Category: Ionian Enchantment
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A Humanist Advent Calendar
Boys with Advent Calendars My mother took my siblings and I through a Christmas Advent calendar one year. A new-ager raised Christian, she held a positive view of the Bible. I can’t recall any of the biblical stories from those sessions preceding the chocolates each night, but I do have a fond nostalgic memories of…
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Closest Thing I Have to Religion: Robert McCall’s “The Prologue and the Promise”
Robert McCall’s “The Prologue and the Promise” I was unfamiliar with the name Robert McCall when I first stumbled upon “The Prologue and the Promise,” the mural he painted for Disney Epicot’s Horizons attraction in 1983, but I was very familiar with his visionary artwork. His imaginative futuristic designs feature in 2001: A Space Odyssey,…
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The Illuminating and Enigmatic Daisyworld Thought Experiment
Daisyworld Simulation I’ve previously written about James Lovelock’s Daisyworld, a thought-experiment meant to support the Gaia Hypothesis. This is the idea that complex ecosystems create a self-regulating environment conducive to perpetuating life. Examples of this include increased plant growth reducing CO2 in the atmosphere or bacteria drawing salt out of the oceans stabilizing salinity levels.…
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Celebrating the Winter Solstice at The Humanist
Winter Solstice Article in The Humanist The Humanist has posted my celebration of the Winter Solstice, the annual cosmological event around which almost all of the season’s holidays orbit, in the article The Darkest Day: A Quintessentially Humanist Celebration. Here’s a sample: The winter solstice connects me to Galileo, who revealed humanity’s true relationship to…
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How the IPCC’s Climate Report is a Model of Good Science
Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis Credit: IPCC Weighing in at over 1,500 pages, surveying the results from thousands of journal articles, and written by 259 experts from fields including meteorology, physics, oceanography, statistics, engineering, ecology, social sciences and economics, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis…
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Creative Commons Children’s Book: ABC’s of Biodiversity
ABCs of Biodiversity from ideonexus Download a PDF Version Here (30MB) Download a PPTX Version Here (103MB) This book is another tool in the myriad strategies we parents use to teach our children. The ebook format allows something print books don’t: an alphabet book with 10 examples of each letter. This means there are 260…
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Evolutionary Wonders in a Newborn Baby
Want to get closer to your primal beginnings? Have kids. During nine-months of pregnancy, you will learn about all the evolutionarily-influenced mechanics of giving birth, from the fetal acrobatics involved in maneuvering an enormous head required to house our big brains through a birth canal constrained in size so that human females can walk upright.…
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Bird Feeders, Pornography, and Other Evolutionary Traps
“Examples of animals exhibiting maladaptive responses to evolutionary novel objects and becoming trapped. (A) A Cuban tree frog (Osteopilus septentrionalis) ingesting a decorative light that mimics the bioluminescent qualities of its insect prey. (B) A black-footed albatross (Phoebastria nigripes) killed by the ingestion of small, often colorful, floating garbage that mimics food items. (C) A…
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Carnival of Evolution #54: A Walkabout Mount Improbable
Mount Ranier Panorama Credit: Tyler Foote I hope everyone enjoyed their holiday dinosaur this Thanksgiving, and thank you joining me in this delightful excursion out into the wide wonderful world of ideas and expressions in evolution.
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The Science of Mindfulness Meditation and Practice for the Rational Skeptic
Jump to: The Science Fiction of Meditation Mindfulness Meditation Science of Mindfulness Meditation Experimentally-Observed Benefits of Mindfulness Meditation How to Meditate References The Science Fiction of Meditation Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was a deeply flawed movie on many levels, but there was one moment in the film that I thought was brilliant. The Jedi…
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Welcome to Life, A Guide for New Members of Species Homo Sapiens
Welcome to Life Science Children's Book from ideonexus Download a PDF Version Here (9MB) Download a PPTX Version Here (14MB) I was walking through the local forest trail a few months ago, and it was getting dark. As the sky shifted from blue to black, the full moon rose up through the trees creating a…
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Naming is Not Understanding
Evil Eye Galaxy, Messier 64 (M64) Credit: NASA Before becoming a parent, I was well-acquainted with the word “colic.” According to my mother, I suffered from severe colic as a baby, keeping her up all night for weeks with my crying. I’ve also heard parents toss the term about when talking about their baby-raising trials…