A Most Significant Anniversery
Tuesday November 24th 2009
It was 150 years ago today Darwin published his book explaining exactly what was going on. If I had time I'd compose an eloquent tribute, but as I don't, the following quote will have to do...
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Indeed Charles, indeed.
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File under: More Geeky Than Usual
I don't usually agree....
Monday November 23rd 2009
Apprently the Vatican has declared the latest emo vampire flick, New Moon to be "deviant" and a "moral vacuum".
Now I don't usually agree with the Pope, but in this case I think I'll make an exception :D
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File under: TV, Cinema and Other Ways to Waste Your Life
Airstrip One
Friday November 20th 2009
You know, Big Media's attack on democracy just keeps getting worse. Not content with "three strike laws" that allow a media conglomerate to cut off someone's internet access by merely accusing them of copyright infringement (yes, that's right, under these laws if Time-Warner or someone wants to throw you off the net all they have to do is say you've infringed their copyright three times, and you're off - no trial, no burden of proof, no appeal) they're now getting the UK government to set up a system where the Secretary of State can just make up and enforce laws about copyright without debate or approval by any other part of government.
Or to put it plainly...
What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright. -- Cory Doctorow
You can read the full details from the link above, including some pretty disturbing things the new powers are intended to do.
If you live in the UK and care about either democracy or the future of the net, get in touch with your MP now!
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File under: Law, politics and other boring things
Found in Space - Again
Thursday November 19th 2009
By the time a species achieves interstellar flight it has usually developed a sense of aesthetics so refined that exposure to poor design causes nausea, lethargy and (in extreme cases) death. As such the post-humans of Nova Eritrea had long divested their culture of all but the very highest in art and architecture, and had no inkling of the dangers contained in the ancient data device they found in a derelict spacewreck orbiting a nearby star... A year later fourteen billion Nova Eritreans were dead, taken by what the chroniclers would call "The Plague of the Lovely Lady Lumps".
-- Boing Boing 100-word fiction competition — "Found in Space"
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File under: Literature or something resembling it
