Sunday, January 6, 2008

2007 Lists from SD Times

SD Times recently published several lists for 2007, including the following...
  1. Catching Up With Recommended Reading.

  2. The Best Sites for Developers.

  3. Best Blogs of 2007. I'm adding most of these to my Bloglines.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

New Rationalist Videos

Two new fantastic sets of secularist/atheist videos are now available. The general focus of both of these efforts is general apprehension over the rise of fundamentalism in the world today. Specifically, concerns include the prominence of religiously motivated terrorism, politically

  1. The so called "Four Horsemen" (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris & Christopher Hitchens) are available here.

  2. The Second annual Beyond Belief symposium is a refreshing followup to the first, whose focus seemed to be "the new atheism". Beyond Belief is a consortium of well-known academics and scientific professionals focused on faith in an age of reason. My favorite sessions are those focused on recent research, in particular David Sloan Wilson (partly a response to Dan Dennett's presentation), Jonathan Haidt, Gregory Clark, and Pat Churchland. John Allen Paulos' presentation was enlightening. I was particularly interested in Scott Atran's presentation regarding terrorism. Sam Harris' speech was excellent as well.