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Saturday, December 24, 2011
A Christian on Hitchens' Atheism and Lowe's Muslim Problem (Time.com)
David Caton owes me one. I interviewed the head of the Florida Family Association last week during his bigoted but successful crusade to get companies like Lowe's to pull ads from All-American Muslim, the Learning Channel reality show about a community of Muslim Americans. Before Caton hung up on me -- he gets angry when you question his complaint that the show presents Muslims in too positive a light and not as crazed radicals plotting to impose Islamic shari'a law from Maine to Monterey -- I corrected his pronunciation of imam, a Muslim cleric, from Eye-mam to the proper Ee-mawm. Later that day, I heard him say it properly on CNN.
But that's all he got right. I concern myself with Caton -- who also likes to hire small planes to haul banners over Orlando warning people that homosexuals visit Disney World -- only for two reasons. One is that a major corporation like Lowe's actually caved to the Evangelical's ugly Islamophobia. The other is that he got his 15 minutes of fame at about the same time that Christopher Hitchens died, on Dec. 15. Hitchens was best known as one of the "angry atheists" for his 2007 best seller God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and narrow-minded fundamentalists like Caton made his work a lot easier. So of course did extremist Muslims, as well as extremist Roman Catholics, Jews, Hindus and all the fanatics who ruin religion the way drunks ruin driving. Which is why Hitchens' attacks on faith, while brilliantly written, could also feel gratuitous. (See "Christopher Hitchens, RIP.")
So it's fitting, at least for the silent majority of Christians who aren't hatemongering zealots but who derive hope and humane inspiration from our beliefs, that Caton and Hitchens should both be in the news during the Christmas season. The holiday's anticommercialization critics are right to argue that Christians spend too much time on outdoor lights at the expense of the inner light kindled by the story of God's incarnation in a manger. I'm as guilty as anyone in that regard. But Caton and Hitchens at least give us Christians a convenient place to start. They prod us on the one hand to assess what isn't Christian -- like demonizing gays and Muslims -- and on the other hand to reaffirm why Christianity and religion itself are a positive and not always poisonous influence in the world.
The crux of the Florida Family Association's campaign is Caton's preposterous claim, as he told me, that "every Eye-mam in this country wants to put the U.S. under shari'a law." Every imam I know here in Miami rejects the idea. "Muslims are only 6 million out of 300 million in this country," one reminds me. "We rely on U.S. law to protect our rights as a minority." They're also a minority who wish Christians well at Christmas: the Koran reverently mentions Jesus and the Virgin Mary almost 60 times. (See "Do Shari'a Courts Have a Role in British Life?")
One way, then, that Christians can practice Jesus' teachings of love, tolerance and charity this yuletide is by resolving to reassure folks like Muslims that we're not like the Florida Family Association. That we're committed to the code of Christmas -- "Peace on earth to people of goodwill" -- trumpeted by the same angels we place atop the trees in our living rooms.
That's also one of the best ways to answer Hitchens as well as other angry atheists like Richard Dawkins and quite a few members of my own hypersecular profession. It's a fairly widely accepted maxim that atheist fundamentalists, as I call them, can be just as intolerant as religious fundamentalists. And the problem they share is that both take religion way too literally. Just as Christian fundamentalists insist on a literal reading of the Bible, angry atheists tend to insist that belief in God qualifies you as a raving creationist. (See "Why Christopher Hitchens Is Wrong About Billy Graham.")
Here's what they refuse to get: Yes, Christians believe that Jesus' nativity was a virgin birth and that he rose from the dead on Easter. But if you were to show most Christians incontrovertible scientific proof that those miracles didn't occur, they would shrug -- because their faith means more to them than that. Because in the end, what they have faith in is the power of the story. In Evelyn Waugh's novel Brideshead Revisited, an agnostic says to his Catholic friend, "You can't seriously believe it all ... I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass."
"Oh yes, I believe that. It's a lovely idea."
"But you can't believe things simply because they're a lovely idea."
"But I do. That's how I believe."
I'm willing to bet it's how most believers believe. Before Hitchens died at 62 from esophageal cancer, he made a point of declaring he was certain no heaven awaited him. But that swipe at the faithful always misses the point. Most of us don't believe in God because we think it's a ticket to heaven. Rather, our belief in God -- our belief in the living ideal of ourselves, which is something even atheists ponder -- instills in us a faith that in the end, light always defeats darkness (which is how people get through the wars and natural disasters I cover). That does make us open to the possibility of the hereafter -- but more important, it gives us purposeful inspiration to make the here and now better.
With all due respect to the memory of Christopher Hitchens, making the here and now better would be difficult without religion. But it's also hard enough without the un-Christian antics of people like David Caton. As Christmas ought to remind us.
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Friday, December 23, 2011
Just Show Me: How to set up email on your Kindle Fire (Yahoo! News)
Welcome to?Just Show Me on?Tecca TV, where we show you tips and tricks for getting the most out of the?gadgets in your life. In today's episode we'll show you how to set up email on your?Kindle Fire.
Email on a tablet makes the entire email experience much more personal. Instead of sitting at your computer responding to messages, you can be sitting out in your living room relaxing and replying. And not only is sending out messages easy, so is reading them on a tablet; in fact, it's practically like reading a book at times.
If you'd like more information on Amazon's tablet, check out our?Kindle Fire guide.
For more episodes of Just Show Me,?subscribe to Tecca TV's YouTube channel and?check out all our Just Show Me episodes. If you have any topics you'd like to see us cover, just drop us a line in the comments.
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Thursday, December 22, 2011
Discovery of 2 Earth-size planets raises questions about the evolution of stars
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_swbHl17f5M36SrrAx4OJLuWVGHazSp7yYuJsrnLgOAUm32yUqerU2rGHb57KACEgSFDcQ5ilrpoPEYbyEtp4ZAFttL4jmJVAoPiueSNNo=s0-d){kind=small}
Public release date: 21-Dec-2011[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Julie Gazaille
j.cordeau-gazaille@umontreal.ca
514-343-6796
University of Montreal
This press release is available in French.
University of Toulouse and University of Montreal researchers have detected two planets of sizes comparable to Earth orbiting around an old star that has just passed the red giant stage. This planetary system is located near Lyra and Cygnus constellations at a distance of 3900 light years. This discovery, to be published by in Nature on December 22 2011, may shed new light on the destiny of stellar and planetary systems.
"The two planets, named KOI 55.01 and KOI 55.02, are on very short orbits around their host star," explained University of Montreal astrophysicist Gilles Fontaine and member of the Center for research in astrophysics of Qubec (CRAQ). "Having migrated so close, they probably plunged deep into the star's envelope during the red giant phase, but survived. The two observed bodies would then be the dense cores of ancient giant planets whose gaseous envelopes were vaporized during the immersion phase." The host star, KIC 05807616, consists of the exposed core of a red giant that has lost nearly its entire envelope, and in fact the planets may have contributed to the increased loss of mass that is necessary for the formation of this type of star. This has lead the researchers to theorize that planetary systems in general may therefore influence the evolution of their parent stars.
Twinkle twinkle little star
While analyzing the data obtained with the NASA Kepler mission to study the pulsations of the star KIC 05807616 (KPD 1943+4058 or KOI 55), an international team of astrophysicists from eight different countries noticed the intriguing presence of two tiny periodic modulations reaching 0.005% of the star brightness. As these variations could not be attributed to the oscillations of the star or to other causes, the presence of the two bodies orbiting around KIC 05807616 became the only plausible explanation.
The observed variations are the joint effects of the reflection of the star light on the illuminated surface of these bodies and of the difference in thermal emission between the heated day-side and cooler night-side hemispheres, modulated by the position of the bodies on their respective orbits. As a comparison, the situation is similar to the brightness variations of the Moon associated with its different illumination phases depending on its position relative to the Sun and the observers on Earth. For KIC 05807616, calculations show that in order to produce such low amplitude brightness modulations, the sizes of the orbiting bodies are likely comparable to that of the Earth.
One Astronomical Unit (AU) is the distance between the Sun and Earth. Since these planets are separated from their very hot (27,000 oC), intensely radiating host star by only 0.0060 and 0.0076 AU, extremely harsh conditions must prevail on their surface, especially in the star-facing hemisphere where temperatures could range between 8000 and 9000 oC. Conditions like these have never been found the planets that have been discovered outside our solar system. The discovery raises many questions about what kinds of life might exist in such hellish conditions.
These planets are referred to as Chthonian planets, could be the remnants of ancient gaseous giant planets perhaps like hotter versions of Jupiter that orbited the star when it was still burning hydrogen in its core, a long time ago. The envelope of these giant planets would have been dissipated during the immersion phase inside the star when the latter became a red giant. Only the dense cores of the planets, composed of iron and other heavy elements, would have survived this extreme episode.
KIC 05807616, a hot and compact sdB star, is all that remains of the former red giant: an active helium-burning core surrounded by a thin hydrogen layer. Forming this type of star requires the red giant progenitor to eject almost its entire envelope via a mechanism that significantly amplifies the normal mass loss from stellar winds. The two planets discovered around this star may have triggered such a process.
###
About this study:
"A compact system of small planets around an evolved post red giant star" was published in Nature on December 22, 2011. The research team was led by Stphane Charpinet (Universit de Toulouse) in collaboration with his former thesis advisors at the Universit de Montral, Gilles Fontaine and Pierre Brassard. Two other former Ph.D. students in the group of Professor Fontaine in Montral, Suzanna Randall (European Southern Observatory) and Valrie Van Grootel (Universit de Lige), also participated in this research project. Gilles Fontaine is a Canada Research Chair for Stellar Astrophysics and a member of CRAQ (Centre de recherche en astrophsyique du Qubec). This study received funding from Fond de recherche du Qubc Nature et technologies and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. University of Toulouse and Universit de Montral are known officially as Universit de Toulouse and Universit de Montral, respectively.
About CRAQ:
The Centre for Research in Astrophysics of Qubec (CRAQ) is a partnership between the Universit de Montral, McGill University, and the Universit Laval. The CRAQ brings together all researchers working in the field of astronomy and astrophysics of these three institutions, as well as other collaborators from Bishop's University, the Canadian Space Agency, the Cgep de Sherbrooke, and the private sector (Photon etc., ABB Bomem Inc., Nv Camras). The CRAQ is funded through the program Regroupements stratgiques of the Fonds de recherche du Qubec Nature et technologies (FRQ-NT). The CRAQ constitutes a unique grouping of researchers in strophysics in Qubec bent on excellence and whose varying and complementary fields of expertise allows them to be innovative, creative and competitive in several scientific fields, thus offering graduate students a wide variety of subjects in both fundamental and applied fields of research.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 21-Dec-2011[ | E-mail |
Share ] Contact: Julie Gazaille
j.cordeau-gazaille@umontreal.ca
514-343-6796
University of Montreal
This press release is available in French.
University of Toulouse and University of Montreal researchers have detected two planets of sizes comparable to Earth orbiting around an old star that has just passed the red giant stage. This planetary system is located near Lyra and Cygnus constellations at a distance of 3900 light years. This discovery, to be published by in Nature on December 22 2011, may shed new light on the destiny of stellar and planetary systems.
"The two planets, named KOI 55.01 and KOI 55.02, are on very short orbits around their host star," explained University of Montreal astrophysicist Gilles Fontaine and member of the Center for research in astrophysics of Qubec (CRAQ). "Having migrated so close, they probably plunged deep into the star's envelope during the red giant phase, but survived. The two observed bodies would then be the dense cores of ancient giant planets whose gaseous envelopes were vaporized during the immersion phase." The host star, KIC 05807616, consists of the exposed core of a red giant that has lost nearly its entire envelope, and in fact the planets may have contributed to the increased loss of mass that is necessary for the formation of this type of star. This has lead the researchers to theorize that planetary systems in general may therefore influence the evolution of their parent stars.
Twinkle twinkle little star
While analyzing the data obtained with the NASA Kepler mission to study the pulsations of the star KIC 05807616 (KPD 1943+4058 or KOI 55), an international team of astrophysicists from eight different countries noticed the intriguing presence of two tiny periodic modulations reaching 0.005% of the star brightness. As these variations could not be attributed to the oscillations of the star or to other causes, the presence of the two bodies orbiting around KIC 05807616 became the only plausible explanation.
The observed variations are the joint effects of the reflection of the star light on the illuminated surface of these bodies and of the difference in thermal emission between the heated day-side and cooler night-side hemispheres, modulated by the position of the bodies on their respective orbits. As a comparison, the situation is similar to the brightness variations of the Moon associated with its different illumination phases depending on its position relative to the Sun and the observers on Earth. For KIC 05807616, calculations show that in order to produce such low amplitude brightness modulations, the sizes of the orbiting bodies are likely comparable to that of the Earth.
One Astronomical Unit (AU) is the distance between the Sun and Earth. Since these planets are separated from their very hot (27,000 oC), intensely radiating host star by only 0.0060 and 0.0076 AU, extremely harsh conditions must prevail on their surface, especially in the star-facing hemisphere where temperatures could range between 8000 and 9000 oC. Conditions like these have never been found the planets that have been discovered outside our solar system. The discovery raises many questions about what kinds of life might exist in such hellish conditions.
These planets are referred to as Chthonian planets, could be the remnants of ancient gaseous giant planets perhaps like hotter versions of Jupiter that orbited the star when it was still burning hydrogen in its core, a long time ago. The envelope of these giant planets would have been dissipated during the immersion phase inside the star when the latter became a red giant. Only the dense cores of the planets, composed of iron and other heavy elements, would have survived this extreme episode.
KIC 05807616, a hot and compact sdB star, is all that remains of the former red giant: an active helium-burning core surrounded by a thin hydrogen layer. Forming this type of star requires the red giant progenitor to eject almost its entire envelope via a mechanism that significantly amplifies the normal mass loss from stellar winds. The two planets discovered around this star may have triggered such a process.
###
About this study:
"A compact system of small planets around an evolved post red giant star" was published in Nature on December 22, 2011. The research team was led by Stphane Charpinet (Universit de Toulouse) in collaboration with his former thesis advisors at the Universit de Montral, Gilles Fontaine and Pierre Brassard. Two other former Ph.D. students in the group of Professor Fontaine in Montral, Suzanna Randall (European Southern Observatory) and Valrie Van Grootel (Universit de Lige), also participated in this research project. Gilles Fontaine is a Canada Research Chair for Stellar Astrophysics and a member of CRAQ (Centre de recherche en astrophsyique du Qubec). This study received funding from Fond de recherche du Qubc Nature et technologies and Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. University of Toulouse and Universit de Montral are known officially as Universit de Toulouse and Universit de Montral, respectively.
About CRAQ:
The Centre for Research in Astrophysics of Qubec (CRAQ) is a partnership between the Universit de Montral, McGill University, and the Universit Laval. The CRAQ brings together all researchers working in the field of astronomy and astrophysics of these three institutions, as well as other collaborators from Bishop's University, the Canadian Space Agency, the Cgep de Sherbrooke, and the private sector (Photon etc., ABB Bomem Inc., Nv Camras). The CRAQ is funded through the program Regroupements stratgiques of the Fonds de recherche du Qubec Nature et technologies (FRQ-NT). The CRAQ constitutes a unique grouping of researchers in strophysics in Qubec bent on excellence and whose varying and complementary fields of expertise allows them to be innovative, creative and competitive in several scientific fields, thus offering graduate students a wide variety of subjects in both fundamental and applied fields of research.
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/uom-dot122011.php
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