Later this week or weekend, I hope to write up a post about the First Vision. As you may know, there are several (and conflicting) accounts of Joseph Smith’s experience. But here’s one that you may not have been aware of:
The more work is done on the subject, the more plausible abiogenesis becomes.
For the first time, scientists have synthesized RNA enzymes – ribonucleic acid enzymes also known as ribozymes – that can replicate themselves without the help of any proteins or other cellular components.
What’s more, these simple nucleic acids can act as catalysts and continue the process indefinitely.
This video is brought to you by the letters W, T, and F.
Okay, so I won’t kill you. But I would appreciate your support for this site. Voting for the William Law X-Mormon awards ends soon (February 22), and SHAFT stands a competitive chance of winning in two categories: “Best Humor Piece” (Watching LDS General Conference so you don’t have to 
and “Best New Blog.”
With an overwhelming majority of our posts being about religion, I think it is high time we break up the monotony and explore more of our club’s free thinking aspiration.
If you’re reading this blog, you probably have at least one online profile, be it at Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, or any of the myriad social networking web sites. You’re probably also aware that the combination of Web 2.0, geopositioning technology (such as GPS, Wi-Fi location databases, and cell tower triangulation), and the explosive growth of mobile data networks has taken social networking and the location-aware web to new heights. Facebook lets you meet people and make friends with those in your same town. Many Twitter-based services show you if any of your friends are nearby and looking to catch a movie or go to dinner. Google Maps helps you get driving directions and public transit information based on your current location, and Google Latitude even e-mails you when people you know break out of their ordinary routine and are nearby (e.g., friends who have the night off, or family visiting from out of town). LinkedIn helps you get a job in your area through the power of word-of-mouth. There are countless useful applications for a location-aware web, but at what cost?
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To keep the rest of our threads cleanly on-topic, this thread will be used for a discussion of atheism and morality. An Überthread.
Kleiner–I’m going to leave your existing comments in place on their current threads, but any future comments that topically belong here will be moved here, along with their responses.
Polish Catholics attended the 22nd Exorcists’ Congress (hehe) in Niepokalanow, near Warsaw. Poland has more than 100 professional exorcists.
When asked by journalists, the exorcists admitted that possession by the devil may look just like it is portrayed in scary movies. But the rites that the exorcists use to expel evil spirits are much less spectacular.
“Our role is mainly to say prayers and psalms,” Father Andrzej Grefkowicz told the press conference. Another priest, Aleksander Posacki, said that too many myths surround exorcisms, which in fact are based on fundamental church rules.
Religion is off the hook in this post. At the moment, my greatest frustration is with skeptics—global warming “skeptics.”
Many conservative commentators have giddily pronounced the death of global warming after the recent string of snowstorms (“snowmaggedon” or “snowpocalypse”). Fox News host Sean Hannity, for example, argued “the most severe winter storm in years” would “seem to contradict Al Gore’s hysterical global warming theories.” This sentiment has opened the floodgates for all sorts of crazy. The Utah legislature recently gave global warming science a vote of no confidence. Donald Trump called for Al Gore’s Nobel Prize to be stripped away. And Glenn Beck expressed regret that climatologists haven’t committed suicide en masse over their alleged failures.