A question for your next trivia night

How about this for a trivia question?

What do the following have in common?

1. the discovery of the genetic process for inheritance of characteristics by sexual reproduction
2. the formation of fossils in rocks, which provides a way of estimating the geological age of the earth
3. the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe.

Answer......

they were all theories proposed by Catholic priests.

1. Fr Gregor Johann Mendel (1822 - 1884)

was an Augustinian monk who studied the inheritance of characteristics in peas and bees and is considered the father of genetics.

http://anthro.palomar.edu/mendel/mendel_1.htm

Mendel was a contemporary of Charles Darwin, but Darwin probably did not know of Mendel's work, which is a pity, because it would have helped Darwin to realise the error of his idea of "blending inheritance"

http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/bc/ahp/MBG/MBG2/MBG.Question.02.html

2.St Nicolas Steno (1638 - 1686)

Niels Stenson was born in Denmark where he studied anatomy and then travelled through Europe and was supported in his scientific work by the Grand Duke of Tuscany. He latinised his name to Steno and also converted from his Lutheran faith to Roman Catholicism. He studied geology and explained how fossils are formed, which was a puzzle to the people of the time who thought they somehow grew in rocks. He wrote one of the classical works of geology, "De Solido".

In 1675, Steno was ordained a priest and in the following year he was made a bishop. He did not continue his scientific work after becoming a priest, but he did not deny the truth of his discoveries, which of course can be used to estimate the age of the earth and explain mysteries such as why fossils of seashells are found in rocks on mountaintops.

http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/steno.html

His pious and virtuous life resulted in him being canonised by Pope John Paul II.

3 Fr Georges Lemaitre (1894 - 1966)

Georges Lemaitre was born in Belgium and became a professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain.

He proposed a Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe, which involves the universe starting at one point and expanding at an increasing rate.

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/science/sc0022.html

This was a controversial theory at the time and was opposed by scientists like Sir Fred Hoyle, who proposed a "steady state" universe which has existed forever. Observations made in 1998 by astronomers in California indicate that Fr Lemaitre was right.

Incidentally, Sir Fred Hoyle was an atheist, but he has said that the existence of certain carbon isotopes which are required for life is statistically so unlikely that he has written a book called "The Intelligent Universe"

http://home.planet.nl/~gkorthof/kortho47.htm

This is sometimes quoted by supporters of Intelligent Design, but I don't know if Sir Fred agreed with them.

Roe and Norma McCorvey

Sometimes the personal experiences behind public events are very surprising.

The famous legal case "Roe v Wade" in the US resulted in legalised abortion in that country. The real person behind the pseudonym "Jane Roe" was Norma McCorvey who has since become a campaigner against abortion:

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/1998/roe.wade/stories/roe.profile/

http://www.virtuemedia.org/norma.htm

Faced with this, the "pro-choice" campaigners say that it is the result of the Roe v Wade case that matters, not the individuals involved.

Norma McCorvey says "If they don't care about me, how can they possibly care about anyone else?"

Kokoda Prayer

last night on the History Channel on pay tv there was an excellent programme on the battles on the Kokoda track in WWII. It has just been made and has interviews with Australians and Japanese talking about the same battles from different sides, intermingled with recreations of the battles:
http://www.historychannel.com.au/tv-shows/showDetails.aspx?show=177
There was one interview in the programme which was pretty startling, about the power of prayer. I have put it on YouTube at

What do you think about it?

set up calendar for Google calendar and Thunderbird

There are add-ons for the Thunderbird email client that gives a calendar and allows you to synchronise with Google calendar (ie, if you add an event on Thuderbird, it appears on GCal, and if you add an event on GCal it appears on Thunderbird. I haven't yet tried the case of adding an event on Thunderbird while there is no internet connection active, and then later activating it. Hopefully the new event is then added to GCal.
I am using Thunderbird 2.0.0.16
Lightning 0.9
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/2313
and Provider 0.5
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/thunderbird/addon/4631#reviews

There is a description of how to set these up at
http://bfish.xaedalus.net/?p=239

This seems to be a practical way of synchronising your calendar between a desktop and a laptop.
There are new versions of all these tools coming up (Thunderbird 3.0 later in the year), so some of the details might change, but Mozilla seems committed to adding this as a useful feature.

Freedom Paradox by Clive Hamilton

I have just finished reading the book “The freedom paradox. Towards a post-secular ethics” by Clive Hamilton.

http://www.clivehamilton.net.au/cms/index.php?page=home

I was interested in this because I have heard Clive Hamilton speaking in the media on topical issues and he seems to be prepared to confront issues that are often ignored.

I think he could be fairly described as a left wing journalist, and he constantly says that he is not religious, but he comes to many of the same conclusions as the churches via the path of humanism and atheist philosophy. This can be a tortuous and hilly path, for example he says that “When Jesus said the meek shall inherit the Earth, he meant that only those who transcend their identification with the ego-self in the phenomenon will find the path to the universal Self in the noumenon.” Having read that, I am grateful that Jesus said what he did, in the way that he did.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that Clive Hamilton deserves respect for his open minded examination of topical issues.

My understanding of his case is that when we look at life today, especially in the West, our material prosperity and the freedom movements of the 60’s and 70’s haven’t delivered the promised satisfying and happy life. We might be free, if we want, to ignore the conventions of the past and institutions like the churches, but many people spend their lives following trends and peer pressure under the disguise of “freedom”. The solution Clive Hamilton offers is to follow the innate moral self, which he describes using the ideas of Kant and Schopenhauer.

The problem he sees is:

 “Although few today feel the need to apologize for their lack of religiosity, it is also broadly acknowledged that the collapse of the authority of the church left most people unsure where to look for moral guidance, except to their equally confused friends. In the new autonomous moral universe individuals would be able to choose their own moral standards, subject only to the constraint that others not be injured. Yet even the ethic of consent – hopelessly inadequate when confronted by predicaments that might involve third parties – cannot help us understand what is in our real interests, those moral interests lying beneath the urge to satisfy immediate desires.” (p.118)

Clive Hamilton believes that a “moral self” can be found without religious faith:

 “When we identify with the universal Self the ‘illusion’ of our independent existence falls away and the personal self merges with the universal Self, which is shared by all. We recognize in another our own inner nature. Abolition of the distinction between subject and object and the participation of self in others give rise to what I call ‘metaphysical empathy’, and it is this that forms the grounds of morality and the basis of the moral self. Methaphysical empathy is the awareness of participation in the being of others that arises from identification of the self with the universal essence.” (p.146)

Nevertheless, he recognizes that churches have provided a direction to the moral self:

 “Despite their institutional failings, the churches were traditionally the repositories of those transcendent elements that remind us of our lives beyond the mundane, of our universal Self and its oneness with the noumenon. Although the authority of the churches as keepers of the transcendent has largely collapsed, the metaphysical ground of their former legitimacy is unchanged. Religious ceremonies such as the Mass still allow some individuals to feel a relationship with something transpersonal. But for most of us the loss of our conviction under the weight of science has closed down our access to the numinous. The modern rational mind’s lack of will to believe denies it knowledge of the stream of meaning that runs beneath to surface of daily life.” (p.227)

My personal opinion from reading this book is that Clive Hamilton understands Kant and Schopenhauer better than Christianity, and “institutional failings” and the “weight of science” are not enough to dismiss the truths of the Church. However, his book is an interesting read, and the product of a person without the prejudices of many “public intellectuals” of today.

Ave Maria by Mirusia and Andre Rieu

In his outdoor concert in Maastricht this year, Andre Rieu and Mirusia performed Shubert's Ave Maria.
You can see a preview on YouTube at:


look at the reaction of the audience as well as listening to the music!!

capture YouTube video

To capture a YouTube video, I used the following, using Ubuntu Linux:
-install the "video download helper" firefox add-on. You then just go to the video and click on the icon on the toolbar. This captures the video and creates a .flv flash file.
-use the linux command-line application ffmpeg to convert from flash to mpeg video
( ffmpeg -i old-file.flv new-file.mpg )
-use the linux application devede to convert from mpeg to iso format. (get devede from the synaptic package manager).
-click on the iso file to burn to dvd.
voila!!!