Brights News Feed

What colour is the world? It is one of those great scientific or philosophical questions.

Well, no, it isn’t really. But in 80 million tiny images from MIT, you can get a pretty good idea of the answer anyway.

The mosaic is comprised of smaller images each of which is an average of several other images each representing the same noun. The images are organised by semantic meaning, hence the areas of similar colour, such as the large green area which is related to vegetation etc.

(Via)

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).

Two amazing stories today testify both to the grandeur of nature, and to the power of humanity in understanding its intricacy and appreciating its power.

New Scientist reports on the discovery that particles of dust immersed in ionized gas can behave as information-transmitting replicators, essentially meaning that they could support “genetic” inheritance, and perhaps even support a full, living, evolutionary process.

Also, widely linked across the internet an on television news, the world has watched amateur nature video. A pride of lions attack a herd of water buffalo, but events take two unexpected twists leaving the spectators aghast and amazed. The video is on YouTube here.

The government has responded to a faith schools petition on the Downing Street website. The petition read:

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to ban within government-funded schools the promotion or practice of any particular faith or religion. […] Faith-based or sect schools encourage and propagate divisions within our society. Schools should be places where our children are taught to think about the world around them and come to their own conclusions. In short, they should be taught, not only about the profusion of religions and faiths but also about how moral and socially responsible lives can be led without them; rather than, at a time before they have sufficiently developed critical faculties, being indoctrinated.

The government response follows below.

Read the rest of this entry »

Philosopher A. C. Grayling famously believes that the current upsurge in religious news coverage, protest, and renewed political assertion, is a symptom of decline: religion is in its “death throes”.

This week he twisted the knife, exploring the responses to the recent wave of successful secularist publishing (”Tome truths“). Basically, he makes a fairly convincing case that the backlash of protest doth protest too loudly.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.)

Numerous liberal bloggers quickly spread the word about the American Family Association’s transparently biased anti-gay internet poll over the last few days. The AFA clearly expected the poll — asking whether consumers will shun businesses which adhere to what the AFA called the “homosexual agenda” — to be filled out mainly by their own supporters.

But the traffic the AFA site actually received, thanks to the bloggers’ ad hoc democratic publicity, clearly turned the results they expected around. Having at first seemingly faked the results of their homophobic poll the American Family Association now appears to have pulled the page altogether.

For the present, however, you can still see the ridiculous survey in the Google cache.

You can even still see the fixed results in the Google cache (these exact same fixed results, as opposed to the real data, were being displayed to everyone who filled out the survey once the wave of bloggers’ traffic skewed the results in the opposite direction from the skew that they had wanted).

It’s worth pointing out that completion of the poll also submitted users’ details to a mailing list. Not only is this a further indication that the AFA had by and large expected only anti-gay responses from their own sympathizers, it also means that many liberal bloggers are now being emailed their rhetorical diatribes and details of the AFA’s anti-gay activist plans. So presumably the liberal blogosphere will now be able to keep an even closer eye on them.

(Also see: GoodAsYou.org)

The Christian “traditional morality” pressure group the American Family Association has posted an unscientific poll on homosexuality. Not only does the poll appear on their own site (where responses are likely to support the conclusions they want to find), but the results are rigged anyway, with every submission returning the same apparently bogus data.

The poll question is:

If a corporation supports the homosexual agenda, would you:

Be more likely to do business with that company
Be less likely to do business with that company
It would not affect my buying decision

At the time of writing, the results that will be returned after you vote are:

Be more likely to do business with that company. 6,238
Be less likely to do business with that company. 188,722
It would not affect my buying decision. 3,946

These “results” are clearly intended to imply that businesses should avoid supporting “the homosexual agenda”.

(Via Seldo)

British Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Professor Richard Dawkins, has had a relatively large media footprint since the release of The God Delusion, globe-trotting his way from interview to interview. But yesterday’s CNN slot with Paula Zahn deserves a special mention, because it seems to have taken place after pressure from complaints generated by RDF site members.

Last week a lengthy panel discussion was aired on the subject of atheism, in which no atheists were invited to take part. The anchor opens the new interview with Dawkins by saying “Well after we first brought this topic out in the open, most of the emails that we received were from people who thought that we should have included an atheist in our discussion.” See Richard Dawkins interview with Paula Zahn.

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.