I think Microsoft is working on it.

I ran across this little calculation on the New Jersey Humanist Network:

In Morality and Religion, it was stated that "this data indicates that theists are more than 40 times more likely than atheists to end up in prison." The number 40 was calculated from the following data: 1) atheists make up 0.209% of the US prison population, and 2) atheists make up 8-16% of the general US population.

(Minor point: "data" is a plural noun.)

Those numbers bother me a lot. I don't trust them—there are just too many faulty assumptions behind them. One is the comparison between prison populations and the US population overall: the people who are likely to end up in prison aren't drawn randomly from the population, but are more likely to come from the ranks of the poor and uneducated, who are also less likely to be atheists. Another is the assumption that the prison population is willing to freely report their religious beliefs. There may be an accentuated social cost to atheism in a prison environment.

And maybe atheists are too clever to be caught, and when they are caught, Satan sends his most ruthless lawyers to help them out.

On a related note, New Scientist reports that the sneakiest primates have biggest brains.

Monkeys and apes who are good at deceiving their peers also have the biggest brains relative to their body size. The finding backs the "Machiavellian intelligence" theory, which suggests the benefits of complex social skills fuelled the evolution of large primate brains.

Of all the terrestrial mammals, primates have by far the largest brains relative to their body size, with humans having the largest of all. The enlargement is almost exclusively in the neocortex, which makes up more than 80% of the mass of the human brain.

Large brains, despite being energetically costly, benefited primates because they conferred complex cognitive skills. But which skills were the priority - was it clever food-finding strategies that were most valuable, for example, or complex social skills?

Earlier studies have hinted that social abilities were the key. And now Richard Byrne and Nadia Corp, psychologists at St Andrews University in the UK, have found more direct evidence for this after studying records of primates deceiving each other for personal gain.

See? Machiavellian, sneaky, cunning, brainy...that's us atheists. No wonder we're good at avoiding prison.

Well, first I was miffed that The World Wide Rant stole my creationist-bashing schtick to pick on the superstitious lot at York, but I forgive him for this nice line:

The question one must ask, if evolution started with a single-celled organism, who created the single-celled organism? Your response to the question will give you the answer that we should teach creationism in public school biology classes.

Duh, obviously a very complex organism without need of a creator created the single-celled organism! It's so obvious!

He also reports on some Texas creationism, a sad little story in the Texas A&M paper...about biology grad students emerging with some unfortunate deficiencies.

But for Mandi Vest, a graduate student in plant pathology, an evolution-based class strengthened her belief in creationism.

It is not the point of grad school to indoctrinate students into a particular religious view (even if some people argue that grad school is a cult), but still...you expect them to come out of biology grad school with some ability to critically evaluate scientific evidence.

Finally, on the political front, the coup has already happened.

Inspired by the early handover of sovereignty in Iraq, President George W. Bush employed the element of surprise once more last night, holding the U.S. presidential election four months early.

The election, about which only top Bush administration officials were notified, went exceedingly well for the president, who carried all fifty states and garnered approximately one hundred percent of the vote.