Time explains today’s Google doodle celebrating the 180th birthday of John Venn.

Correlation has never looked this cute. Google created an interactive illustration in honor of the 180th birthday of logician and philosopher John Venn — best known, of course, for inventing the circles known as the Venn diagram. The doodle allows you to choose from five different subjects (mammals and sea life, for example) along with five descriptors (thrives in cold, has wings, etc.) and then see the resulting correlation. 

I’ve been playing with it, with much amusement.

Venn’s 180th.… Read the rest

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The WHO reports new numbers on the Ebola outbreak.

The World Health Organization says the death toll from the worst outbreak of Ebola on record has reached 887.

That’s an increase of 158 since the global health body released figures on July 31.

WHO said in a statement on Monday that there now have been more than 1,600 cases of Ebola since the disease emerged in Guinea earlier this year.

According to WHO, there now have been a total of 358 deaths in Guinea, 255 deaths in Liberia, 273 deaths in Sierra Leone and one in Nigeria.

The news comes as Nigeria announced Monday that it now had confirmed a second case in Africa’s most populous nation. Health Minister

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The BBC has discovered American Atheists.

Atheists in the US are rallying together, launching a new TV programme and providing support for those who go public with their beliefs.

“Sometimes things need to be said, and fights need to be fought even if they are unpopular. To the closeted atheists, you are not alone, and you deserve equality.”

So goes the rousing speech from the American Atheists president, David Silverman, in the opening moments of the first US television broadcaster dedicated to those who do not believe in God, Atheist TV.

A series of testimonies from prominent atheists then follows.

“It’s one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life and I completely advocate people ‘coming out’,”

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The cops in Alhambra, California nabbed a tortoise yesterday. They told us about it on their Facebook page, in hopes of reuniting tortoise with human or humans.

It wasn’t your dime-store tortoise.

It has a sweet face. As tortoises do.

It’s back with its people now, and we know its name.

* * * Turtleman Update 08/03/14* * *

The tortoise is actually named “Dirk.” He has been reunited with his human family who actually live in Alhambra. According to 21310 of the Penal Code, it is illegal to possess a “dirk.” We enjoy keeping families together, so an exception was made in this case.
* * * We stand corrected and have edited this post at 4:30 pm*

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Interesting.

Aug. 1, 2014 – A study of 1,400 ancient and modern human skulls suggests that a reduction in testosterone hormone levels accompanied the development of cooperation, complex communication and modern culture some 50,000 years ago.

The research, published in today’s issue of the journal Current Anthropology, “uses craniofacial evidence to propose that lowered testosterone levels could explain the relatively sudden origin of modern behavior about 50,000 years ago,” says University of Utah biology graduate student Robert Cieri.

The idea being – to put it as crudely as possible – that lower testosterone would lead to less bashing over the head and more dialogue.

“Humans are uniquely able to communicate complex thoughts and cooperate even with strangers,” Cieri says.

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It’s good to see that everyone sees the point of the joint statement and has decided to avoid the more childish ways of responding to disagreements like attacks on appearance and photoshops and caricatures and similar. Well maybe not quite everyone…

Haw haw.… Read the rest

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CNN notes that being a big noise in the Catholic church provides some pretty comfortable lodgings.

There’s Timothy Dolan’s cottage on Madison Avenue, for instance.

From Google

It’s 15,000 square feet. He squeezes into it with three other priests. Not too shabby, is it.

The one in Chicago for Cardinal Francis George is even nicer.

This mansion has 19 chimneys and sits on 1.7 acres of prime real estate in Chicago’s ritzy Gold Coast neighborhood. It’s worth $14.3 million “as is,” but the property could fetch far more, appraisers told CNN.

George, whose private quarters occupy the mansion’s top two floors, according to the archdiocese, shares the residence with two bishops and a priest.

Three nuns who care for

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There’s a rather depressing piece in the Guardian by Fazel Hawramy and Mohammad Moslawi about the beginnings of resistance to ISIS in Mosul.

Iraqis living under Isis rule in Iraq, where non-Sunni residents have been forced from their homes and tens of mosques have been deemed idolatrous and marked for destruction, have started to push back against the extreme interpretation of Islam being imposed on them.

…

In Mosul, despite its military triumphs, Isis is losing the hearts, minds and obedience of residents who say they have had enough.

When its fighters destroyed the Nabi Jonah mosque (Jonah’s tomb) in the Iraqi city last Thursday, they failed to removed copies of the Qur’an and other religious texts. Residents treading

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So everything good is evil, it seems.

Dangerous Minds on Facebook

Orange Church of God announces on the advertising board thingy (what do you call those things, anyway?):

SURFERS, SKATEBOARDERS, MUSICIANS, ARTISTS, VEGETARIANS, OCCUPIERS, ACTIVISTS, ADDICTS AND FORNICATORS ARE ALL GOING TO HELL!

REPENT NOW!

Seriously? Surfboarders? Skateboarders? Musicians, artists, vegetarians, activists? Going to hell? Why?

Maybe the Orange Church of God is actually just someone’s living room, and that’s a list of someone’s pet peeves. (But even then – surfing?? Why on earth? It’s so obviously fun, and it’s pretty to watch, and it doesn’t hurt anything. It doesn’t mess up anyone’s living room.)… Read the rest

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Here’s an example of the kind of thing that the statement Richard Dawkins and I posted last week opposes.

John ‏@JohnTheSecular
So tell me, @RichardDawkins, what is “modern art” the result of, then? Your fuckwittery?

Description: it’s a photo of Dawkins talking next to a passage in quotation marks:

“Too many so-called ‘great works of art’, from the Sistine Chapel to Bach’s Masses, were inspired by the Christ myth and therefore, despite their beauty, come from a place of anti-intellectualism and refusal to confront empirical reality.

The only pure, untainted art form left is the Japanese RPG.”

Richard Dawkins

That’s a shitty trick because it’s too plausible and people are passing it around and taking it seriously. It looks real. … Read the rest

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I learned about another cognitive bias this morning – the curse of knowledge. Wikipedia explains.

The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias that leads better-informed parties to find it extremely difficult to think about problems from the perspective of lesser-informed parties. The effect was first described in print by the economists Colin Camerer, George Loewenstein and Martin Weber, though they give original credit for suggesting the term to Robin Hogarth.

…

…researchers have linked the curse of knowledge bias with false-belief reasoning in both children and adults, as well as theory of mind development difficulties in children. The curse of knowledge bias reportedly decreases in degree for adults versus children, who experience exaggerated effects; however, it was also found

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The last paragraph of chapter XXI of George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

Morality requires educated feeling. It’s never a … Read the rest

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The WHO says Ebola is spreading faster than efforts to control it. That’s not good. We need it to be the other way around.

But it’s difficult. Poverty makes it more difficult. Poverty means lack of infrastructure, and that makes it more difficult.

Analysis: David Shukman, BBC science editor

Friday’s summit should provide the kind of international co-operation needed to fight Ebola but the battle against the virus will be won or lost at the local level. An over-attentive family member, a careless moment while burying a victim, a slip-up by medical staff coping with stress and heat – a single small mistake in basic hygiene can allow the virus to slip from one human host to another.

The

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