The weekly report on the SPI Fellows
by Johnny Monsarrat
Already the world’s largest secular think tank, the Secular Policy Institute welcomes three new members this week!
Advisory Board Member Douglas Kinney is a lifetime member of several secular organizations, and was married at the Center for Inquiry in New York. A retired US Coast Guard Lieutenant Commander and US Army Major, KinneyÔÇÖs long military experience includes being a document courier with top secret clearance, air traffic controller, pilot. As a dentist he has worked for the military, a state prison, and in private practice for 30 years until retiring in 2007. He lives now in Belgium.
SPI Fellow Kevin Perrott is a cancer survivor who is now one of the leading figures in the life extension movement. His organizations work to cure disease, disseminate treatments, and extend the healthy human lifespan. He is founder and CEO of the Aging Research Network (AgeNet), Executive Director of the Methuselah Foundation Mprize, co-founder of SENS Research Foundation and LifeStar Institute, and a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
In other news, check out the TED Talk by SPI Fellow John Allen Paulos, an American professor of mathematics at Temple University, who speaks on Stories vs. Statistics and notices that 2015 is a palindromic year, because it can be written as 11111011111 in binary notation.
And SPI Fellow Michael Semple, Visiting Research Professor in the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at QueenÔÇÖs University Belfast, has written an article for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Making Peace with the Taliban, in which he says, once we acknowledge that in Afghanistan, neither side can win, this can open doors to better peace talks with religious fanatics.