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By Neece
 We met at 5pm at the Blue Moose on Sunday, March 7.
Our topic was:
Who We Admire in Science, Philosophy or Atheism and Why.
Update:
Ivy: Victor Frankl, author of Man’s Search For Meaning. His Logotherapy was about searching for a new and increased awareness in the present and enabling a new freedom and responsibility to act. The patient can then accept they they are not special and that their existence is simply coincidental, without destiny or fate. By accepting this, they can overcome their anxieties, and instead view life as moments, in which they are fundamentally free.
Daniel: Thomas Jefferson, the third president and a founding father. A freethinker and a great leader, he worked very hard to give America the separation of church and state. He was also opposed to a central bank, he was very insightful, and wanted to keep the…
By Neece
 Over the past several weeks I’ve accumulated links and information from several of our members. If you have information you want to share with us, just email it to Neece or leave a comment below. I’ll do a regular roundup of links and information in the future. If it’s about science, critical thinking, books or other media, or religion and atheism, share it with us whenever you come across it.
You may have noticed the tab under the banner that says Library. That lists all the books and media we each recommend. Feel free to contribute to it. In that list you’ll find that Tim recommended a book called Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel L. Everett. Brent found an interview on Groks Science Radio Show with the author.
Daniel has three stories to share:
The first…
By Neece
 Brent sent me a list of his favorite internet radio stations and podcasts to share with you. I listen to several as well so I will add them below:
~Edit: I’ve added descriptions for you!
Brent’s Favs:
- The Center for Inquiry’s Point of Inquiry: Point of Inquiry explores CFI’s three research areas:
- Pseudoscience and the paranormal (Bigfoot, UFOs, psychics, communication with the dead, cryptozoology, etc.)
- Alternative medicine (faith healing, homeopathy, “healing touch,” the efficacy of prayer, etc.)
- Religion, humanism, and secularism (church-state separation, the effects and proper role of religion in society, the future of secularism and nonbelief, etc.)
Rotating hosts Chris Mooney, Karen Stollznow, and Robert Price bring engaging and thought-provoking interviews and commentary on a broad range of topics to each episode of Point of Inquiry.
- NPR’s Science Friday: A weekly radio talk show on NPR from 2-4pm on
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By Neece
 Happy Darwin Day everyone! Today is Darwin’s birthday and in honor of him, I thought I’d post this article about Liquid Glass, which could possibly be the coolest nanotech material I’ve seen in some time. I think it’s so cool mainly because of its versatility and the fact that it’s already in use in Germany, the UK and Turkey.
Why am I talking about nanotech on Darwin’s birthday? If you think about it, without evolution, we wouldn’t be able to manipulate our world so deftly and with such finesse. About 195,000 years ago homo sapiens first appeared in the fossil record. We started leaving Africa about 70,000 years ago, and migrated as far as the Americas 14,500 years ago.
A mere 10,000 years ago, we were mostly hunter-gatherers in nomadic groups. The first proto-states were developed only 6,000 years ago. Think of that! Look how far we’ve come in such…
By Neece
 At Sunday’s meeting, Brent talked about John Maynard Smith and a talk he gave to the Royal Institution in 1995. He was a British theoretical evolutionary biologist and geneticist.
So here is that video. It’s about an hour long and quite interesting.
A few of his books include:
By Neece
Dave told us about this video at our meeting last Sunday. This is Julia Child cooking up a batch of Primordial Soup. Here is the description:
Julia Child cooks up a batch of primordial soup and explains how these simple ingredients produce amino acids – the building blocks of life. This video played in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Life in The Universe gallery from 1976 until the gallery closed.
I never watched her cooking show, but I’ve heard she never took herself too seriously, always made fun of herself a bit, and seemed to have fun. She is quite endearing in this video. I hope you enjoy it.
By Neece
 Brent sent me a link to a page on the web. It’s a conversation with Robert Sapolsky, a quiet, funny, apparently brilliant professor of biological sciences at Stanford University and of neurology at Stanford’s School of Medicine. Professor Sapolsky has written several books such as:
The link Brent sent me was called TOXO and he suggested it to me, to share with you, because we’re reading The God Virus: How religion infects our lives and culture, by Daniel W Ray. Now the video on that page was Robert Sapolsky talking about a most interesting parasite called Toxoplasma. This is what pregnant…
By Neece
 OMG, yo! Hide the good silver! Run for your lives! The Mayans say the world will end December 21, 2012 and that’s only 2 years and a month away! Whatever will we do?!
Of course the Mayans themselves didn’t survive till 2012, so maybe they aren’t the best group to ask about such things. 
Recently a friend of mine mentioned the 2012 phenomenon as if it were true. Unfortunately I didn’t have the hard facts at my disposal so I told him it’s not going to happen and left it at that. But I thought I’d look up some more information so when your mother starts talking about the end of the world, you will have some facts to back you up.
Lucky for me, NASA and Wikipedia have pages to explain where the concept came from and what scientific…
By Neece
Here is a video by the Center for Inquiry. It’s not a new video, even though it’s dated July 21, 2009. I think it’s from during the Bush Administration, from what I can tell.
Anyway, it’s Richard Dawkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Ann Druyan and Victor Stenger. Moderated by D.J. Grothe (of Point of Inquiry), it took place at the New York Academy of Sciences at a Center for Inquiry conference titled “Secular Society and its Enemies.”
The panel discusses atheism versus science, science education, the nature of science, various strategies for advancing society in society, threats to science education including religion and popular culture, racism and sexism in science, and many other topics. It’s about an hour long and quite interesting:
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We met at 5pm at the Blue Moose on Sunday, March 7.
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