My own view on religion is that of Lucretius. I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race. I cannot, however, deny that it has made some contributions to civilization. It helped in early days to fix the calendar, and it caused Egyptian priests to chronicle eclipses with such care that in time they became able to predict them. These two services I am prepared to acknowledge, but I do not know of any others. — Bertrand Russell, “Has Religion Made Useful Contributions to Civilization?” Read more →
EppsNet Archive: Astronomy
They Submitted Fake Papers to Peer-Reviewed Journals — Here’s What Happened Next
Three writers produced 20 intentionally outlandish academic papers and submitted them to the best peer-reviewed journals associated with fields of scholarship loosely known as “cultural studies” or “identity studies” (for example, gender studies) or “critical theory.” Seven of the papers were accepted for publication and seven more were still under review when the authors elected to end the experiment. Their point would seem to be that scholarship in these fields is based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances. Just about anything can be published, so long as it falls within the moral orthodoxy and demonstrates an understanding of the existing literature. The authors summarize their methodology as follows. (I’ve inserted the material in brackets from elsewhere in the article, which you should look at in its entirety because there’s too much good stuff to summarize.) What if we write a paper saying we should train… Read more →
Galactic Meetup Scheduled
Our nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy, is speeding toward the Milky Way at 250,000 miles per hour and will crash into us in 3.75 billion years. The good news is that because of the vast distances between stars, it’s unlikely that any stars will actually collide. Before you mark this event on your calendar, however, remember that our sun is continually growing. About 3 billion years from now, the sun will be 40 percent larger than its current state and all life on Earth will probably cease to exist. Read more →
Income Inequality Explained
Via NPR: Read more →
See You in Hell, Game of Thrones Fans
[See You in Hell is a feature by our guest blogger, Satan — PE] The Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles had a telescope pointed at Saturn this week. Anyone who wanted to could stop by and have a look. “It looks like I thought it would look,” one observer remarked. HA! He wasn’t impressed AT ALL by the fact that better men than himself built a device that lets him see things a BILLION miles away. This same idiot later pronounced himself “blown away” by the deaths of several make-believe characters on a TV show called Game of Thrones. If your Facebook and Twitter feeds look anything like mine this morning, you know that unfortunately this is just one idiot out of many. One of the reasons America is circling the drain is people’s inability to distinguish fantasy from reality until reality hits them like a pitchfork in the guts.… Read more →