Religion May Become Extinct

...in nine nations, says study.

A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers.

Science! Math!

The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation.

The team's mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.

The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

Note, I don't see the USA on that list...

"In a large number of modern secular democracies, there's been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%."

There's more about being a member of a group, speaking dead languages - read more

Wow. Just imagine.

A Study in Obedience

Obedience: the act or practice of obeying; dutiful or submissive compliance.

Gamers More Perceptive

University of Rochester has discovered an alarming phenomenon: Playing video games trains the brains of players to be more perceptive than the rest of us:

"According to the researchers, video game players develop a heightened sensitivity to what is going on around them, which improves a variety of general skills, for example: multitasking, driving, reading small print, keeping track of friends in a crowd, and navigating around town."

Gamers also become better at probabilistic inference, which is the ability to flexibly calculate probability based on whatever is going on.

That's great, but it still isn't going to get these guys laid anytime soon.... we're just going to KNOW we're not going to get laid.