I keep thinking that
Unicode
has everything, but it turns out that it doesn’t. In particular, there’s a
collection of emoji
that’s been proposed, but hasn’t been approved by the powers that be.
The reason I bring this up is that recently, the pope made some
remarkably boneheaded comments; naturally, people pointed and laughed,
because that’s what you do when someone says [...]
Bennett Haselton has an interesting
article
at Slashdot about how to develop a “scientific” test for child
pornography.
Given that Slashdot is all about technology and gadgets and stuff, you
might expect the article to describe a new image-recognition algorithm
or something, and wonder how it could possibly work on such a
subjective problem. But he doesn’t; in his proposal, the
“measurement”, if [...]
You may remember a
story
from last year about a 16-month-old infant who was starved to death by
his mother for not saying “Amen” at mealtime. Today’s
Post has a
followup.
The story is ghastly and appalling, and the mother is obviously crazy
by any reasonable definition of the term. But that doesn’t mean that
she’s legally insane:
Tomorrow, five of the group’s alleged [...]
PZ has a
post
today about how intelligence and atheism don’t always go hand in hand.
Intelligent people who are indoctrinated into a faith can build marvelously intricate palaces of rationalization atop the shoddy vapor of their beliefs about gods and the supernatural;
A perfect case in point is
this post
in the “On Faith” section of Thursday’s Post by John [...]
Remember back in the summer of 2007, when two pharmaceutical companies
released a vaccine against human papilloma virus (HPV), how if girls
were vaccinated against HPV, it could prevent them getting cervical
cancer later in life, and the religious right
got all bent out of shape about it?:
A spokeswoman for the Family Research Council (FRC) says young women should [...]
A lot of people have written about the
pope’s remarks about
about condoms in Africa and AIDS. Comments that, if heeded, will cause
the death of hundreds or thousands of people.
But Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheist
points out
that the Russian Orthodox church, in which I was raised,
agrees with the pope
(original in Russian
here).
“It is incorrect to consider condoms as a panacea [...]
I’ll have to remember this
Bad Gods
strip the next time someone demands that atheists disprove God:
Or when any random douchenozzle completely misunderstands the concept
of “burden of proof”.
Looks like Texas is the new Florida.
Think Atheist is reporting
that
Bill Nye the Science Guy was
giving a talk in Waco, TX, and mentioned that despite what it says in
Genesis 1:16,
the moon does not emit light, but merely reflects the light of the
sun. So he got booed, and one woman left with her children, so that
they wouldn’t [...]
Today’s Post
reports:
A Silver Spring psychiatric hospital that specializes in treating Catholic clergy has been cited for problems that are “serious in nature,” according to a report from Maryland health officials who investigated the facility after a patient drowned himself in a bathtub there in January.
[…]
St. Luke, which sees about 600 people a year, almost all [...]
Legum’s New Line is
reporting
that Maryland General Assembly member, arch-reactionary,
homophobe,
reanimated corpse, and all-around asshat
Don Dwyer
(R-I Feel Sorry for Anne Arundel) has left the Republican caucus
because they wouldn’t support his attempt to
amend
the Maryland constitution to define anything from a fertilized egg
onward as a person.
I realize that Maryland is a fairly liberal state, but even so, it’s
fairly impressive [...]