Leonard Nemoy, the actor who played the memorable Mr. Spock, has passed away. He was 83.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/fe...bangladesh

EXCERPT: A prominent American blogger of Bangladeshi origin was hacked to death with machetes by unidentified assailants in Dhaka, police said, with the atheist writer’s family claiming he had received numerous threats from Islamists.

The body of Avijit Roy, founder of Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog site which champions liberal secular writing in the Muslim-majority nation, was found covered in blood after the attack which also left his wife critically wounded....

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree...-believers

EXCERPT: Vienna’s wish for an organic, integrated form of Islam that avoids foreign influence risks creating an official religion distrusted by ordinary Muslims...

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/201...ring-test/

EXCERPT: [...] Unfortunately, the popular conception of A.I., at least as depicted in countless movies, games and books, still seems to assume that humanlike characteristics (anger, jealousy, confusion, avarice, pride, desire, not to mention cold alienation) are the most important ones to be on the lookout for. This anthropocentric fallacy may contradict the implications of contemporary A.I. research, but it is still a prism through which much of our culture views an encounter with advanced synthetic cognition.

[...] I argue that we should abandon the conceit that a “true” Artificial Intelligence must care deeply about humanity — us specifically — as its focus and motivation. Perhaps what we really fear, even more than a Big Machine that wants to kill us, is one that sees us as irrelevant. Worse than being seen as an enemy is not being seen at all.

Unless we assume that humanlike intelligence represents all possible forms of intelligence – a whopper of an assumption – why define an advanced A.I. by its resemblance to ours? After all, “intelligence” is notoriously difficult to define, and human intelligence simply can’t exhaust the possibilities.

[...] We need a popular culture of A.I. that is less parochial and narcissistic, one that is based on more than simply looking for a machine version of our own reflection. As a basis for staging encounters between various A.I.s and humans, that would be a deeply flawed precondition for communication. Needless to say, our historical track record with “first contacts,” even among ourselves, does not provide clear comfort that we are well-prepared....

http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-first...1688228821

EXCERPT: Think people going bald here in the 21st century have it tough? Just imagine what the folks of 100 years ago went through. Balding men were apparently so desperate for hair that they'd let a doctor near them with this terrifying machine....

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/s...59519.html

EXCERPT: What is America’s greatest contribution to the arts? Time was when many, perhaps most, people would have pointed to the Broadway musical as the likeliest candidate for admission to the pantheon. Theatergoers around the world have long rejoiced in the delights of the genre, including some whom one might well have thought too snobbish to admit its excellence. (Evelyn Waugh, who had next to no use for anything made in America, saw the London production of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me, Kate a half-dozen times, pronouncing it, according to one biographer, “ingenious and admirable.”) But big-budget musical comedy has been in increasingly steep decline since the 1970s, and 10 long years have gone by since The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, the last homegrown musical to be wholeheartedly embraced by audiences and critics alike, made it to Broadway.

Since then, we’ve seen a parade of what I call “commodity musicals,” the slavishly literal throwaway stage versions of hit movies that now dominate Broadway, as well as a number of highly imaginative small-scale musicals that, to date, have failed to draw large-scale crowds. But the old-fashioned school of Oklahoma! family musical appears to be all but gone for good, killed off by the disintegration of the common culture that made it possible in the first place....

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/201...144911.htm

EXCERPT: The recent slowdown in climate warming is due, at least in part, to natural oscillations in the climate, according to a team of climate scientists, who add that these oscillations represent variability internal to the climate system. They do not signal any slowdown in human-caused global warming.

"We know that it is important to distinguish between human-caused and natural climate variability so we can assess the impact of human-caused climate change on a variety of phenomena including drought and weather extremes," said Michael Mann, Distinguished Professor of Meteorology, Penn State. "The North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans appear to be drivers of substantial natural, internal climate variability on timescales of decades."...

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015...e-religion

EXCERPT: [...] In this wide-ranging, accessible and lively study, [Greg] Garrett goes on to show how various kinds of afterlife are represented in films and television series, comics and music – all of them expressing beliefs and attitudes about how we ought to live....