Atheism trending - even in the Arab world

Several years ago I bookmarked an article in The Telegraph which highlighted the rising number of atheists and Muslims in the United States.  Citing a Washington Post article, the author noted "how washed out and feeble Catholicism and mainline Protestantism have become."

So 40 per cent of people in Boston have no religion at all, and it's more than half in many counties. As for the 47 per cent of Bostonians who are Catholic "participants" – well, there isn't much participation going on come Sunday morning. We're talking about 17 per cent Mass attendance these days... not even the Deist Jefferson would have been pleased to know that, in 2013, America's fastest-growing religious allegiance is "None" – that is, agnosticism shading into atheism... Let's put this simply: America is secularising just like Europe...

I never posted the information at the time, but will do so now as a companion piece for an article in The New Republic about the rise of atheism in the Arab world.

While Arab states downplay the atheists among their citizens, the West is culpable in its inability to even conceive of an Arab atheist. In Western media, the question is not if Arabs are religious, but rather to what extent their (assumed) religiosity can harm the West...

Large numbers of individuals are tilting away from the rote religiosity Westerners reflexively associate with the Arab world. In 2012, a wide-ranging WIN/Gallup International poll found that 5 percent of Saudi citizens—more than a million people—self-identify as “convinced atheists,” the same percentage as in the United States. Nineteen percent of Saudis—almost six million people—think of themselves as “not a religious person.” (In Italy, the figure is 15 percent.) These numbers are even more striking considering that many Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Sudan, and Yemen, uphold the sharia rule punishing apostasy with death...

Despite such draconian measures, the percentage of people who express some measure of religious doubt is higher in the Arab world (22 percent) than in South Asia (17 percent) and Latin America (16 percent). And that 22 percent is only an average; the percentage goes higher in some Arab countries, from 24 percent in Tunisia up to 37 percent in Lebanon...

Despite the risks and the social and political challenges they’re facing, all the atheist activists I interviewed said they were confident that the future of the Arab world belongs to secularism. Willoughby told me that “atheism is spreading like wildfire” in the Middle East. Brian Whitaker views it as “the symptom of a much bigger thing, which is the battle against oppression.” The booming Arab underground music scene is another example of the irresistible impetus for change that is quietly transforming the Middle East and North Africa. A full cultural revolution will probably take some time. Speaking about his country, Abdel-Samad said, “I think secularism is a certainty, not just a possibility, for Egypt’s future. All that remains unclear is what price the country will pay first. History tells me blood.”

Much more at the link.

Libyan desert glass

The so called Libyan Desert Glass is the purest natural silica glass ever found on earth. The glass is generally yellow in color. It can be very clear or it can be a milky, and even contain tiny bubbles, white wisps, and inky black swirls. Over a thousand tons of these glass are strewn across hundreds of kilometers of bleak desert. Most of these are the size of pebbles polished smooth by the abrasive action of the blowing sand. Others are chunks of considerable size and weight. The biggest piece ever found weighed around 26 kg...

The Libyan desert glass has been dated as having formed about 26 million years ago, which made scientists assume that the glass here was formed when a meteorite struck earth around this time, but the absence of an impact crater pose problems for this theory...

Local inhabitants in the Neolithic period made tools out of the glass, and later the Egyptians used it as jewel. A large piece of carved stone on the breastplate of the famous Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun was identified as none other than Libyan Desert Glass..

More info and photos at Amusing Planet.

There was no "War of the Worlds panic"

Excerpts from an myth-busting report in The Telegraph:

According to popular myth, thousands of New Yorkers fled their homes in panic, with swarms of terrified citizens crowding the streets in different American cities to catch a glimpse of a “real space battle”... The true extent of the panic seems to have been that a small band of Grover's Mill locals, believing the town's water tower on Grover's Mill Road had been turned into a “giant Martian war machine”, fired guns filled with buckshot in an attack on the water tower...

The radio ratings survey firm CE Hopper Company were, coincidentally, conducting a telephone poll that night of approximately five thousand households. They asked: "To what programme are you listening?” Only two per cent of people said they were listening to The War of the Worlds...

Research published six weeks after the broadcast by the American Institute of Public Opinion was skewed. They later admitted that figures of one million people listening to the programme were wildly inaccurate...

The newspapers had a clear agenda. An editorial in The New York Times, headlined In the Terror by Radio, was used to censure the relatively new medium of radio, which was becoming a serious competitor in providing news and advertising...

In Getting it Wrong, Professor Campbell said that Welles was happy in later decades to encourage the myth of the panic because it was a "tale just too delectable not to be true".

Greenlandic seal fur g-string

The indigenous people of East Greenland made this sort of underwear, known as naatsit, by sewing strips of seal pelt together using a thread of reindeer or whale sinew. The naatsit above, decorated with glass beads tied onto seal-skin fringe, was made for women and worn under seal-skin trousers. Explorer Captain C. Ryder acquired the item in the southeast Greenland settlement of Ammassalik during an expedition in 1892.

According to Peter Toft, the National Museum of Denmark's Greenlandic fur clothing expert, this beaded, furry thong was intended to be displayed not just during intimate moments, but in polite company. Inside the warm homes of the Greenlandic Inuit, a naatsit "was the only thing worn even when having guests or visiting the houses of other families," says Toft. "This shocked the Danish missionaries of the 18th and 19th century, who tried to convince the Inuit to wear European linen (longer) underwear indoors. This attempt was not very successful."

Mom invites strangers to child's birthday party

YouTube link.

On Tuesday, Mackenzie Moretter turned 10. But days before the planned birthday party, all of the invited guests turned down her invitation.

"I was sad that no one was coming," Mackenzie said with pain in her eyes.

So her mom, Jenny Moretter posted a message on Facebook.

[Mackenzie has Sotos syndrome] "It causes gigantism where kids grow at a faster pace. So Mackenzie is a lot taller than other classmates," he said. "Kids are friendly to her, but she doesn't have friends. No one calls and talks to her. I'll show up at her school and she will be playing alone...

Members of the Shakopee Fire Department stopped by, allowing the kids to tour their fire truck. Sam's Club and Mr. Pigs Stuffed BBQ and Catering donated food beverages to serve 250. At least 300 attended."

Bawdy, racy fairy tales

In 2012, readers around the world were intrigued to learn that a researcher in northern Bavaria had discovered hundreds of never-published fairy- and folktales collected by the 19th-century folklorist Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. Working just a few decades after the Brothers Grimm, Schönwerth considered scholars his natural audience, and as a result the tales he recorded are bawdier, racier and significantly more scatological than the collection the Grimms published under the title “Children’s and Household Tales.” Everyone knows that the Grimms’ fairy tales are much darker than the cleaned-up Disney versions, but with Schönwerth’s, the action gets even more down-to-earth.

Erika Eichenseer, who ferreted Schönwerth’s finds out of the Regensburg Archives, has been publishing single and collected tales in German over the past few years, but now at last there’s an English translation of more than 70 of them, published this week by Penguin Books as “The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales.” Maria Tatar, chair of the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University and distinguished editor of such books as “The Annotated Brothers Grimm,” took on the tricky task of rendering 19th-century Bavarian folklore into modern English.

Salon has an interview with Maria Tatar.  I've requested the book from our library.

"Metamers" - images that look the same, but are different

YouTube link.

Our illusions show the opposite: two images that are different but look the same -- those are called "metamers"; -- and two images that are identical but look different -- we call those "anti-metamers." Our main illusion mixes the two: it shows three images, two of which match with a third one mismatching. Viewers see one image as odd, but it's one of the two identical images they see as different, an illusion we call "false pop out."

Ug99

Ug99 is a strain of wheat stem rust that was first identified in Uganda in 1998 (and named in 1999). By 2001, Ug99 began appearing in fields in Kenya; in Ethiopia by 2003; Sudan and Yemen by 2006; and Iran a year later. It now plagues wheat plants in nine African and Middle Eastern countries. Should the pathogen establish a global presence, 90 percent of wheat varieties could succumb, with whole crops flopping over and rotting within weeks or months of infection. The annual global harvest of some 700 million tons of wheat would be decimated...

University of Minnesota’s Anderson says GM corn and soybeans may have received more acceptance because they’re often processed or fed to animals, whereas most wheat enters the human food stream. Some consumers fear that tinkering with crop genomes could reduce the nutritive value of food, introduce toxins, increase the use of pesticides, or propel our already heavily-processed diets further away from what nature provided...

Nevertheless, GM wheat may still make its debut. In 2010, Monsanto announced that it was re-entering the field of biotech wheat and would work to genetically engineer crops that are higher yielding, stress tolerant, or herbicide resistant... Wheat growers are also starting to come around to the idea of cultivating GM plants. Several years ago, the National Association of Wheat Growers and US Wheat Associates expressed their support of biotech wheat. “We just have to prepare ourselves for a future where GM crops are more accepted,” Wulff says.

Much more info at the link.

Berlin, July 1945

YouTube link.

Awesome color footage with excellent definition, certainly worth clicking the full-screen button.  I'm glad this was compiled without any narration - the images speak for themselves.

Fire buckets

"In the glass-enclosed top floor with open views over the rooftops of old Lemberg, a typical red-painted Soviet-era wall board with red fire buckets and shovel. “Do you know why the bottom of the fire bucket was pointed in those days?” asks András. “So it would not be stolen. Because like this, it could not be used for anything else.”

Text and image (cropped for size) from Poemas del Rio Wang.  More about fire buckets at Wikipedia.

"Flakka" is also known as "$5 insanity"

"One man ran naked through a Florida neighborhood, tried to have sex with a tree and told police he was the mythical god Thor. Another ran nude down a busy city street in broad daylight, convinced a pack of German shepherds was pursuing him.

Two others tried separately to break into the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. They said they thought people were chasing them; one wound up impaled on a fence.

The common element to these and other bizarre incidents in Florida in the last few months is flakka, an increasingly popular synthetic designer drug. Also known as gravel and readily available for $5 or less a vial, it's a growing problem for police after bursting on the scene in 2013...

Flakka, a derivative of the Spanish word for a thin, pretty woman, is usually sold in a crystal form and is often smoked using electronic cigarettes, which are popular with young people and give off no odor...

From an article by Curt Anderson (Associated Press) via the StarTribune.  More information at the link.

London underground

YouTube link.

"The super-rich are maximizing property value in the heart of London as never before. But they're not building up, they're digging down, creating mega-basements or 'iceberg homes' - nicknamed because there's more square footage under the ground than above. Over the last ten years an estimated 2000 new basements have been dug in central London. Into these multi-level subterranean structures owners are building anything from cinemas, swimming pools, beauty parlours, squash courts, wine cellars and servants' quarters. Some take as long as three years to complete. As well as the noise of the digging, fleets of concrete mixers and lorries taking away the dug soil service the sites. So life for neighbours in some of London's poshest addresses has been hell.

As the Royal Borough of Kensington Council responds to angry residents and tries to regulate the number of mega-basements and the disruption they cause, this BBC film goes behind the hoardings to look inside the extraordinary structures and talk to builders, owners and irate neighbours to tell the story of the conflict that has gripped the millionaires and gold-paved streets of London's smartest postcodes."

The importance of word order

From Into The Shadows, via BoingBoing.

If you drive through Cedar Rapids, Iowa

As reported in the StarTribune:

Cedar Rapids has become the ultimate speed trap in the Midwest.  Ever since installing hidden cameras on the interstate that runs through it, Iowa’s second-largest city has been sending out tickets at an unprecedented rate...

Iowa is the only state where cities post speed cameras on interstates, and no Iowa town has embraced photo enforcement of its expressway speed limit as wholeheartedly as Cedar Rapids, a city of 128,000 halfway between the Twin Cities and St. Louis...

In 2010, Cedar Rapids installed four sets of cameras on Interstate 380. Over a 20-month period in 2013 and 2014, Cedar Rapids cited more than 160,000 motorists for speeding on the interstate through town...

The speed cameras, two north of the curve and two to the south, are owned and operated by Gatso USA on the city’s behalf. The firm gets $25 from every $75 fine. The cameras snap a picture of any vehicle traveling at least 12 miles per hour over the speed limit and capture license plate data. The owner is then sent a citation...

About 70 percent of people who get a speeding citation in the mail from Cedar Rapids end up paying, according to the city. That yields about $3 million for Cedar Rapids, which assigns it to the police department, and amounts to 14 percent of the agency’s fiscal 2015 budget.

The city’s rationale for the cameras is that the S-curve can be dangerous, especially for unfamiliar drivers going too fast.

More details at the link.

Chuckleworthy