Brights News Feed

As a special Christmas treat the Brights News Feed has, with ironically Easter-like symbolism, spontaneously risen from the dead.

Despite for a while receiving a growing amount of traffic, the editor withdrew from regular posting almost by accident, and other contributors with similarly busy lives have also failed to satiate your news hunger.

BrightsOnline.net will be undergoing an overhaul in the next few months aimed at making regular management easier for editors, as well as providing more routes for collaboration and contribution from all visitors.

In the meantime, in lieu of a season greet from BrightsOnline.net, here are two thoughtful mid-winter messages, both aimed at the widespread “demonology” which regards secularists as rabidly anti-Christmas, a major theme in the British press this year.

• The President’s Mid-Winter Message — Terry Sanderson, President of the National Secular Society (UK)
• Sorry to disappoint, but it’s nonsense to suggest we want to ban Christmas — Polly Toynbee, President of the British Humanist Association

Links to “mid-winter” messages from other secularist figures from anywhere in the world would be welcome (use the comments below).

Online magazine Slate has today completed a run of three excerpts from Christopher Hitchens’ new book, God is Not Great.

Wednesday — “Religion Poisons Everything”
Thursday — “Was Muhammad Epileptic”
Today “Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion”

The book is published on 1st May.

(If you purchase the book via the Brights’ Net’s affiliation with Amazon then 6% of the price goes to the-brights.net at no extra cost.)

As announced yesterday, the Humanist Society of Scotland has used Darwin Day to launch Humanist Thought for the Day, at www.ThinkHumanist.org (RSS). To start things off, A. C. Grayling talks about the Paradox of Tolerance. The HSS will be encouraging humanists from around the world to voice their own “thoughts for the day”. To that end you can get in touch with them, or subscribe to receive the podcasts by email, here.

From the nation that brought us the Enlightenment, the French edition of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? features an astonishing display of scientific ignorance en masse. For €1,500 the question is “Qu’est-ce qui gravite autor de la Terre?” — “Which of these is in orbit around the Earth?” Is it A, the Moon; B, the Sun; C, Mars; or D, Venus?

Not only does the contestant not know the answer, he uses his “Ask the audience” lifeline… with astonishing results.

See the YouTube. (Only limited French required to follow it.) (Via Perlocutionary.)

Cambridge University (UK) has launched a new website which will make available all of Charles Darwin’s writings for the first time online. Along with earlier editions of published works that have not been available online before, the collection will also include some notebooks and diary entries have never been published before, including notes from the Beagle voyage that were used as material for The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’. The site is http://darwin-online.org.uk/

Jon Stewart and the Daily Show once again stick it to the man, showcasing a bizaree selection of Middle East-related “end times” stories from the US media.

On YouTube (via Thinking Aloud).

David, one of the brightsOnline bloggers, points out (Science and sensibility: “Blogging about the natural world“) two recent “blog carnvials“.

Tangled Bank #59 is at ScienceAndReason.blogspot.com (all issues of Tangled Bank can be found here).

And the invertebrates’ Circus of the Spineless latest carnival is at Roger Butterfield’s Words & Pictures.

Butterfield links for example to Via Negativa and Dave Bonta’s original photographs of various spineless critters, including these Monarch butterflies (“Love and death at the milkweed saloon”).