June 1, 2012

Your Assistance Is Requested

Help the secular community out! Two fellow bloggers have requests that some of you fine people may be able to fulfill:

• Greta Christina is writing a new book about coming out of the closet, and she’s collecting stories about how you told other people that you were an atheist. If you’ve got one to tell, please read her guidelines for what she’s looking for and contribute!

• Also, over at Unequally Yoked, Leah is running a sequel to her ideological Turing test, and needs atheists to judge the entries posted so far. (If you’re not familiar with the concept, it entails a mix of atheists and Christians answering questions twice, once from their own viewpoint and once while masquerading as a member of the other group, and the judges are challenged to spot the fakers. Read my thoughts on the last one.) If you think you can tell the real atheists apart from the Christian pretenders, go read and cast your ballots.

Image credit: Hamed Saber, released under CC BY 2.0 license

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

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7 min

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with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

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