Religious leaders should be held accountable when their irrational ideas turn harmful

Faith and Foolishness — Scientific American

Every two years the National Science Foundation produces a report, Science and Engineering Indicators, designed to probe the public’s understanding of science concepts. And every two years we relearn the sad fact that U.S. adults are less willing to accept evolution and the big bang as factual than adults in other industrial countries.

Except for this time. Was there suddenly a quantum leap in U.S. science literacy? Sadly, no. Rather the National Science Board, which oversees the foundation, chose to leave the section that discussed these issues out of the 2010 edition, claiming the questions were “flawed indicators of scientific knowledge because responses conflated knowledge and beliefs.” In short, if their religious beliefs require respondents to discard scientific facts, the board doesn’t think it appropriate to expose that truth.

The section does exist, however, and Science magazine obtained it. When presented with the statement “human beings, as we know them today, developed from earlier species of animals,” just 45 percent of respondents indicated “true.” Compare this figure with the affirmative percentages in Japan (78), Europe (70), China (69) and South Korea (64). Only 33 percent of Americans agreed that “the universe began with a big explosion.”

Faith and Foolishness — Scientific American

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Boredom can be lethal

«They discovered that those who expressed severe job boredom were 2.5 times more likely to be dead of cardiovascular disease. Their conclusion: “those who report being bored are more likely to die younger than those who are not bored.”»

Technoccult: http://bit.ly/cdOslc


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Great PCMagazine article explaining how to print from an iPad

Great PCMagazine article explaining how to print from an iPad: http://bit.ly/ce58Gp


«iPad printing apps claim to do a lot, but in our testing, many of them simply didn't work. There's definitely still room for a brilliant third-party app which can print to a range of Wi-Fi printers, because we couldn't find one. The best we could find was Air Sharing HD, an app that reliably prints to printers shared by Macs on the same Wi-Fi network as your iPad, but even that had some formatting oddities.


There are three basic types of iPad printing apps. The first, supposedly, print directly to Wi-Fi-enabled printers. The second look out on your Wi-Fi network for Macs sharing printers, and can print to the shared printers without any intervention from the Mac's user. This is a decent solution if you go somewhere with Macs and printers. The third type requires you to run a server in the background on a Mac or PC every time you want to print something. I consider that an unforgivable kludge; at that point, you might as well just sync your iPad… http://bit.ly/ce58Gp »


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Cops using Will.i.am's iPad to track down thief

Cops using Will.i.am's iPad to track down thief: http://bit.ly/bf1UjX [TUAW]

«… law enforcement officials have honed in on the the perpetrator using the iPad's GPS functionality, and are close to making an arrest…» http://bit.ly/bf1UjX [TUAW]


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