The Kennewick Man

On my archaeology midterm, I answered a question incorrectly about the Kennewick Man. Later, I looked it up, and look what I found:

According to NAGPRA, if human remains are found on federal lands and their cultural affiliation to a Native American tribe can be established, the affiliated tribe can claim them. The Umatilla tribe of Native Americans requested custody of the remains, wanting to bury them according to tribal tradition. However, their claim was contested by researchers hoping to study the remains; if Kennewick Man has no direct connection to any modern-day native tribe, then NAGPRA should not apply.

The Umatilla argued that their creation myths say that their people have been present on their historical territory since the dawn of time, so a government holding that Kennewick Man is not Native American is tantamount to the government's rejection of their religious beliefs.

I found this hilarious, at least at first. The courts can't reject the Umatilla tribe's claim of connection to the Kennewick man, because that would be rejecting their religious beliefs? Hilarious.

So what happens if I believe, as part of my religion, that Native Americans, in ancient times, defected from and killed off a righteous civilization? What if I believed--religiously, of course--that Native Americans deserved retribution for this crime? You can't say that they did nothing to deserve it, because that would be tantamount to rejecting my religious beliefs!

If you thought I was just making that religion up, you'd be wrong. This has historically been believed by Mormons.

After reading that, I looked around Wikipedia some more (you know how it is), and I read about the American Indian Religious Freedom Act. I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. I'm all for religious freedom, but under most circumstances, religious people should not be allowed to do things that would otherwise be illegal. I consider the AIRF act to be a sort of grandfathering in of Native American religions. If a group started a new religion and just claimed that, say, marijuana was part of their religious practices, then I doubt that this would be legal, because this new religion has not been grandfathered in.

50% chance of doomsday

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Large Hadron Collider
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I love how Walter Wagner claims that the LHC has a fifty percent chance of destroying the earth. See, there are two possibilities: the LHC will destroy the earth, or it won't. Each outcome has a one in two chance, so it's fifty-fifty.

The fatal flaw is that he's assuming all possibilities are equally likely. That assumption may work for coin flips, or for rolling dice, or for picking colored marbles out of a black bag, but it fails spectacularly when applied to less artificial situations, doesn't it?

Cosmic rays are constantly bombarding the earth, sun, and other observable bodies. In the entire history of the earth, about 3 x 10²² cosmic rays have hit the earth with higher energies than the energy of the LHC collisions (from the LSAG report). So it's sort of like we've already flipped the coin thirty thousand billion billion times, and gotten heads every time. I think it's safe to say at this point that it's a two-headed coin.