Posty Post

Thar she blows me hearties. Below, find a whole mess of links about a variety of subjects. Enjoy!

But first... Went into work for 6:15 am today to finish up a time sensitive project by 9 am. Gah. The whole day went pretty quickly. It's becoming quite busy at the office, with lots of work being generated by the fluctuating grain and fuel prices... Tired now.

While on a walk after lunch today my coworker and I spotted our neighborhood's resident turkey stalking around in the middle of the road at an intersection. It strutted up to the stoplight, cutting in between a stopped motorcycle and SUV, and proceeded to chase the motorcycle when it turned left when the light turned green. It didn't stop there. The evil little creature (yeah, he's great and we all love him) took his time exploring the intersection and kept traffic at a really slow speed while everyone in the area traversing through made room for the turkey. Yeah. It was quite a site.

I didn't find anything about turkeys chasing motorcycles, but here's one out in Ohio that looks just like our turkey, dangling chest feather and all, chasing a cop... Repeatedly.

And now - on with the posty post!

For the photographically inclined: Bokeh Photograph how-to wiki. Boke (often spelled bokeh) is a term used to describe images that have a sharply focused subject surrounded by a blurry background.

Example:


Speculation on possible voter fraud attempts is revealed in a 43-page study (PDF) that reveals the frausters methods:
( Read more... )

One solution recommended by the authors: Voters can use the website and call-in line of Election Protection, a national nonpartisan voter-protection coalition, to get accurate information. And don't forward e-mails about voting procedures, even if they look authentic.

Elsewhere: About 53% of working Americans have had a work-related phone call or email while in the bathroom. The survey (commissioned by Nokia) discussed in the article also talks about how the lines dividing work and personal life are also blurring; about 62% of workers have had their personal lives interrupted by work ten or few times each week and vice-versa.



It doesn't stop there, however, another study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project is raising questions about the value of "connectedness" that comes with increased use of the internet and cell phones by families. Sounds just like the stuff done by radio and for television when those two technological devices were marketed to the public. New habits for old, new habits for old!

And what if people are biologically unsuited for (achieving) the American Dream? Peter Whybrow, head of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Behavior at UCLA paints a disturbing picture of 21st century American life, where behavioral tendencies produced by millions of years of scarcity-driven evolution don’t fit the social and economic world we've constructed. Foremost among Whybrow's targets is the modern culture of spending on credit.

The answers aren't easy, Whybrow goes on to caution — but they do exist. People can think creatively about jumping from the treadmills of bad jobs and unmeetable needs; and even if this isn't always possible, they can teach their children to live modestly and within their means. Urban engineers can design cities that allow people to live and work and shop in the same place. Governments can, at the insistence of their citizens, provide the social safety nets on which social mobility, stagnant for the last 50 years, is based. And we can — however much it hurts — look to Europe for advice. Oh. crabbyolbastard? He mentions ponzi schemes in relation to the economy. Heh.

"You can think about markets in the same way as individuals who mortgaged their future — except markets did it with other people's money," he said. "You end up with a Ponzi scheme predicated on the idea that we can get something now, rather than having to wait. And it all comes back to the same instinctual drive."

That's right, stagnant for the last 50 years.

Neither Whybrow nor you, my reader, should be surprised about there being more to be outraged over with AIG. It's a take the money and run type of attitude it seems. AIG seems to think it doesn't need to act responsibly nor soberly in the current economic climate.

Further elsewhere: Thousands volunteer to Expose DNA Secrets to the World. 'No need to ask, I'll tell' mentality gets even more personal.

Interruption of regularly scheduled grumblings:

Awwww. Baby giraffe Bonsu! More baby animals here!

On a lighter note: For a little YA reading for the cryptologist ENIGMA - A Magical Mystery by Graeme Base was just released. Of course, anyone who has read Graeme Base knows that the best parts are below the surface. Each page has its retinue of hidden images, some of which are clues, some visual puns, and some of which are just plain fun. Best of all, Enigma declares that he wrote down all the locations of the missing items, but in a code he no longer remembers. The secret to the code is in the back of the book: a machine with three dials and... well, you see where this is going. Cracking the code adds a whole new layer to the book.

Check out this truly bizarre set of counterintelligence posters some viewable here on Wired's Danger Room. All of the ones available on the ONCIX website are located here. Enjoy!

Okay zombie lovers Dead Space is launching their webisode finale! As space-zombie videogame Dead Space racks up kudos internet-wide with this week's release of the PC version, parent company Electronic Arts has unveiled the final webisode of No Known Survivors.

For six weeks, No Known Survivors has been streaming back-stories building out from the game's main scenario. The series is one branch of a multiplatform synergy attack from EA, which also includes a comic book spinoff (pictured) and a deal with Starz to produce an animated Dead Space movie.



Music addicts… that want to stay or go legit, check out LaLa.

In politics; as goes Colin Powell, so goes Google. Rather, Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt.

Please protest this outrage:

From ginmar; Until the dotted line is what is on gin's post, and this is the situation:

Woman who was beaten says DA's office mishandled her case
I'm reposting this with mindslide's permission, and urge you all to do the same. This is mindslide's experience with her friend's case. This is a gross injustice. How do we right this? How do you start an internet petition?

All comments in regular type are mindslide's; remember, this is her friend who was treated this way.

Not a strong enough headline, in my opinion.

Headline and article here.

That is a story about my friend, Shadayra.

When I had my jaw wired shut, I had a friend who was going through the same thing. Only, while I had mine wired shut due to a planned surgery, she had hers wired shut because her exbf broke into her house, expressed his intent to kill her, then choked her and beat her senseless, breaking her jaw and severely damaging her facial bone structure.

In the early morning hours of Jan. 1, Shadayra Kilfoy-Flores picked herself up off the floor of her apartment. Unable to see out of her right eye, she watched as her attacker, Christopher Burns, grabbed her cell phone and took it with him as he left her apartment. She stumbled down the hallway for help.

You wouldn't know it to look at Kilfoy-Flores now, but she spent the remainder of that night in the hospital, where doctors determined she had suffered five fractures to her face that required her jaw to be wired shut for eight weeks, and the bone and tissue around her right eye to be reconstructed with metal plates. The emergency room doctor called it a "blowout" fracture, meaning that her eye was not moving correctly because of nerve damage.

During a preliminary hearing for Burns on April 10, Kilfoy-Flores testified on the details of the attack. According to the hearing transcript, Burns, while screaming he wanted to kill Kilfoy-Flores, kicked the door to her apartment open. Once inside, he grabbed her by the neck, cutting off her airway for up to 30 seconds. He threw her across the dining room table, then onto the floor, where he punched her repeatedly in the face during an attack that lasted between six and seven minutes.

Shadayra originally had a DA who was going to go after the perp for burglery and battery. The max sentence for burglery is 10 years, while the max sentence for battery is a whopping 18 months.

The original DA assigned to her case, however, has retired. The case was assigned a new DA and she, as a victim, never recieved notice of that. In addition, the new DA offered the perp a plea bargain.

She is angry about the potential sentence, too. The plea deal dropped the maximum number of years Burns could serve in prison from just over 11 years to 18 months. Last week, Kilfoy-Flores attempted to resolve the issue through an informal complaint process that involved a meeting with Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard, members of his staff, and Jennifer Rhodes, the victims services specialist with the Wisconsin Department of Justice.

Blanchard maintained that some miscommunication between his staff is to blame for Kilfoy-Flores not being told of the plea, but he said no legal errors were made by his office in prosecuting the case. Not satisfied with that explanation, Kilfoy-Flores is in the process of filing a formal complaint with the Crime Victims Rights Board, an independent agency with staff support from the Department of Justice. She said an understaffed district attorney's office coupled with the fact that the attack was a minority-on-minority crime -- she is Hispanic and her attacker is African-American -- led to her case not receiving adequate attention.

I am really pissed about this. I had to drive this woman to work for months because even after all the reconstructive surgeries, she still can't see out of one eye. I don't understand how this dude is going to walk because the DoJ switched up the attorney handling her case without notifying her, so her voice could be heard BEFORE offering the guy a plea bargain. A dude is going to walk because the DA fucked up.

She refuses to believe her case was properly handled, citing sections of state statute 971.095. The statute reads, in part:

"...the district attorney shall, as soon as practicable, offer all of the victims in the case who have requested the opportunity an opportunity to confer with the district attorney concerning the prosecution of the case and the possible outcomes of the prosecution, including potential plea agreements and sentencing recommendations."

It also says: "... if a person is charged with committing a crime and the charge against the person is subsequently dismissed, the district attorney shall make a reasonable attempt to inform all of the victims of the crime with which the person was charged that the charge has been dismissed."

I mean, this beating was fucking brutal, and he had every intention of killing her and actually DID take something from her home -- her cell phone.

Blanchard conceded that miscommunication between members of his office did occur in this case when former Assistant District Attorney Lynn Opelt, who was handling Kilfoy-Flores' case, retired in July. The case was then reassigned to Assistant District Attorney Chris Genda.

Blanchard said that while he would never use the office's staffing shortage as an excuse for how victims are treated, he said miscommunication between his staff and victims could happen less frequently if attorneys had more time to spend with each case file. According to the state Department of Administration, the Dane County District Attorney's Office is in need of 11 more attorneys.

"We do our best not to put the staffing problems of our office on the shoulders of the victims," Blanchard said. "But victims are effectively competing with each other for the attention of too few attorneys."

The change in attorneys also meant a new approach to the case.

While Opelt felt there was sufficient evidence to charge Burns with two felonies -- burglary, which carries a maximum prison time of 10 years, and substantial battery, which brings a maximum 18 months -- Genda didn't prosecute Burns for both. She offered a plea deal that dismissed the burglary charge in exchange for Burns pleading guilty to substantial battery. He accepted.

"The new attorney decided that burglary was not a charge that could prevail at a trial," Blanchard said of Genda. "And I agree with her."

In order to get a burglary conviction, Blanchard said the prosecution would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Burns entered Kilfoy-Flores' apartment with the intent to steal or to commit another felony. Proving that intent would have been difficult, Blanchard said.

After hearing the testimony, Dane County Circuit Court Judge Juan Colas said: "There is ample probable cause for a number of felonies based on the testimony and the evidence that's been presented," according to a transcript of the hearing.

The case then moved into arraignment, with Opelt entering the felony burglary charge against Burns. Burns stood mute to the charges, a move that automatically results in the court entering a not guilty plea on a defendant's behalf. This move also forces the prosecution to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

"He broke my door in and planned to kill me," Kilfoy-Flores said. "He bashed my skull in and now is having his freedom handed to him on a platter."

Disgusting. Our system fails.

# How the fuck are you NOT going to charge the dude when you have the evidence to prove it and the JUDGE even says theres ample evidence to prove it?
# Even more disgusting, how is burglery punishable up to ten years while beating a woman is punishable up to 18 months?

Any ideas on what she could do, or how I can help or motivate others to help as a citizen? Can I write the judge a letter or something??

Edit: Help us out and do something about it --

Contact DA Brian Blanchard by mailing or e-mailing the following addresses:

Dane County Courthouse Room 3000
215 S Hamilton St
Madison, WI 53703-3297
Tel / TTY: (608) 266-4211
Email: blanchard.brian@mail.da.state.wi.us

Spread this around.

----------------------
This was the response I made to the DA:

Mr. Brian Blanchard,

I was told about Shadayra's case via a mutual friend, and I just don't understand how burglary carries a maximum 10 year sentence, but bashing
in a person's skull, leaving her with permanent injuries with the intent to murder her only gets you 18 months?

As described, the event involved; breaking and entering, assault and battery, theft (or burglary, depending on cost of said cell phone), a hate crime, and last but certainly not least - Attempted Murder. Why isn't this man being charged with any of these other crimes?

The assailant/perpetrator broke into the victim's residence in order to assault her, beating her to within an inch of life (with the probable intent to have her die of her injuries) and then stole what he took as her only means of calling for help given his possible belief of the extent of her injuries.

Shadayra's attacker is black, Shadayra is hispanic. Those are two different races and race may have been a factor. Why isn't the Hate Crimes Enhancer being utilized? Why not use it as a base to establish a black/hispanic hate crime and maybe expand upon the factor gender played in court, even though it (nor sexual orientation) is not a basis for a hate crime as of yet? It would play well with a jury. As concerns hate crimes and race: Does it count as a hate crime only if one of the races involved is white or wouldn't the law count black on hispanic crimes?

I thought the purpose of plea arrangement was to keep less violent offenders out of prison so that space could be used for the real
threats? So choking and beating a person's head and leaving them for dead in isn't violent enough? And what happens in 18 months when he gets out and comes back after the victim?

Please do whatever can be done. This is a hate crime. It victimized Shadayra, and showed every other (hispanic) woman that this could happen to them, when dealing with a (black) man - and yes, you can put any other race into the two placers and get the same result - and nobody would help them.

Justice is not being served in this situation. Please do something. The world is, literally, watching. Thank you for your time.

Cordially,

Ms. Real Name
Member of the Concerned Public



Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws.
- Plato

I included the signature quote for the emphasis to act responsibly. Hopefully it adds the final twist to my argument. I would suggest responses in a similar vein, from everyone and anyone, regardless of physical location. There was someone from the UK in the comments who wanted to make sure she wasn't just going to seem sensationalist by writing from there. I'm not a voter in Wisconsin - neither is she and we are part of world-wide public response and outcry for justice. I may note that the DA may be trying to use this as a platform to create an outcry of his own to change the Substantial Battery maximum sentence but this isn't the right way to do it. I will edit with the response I get or put it in a new post with a link back to this one.

Rise up and protest!

Edit: Went to the article linked in the original post again, here and got this as a response:

We are currently in the process of upgrading our systems. Thank you for your patience.

Wonder if they are changing the article or upgrading the system in general. It goes all the way up to the parent website so it is probably the latter. Can't find a copy of the article cached... wish I could.

Religion versus Science - Controversy in the UK

Religion vs science: can the divide between God and rationality be reconciled?
By Paul Vallely
Saturday, 11 October 2008
Article from The Independent

''A clergyman in charge of education for the country's leading scientific organisation – it's a Monty Python sketch," pronounced Britain's top atheist, Richard Dawkins, recently.

The problem was that Reiss, as well as being an evolutionary biologist and population geneticist, is a non-stipendiary priest in the Church of England. When he said recently that science teachers should answer questions about creationism if pupils asked them he was deemed to have been advocating the idea that British schools should teach the idea that the world was magicked up (complete with fossils and ancient geology) just 6,000 years ago – and then tell pupils to make their own minds up between that and the theory of evolution to which the overwhelming scientific evidence points.

The hapless Reiss made it clear that he insists creationism is scientific nonsense. But a handful of the Royal Society's most eminent members began a campaign to have him sacked. Sir Harry Kroto, Sir Richard Roberts and Sir John Sulston said in a letter to the president of the Royal Society: "We gather Professor Reiss is a clergyman, which in itself is very worrisome." We must all now be on the look-out, it now seems for Revs under the beds.

The idea that science and religion are incompatible is a fairly recent import into contemporary culture. It has been given huge credence by the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States. The pronounced motivation of Islamic fundamentalists in 2001 hammered home that some people are prepared to inflict outrageous acts of inhumanity in the name of religion.

Yet the roots of the shift in attitude go back much further. "It came about because of a perfect storm – a wide range of factors came together," says the atheist philosopher Julian Baggini. Among them were a shift from liberal to evangelical Christianity in Britain, the rise of creationism in America, advances in scientific techniques in biology and changes in public perception on issues as disparate as homosexuality and assisted dying.

But we are leaping ahead here. The relationship between science and religion has had a long and chequered history since the settled days of the medieval consensus, which saw faith and the natural sciences as part of a cosmic whole. Galileo put paid to that with his insistence that the earth revolved around the sun. The Catholic Church, which saw man and his planet at the centre of the universe – and which already felt its authority threatened by the rise of Protestantism – locked horns with him. The clash became a metaphor for the irreconcilability of scientific materialism and biblical literalism.

Things changed with Isaac Newton. His laws of physics led to a world view which relegated God to background status as the designer of a clockwork world which he wound up and then left to its own devices. Newton's celestial mechanics brought an advance in our scientific understanding but didn't really work for a faith that wanted to believe that, through the historical Jesus, God had become, in the words of the song "a slob like one of us".

Next came Darwin. At first many saw his theory of evolution as a threat to religion but mainstream Christianity soon accepted evolution as the answer to the "how" of creation, leaving the "why" questions of meaning and morality to faith. Science and religion exercised authority over two discrete compartments of life between which there could be no link.

But through the latter half of the 20th century a synergy developed. In cosmology the science of the expanding universe and the Big Bang chimed in with a moment of creation. The inherent uncertainty that quantum physics discovered at the subatomic level overturned Newton's mechanics and created room for a "God of the gaps". Process theology embraced evolution and said men and women are called to play a part in an ever-ongoing creation. Advances in neuro-science showed that mental and spiritual phenomena depend upon biological processes, undermining the old dualist notions about body and soul and offering a more holistic body-mind-spirit axis.

"Attacks on religion, when I was a student in the Sixties, were largely on political grounds," says Dr Denis Alexander, the Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion in Cambridge. "It was seen to be on the side of capitalism and the rich." In Anglo-American philosophy, says Baggini, "religion was seen as wrong but as something that didn't really matter much. The world was going secular and eventually it would just die out."

But the rise of Christian fundamentalism in America in the past few decades – the word fundamentalist in its religious sense was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in only 1989 – was mirrored in a milder way in Britain too. Liberal Christianity, so long in the ascendant in the Church of England, began to lose ground to evangelicalism. "Non-literal Christianity failed," says Baggini, "because it doesn't capture the popular imagination. The certainties of evangelical Christianity appeal more to those for whom the attractions of religion are on a more visceral level." This appeal was symbolised through the 1990s by the Alpha course on the basics of the Christian faith devised in London by a curate at Holy Trinity, Brompton, which has since been used by more than 10 million people in 160 countries. The idea that the miracles of the New Testament may have been metaphors rather than literal truths suddenly went out of fashion in Christian circles.

Throughout this time scientists such as Richard Dawkins had evidenced a disdain for such simple certainties. In his 1976 book The Selfish Gene there were a few side-swipes at religion and in 1986 in The Blind Watchmaker he conducted a sustained critique of the 18th-century deist argument that the world is too complicated to have sprung into existence by accident so a rational observer should conclude that it must have been designed, just as someone finding a watch would conclude that somewhere there must be a watchmaker who made it. And by 1991, in response to the question of why evolution had allowed religion to thrive, he had coined the notion that religion was a virus.

But it was the terrorist attacks in 2001 that turned Dawkins into an Alpha atheist and transformed him from an academic backwater into a populist ideologue. Before 9/11, he said, religion may have appeared a "harmless nonsense". But the attacks in New York showed it to be a "lethally dangerous nonsense". Previously, he said, "we all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let's now stop being so damned respectful!" The gloves were off.

But another prominent atheist, medic and secularist, the Liberal Democrat MP, Dr Evan Harris, is not so sure that 9/11 was the nodal point. "It's not the main thing to scientists," he insists. "When you talk to them the thing that comes up most often is the influence religion has had on science in America under George Bush." Religious pressures there have had direct impacts on a wide range of policy – from a ban on public money being put into stem cell research to a refusal to allow US aid programmes to hand out condoms to fight Aids in Africa. "Scientists who are publicly funded can't go to conferences and speak without being obliged to stick to the Bush line," says Harris.

Advances in bio-technology have opened up new areas for disagreement. Test tube babies, embryo selection, saviour siblings, stem cell research and animal-human cybrids have all created new battlegrounds between those who think that an embryo is a person from the moment of conception to those who think it is merely a cluster of cells before implantation or even birth – and all variety of opinions in between.

"There is a definite danger of our desire for research outstripping our capacity to anticipate the ethical implications of those advances," says the feminist theologian, Tina Beattie, whose book The New Atheists argues that Dawkins & Co misuse Darwin and evolutionary biology as much as the Christian fundamentalists misuse the Bible. "Some scientists experience religion as merely an irritating brake on their striving to do new things." The public, after a list of scientific disasters from thalidomide and nuclear weapons to BSE and the stealing of dead children's organs at Alder Hey, are much more suspicious, judging that "scientists have problems policing their borders".

From a very different perspective Andrew Copson, the director of education for the British Humanist Association, agrees. "Scientists are fearful so the issue has become very emotive," he says. "They fear that, behind what people like Michael Reiss say, there lies a Trojan horse." It is perhaps significant here that the two main instigators of the campaign to have Reiss ousted from his Royal Society job, Sir Harry Kroto and Sir Richard Roberts, are now based in the United States where creationism is a major phenomenon. Polls suggest that around 45 per cent of Americans are creationists with 40 per cent believing that God worked through evolution and just 10 per cent saying it was nothing to do with a God.

The experience of being a secularist in the US is clearly a radicalising one. "I don't know if it is too late to stop the slide in Britain but I think it is in the US where [the religious right] have now almost complete control over politics, the judiciary, education, business, journalism and television," Kroto, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1996, has said, adding darkly: "The Royal Society does not appreciate the true nature of the forces arrayed against it."

The position in the UK is nothing like that, though the statistics are unclear. A 2006 BBC poll claimed that 48 per cent of the British public accepted evolution with 22 per cent preferring creationism but the definitions it used were so sloppy as to be almost meaningless. A survey of schoolchildren has suggested that more than 10 per cent now believe in creationism. But the Evangelical Alliance, whose members now number around 3 per cent of the UK population, reckons that only a third of its members – about 1 per cent of the population – are creationists. About a third think Genesis is merely symbolic, and a third believe that God worked through evolution but is still capable of intervening in specific ways. Its most recent, unpublished, survey shows that the proportion seeing the Genesis account as symbolic is increasing, the EA's Head of Theology, Dr Justin Thacker, says.

Evan Harris accepts that the number of British schools teaching creationism is tiny. But, as an MP, he is worried about the increasing activity of religious lobby groups in public life. "Groups like the Evangelical Alliance, the Christian Institute and Christian Action Research and Education are now all much more organised and active in seeking to change public policy. They are making the running in parliament, much more than the leadership of the Catholic Church. The Church of England's bishops are much more evangelical too; their centre of gravity has changed form the days when liberals ruled the roost. And the C of E has been much more active in Parliament."

All this is having a real impact, Dr Harris suggests. "In the days of Thatcher all the mainstream Tories voted in favour of embryo research. Twenty years on most of the new suave modernising Cameroonian Tories vote against it." Academics detect a similar shift. Professor Steve Jones, of University College London, who has been teaching genetics and evolutionary biology for 30 years, has said that religious students – even those studying medicine – are becoming increasingly vocal in their opposition to evolution, demanding to be exempted from classes and exam questions on the subject.

Creationism, like Coca-Cola, came here from the United States. The American lobby group Answers in Genesis, with its $13m annual budget, now has an office in the UK from where staff go round giving illustrated talks about how humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth together. Another conservative group, Truth in Science, has adopted a strategy of lobbying for schools to "Teach the Controversy" in an attempt to get Intelligent Design, a spin-off of creationism, taught alongside evolution in school science lessons. In 2006 it sent resource packs to the heads of science of all British secondary schools; New Scientist claims that 59 schools have used, or plan to use, them.

The fear generated by such tactics is what did for Michael Reiss. "Even if he doesn't support all this, what he said might be seen to give succour to it," says Andrew Copson of the British Humanist Association. "I can understand why alarm bells go off with people who are familiar with 'Teach the controversy' tactics of people who want to baby-step creationism into our science classrooms."

All of this mystifies the vast majority of the nation's Christians who have been taught since the time of St Augustine, who died AD430, that where there appears to be a conflict between demonstrated knowledge and a literal reading of the bible then the scriptures should be interpreted metaphorically. They see no conflict between faith and reason because, as Pope John Paul II put it: "God created man as rational and free, thereby placing himself under man's judgement." Just last month the present Pope reiterated the same line, warning of the dangers of fundamentalist readings of the Bible. Each generation, he said, needs to find its collective interpretation of the text. For this task of interpretation – which can never be never completely finished – science offers a major tool.

It all perplexes academics who specialise in the interplay between science and religion too. Creationism doesn't just involve many scientific errors, it relies on a major theological one too. "When Robert Burns tell us his love 'is like a red, red rose', we know that we are not meant to think that his girlfriend has green leaves and prickles," says the particle physicist and Anglican priest, Sir John Polkinghorne. Why, he wonders, would any rational person want to read the Bible in that way?

The world of science he encounters is a much more subtle one. "There's a cosmic religiosity among physicists," he insists, though "biologists see more ambiguity, perhaps because they look at the wastefulness of nature, and perhaps because sequencing the human genome has made them triumphalist." It is more complex even than that: the head of the Human Genome Project, Dr Francis Collins, last year published a book about his journey from atheism into faith arguing that science and religion, far from being irreconcilable, are in fact in deep harmony.

In the past 30 years an area of inter-disciplinary activity has opened up to explore this. Areas of research include cognitive neuro-sciences and issues like freewill and consciousness and whether human minds are merely matter or something more. In evolutionary psychology they have also explored together questions like the origins of altruism – asking whether evolutionary biology can give an adequate account of why people are willing to sacrifice themselves on behalf of others. In paleobiology they are asking questions like how eyes evolve in different lineages – suggesting that evolution isn't a random or chance process but is channelled by certain chemically-determined pathways. In cosmology there is a universe versus multiverses debate.

"All that going on, but all the public knows about is Dawkins," says Dr Denis Alexander of the Faraday Institute in Cambridge. "Academic discussion on the relationship between science and religion is genuinely exploratory, not polarised. To most people in it Dawkins just sounds rather odd."

John Hedley Brooke, who recently retired as the first Professor of Science and Religion at the University of Oxford, is more sanguine. "These eruptions take place from time to time historically," he shrugs. "Dawkins is just a throwback to 19th-century rationalism. He has a strong emotional antagonism that is very indiscriminate and treats all kinds of religion the same. A lot of fine distinctions that get lost in the polemics. The problem is that it is all a cumulative process in which the extremes feed off one another."

"Paradoxically, Dawkins is the biggest recruiter for creationism in this country," says Denis Alexander. Recently, he says, Bill Demcksi, a leading US creationist, e-mailed Dawkins to thank him for his assistance. "The danger is that all this polarisation will make some believers more anti-science which is not a clever move tactically." He hopes that whoever succeeds Dawkins as Oxford's Professor of the Public Understanding of Science is more interested in promoting science than in attacking religion.

On the other side of the argument Evan Harris is unapologetic about contributing to what Julian Baggini waggishly calls this "assertiveness inflation". "It's good that there's this tension," the MP says. "These debates need to be had in public. Science has nothing to fear from them. I don't think we're winning; we've won a few battles; but there's a war to be fought." He concedes that Michael Reiss may have been sacked unfairly – saying that the "overstrong line" taken by Kroto and Co should not be taken as representative of all on the secular side – but points out that employment injustices are perpetrated every time a church school refuses to appoint a maths teacher because she doesn't "have Jesus in her heart".

The danger is that between the strident secularists and the fanatical fundamentalists some important middle ground is being squeezed out. "Dawkins sees religion as credulous, superstitious and prejudiced but mature religious traditions teach people to challenge all that," says Tina Beattie. "Science will never offer an answer to the parents of Madeleine McCann. Nor will it ever be irrational to go to a Mozart concert, though science can never explain the genius of his music. The new atheism completely misunderstands the way that human beings experience the poetry and narrative of life."

Perhaps the conflict is not between science and religion but between good and bad ways of doing both. In all of us there will always be a struggle between the craving for certainty, purity and closure and the acceptance of mystery, brokenness and provisionality. At their best, both scientists and people of faith are in a permanent state of awe-struck humility before the wonder and strangeness and messiness of things. At their worst, they are arrogant, dogmatic, and incurious. There's a bit of both in all of us, of course.

---------------------------

Huzzah! for the red squirrel!