links for 2009-05-02

"Bruce, like Tim LaHaye, has a way of running off the rails when he gets into the details of his prophecy scheme. One can, in fact, open the book of Revelation and find mentioned there seven "seals" of divine judgment. By mentioning that fact first, Bruce casts a kind of biblical halo over whatever non-sequitur nonsense he says next -- "Remember the seven Seal Judgments Revelation talks about? Well, then Godzilla, lamb chop, munchkin, glockenspiel gumdrop." And everyone nods along as though he was somehow citing chapter and verse with authority."

"To put this idea in practice, one fabricates spheres out of silicon single crystals, whose diameters are measured to within parts of a nanometre. From the accurately known size of the silicon crystal unit cell, one can then calculate the number of atoms in the sphere to a very high precision. If one knows the isotopic composition of the silicon, or uses highly enriched, nearly monoisotopic silicon-28, one can calculate the mass of the sphere."

"In 1964 when Yakir Aharonov, Peter Bergman, and Joel Lebowitz started to think seriously about the issue of the arrow of time in quantum mechanics [1]âwhether time only flows from the past to the future or also from the future to the pastânone of them could have possibly imagined that their esoteric quest would one day lead to one of the most powerful amplification methods in physics. But in the weird, unpredictable, yet wonderful way in which physics works, one is a direct, logical, consequence of the other. As reported in Physical Review Letters by P. Ben Dixon, David J. Starling, Andrew N. Jordan, and John C. Howell at the University of Rochester this amplification method makes it possible to measure angles of a few hundred femtoradians and displacements of 20 femtometers, about the size of an atomic nucleus "

"Here are some interesting numbers from Dr. Elaine Howard Ecklund, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Associate Director for the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life at Rice University. Professor Ecklund previously conducted the "Religion Among Academic Scientists" (RAAS) study in 2005-2007 that found that it wasn't true that scientists lose their religion upon professional training, due either to an inherent conflict between science and faith or to institutional pressure to conform."