Interesting Links for 22-07-2014

[andrewducker]

• "I bought a woodland with 60 strangers" - sounds rather lovely.
  (tags: trees wood UK )
• The Russian Public Has a Totally Different Understanding of What Happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight 17
  (tags: Russia ukraine conspiracy media )
• The Roles Nicolas Cage Turned Down
  (tags: niccage movies )
• Liberal Democrat amendment making revenge porn a crime to

Comments

[andrewducker]

Source paper for the "Children exposed to religion..." article:
http://www.bu.edu/learninglab/files/2012/05/Corriveau-Chen-Harris-in-press.pdf

(Nobody tell Richard Dawkins!)

[supergee]

Having a hard time differentiating between fact and fiction is perfectly reasonable for six-year-olds, and even many of the religiously indoctrinated ones grow out of it.

[andrewducker]

It is perfectly reasonable - but it's interesting that religiously raised children find it harder in general.

[momentsmusicaux]

I'd totally be up for buying part of a woodland! Can we gather 58 more people and find a wood?

[andrewducker]

Get on it!

[andrewducker]

57 to go!

(If I had more energy and stability I'd be tempted to give it a go.)

[momentsmusicaux]

Also, is it just an impression, or are there a lot of breakthroughs surrounding renewable energy at the moment? (Or is it just a bias of your links? ;)

[andrewducker]

I resist the urge to link to more of them (as I wrote about a while back) because _loads_ of them happen, all the darn time.

I think a lot more money is being pumped into renewable energy right now, and anything that makes them cheaper or more effective is getting traction. But I'm not actually convinced that this is great for energy production so much as for purifying water. The "steam" that's produced isn't at terribly high temperatures, but then it doesn't need to be for desalination or distillation.

[asher63]

That was the sense I got from the article. That's an exciting prospect in itself.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I think it has a lot of potential. I'll keep my fingers crossed there isn't some excellent reason why it's not feasible!

[gonzo21]

It's a genuine concern. Russian news media now being 100% owned and operated by the state intelligence services, and the people are... fully prepared to believe everything they hear.

If you ever watch the RT network, you'd honestly think American-backed Fascist armies are already in position and shelling Russian villages from the border.

... seriously. They reported that last week. American artillery was shelling Russian towns.

And the only reason they can be doing this, is to prepare the general public for going to war.

Which, to be honest, is pretty scary stuff.

[drainboy]

Have you any idea of how locked down the Russian internet is? Can people freely look at alternative media sources? Freely read blogs or write them? I'm always slightly incredulous of my own country's media, though I tend to believe the broad strokes unless someone suggests things are specifically wrong. I wonder how many Russians look externally for a more rounded picture of world events.

[gonzo21]

I occasionally bump into one or two Russians here on LJ, I think the language gap is the real problem though.

How many sources from non-Russian news agencies are they likely to find that have been translated into Russian?

Perhaps the BBC need to look at providing a Russian-language version of their news website or something.

(But if they did, I expect it would wind up blocked in Russia very quickly.)

[drainboy]

...or disbelieved as propaganda.

There are websites that auto translate other websites, but I don't know how well or how much they'd be used.

A quick google search suggests 7.5m out of 138m Russians speak English. Not a large enough proportion to make a dent.

I guess the first step would be people wanting to find out information and then finding a source they trusted. For most people that's a step too far. Especially when you'll not like what you find.