but not geriatric,” the authors write.
The skull has been described from the outset as that of an early modern human, due to ear anatomy, details of the neck muscle attachments, and the presence of a high, rounded braincase. The lateral bones resemble those of recent human males. However, the area above the neck muscles contains a distinctly Neanderthal feature, a suprainiac fossa – a groove above the inion, or, the place on the bone at the lower back of a human skull that juts out the farthest.
“This feature implies some level of Neanderthal ancestry in this otherwise modern human fossil,” the authors explain. “It joins other early modern European fossils, from the sites of Oase and Muierii in Romania, Mlasdec in the Czech Republic, and Les Rois in France in indicating some degree of Neanderthal admixture occurred when modern humans spread across Europe starting around 40,000 years ago.”
Reference: Andrei Soficaru, Catalin Petrea, Adiran Dobos, and Erik Trinkaus. “The Human Cranium from the Pestera Cioclovina Uscata, Romania.” Current Anthropology 48:4.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Chicago Press Journals.
Coelacanth Fossil Sheds Light On Fin-to-limb Evolution
Science Daily — A 400 million-year-old fossil of a coelacanth fin, the first finding of its kind, fills a shrinking evolutionary gap between fins and limbs. University of Chicago scientists describe the finding in the July/August 2007 issue of Evolution & Development.
The fossil shows that the ancestral pattern of lobed fins closely resembles the pattern in the fins of primitive living ray-finned fishes, according to the scientists.
“This ends intense debate about the primitive pattern for lobed fins, which involves the ancestry of all limbs, including our own,” said author Michael Coates, Ph.D., associate professor of organismal biology and anatomy at Chicago.
According to the researchers, the fossil’s pattern is similar to the branching arrangement still embedded in the fins of paddlefishes, sturgeons and sharks.“To understand the developmental evolution of the limbs of tetrapods [four-limbed vertebrates], we shouldn’t be looking at the fins of our nearest living fish relatives—lungfishes and coelacanths—because they’re far too specialized,” Coates said.
“Part of the reason why this is an interesting discovery is that people think of coelacanths animals as archetypal living fossils,” said Matt Friedman, evolutionary biology graduate student at Chicago and lead author of the paper. “But it’s a common misconception. If you look deep in the fossil record to the first members of that group, they are really different and very diverse.”
Until now, many biologists have looked at lungfish as a primitive model of the evolution of tetrapods. “Our fossil shows that what we’ve been using to define a primitive state is actually very specialized,” Friedman said, “which means it might give a deceptive view of what evolution was like for these fins skeletons.”
“If you’re going to figure out how limbs evolved, you need to have a good idea about pre-conditions,” Friedman said. “You need to know what the ancestral morphology was. With things like this [fossil], we’re beginning to hone in on the primitive conditions of fins that gave rise to limbs later on."
Named Shoshonia arctopteryx after the Shoshoni people and the Shoshone National Forest, the fossil was excavated from Paleozoic sediments at Beartooth Butte in northern Wyoming.
Even though they both have been called living fossils, the discovery suggests that the two living groups of close fish relatives of tetrapods (lungfish and coelacanth) are both highly specialized, according to Friedman. Both groups acquired many of the same specializations, but independently of one another.
“They give this perception that maybe those are general characters, but we can show with fossils like this one that they’ve actually developed specializations in tandem,” Friedman said.
Shoshonia also supports recent work by the University of Chicago’s Neil Shubin, Marcus Davis and Randall Dahn that showed genetic expression of developmental patterns in fish fins and tetrapod limbs are conserved (Nature, May 24, 2007). “With this fossil, we have a conservative pattern in a close relative of tetrapods that is actually conserved in other fish groups outside of this immediate group,” Friedman said.
Not only does this fossil bridge the gap between primitive ray-finned fish and limbed animals like Tiktaalik roseae, the new data forces scientists to reassess the characteristics of the coelacanths, Friedman said.“
‘Living fossils’ are a problematic concept,” he said. “Often times the fossils look like living animals because the fossils are so poorly studied. Once you start to go in depth with the fossils, you start highlighting differences.”
Coelacanths were dubbed “Old Fourlegs,” because of their husky, limb-like fins. “When they first discovered them in the 1930s, people made all sorts of inferences about them,” Friedman said. “They assumed that it would use its fins to walk around on the bottom of the sea floor.
”Rather, these distinctive blue fish swim with their heads down, hovering just above the sea floor using an organ in their nose to detect living things in the mud.
“It was astonishing luck that we found it,” Friedman said, adding that the fossil had fallen off a cliff a couple of hundred feet high and landed in a different set of rocks. The four-inch long specimen details the fin of the animal, which the scientists approximate would have been about 18” to 24” long.
The scientists will return to the Wyoming site next summer to collect more samples.Postdoctoral researcher Philip Anderson also contributed to the paper. The dig was funded by a faculty research grant from the University of Chicago, and by the National Science Foundation and Environmental Protection Agency.
Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Chicago.
Perseid Meteor Shower to Peak This Weekend
Victoria Jaggard
National Geographic News
August 10, 2007
This year's Perseid meteor shower—which got underway this week—will light up the night for about two weeks, with the event's peak happening late on Sunday, astronomers announced.
"It's going to be a great show," Bill Cooke, of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, said in a news release.
"The moon is new on August 12—which means no moonlight, dark skies, and plenty of meteors." But even with the lack of moonlight, experts recommend getting out of light-filled cities for the best view.
Skywatchers should already be able to see dozens of "shooting stars" an hour, with as many as one or two a minute during the shower's peak on Sunday.
As an added bonus, this year's moonless sky will offer a clear view of Mars just below the constellation Perseus, and several meteors will likely flit past the shining red "star" on August 12 and 13.
(Related: See red planet images from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor.)
Each meteor is actually a pebble-size particle left behind in the wake of the large comet Swift-Tuttle, which orbits the sun about every 130 years.
Although the comet last passed by Earth in 1992, our planet sweeps through the orbiter's trail of debris every August.
(Related: "Comet Wiped Out Early North American Culture, Animals, Study Says" [May 23, 2007].)
The tiny pieces of debris hit Earth's atmosphere at a blinding 132,000 miles (212,000 kilometers) an hour, burning up and creating bright white streaks that are visible with the naked eye.
Named because they appear to originate from Perseus, the Perseid shower is mostly visible from the Northern Hemisphere.
Southern countries such as Australia rarely see any Perseid meteors.
New, "Luminous" Galaxies Are a Wild Bunch
Anne Minard
for National Geographic News
August 10, 2007
Astronomers just got new glasses—and they're helping reveal the universe at its wildest.
A new study has found unusually large, prolific galaxies dating back to just two billion years after the universe formed around 13.7 billion years ago.(Explore a virtual solar system.)
Using new telescope technologies, a global team of 25 researchers are chronicling the galaxies' early lives, when they churned out stars a thousand times faster than the Milky Way, astronomers say.
"It's a real surprise to find galaxies that massive and luminous existing so early in the universe," said astronomer and lead study author Giovanni Fazio of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Astronomers had believed smaller, dimmer galaxies were much more common in the early universe, because it takes time for galaxies to form and grow. (Related: "Eight New Neighboring Galaxies Found, Scientists Announce" [January 10, 2007].)
The findings were published this week in the Astrophysical Journal.
Sharper Focus
Astronomers believe the galaxies are so violent, with new stars constantly colliding and merging, that they also churn out massive amounts of dust. (Related: "Colossal Four-Galaxy Collision Discovered" [August 7, 2007].)
Grant Wilson, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Massachusetts and a co-author on the new paper, said astronomers once underestimated the rate of early star formation in bright, active galaxies because their dust hid the starlight.
But because the new galaxies are so massive and hot, their stars heat the surrounding dust to about -387 degrees Fahrenheit (-233 degrees Celsius)—about twice as warm as dust in the Milky Way.
Those are perfect conditions for astronomy's newest tools—telescopes that are built to capture nonvisible light—to detect the galaxies, experts say.
Old News?
Not all astronomers agree the results are such a surprise.
The new paper is one of several in the past two years that have "discovered" the wild galaxies.
Scott Chapman at the University of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy in the United Kingdom published his own sightings of such galaxies in 2005.
He said the current paper "really does not offer anything new to the speculation."
George Rieke, at the University of Arizona in Tucson, led NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope team for 15 years. He declined to comment on the paper.
"I think praising the new work would get me in trouble with those who did the older effort," he said.
Nevertheless, the new galaxies further open a stunning new window into the skies, many experts agree. (Learn about galaxy hunters.)
You Can't Believe Your Eyes
Wilson said it took so long to see these galaxies partly because of human bias.
"Our eyes are adapted to optical light and that's how we built our telescopes," he said.
But dust hides most of the starlight in the bright galaxies, and optical telescopes aimed straight toward them—even the Hubble Space Telescope—see only darkness.
The Spitzer Space Telescope can see the galaxies because it uses infrared wavelengths, though it gets interference from other galaxies.
A newer breed of telescope, called submillimeter telescopes, uses wavelengths between the infrared and radio wavelengths.
The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii, which originally spotted the new galaxies, will soon be fitted with a new submillimeter camera.
The device will allow it to detect hundreds to thousands of hot, distant galaxies every year.
And the Large Millimeter Telescope, under construction now in Mexico, will open the door to discovering hundreds of such galaxies per hour, rather than hundreds per decade, Wilson of the University of Massachusetts said.
The galaxies provide countless opportunities to study new stars.
Scientists still don't really know how stars form or how starbursts happen, Wilson said, but now all those processes may come into focus.
What the World Thinks of God Part 1-9
What the World Thinks of God 1
What the World Thinks of God 2
What the World Thinks of God 3
What the World Thinks of God 4
What the World Thinks of God 5
What the World Thinks of God 6
What the World Thinks of God 7
What the World Thinks of God 8
What the World Thinks of God 9
Pastor's prostitute takes on new role
BOULDER, Colo., Aug. 12 (UPI) -- The male prostitute who exposed a sex and drug scandal involving Colorado preacher Ted Haggard is set to make his stage debut in Boulder.Mike Jones, 50, revealed last October that he had used methamphetamine and conducted had a sexual relationship with Haggard, who at the time was pastor of the New Life megachurch in Colorado Springs, Colo.
Jones is set to debut Thursday at the Boulder International Fringe Festival in "Porridge," a play about three Gulf War Marines who "go AWOL after being exposed to friendly-fire nerve gas in an all-base orgy," playwright Brian Bauman told The Denver Post.
Bauman said he was moved to add Jones' role -- Private Ed -- to the play after reading his book "I Had to Say Something: The Art of Ted Haggard's Fall," in which Jones describes encounters with military men who felt they had to hide their homosexuality.
The playwright said he felt sorry for the way Jones was treated by many members of Colorado's gay community -- who blame him for the defeat of a ballot measure allowing basic rights for same-sex couples.
Jones went public about his relationship with Haggard just six days before the election.
He is not sure what his next undertaking will be, he said.
Copyright 2007 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
At least three killed in church shootingNEOSHO, Mo., Aug. 12 (UPI) -- At least three people were killed and several others were wounded Sunday when a gunman opened fire inside a church in Neosho, Mo.Desiree Bridges, a spokeswoman for the city, told the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader the gunman held about 25 to 50 people hostage briefly following the shooting in the sanctuary at the First Congregational Church. Authorities said they received a call about the shooting at 1:54 p.m. local time. Police said they secured the scene and began negotiations with a suspect. The gunman surrendered and was being held at the Newton County Jail. His identity was not disclosed, but Bridges said he was related to someone in the church Police said they recovered three guns from the suspect. As many as six people were reported wounded in the shooting. The shooting occurred during a service for a group of people from the Marshall Islands who use the church, the News-Leader said. Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt offered condolences to the victims' relatives and the Neosho community. He ordered state officials to assist local law enforcement in investigating the shooting, the newspaper said. Copyright 2007 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved. Pastor charged with assault at boot campSAN ANTONIO, Aug. 11 (UPI) -- A retired Air Force instructor has been charged with assaulting a girl at a Christian boot camp he runs in Texas by tying her and dragging her behind a van.The girl said Charles Flowers dragged behind a van when she failed at a running exercise. Nueces County Sheriff's Department deputies arrested Flowers Friday at the Faith Outreach Center in San Antonio, The San Antonio Express-News reported. A trainer at the camp, Stephanie Bassitt, was arrested at her home. Flowers, who is also a Christian pastor, is the commandant of the Love Demonstrated Ministries boot camp in Banquete, outside Corpus Christi. The 15-year-old girl's mother became concerned after the girl was taken to a hospital for treatment of abrasions on her limbs and abdomen. The girl said she was tied to the van and then dragged on her stomach. Copyright 2007 by United Press International. All Rights Reserved.
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