California Constitution Preamble: We are greatful to Almighty God

If a job requires you swear an oath of loyalty, “without mental reservations,” to the California State Constitution and you do not have religious beliefs, could you swear to support and defend this statement?

If that same job prohibits discrimination in hiring based on religion, which would win, the requirement of the oath or your freedom to hold secular views?

Did you know this was in the CA Constitution?

CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION
PREAMBLE

We, the People of the State of California, grateful to Almighty God for our
freedom, in order to secure and perpetuate its blessings, do establish this
Constitution.

http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/const-toc.html

Even the Spineless Feel Pain

Can invertebrates feel pain?

“No” is the scientific consensus thus far on all but octopuses — but that may just reflect an ingrained human bias against “simple” animals.

Last spring, Robert W. Elwood of Queen’s University Belfast and graduate student Mirjam Appel caused ripples when they reported that hermit crabs — those little crustaceans that live in salvaged seashells — appear to experience pain. The two biologists subjected each crab to a slight electric shock delivered by wire through a hole in its shell. The shockee hastily exited its shell and rubbed its abdomen where it had been zapped—much as we and other vertebrates respond to painful stimuli.

Now Elwood and Appel have gone further, showing that hermit crabs not only seem to feel pain, but can remember it, too. The team’s shocked subjects usually reenter their mobile homes, but during the twenty-four hours following the bad experience they are more likely than unshocked crabs to inspect an empty shell nearby. In fact, a half hour after the shock, they’re also more likely to abandon their old shell altogether and trade it in for the new one.

Scientists usually invoke reflex, as opposed to pain sensation, in explaining invertebrates’ responses to noxious stimuli. One key criterion they use to identify pain objectively in vertebrates is the creation of memories that affect such decisions as the hermits’ shell swap. By that measure, Elwood and Appel argue, hermit crabs—and perhaps other crustaceans—probably do feel pain.

This research was published in the journal Animal Behaviour.

via Even the Spineless Feel Pain | LiveScience.

‘Sex dungeon’ found in sleepy Devon village

Officers were alerted after neighbours reported “unusual behaviour” and “strange sounds” coming from the four-bedroomed house in Lee Mill, Devon.

Police arrived with battering rams to raid the home but after a plain clothes officer knocked on the door the residents let them in – thinking he had an appointment.

The sex dungeon was then found in a converted room filled with “hundreds” of items including whips, gas masks, wooden bats, handcuffs, clothes pegs and shackles.

Police also discovered bondage chairs with straps, straight jackets, sex toys, gimp masks, S&M outfits, shackles, cattle prods and car batteries used to power the toys.

The dungeon was also stuffed with “various electrical vibrating” items and a recording studio complete with computer equipment and mixing desk.

Detective Sergeant Stuart Gilroy of Devon and Cornwall police said officers made the “startling” discovery last Friday (26/02) afternoon.

But during the raid one “customer” arrived at the home – and still asked for his appointment despite the large police presence.

DS Gilroy said: “We were surprised to uncover this to say the very least. Upon searching the house we found a room set up as a dungeon. …

Ds Gilroy said the home – near a Tesco supermarket – had been a suspected brothel and police had expected to make a forced entry.

But they were “welcomed” in by the occupants and after executing a warrant discovered the dungeon on the first floor. …

A 38-year-old man from Lee Mill, a 21-year-old woman from Ivybridge, Devon, and a 24-year-old woman from Plymouth have been arrested in connection with the incident.

They have been released on police bail until April 30 to allow police to carry out further enquiries.

DS Gilroy said: “We are glad to have disturbed this activity and restored normality to the neighbourhood. We would also like to thank residents who reported the activity to us.”

Inspector Phil Chivers, police inspector for the South Hams, added: “This incident demonstrates that we, the police, are reliant on information from the community.”

via ‘Sex dungeon’ found in sleepy Devon village – Telegraph.

What other abnormalities may lurk in the sleepy village of Detective Sergeant Gilroy?

Man Goes To Court To Prove He is Not Dead

A weird story proving the absurdity of bureaucratic approach took place in Russia’s Yakutia Republic. A 55-year-old male local resident was listed as dead for eight months over a mistake at the registrar office. The man had to go to court to prove that he was actually alive.

The man was declared dead on July 20, 2009. He learned of his own death after he had to go to hospital. The man’s relatives were supposed to collect a number of documents confirming his physical condition of a disabled person. They went to the pension fund, where they were told that the man, named only as Nikolai, had already been dead.

The stunned relatives went to the registrar office to report the mistake. They had to visit many offices and conduct a number of inspections, albeit to no avail: the people could not prove that the man was alive. In the end, they addressed to the Commissioner for Human Rights in the Republic of Yakutia.

The “living dead” was shocked with the story, although, luckily, the bureaucratic crusade had not affected his condition.

Nikolai went to the registrar office himself, but he could not convince the officers that he was not dead. The court eventually ordered the office to cancel the man’s death account.

Bureaucrats have not provided anything to compensate the man’s material or moral damage. …

via World around us: Man Goes To Court To Prove He is Not Dead.

Nasca Lines Explained?

Since they became widely known in the late 1920s, when commercial air travel was introduced between Lima and the southern Peruvian city of Arequipa, the mysterious desert drawings known as the Nasca lines have puzzled archaeologists, anthropologists, and anyone fascinated by ancient cultures in the Americas. For just as long, waves of scientists—and amateurs—have inflicted various interpretations on the lines, as if they were the world’s largest set of Rorschach inkblots. At one time or another, they have been explained as Inca roads, irrigation plans, images to be appreciated from primitive hot-air balloons, and, most laughably, landing strips for alien spacecraft.

After World War II a German-born teacher named Maria Reiche made the first formal surveys of the lines and figures—called geoglyphs—outside Nasca and the nearby town of Palpa. For half a century, until her death in 1998, Reiche played a critically important role in conserving the geoglyphs. But her own preferred theory—that the lines represented settings on an astronomical calendar—has also been largely discredited. The ferocity with which she protected the lines from outsiders has been adopted by their caretakers today, so that even scientists have a hard time gaining access to the most famous animal figures on the plain, or pampa, immediately northwest of Nasca. …

To most people today, Nasca is all about the lines. But although the Nasca were certainly the most prolific makers of geoglyphs, they were not the first. On a hillside abutting a plateau south of Palpa sprawl three stylized human figures, with buggy eyes and bizarre rays of hair, that date to at least 2,400 years ago—earlier than almost any textbook date for the start of the Nas­ca civilization. Reindel’s group has attributed no fewer than 75 groups of geoglyphs in the Palpa area to the earlier Paracas culture. These Paracas geoglyphs, which often depict stylized humanlike figures, in turn share distinct visual motifs with even earlier images carved in stone, known as petroglyphs. …

These new findings make an important point about the Nasca lines: They were not made at one time, in one place, for one purpose. Many have been superimposed on older ones, with erasures and overwritings complicating their interpretation; archaeologist Helaine Silverman once likened them to the scribbling on a blackboard at the end of a busy day at school. The popular notion that they can be seen only from the air is a modern myth. The early Paracas-era geoglyphs were placed on hillsides where they could be seen from the pampa. By early Nasca times the images—less anthropomorphic, more naturalistic—had migrated from the nearby slopes to the floor of the pampa. Almost all of these iconic animal figures, such as the spider and the hummingbird, were single-line drawings; a person could step into them at one point and exit at another without ever crossing a line, suggesting to archaeologists that at some point in early Nasca times the lines evolved from mere images to pathways for ceremonial processions. Later, possibly in response to explosive population growth documented by the German-Peruvian team, more people may have participated in these rituals, and the geoglyphs took on open, geometrical patterns, with some trapezoids stretching more than 2,000 feet. “Our idea,” Reindel says, “is that they weren’t meant as images to be seen anymore, but stages to be walked upon, to be used for religious ceremonies.” …

The legacy of the Nasca lives on in the lines, of course, and although most people come to admire them from the air, what I’d seen and heard convinced me that you can’t truly understand the geoglyphs unless you experience them at ground level. In one conversation, Isla had described to me the sensation of walking upon those sacred paths. “You can feel it,” he said.

via Nasca Lines – National Geographic Magazine.

Stone Age Engravings Found on Ostrich Shells

Long before human communication evolved into incessant tapping on computer keys, people scratched on eggshells.

Don’t laugh—researchers say a cache of ostrich eggshells engraved with geometric designs demonstrates the existence of a symbolic communication system around 60,000 years ago among African hunter-gatherers.

The unusually large sample of 270 engraved eggshell fragments, mostly excavated over the past several years at Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa, displays two standard design patterns, according to a team led by archaeologist Pierre-Jean Texier of the University of Bordeaux 1 in Talence, France. Each pattern enjoyed its own heyday between approximately 65,000 and 55,000 years ago, the investigators report in a paper to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers already knew that the Howiesons Poort culture, which engraved the eggshells, engaged in other symbolic practices, such as engraving designs into pieces of pigment, that were considered to have been crucial advances in human behavioral evolution. But the Diepkloof finds represent the first archaeological sample large enough to demonstrate that Stone Age people created design traditions, at least in their engravings, Texier says.

Evidence of intentionally produced holes in several Diepkloof eggshells indicates that ancient people made what amounted to canteens out of them, a practice that researchers have documented among modern hunter-gatherers in southern Africa.

The engraved patterns probably identified the eggshells as the property of certain groups or communities, Texier proposes.

“The Diepkloof engravings were clearly made for visual display and recognized as such by a large audience comprising members of a community, and probably members of related communities,” comments University of Bordeaux 1 archaeologist Francesco d’Errico, who was not involved in the new study.

D’Errico participated in the recent unearthing of 13 pieces of engraved pigment at South Africa’s Blombos Cave dating to between 100,000 and 75,000 years ago. Along with perforated sea shells and other personal ornaments previously excavated in Africa and the Middle East, these discoveries show that items holding symbolic meaning were made more than 60,000 years ago by both modern humans and Neandertals.

Even more exciting, according to archaeologist Curtis Marean of Arizona State University in Tempe, is the presence of drinking spouts in the South African eggshells. Water containers opened a new world of travel across arid regions for ancient people, he notes.

“The ability to carry and store water is a breakthrough technological advance, and here we have excellent evidence for it very early,” Marean says. “Wow!”

…

via Stone Age Engravings Found on Ostrich Shells | Wired Science | Wired.com.

US court rules ‘Zombies have free speech rights’

A court has allowed a group of protesters dressed as zombies to continue with a lawsuit against police who arrested them for disorderly conduct.

The appeal court overturned a previous finding that the group had correctly been arrested over a 2006 protest in a shopping centre.

The group had been wearing makeup designed to make them look like and extra in a horror flick, with white faces, fake blood and black circles round their eyes.

They then proceeded to stagger round the shops, urging consumers to “get your brains here”.

They also carried audio equipment, which police described as “simulated weapons of mass destruction”, even though they were mobile phones.

The appeals court ruled that the police had no reason to imprison the protesters simply for “dressing as zombies, and walking erratically in downtown Minneapolis,”

via US court rules ‘Zombies have free speech rights’ | Metro.co.uk.

Surreal Chilean Skies

A video has emerged of strange lights in the Chilean sky on the day before the massive 8.8 earthquake, causing speculation about whether the apparition was a HAARP projection or UFO warning related to the impending disaster. Others point to similar videos taken in China and Haiti prior to the recent earthquakes in those countries, and the possibility that shifts in the earth’s crust have a dramatic effect on the atmosphere.

Whatever the case, there is at least one eyewitness account of strange lights being present in the sky at the time that the ground opened up in Chile. Cecelia Lagos, a Chilean reporter, was interviewed by CNN and described seeing the sky change colors outside her window as her house shook. Although the CNN clip wasn’t available, here’s an MSNBC video of her telling a similar story and the transcript from the actual CNN interview, in which she compares what she saw to a seen out of the big blockbuster disaster film, 2012:

Cecelia Lagos – “Besides, I saw through my window, while I was still in bed, I saw the sky changing colors, it was absolutely surreal. I really thought it was the end of the world…I don’t know I hope you understand me because I’m not exaggerating really because I saw it through my window like that. That was the most terrifying thing seeing the sky changing colors with the terribly, amazingly,strong movement of the earth, I thought, ok…this is mother earth… the earth opened up and buildings crumbled into the earth …like in the movie 2012…”

via Surreal Chilean Skies | Reality Sandwich.

Church must accept reality of false memories of sexual abuse

Contrary to popular belief, the brain does not record memories like a tape recorder. False memories of sexual abuse can seem perfectly real.

Last April, I wrote a column on the topic of false memories of childhood sexual abuse and the misery that such memories, typically “recovered” during therapy, can cause.

On Friday, in my role as a member of the scientific and professional advisory board of the British False Memory Society (BFMS), I was more than happy to be a signatory to a letter to the archbishop of Canterbury concerning the views expressed by the Rev Pearl Luxon, safeguarding adviser to the Church of England, who is responsible for child protection issues. Luxon apparently accepts her advisers’ assertion that “there is no such thing as ‘false memory’” and that, “It is quite common when people have suffered severe trauma for memory to be patchy and disjointed.”

These are dangerous and uninformed views for someone in such an influential position.

The letter to the Rowan Williams, which I would urge you to read in full for a more informed perspective on the subject of false memories and the truth about memory for traumatic events, concludes by asking how Luxon might have come to adopt such views in the first place.

The sad truth is that such views about the nature of memory are still surprisingly common among people in all walks of life, despite well over a century of scientific research into the way memory works. Luxon asserts that “there is no such thing as ‘false memory’. It is either a memory or it is not.”

I can only assume that such a view must be based upon the erroneous notion that memory in some sense works like a tape recorder or a video camera, accurately recording all that happens around us. According to this view, ‘real’ memories would always be 100% accurate replays of previous events as we originally experienced them. Anything that is not 100% accurate is therefore not really a memory at all, and therefore false memories cannot exist.

A survey last year of more than 600 undergraduates at a Midwestern university in the USA revealed that about 27% believed that memory does indeed operate like a tape recorder. Other surveys show that 36% of us believe that our brains retain perfect records of everything we’ve ever experienced, a mistaken view that, worryingly, is shared by some psychotherapists.

The truth is that memory is always a reconstructive process, not a reproductive one. What we think we recall about events, with degrees of confidence ranging from uncertainty to absolute conviction, is actually a construction based upon a mixture of accurate recollections and gaps filled in upon the basis of our general knowledge and beliefs about what is plausible, our expectations, fragments of recollections of other similar events, and even input from dreams, fantasies and imagination.

Importantly, our confidence in the memory is not a reliable guide to its accuracy. …

For most people, a little reflection on their own personal experiences of memory is enough to convince them that memory does not work like a tape recorder and that false memories do occur. Research into memory, and in particular the processes underlying the formation of false memories, has proved this beyond all reasonable doubt.

The fact that the Church of England official responsible for child protection appears not to have familiarised herself with the evidence on a topic that is central to her role is deeply worrying.

via Church must accept reality of false memories of sexual abuse | Chris French | Science | guardian.co.uk.

Is the author saying that there is not really as much abuse as the Church thinks? Whatever his point about the abuse, it is important to understand that memory is an active and reconstructive process. We don’t remember events. We remember the last time we remembered the event, and each time we recall, the memory changes a bit, almost always without our realizing that we are morphing the facts to fit our beliefs.  I get mental blocks at times. I couldn’t remember the word “jalapeno” a few days ago.

Chilean Quake May Have Shortened Earth Days

The Feb. 27  magnitude 8.8 earthquake in Chile may have shortened the length of each Earth day.

JPL research scientist Richard Gross computed how Earth’s rotation should have changed as a result of the Feb. 27 quake. Using a complex model, he and fellow scientists came up with a preliminary calculation that the quake should have shortened the length of an Earth day by about 1.26 microseconds (a microsecond is one millionth of a second).

Perhaps more impressive is how much the quake shifted Earth’s axis. Gross calculates the quake should have moved Earth’s figure axis (the axis about which Earth’s mass is balanced) by 2.7 milliarcseconds (about 8 centimeters, or 3 inches). Earth’s figure axis is not the same as its north-south axis; they are offset by about 10 meters (about 33 feet).

By comparison, Gross said the same model estimated the 2004 magnitude 9.1 Sumatran earthquake should have shortened the length of day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted Earth’s axis by 2.32 milliarcseconds (about 7 centimeters, or 2.76 inches).

Gross said that even though the Chilean earthquake is much smaller than the Sumatran quake, it is predicted to have changed the position of the figure axis by a bit more for two reasons. First, unlike the 2004 Sumatran earthquake, which was located near the equator, the 2010 Chilean earthquake was located in Earth’s mid-latitudes, which makes it more effective in shifting Earth’s figure axis. Second, the fault responsible for the 2010 Chiliean earthquake dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle than does the fault responsible for the 2004 Sumatran earthquake. This makes the Chile fault more effective in moving Earth’s mass vertically and hence more effective in shifting Earth’s figure axis.

Gross said the Chile predictions will likely change as data on the quake are further refined.

via NASA – Chilean Quake May Have Shortened Earth Days.

Yikes.