Category — General

Canadian Was Falsely Accused, Panel Says – washingtonpost.com:
Some crucial questions about the incident remain unanswered, at least publicly. Over the repeated objections of O’Connor, the federal government censored much of the testimony given during the proceedings as well as some of the final report. O’Connor’s report said a federal court should be asked to decide whether to disclose some of the censored items.

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what part of ‘innocent until proven guilty’ and ‘due process’ won’t our freedom loving(sarcasm) governments ignore?

Opinions: ‘Baby bomber’ by Josephine Wall | Prospect Magazine October 2006 issue 127:
Google made obsessively tracking progress of my bad joke an easy task. A week after the solicitor’s letter, the controversy had appeared in 35 newspaper articles. Ten days later and my quote had appeared on nearly a thousand websites. An online store started selling t-shirts depicting tiny swaddled babies strapped to rockets, with proceeds to Mumsnet and the NSPCC.

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The article is funny until the end when you realize… that people are now self-censoring their own political and economic humor in order to avoid legal harassment.

Free Wikis for Educators:
Adam Frey and the gang at Wikispaces want to give away 100,000 free wikis to educators and I think we should help them meet their goal, don’t you? You can create a public space that is open to anyone, a protected space where anyone can see the work but only members can edit, or a totally private space where only wiki members can work. in other words, there’s a flavor for every taste.
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wikis are evil.

Gabe Wachob: RIP Rob “lilo” Levin:
Rob Levin (aka “lilo” or “somegeek”), the head of PDPC and the leader of the Freenode IRC network, passed away today after being hit by a car while riding his bike. The news came to me through a global notice on freenode at 14:18 pacific time today.

We’ll miss you, lilo…

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I’ll add my sentiment to Gabe’s. I only knew Rob online, but we had some nice conversations and I tried to help him when i could. Lilo always tried to do the right thing, though sometimes that was difficult. He was a good guy and this is really a sad day. I wish his family the best in these tough times.

Crumbs! Web site gives archivists food for thought – Yahoo! News:
The British Library may have raised academic eyebrows when
it decided that a Web site with this mission statement should
be archived among those that may be of social significance,
stamping it a modern classic of British popular culture.

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archiving cultural website, whodathought.

links for 2006-09-16:
GNU LilyPond – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Free music transcribing software (tags: music software wikipedia gnu) LilyPond, music notation for everyone (tags: application design audio free freeware gnu language mac macintosh macosx mediawiki mt music open_source opensource osx script software…
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This is pretty cool

Is God an Accident?:
As predicted, when asked about biological properties, the children appreciated the effects of death: no need for bathroom breaks; the ears don’t work, and neither does the brain. The mouse’s body is gone. But when asked about the psychological properties, more than half the children said that these would continue: the dead mouse can feel hunger, think thoughts, and have desires. The soul survives. And children believe this more than adults do, suggesting that although we have to learn which specific afterlife people in our culture believe in (heaven, reincarnation, a spirit world, and so on), the notion that life after death is possible is not learned at all. It is a by-product of how we naturally think about the world.

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so you believe in religion… that’s ok said the apologist… it’s natural.

Richard Morin – When Malls Stay Open on Sundays, the Pious Party – washingtonpost.com:
Gruber and Hungerman found that when states eliminated blue laws, church attendance declined while drinking and drug use increased significantly among young adults. Even more striking, the biggest change in bad behavior mostly occurred among those who frequently attended religious services, they report in a working paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, “The Church vs. the Mall: What Happens When Religion Faces Increased Secular Competition?”
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this is unsurprising. what it likely means though.. is that far more of these frequent attenders, will claim that the bible endorses war and giving your money to some random bloke to build glass churches.

Internet research 7.0 Conference Program:

The conference program is available here, in PDF format.

Prejudice and fear surrounding sexual pleasure makes me weep:
You’ve seen the bumper sticker: “You think education is expensive? Try ignorance.” The costs of sexual ignorance are far, far greater than the costs of honest sexual education.
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knowledge in this case is necessary, to keep someone in ignorance because of personal embarassment seems to be antithetical to the spirit of education.