The article asserts that verses 124–130 in the second sūrah of the Qurʾān (al-Baqara/“the Cow”) alludes to the biblical precept (Genesis 17) but presents the practice as a custom that has no special virtues, and certainly not those the Jews ascribed to it. It then claims that circumcision is identified as one of Abraham’s trials, which are mentioned in the Qurʾān and thus part of early Islam, and that this idea did not arise in the Middle Ages.

It is shown that quantum mechanics is a plausible statistical description of an ontology described by classical electrodynamics. The reason that no contradiction arises with various no-go theorems regarding the compatibility of QM with a classical ontology, can be traced to the fact that classical electrodynamics of interacting particles has never been given a consistent definition. Once this is done, our conjecture follows rather naturally, including a purely classical explanation of photon related phenomena. Our analysis entirely rests on the block-universe (...) view entailed by relativity theory. (shrink)

An introduction to yoga discussing its usefulness in improving breathing and body building and describing the yoga positions.