By General on 5/29/2009 3:18 AM

27 May 2009 by Andrew Robinson

 

WRITING is one of the greatest inventions in human history. Perhaps the greatest, since it made history possible. Without writing, there could be no accumulation of knowledge, no historical record, no science - and of course no books, newspapers or internet.

 

The first true writing we know of is Sumerian cuneiform - consisting mainly of wedge-shaped impressions on clay tablets - which was used more than 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Soon afterwards writing appeared in Egypt, and much later in Europe, China and Central America. Civilisations have invented hundreds of different writing systems. Some, such as the one you are reading now, have remained in use, but most have fallen into disuse. These dead scripts tantalise us. We can see that they are writing, but what do they say? That is the great challenge...

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By General on 4/6/2009 12:47 PM

Romanes Lecture at Oxford University, held on December 2, 2008

Vice Chancellor Dr John Hood, members of the faculty, students, distinguished ladies and gentlemen : I am very honored to be invited to deliver the Romanes Lecture at the world famous Sheldonian Theater at Oxford.   It is indeed a privilege for me to become a part of this great, hundred- year old tradition at Oxford University. Thank you for inviting me here. I have chosen today as the title of my speech "A Poverty Free World-  When? How?"  because I believe that not only is poverty  the most pressing issue of our time, I also believe, at the same time, that it is a problem that we have fully the capacity to tackle and overcome  within the first half of this century - if only we choose to do so. I am a compulsive optimist as far as poverty is concerned. I am an optimist because I am convinced that poverty is not as difficult or complex an issue as we are constantly told it is.  After all, poverty is about people.  I have always said that the ingredients for ending poverty comes neatly packaged within each person.  A human being is born in this world fully equipped not only to take care of him or herself, but also endowed with the ability to enlarge the well being of others in the world....

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By General on 2/5/2009 11:54 AM

 

IN JULY 1837, Charles Darwin had a flash of inspiration. In his study at his house in London, he turned to a new page in his red leather notebook and wrote, "I think". Then he drew a spindly sketch of a tree. As far as we know, this was the first time Darwin toyed with the concept of a "tree of life" to explain the evolutionary relationships between different species. It was to prove a fruitful idea: by the time he published On The Origin of Species 22 years later, Darwin's spindly tree had grown into a mighty oak. The book contains numerous references to the tree and its only diagram is of a branching structure showing how one species can evolve into many. The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile largely speaks the truth... The tree-of-life concept was absolutely central to Darwin's thinking, equal...

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By General on 2/5/2009 11:52 AM

ONCE upon a time, 4.6 billion years ago, something was brewing in an unremarkable backwater of the Milky Way. The ragbag of stuff that suffuses the inconsequential, in-between bits of all galaxies - hydrogen and helium gas with just a sprinkling of solid dust - had begun to condense and form molecules. Unable to resist its own weight, part of this newly formed molecular cloud collapsed in on itself. In the ensuing heat and confusion, a star was born - our sun. We don't know exactly what kick-started this process. Perhaps, with pleasing symmetry, it was the shock wave from the explosive death throes of a nearby star. It was not, at any rate, a particularly unusual event. It had happened countless times since the Milky Way itself came into existence about 13 billion years ago, and in our telescopes we can see it still going on in distant parts of our galaxy today. As stars go, the sun is nothing out of the ordinary. And yet, as far as we know, it is unique. From a thin disc of stuff left over from its birth,...

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By General on 1/28/2009 3:25 PM

Jan. 27, 2009 -- A sperm-looking creature called monosiga is the closest living surrogate to the ancestor of all animals, according to new research that also determined animal evolution may not always follow a trajectory from simple to complex. Yet another find of the study, published in the latest PLoS Biology, is that Earth may have given rise to two distinct groups of animals: bilaterians -- animals with bilateral symmetry, like humans -- and non-bilaterians, which include corals, jelly fish, hydra, unusual, often poisonous, creatures known as cubozoans, and other organisms. Free-living, unicellular organisms called choanoflagellates, however, could be on every person's family tree, so long as it was a gigantic one. "It is clear that the choanoflagellates -- living representative is monosiga -- are the best candidate for the nearest relative of animals," co-author Rob DeSalle told Discovery News. ...

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By General on 1/6/2009 3:37 AM

 

 

By Professor Jim Al-Khalili University of Surrey  Isaac Newton is, as most will agree, the greatest physicist of all time. At the very least, he is the undisputed father of modern optics,­ or so we are told at school where our textbooks abound with his famous experiments with lenses and prisms, his study of the nature of light and its reflection, and the refraction and decomposition of light into the colours of the rainbow. Yet, the truth is rather greyer; and I feel it important to point out that, certainly in the field of optics, Newton himself stood on the shoulders of a giant who lived 700 years earlier. For, without doubt, another great physicist, who is worthy of ranking up alongside Newton, is an Iraqi scientist born in AD 965 who went by the name of al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham. Most people in the West will never have even heard of him. As a physicist myself, I am quite in awe of this man's contribution to my field, but I was fortunate enough to have recently...

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By General on 12/28/2008 12:58 PM

Please see:

http://revelation-online.blogspot.com/search/label/Theism

Press older posts below right to see the other books.

You will see 2 buttons, Rapidshare or Filefactory. Rapidshare is the best one, but only allows 1 download at a time. When using Filefactory, you go down the new page that opens and will see a grey small window beneath a red window. In the grey window you see the lowest sentence given in blue (Download with filefactory Basic), this is the link to the free download.

By General on 12/28/2008 12:54 PM

Please see:

http://revelation-online.blogspot.com/search/label/Islam

Press older posts below right to see the other books.

There are some very good books among them, the cambridge companion to the Quran, the Blackwell companion to the Qur'an, the Qur'an an Encyclopedia by Leaman, the Qur'an and the secular mind, Islamic Legal Theories by Hallaq.

 

You will see 2 buttons, Rapidshare or Filefactory. Rapidshare is the best one, but only allows 1 download at a time. When using Filefactory, you go down the new page that opens and will see a grey small window beneath a red window. In the grey window you see the lowest sentence given in blue (Download with filefactory Basic), this is the link to the free download.

By General on 12/22/2008 4:01 AM

By Kamran Pasha

It’s a miracle (Obama, that is) The Hajj, the grand Pilgrimage to Mecca, has just ended after having attracted a record four million Muslims from all over the world for a week of worship in the vast Arabian desert. I attended this year for the first time and experienced one of the most remarkable and transformative events known to humanity. Believers of every race, nation and age brought together to transcend our differences and unite before God.

But there was one topic that was on everyone’s lips as we sat together under a tent in the pilgrim camp at Mina – the improbable election of Barack Hussein Obama to the Presidency of the United States. Everyone I spoke with expressed wonder at God’s will in bringing such remarkable change after eight years of George W. Bush. Most were hopeful that Obama could restore to America its prestige as the moral leader of the world, squandered so recklessly by an Administration that redefined the meaning of the word “hubris.”

There was much...

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By General on 12/21/2008 7:02 AM

 When researchers ran a computer simulation of the universe rewinding towards the big bang, they made an unexpected discovery. At first, the universe started becoming smaller and denser as the galaxies converged, but then instead of becoming infinitely dense at the big bang, the universe bounced and started expanding again. So is our universe recycled from an older cosmos?

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