Katha Pollitt summarises Dinesh D’Souza’s latest insane dropping: “9/11 was provoked by feminism, birth control, abortion, pornography, feminism, Hollywood, divorce, the First Amendment, gay marriage, and did I mention feminism?”
Anne Zelenka has links to companies who are trying to “monetize” the mashup space.
Ophelia Benson on Catholics: “We know they have a very warped idea of what is immoral and what isn’t. Forbidding condoms during a pandemic, moral; keeping children in institutions rather than letting them go to gay parents, moral; being gay, shockingly immoral and sinful and bad.”
Andy Budd has thoughts on the development of HTML. Personally, I rather like the way that XHTML2 is shaping up, though it’ll probably take all of about nine years to actually get adopted. The sooner we get away from HTML’s SGML roots and towards pure XML the better. Yes, the XML stack is big, but it’s a lot less messy than the HTML stack.
This week, James Randi has a transcript from a conversation with Sylvia Browne. It’s instructive if you want to understand human deception. Randi was on Larry King on Friday. Read about it here.
Ivan Pope has some links to interesting bits and pieces from the forthcoming LIFT conference in Geneva. I hope you guys enjoy it more than the last conference I saw you at. “;->”
I have the same problem that Joshua has. I’m an obsessive-compulsive bookworm, apparently. I’m not in the final stages of a Ph.D. though, thankfully.
Some people call it being a jerk. I call it revenge. PZ Myers has it bang on. It’s never prayer that cures illness, it’s medicine. Consider, please, zealots. Ooh, didn’t know that PZ has an IRC channel - irc.zirc.org #pharyngula - might visit ‘em tomorrow.
I have a lot of respect for Danny Ayers, but why on earth is he putting SPARQL queries in encoded URLs? Dude, stored queries, HTTP POST, XML-RPC, SOAP, anything but having 900 character URLs. How about returning a namespaced element in the SPARQL results with some kind of ID to call the procedure again?
Ophelia is still hoppin’ mad over tha Catholic anti-gay thing. Can’t blame her. I supposedly do know something about the Catholic conception of conscience, and if I (a) had my Macintosh handy and (b) had more than half an hour or so free, I’d write something about it. It’s interesting and shockingly dull at the same time. Tom Coates is hoppin’ mad too.
The first step is admitting that you have a problem. Maybe now that Google have taken the first step to recovery from China insanity, they can help in the fight against the tinpot, pretend capitalist government of China - even though Falun Gong organ transplants are Tony the Tiger greeeeat.
