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

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Looking for 50 good men, atheist activist call out!

Disclaimer: The title of this blog is a parody of "a few good men." It is in no way meant to lessen the effectiveness of female activists.

In the last year I have received hundreds of emails and comments from people asking how they can help. My suggestion was always to use our forums and participate in the projects that you see come up from time to time on our forums. For those who are curious, most issues of importance come up in our alerts section. Here is a feed to our alerts section for your RSS reader

I have a new suggestion for those who want to help, and I've had recent success putting together a crew. Much of the work I do requires having not only knowledge of the issues we are working on but also advanced knowledge of the internet. Before I waste any more of your time, if you don't have at least 5 hours a week to help for a long period of time (like for at least a year) then you don't have the time to make it worth training you. Please don't take offense, I speak from experience, many have tried to keep up with me and they can't. I bust my ass behind closed doors, and feel like I need a total of 75 part time helpers to keep up with my level of activity. I've had past problems with getting helpers on board that took more time to train than the return on the training I received in work. Please keep this in mind, right now. If you aren't dedicated to helping with what may seem like menial tasks on a recurring basis, but are in effect responsible for big growth, please don't waste my time (by doing so, you may actually slow us down).

Because of time that I lost due to "training" people and along with security concerns, it may take a while to build my trust and the trust of our other volunteers. I am looking for dedicated helpers.

The ideal candidate is one who:
- will use skype.
- While not as mandatory as skype, you know how to access our chatroom and have a mic/cam.
- Can work at least 10 hours a week, hopefully more.
- Would be well versed in either video production, graphics editing, audio editing, drupal, and/or html.
- Can work independently
- Has a good idea on how to utilize internet to research issues.
- Writes well
- Dedicated to helping even if tasks seem small. (ie searching google, cutting and pasting info, data entry, etc...)

You need not have all qualities, but hopefully this gives you an idea of what we need. I am willing to work with all of you in a massive private skype area to work on specific projects to enhance our sites, draw in traffic, and work towards the progress we want to see made in the future.

If at any point we are able to develop paid roles for people, we would first pull them from this group of activists who will be putting in their time on a volunteer basis. Volunteers will receive special recognition and gifts when possible.

If you are serious about wanting a change, and you like how the RRS does it, this is your chance to work with me behind the scenes and make yourself feel better about making a big impact.

If you are interested, your first job is to get skype at www.skype.com. Please also feel free to bump this thread with your interest. In fact, if you don't have the time, just bumping this thread alone will be a help. It'll likely take me a year to build this crew, but when I do, it'll be a force to be reckoned with, that is for sure.

For those that have already been helping and don't have skype, please get it. We'll be using it more often to call on people to help, the instant a project comes up.

After you get skype search for "Brian Sapient." Do not call me, no microphone is attached to this computer, I can't answer. If you have never posted on our board and don't have someone we know that can vouch for you, please be prepared to take the slow track, including starting by posting on our message board. Basically we need to be able to be reasonably certain of who you are and your intentions before we ask for too much from you, I hope you understand.

If you even consider helping us in this sort of manner, please accept my thanks already.

Keep in mind that we currently manage multiple sites with the same name and password and hope to be bringing many more on in the future. Because of our support for Margaret Downey, we already have interest from two major atheist groups to merge. We are not opposed to helping to create the largest multi site atheist community in the world. And if we already are the largest multi site atheist community (I think we are), then we're willing to make it larger, and find the money to afford the server. Special thanks to Gizmo for footing the bill and spending tons of hours on our sites in the last few months.

RRS Network Sites
Your username/password will also work at these sites:
- Rational Response Squad
- Margaret Downey
- Atheist Volunteers
- Prayers To Jake
- Free Thinking Teens
- Ask the Atheist
- Mr. GAWN


Coming soon:
RookHawkins.com
BrianSapient.com
TheComptonEffect.com
ProclaimCreations.com

Sites that would come on board if we had the time to help integrate everything properly (requires 5 good coders with time whom can be trusted):
atheistnetwork.com
afterfaith.com
secularstudents.org
marlenewinell.net

Sites that we could probably get, have expressed interest, or would show interest as a result of support for Margaret Downey:

www.atheistalliance.org
www.atheistsunited.org
Many other Atheist Alliance sites may be willing to come on board.

If you found this post long or boring, this volunteer task is likely not for you. This request for help will be posted elsewhere online. If you feel as if it'll make a difference, please feel free to redistribute. If you found this elsewhere and you want me to see your comment, please post it on my blog post version of this.

In Rationality,

Brian Sapient
Rational Response Squad

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Newest addition to the family, RRS Utah!

We have a new chapter as of Saturday, Rational Response Squad Utah is being run by long time supporter *iVY*. So if any readers out there are in that state, be sure to look her up! You can reach her on Myspace HERE! On behalf of the rest of us local affiliates, we welcome you, and I'm sure your chapter will be a great success in the land of the Mormons.

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Second Greatest Toolmaker? A Title Crows Can Crow About

THE cognitive ability to design, make, standardize and use tools is widely thought to be a hallmark of human society, exceeding the capacity even of chimpanzees, mankind's brightest primate relatives. But a biologist who has spent three years studying a breed of crows in South Pacific rain forests reports that the birds actually make tool kits to extract worms and other prey from holes in trees and dead wood.

The toolmaking ability of these crows, he believes, is superior to any observed in other nonhuman species.

All corvids, members of the crow genus, exhibit innate ability to solve many kinds of problems. But according to Gavin R. Hunt, a biologist at Massey University in Palmerston, New Zealand, one species is special: Corvus moneduloides of the New Caledonia island group 900 miles east of Australia.

In a paper published on Jan. 18 in the journal Nature, Mr. Hunt said he had observed that "crow tool manufacture had three features new to tool use in free-living nonhumans, and that only appeared in early human tool-using cultures after the Lower Paleolithic: a high degree of standardization, distinctly discrete tool types with definite imposition of form in tool shaping, and the use of hooks."

Claims by scientists to have detected highly intelligent behavior in animals are often challenged by skeptics, and Mr. Hunt said in an interview that he expected sharp questions from his peers.

In a comment published in the same issue of Nature, Dr. Christophe Boesch, a zoologist at the University of Basel, Switzerland, questioned whether the tools Mr. Hunt observed crows making and using are truly planned or are merely shaped by trial and error for specific tasks. Only if the shape of the tool is preconceived by its makers can the process be considered "by some to be the characteristic of the existence of culture," Dr. Boesch wrote.

But whether crow toolmaking is planned or not, he added, Mr. Hunt's "fascinating paper gives much food for thought and argument," showing at least that "tool use in birds is less stereotyped than previously thought."

A more positive assessment came from Dr. Randall L. Susman, an anatomist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, who has extensively studied the anatomy and behavior of wild chimpanzees and other intelligent primates in the African wilderness.

"I'm not a psychologist," he said, "but if the birds Mr. Hunt has observed are actually shaping implements according to some plan, I'd call their activity cognitive. The only higher primates that make tools conforming to a preset template are human beings." Although chimpanzees use objects they find as tools, if they modify the objects at all, it is not according to any standardized pattern, he said.

During his research from 1992 to 1995 in four mountain rain forests of New Caledonia, Mr. Hunt watched moneduloides crows make and use two distinctly different types of tools, one of them hooked at one end, and the other made from a tapered piece of stiff leaf from the pandanus plant, with a barbed edge on one side.

To make hooked-twig tools, he said, the crows use their wide beaks to carefully pull a twig away from a branch using a "nipping cut" to create a distinct hook at the twig's end -- the end the bird inserts into holes. Holding the twigs with their claws and shaping them with their beaks, the crows remove leaves, carefully shape the hooks and trim off the bark to make their tools smooth.

A second type of tool manufactured by the crows uses pieces cut from the stiff, jagged-edged leaves of pandanus plants. In finished form, these tools resemble locksmiths' picks, tapered to points and with serrated barbs along one edge; Mr. Hunt calls them "stepped-cut tools." To make one, a crow takes successively deeper bites from the section of leaf while it is still attached to the plant, and then bites off the finished implement. When the pointed end is inserted into a hole, the natural barbs along the edge of the leaf point outward so that withdrawing the tool snags and pulls up the prey.

Moneduloides are small crows resembling European jackdaws. They have broad bills with which they grasp their two types of tools in different ways. The hooked twig is held at an angle to the bill and the crow moves its head from side to side to probe a hole. To use a stepped-cut tool, the crow holds it by the broad end with the tip pointing straight ahead. The bird probes holes with it by moving its head back and forth.

Mr. Hunt compared the lengths and number of stepped cuts in tools made by moneduloides crows in three different areas, and found significant differences among them, perhaps suggesting cultural differences among neighboring crow communities analogous to differences among early human societies in the ways they shaped stone spear points.

Moneduloides crows evidently value their tools and try to keep track of them, Mr. Hunt said. When crows change their foraging sites they generally take their tools with them, he said, and when crows eat they generally grasp their tools in their feet. Sometimes crows leave their tools on secure perches while searching distant hunting grounds, returning later to retrieve their hooked twigs or stepped-cut leaves.

One of the few animal users of tools is the woodpecker finch, or Camarhynchus pallidus, one of 14 distinctive species of Darwin finches that evolved in the Galapagos Islands and are named for their discoverer, Charles Darwin. But the woodpecker finch does not make its tools. It plucks needle-like thorns from local plants and without modifying them, it uses the thorns as picks to tease prey out of holes. The brown-headed nuthatch of the Eastern United States uses bits of bark to probe holes for food, Mr. Hunt said.

Crows and sea gulls sometimes open whelks and other shellfish by dropping them from a height on rocks, and sea otters use stones as tools to pound the shells of crabs and other prey held against their chests. But Mr. Hunt and many other scientists regard this as different from making tools.

In the wild, pygmy chimpanzees in East Africa modify stems or twigs to "fish" for termites in holes, Dr. Susman said, and in the Tai Forest of Cote d'Ivoire in West Africa during periods of drought and food shortage, he said, chimpanzees use stones to pound open hard nuts that are not normal components of their diet. But the shaping of stone nutcrackers by continued use appears to be accidental, with no plan in mind for making tools according to a standardized pattern, he said.

Nevertheless, the use of stones for cracking nuts seems to vary with different chimpanzee societies; on one side of the Sassandra River in Cote d'Ivoire, Dr. Susman said, the chimpanzees crack nuts with stones, and on the other side, they do not.

Chimpanzees in the wild modify leaves somewhat haphazardly to use as sponges and as umbrellas. Although this activity does not meet all the criteria for planned tool manufacture, Dr. Susman said, "there no longer seems to be a sharp dividing line between the cognitive behavior of apes and human beings." It may be, he said, that the distinctions between bird and human planned behavior has also been blurred; in any case, "humans are part of the continuum of animal cognition, not separate from it."

If New Caledonian crows intentionally modify their tools to specific shapes before using them, he said, their behavior is "qualitatively different from chimpanzees, and I'd call it cognitive."

Zoologists are revising traditional views of the relative importance of genes and learned behavior in young birds.

Experiments have shown, for example, that birds are born with an innate ability to sing the songs of their species, but that young birds need the examples provided by their elders to master the fine points of avian melody; a laboratory bird raised in isolation from others of its species never becomes expert in the songs of its race.

Mr. Hunt said that he had not noticed any evidence that moneduloides chicks learn the art of toolmaking from more experienced birds, but he was not able to investigate the question.

"One thing this kind of study does," he said, "is to impart a feeling of humility and greater respect for animal cognition."

Read the original story HERE!

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Pluto-bound Spacecraft Sees Changes In Jupiter System

This is a montage of New Horizons images of Jupiter and its volcanic moon Io, taken during the spacecraft's Jupiter flyby in early 2007. The Jupiter image is an infrared color composite taken by the spacecraft's near-infrared imaging spectrometer, the Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) at 1:40 UT on Feb. 28, 2007. The infrared wavelengths used (red: 1.59 µm, green: 1.94 µm, blue: 1.85 µm) highlight variations in the altitude of the Jovian cloud tops, with blue denoting high-altitude clouds and hazes, and red indicating deeper clouds. The prominent bluish-white oval is the Great Red Spot. The observation was made at a solar phase angle of 75 degrees but has been projected onto a crescent to remove distortion caused by Jupiter's rotation during the scan. The Io image, taken at 00:25 UT on March 1st 2007, is an approximately true-color composite taken by the panchromatic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), with color information provided by the 0.5 µm ("blue") and 0.9 µm ("methane") channels of the Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The image shows a major eruption in progress on Io's night side, at the northern volcano Tvashtar. Incandescent lava glows red beneath a 330-kilometer high volcanic plume, whose uppermost portions are illuminated by sunlight. The plume appears blue due to scattering of light by small particles in the plume. (Credit: NASA)

Science Daily — The voyage of NASA’s Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft through the Jupiter system earlier this year provided a bird’s-eye view of a dynamic planet that has changed since the last close-up looks by NASA spacecraft.

From WOTMWatchdog.org: Yes, the RRS vs. WOTM debate on ABC's NightLine is old news. It happened back in May. I remember joining the fray on ABC's message boards, teaming up with another atheist, a perfect stranger, who called himself Former Follier. Ah, the memories. Little did I know that one day, WOTM Watchdog would bring us together once again to battle the juggernaut directly. But now we hear a side of the story that has never been told. Our good friend Brian Sapient of the Rational Response Squad has agreed to share some inside information regarding the lead-up to the debate... And it doesn't reflect well on Mr. Comfort and Mr. Cameron. For those who watched the debate, do you remember the promos? I do. Mr. Comfort and Mr. Cameron stated repeatedly that they would prove the existence of God, "scientifically, absolutely, without mentioning faith or the Bible." In fact, they are directly quoted saying exactly that on the ABC News web page promoting the debate. It's a claim Mr. Comfort makes often. For another example, listen to his "What Hollywood Believes" sermon.