Thursday, August 30, 2007
sticks and stones
It looks like it’s okay to call label others with names they may find objectionable, even if there’s little or no basis for it (at least as far as ‘spyware’ is concerned):
Zango complains that its software is not objectionable, and therefore the security providers cannot block it as objectionable. However, the court points out that the statute clearly says that it’s for what the service provider finds objectionable. In other words, the content in question need not be “objectionable” at all—it only matters what the service provider feels about it. This is a pretty strong endorsement for the idea that security companies absolutely can call software whatever they feel is appropriate.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070830/003443.shtml
Monday, August 27, 2007
those Christians complicate everything…
To belatedly join the flowchart fad: “the sexual decision-making process according to the penitentials”
(click image to embiggen)
Us atheists have it easier:
Everybody of legal age?
If not, don’t. Otherwise:
Everybody want to?
If yes, go for it. If not, don’t.
Baptist troglodytes?
A BA in ladylike submission!
I guess it makes some twisted kind of sense. In order for Baptist women to graciously submit in the manner their guys want to be accustomed to, the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary is offering a new academic program: homemaking. Either a degree in theology is worthless and you need home-making as a fall-back position or the Baptists want to make a point about higher education for women.
I wish I could find a video of that race
STILETTO RACE IN BERLIN: High Heels of Fire
One hundred German women braved broken heels and sprained ankles in Saturday’s second annual “Stiletto Run” 100-meter race in Berlin.
The distance was 100 meters. The field was 100 women. The prize was €10,000. The setting was Berlin. And the shoes were stilettos.
With a time of 14.7 seconds, Berliner Denise Hanitzsch beat out 99 fellow heel-wearers Saturday to take the prize in the second annual “Stiletto Run,” held in West Berlin near the upscale Kurfürstendamm shopping district.
The run, sponsored by the women’s fashion magazine Glamour and held in connection with Berlin’s “Global Fashions Festival,” had only two rules for its reader-contestants: the stiletto heels had to be at least 7 centimeters (2.75 inches) high and no more than 1.5 centimeters (0.6 inches) wide at the tip.
The 24-year-old office worker claims to not have trained specifically for the event, but apparently she didn’t have to. “I have to run around every day with high heels on, and I’ve always been a good runner,” Hanitzsch told the German tabloid Bild.
Asked about her technique, Hanitzsch told Bild: “Make your strides as big as possible and never let your foot roll back onto the heel.”
Oh my. Have a look at the photo gallery...
It occurs to me that the winner wouldn’t have problems beating my best 100m time wearing track shoes.
Boy howdy, will the creationists hate this
Scientists Around World in Race to Create Artificial Life; Success Likely in 3 to 10 Years
Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create life from scratch and they’re getting closer.
Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the now little-known field of “wet artificial life.”
“It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it,” said Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of those in the race. “We’re talking about a technology that could change our world in pretty fundamental ways—in fact, in ways that are impossible to predict.”
That first cell of synthetic life—made from the basic chemicals in DNA—may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you’ll have to look in a microscope to see it.
“Creating protocells has the potential to shed new life on our place in the universe,” Bedau said. “This will remove one of the few fundamental mysteries about creation in the universe and our role.”
And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.
Not to forget that a True Scientist will do it just to see if it can be done.
Certainly something to get excited about, though.
Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:
—A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow good ones, and the ability to multiply.
—A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.
—A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and then changes it into energy.
One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School, predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence that the first step—creating a cell membrane—is “not a big problem.” Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.
Szostak is also optimistic about the next step—getting nucleotides, the building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.
His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.
“We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened,” Szostak said.
Hear, hear. Can they expedite in the lab what took abiogenesis billions of years? Conceivably; they’re not trying to replicate abiogenesis, but to jump-start the processs.
In Gainesville, Fla., Steve Benner, a biological chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside of natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases—adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T)—molecules that spell out the genetic code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the genetic alphabet.
I never bothered to read up on what, if anything, is special about A,C,G,T. Perhaps they’re uniquely suited to the task and crowded out any others, perhaps an extended genetic alphabet just doesn’t work.
Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could “run amok,” but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time before that is a problem.
“When these things are created, they’re going to be so weak, it’ll be a huge achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab,” he said. “But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this happen.”
I’m a bit dubious about this claim, but evolution had billions of years to help along organisms that are extremely adept at replicating and using resources. One would hope that a new proto-organism isn’t good enough to give the established ones a run for the money, uh, resources.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
european travel
Unfortunately, I don’t have the entire book. Just the first couple of chapters.
The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe by Colm Toibin
Don’t worry, it’s not a ‘religious’ book per se. It’s kind of a ‘travel diary’ that takes you through parts of Europe, through the eyes of someone who could probably be termed, for lack of a better term, a ‘culturally Catholic’ atheist.
The first chapter is about visiting Lourdes. The second chapter is about visiting Auschwitz and other places in Poland.
Parts of it are funny, parts are heart-wrenching.
I’m going to try to get my hands on the rest of the book.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
angels 101?
NORWEGIAN PRINCESS MÄRTHA’S NEW COURSE OFFERING: Communicating with Angels 101
When one thinks of European royalty scandals, it is generally Prince Harry (dressing as a Nazi) or Ernst August Prinz von Hannover (caught urinating in public) that comes to mind. But as Norway is demonstrating these days, its royal family can hold their own in the headline-generating department.
To whit: Princess Märtha Louise, fourth in line to the Norwegian throne, has generated a storm of criticism in the Scandinavian country for her plan to start a school that will teach people how to communicate with angels.
On Monday, one influential paper from the western town of Bergen demanded that the princess renounce her royal title. She has also been blasted by politicians, prominent journalists and TV pastor Jan Hanvold who accused her of blasphemy and said that Märtha was “an emissary from hell.” There have also been calls for her to be excommunicated from the state Evangelical Lutheran church. Most critics accuse her of trying to use her royalty status for profit.
“As a princess and theoretically an heir to the throne (the princess) needs to relate to the rest of us others within a certain framework,” Bergens Tidende wrote in a Monday editorial. Norway’s leading daily Aftenposten also carried an editorial on Monday questioning Märtha Louise’s business idea.
Dubbed by the Norwegian press as the “angel school,” the princess’ institution, named “Astarte Education” after “one of the oldest goddesses in the Middle East,” offers a three-year program on communicating with angels, healing and hands-on treatment. The courses are scheduled to begin on August 22, with a weekend session in September devoted to helping participants “get into contact with the angels” and teaching students “how to create ‘everyday miracles’ in your own life.”
O-kay.
Clinton vs. Bush
Found here:
Dick Armey, the House Republican majority leader when Bush took office (and no more a shrinking violet than DeLay), told me a story that captures the exquisite pettiness of most members of Congress and the arrogance that made Bush and Rove so inept at handling them. “For all the years he was president,” Armey told me, “Bill Clinton and I had a little thing we’d do where every time I went to the White House, I would take the little name tag they give you and pass it to the president, who, without saying a word, would sign and date it. Bill Clinton and I didn’t like each other. He said I was his least-favorite member of Congress. But he knew that when I left his office, the first schoolkid I came across would be given that card, and some kid who had come to Washington with his mama would go home with the president’s autograph. I think Clinton thought it was a nice thing to do for some kid, and he was happy to do it.” Armey said that when he went to his first meeting in the White House with President Bush, he explained the tradition with Clinton and asked the president if he would care to continue it. “Bush refused to sign the card. Rove, who was sitting across the table, said, ‘It would probably wind up on eBay,’” Armey continued.
good for Amnesty
Amnesty to defy Catholic church over rape victims’ abortion rights
Amnesty International is set to defy the Vatican and risk the wrath of Catholics around the world over its decision to back abortion for rape victims.
Leaders of the international human rights group meeting in Mexico are expected to reaffirm the policy adopted by its executive board in April after two years of soul-searching within the organisation.
The decision, which will also cover women whose health is at risk from giving birth, follows the use of mass rape as a political weapon in the conflict in Darfur. But Amnesty has infuriated the Vatican by expanding its definition of human rights to include access to abortion, prompting leading Catholics to accuse the organisation of having “betrayed its mission”. Cardinal Renato Martino, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, has threatened that unless Amnesty’s policy is reversed, the Vatican will call upon Catholics worldwide to boycott the organisation.
The usual strong-arm tactics…
Amnesty’s deputy general secretary, Kate Gilmore, denies the organisation has become “pro-abortion” insisting the organisation took as its guide legal not theological imperatives. “Amnesty International’s position is not for abortion as a right but for women’s human rights to be free of fear, threat and coercion as they manage all consequences of rape and other grave human rights violations,” she said.
“Amnesty International stands alongside the victims and survivors of human rights violations. Our policy reflects our obligation of solidarity as a human rights movement with, for example, the rape survivor in Darfur who, because she is left pregnant as a result of the enemy, is further ostracised by her community. Ours is a movement dedicated to upholding human rights, not specific theologies. Our purpose invokes the law and the state, not God.”
I can’t find fault with that. The Vatican would, though—how dare AI disagree with a long-term backer?
The Vatican is accusing Amnesty of double standards, because it opposes the death penalty in all circumstances but, it argues, under some circumstances will now condone the killing of an unborn child.
So what’s the Vatican’s stance on capital punishment?
Darfur is not the first place in the world where military conquerors have used mass rape to subdue a population but the report put together by Amnesty International observers in the region in 2004 was particularly harrowing. As well as being traumatised, the victims were frequently injured or afflicted with sexual transmitted diseases, and left to cope alone with unwanted children. One survivor said: “Five to six men would rape us, one after the other, for hours during six days, every night. My husband could not forgive me after this. He disowned me.”
So what? The only thing that matters is that these victims don’t have abortions. More examples for Tough Christian Love™:
Even in countries where the law permits abortion for rape victims, women who seek the operation can encounter a wall of obstruction. In Peru, a 17-year-old girl discovered that her foetus had anencephaly - meaning that it was going to be born without a brain - but a doctor refused to allow her access to an abortion. She was compelled to give birth and breastfeed the child for four days before its died.
In the Sante Fe province of Argentina, a social worker told the organisation Human Rights Watch about a woman who went into hospital after having an unsafe abortion and was bleeding badly. “A doctor started to examine her, and when he realised, he threw down his instruments and said: ‘This is an abortion. You go ahead and die’.”
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