Does the Universe Have a Purpose?

Does the Universe Have a Purpose?
No.
That’s my point of view, the same camp as Peter William Atkins and Christian de Duve.
Christian de Duve made my day
There should be a lot of rewriting in Jean Staune’s recent book, where quoting de Duve is used to support a purposeful universe. It will be funny to [...]

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freedom of speech

And freedom to say whatever one believes. I just wrote elsewhere that I’m prompt to help opponents widely display their opinions. I think this is the best thing to do, including to have an easy mean to link to them when we disagree and wish to clearly indicate that we don’t make up stupidity, we [...]

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Birth of an iceberg

A quite big baby shown in an animated gif, it’s birth over several months. Enough ice for the Ouzo during a century, I assume.
Who should one congratulate for such births?

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Inner ear hair cells produced in vitro by a mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition

Inner ear hair cells produced in vitro by a mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition
Zhengqing Hu and Jeffrey T. Corwin
PNAS October 16, 2007 vol. 104 no. 42 www.pnas.orgcgidoi10.1073pnas.0704576104 (abstract below the fold).
And to make a bundle, a press release from ESF on New Stem Cells by Reprogramming. And just for the pleasure to read it once [...]

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PS3 cluster

Just got this one by e-mail, from CM (:-*)
And this is from Wired: Astrophysicist Replaces Supercomputer with Eight PlayStation 3s
I don’t know if this is a supercomputer replacement, but the guy did it. A cluster of 8 PS3 using Linux for his calculations.
Go and read the story either at Wired or at the PS3 [...]

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Denyse, avoid showing your ignorance

Denyse, that’s Denyse O’Leary, is on a cartoon trip and that’ a good thing, helping get stress away; you know, laughing a little bit is always good.
But Denyse is Denyse and she is of the IDiot crowd, so she manage to say absolutely remarkable things in every single occasion:

I still cannot figure out why anyone [...]

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pareidolia

If one believes that (a) is an apparition of (b) you may bet he may believe whatever or that he is a blunt liar.
I wondered what kind of mental disease maya make you believe such crap and who the guy seeing in the flames an apparitions of JPII could be.
Well, he is service director Jarek [...]

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WTF

What the fuck a numerology assistant intended “for numerologists, astrologers, and people who are interested in discovering synchronicity in their lives” is doing at Apple’s Math & Science section?
Get it out of there.Via the General comments feedback form:

Hi there,
I suppose there is an error at the category where Q-Decode [http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/math_science/qdecode.html] is presented. For numerologists and [...]

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PLoS ONE Picks

A few interesting ones this week also, and I have a pile of unread yet. That will be a studious week-end.

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Creationism to be banished from schools

After the recent resolution of the European Counsil, a first step is done “Creationism to be banished from Swedish schools“
A second step must be done as soon as possible “Creationism banned from European schools”
To Dembski’s question, “How far is the U.S. from following Sweden’s lead?” the answer is obvious : It’s already done Billy-boy. Obviously, [...]

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