On Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize

When Norway's Nobel Committee awarded its Peace Prize to Barack Obama, they hit America's right-wing zealots with egg in the face. Here's how Steven Weber put it at Huffpo:

As the predictable mobs of crypto-racist/sexually repressed obstructionists coagulate around the recipient, the Norwegian Nobel committee has acted unilaterally and struck a blow for the rest of humanity. The big tent Republicon party, which shelters everyone from flat-earthers to Taitz birthers, from gun-toters to Swift Boaters, in other words every scrap of social flotsam which identifies with the right's disdain for All Things Other, is coming away from its stakes.

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The correlation between religiosity and intelligence.

Gad Saad of Psychology Today reports that really smart people tend to not be religous. I know that this topic is going to stir up a lot of emotion, but it is quite clear that our smartest scientists tend to not follow religions. Not that there aren't lots of blisteringly smart believers out there, some of them first-rate scientists. The trend says that Nobel Prizes mostly go non-believers.

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Astrophysicist George Smoot explores how the universe congealed into structures.

In this TED video, astrophysicist, cosmologist and Nobel Prize winner George Smoot studies the cosmic microwave background radiation -- the afterglow of the Big Bang.  Smoot presents his lecture with the help of dramatic images created through the crunching of massive amounts of real-life data. The bottom line is that…

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Dozens of top scientists support Obama for President.

Obama understands the importance of science as an important part of grappling with the huge problems Americans are facing.   Hence, this important vote of confidence by numerous nobel laureates. During the administration of George W. Bush, vital parts of our country's scientific enterprise have been damaged by stagnant or declining…

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