alQpr

In democracyarsenal.org, Shadi Hamid makes a Note to Muslims objecting to a the claim by Zaid Shakir that his wish for an Islamic law is shared by “every Muslim who is honest”. Perhaps the wish for a Muslim country governed by Islamic law is parallel to the wish for a Christian nation governed according to [...]

AlterNet: War on Iraq: Iraq’s War Porn is powerfully written and has stimulated a thoughtful set of responses – well worth reading.

This Butterflies and Wheels Article is the introduction by Frederick Crews to his book ‘Follies of the Wise’

At first I thought this might be a case of “the emperor’s new tones” but when I cranked the volume way up I did start to get that nasty sensation that tends to precede a hard drive crash. Since it’s the same sound used to repel teenage loiterers from hi-tone stores, I suspect that in [...]

This has been around for at least a couple of years but keeps returning to the email inbox so I thought I’d point out that although the authors of the joke seem to see “al-gebra” as just a funny coincidence,I’ve always thought that it could be used as a lead-in to a discussion of the [...]

In Edge; DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism, Jaron Lanier garbles many concepts. His complaints about Wikipedia are best answered by the response of Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, who point out his apparent ignorance of the document history and discussion pages and his failure to convincingly identify himself when making edits [...]

This is amusing but also frightening. Our public institutions are being blackmailed into paying huge fees to an organization which is aggressively promoting a wrong understanding of ethics and the law mainly for the benefit of institutions which have no qualms about stealing ideas and property which are either public domain or owned by others. [...]

Freeman Dyson reviews Daniel Dennet’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. He gives what appears to be a fair summary of the book, but takes issue with Dennet’s opinion that religion is harmful and states “I see religion as a precious and ancient part of our human heritage. Dennett sees it as a [...]

Whiteboard Movies

David Brin discusses how tribalism may be an evolved characteristic of humans which appears to follow a pattern in which the scope of altruistic feeling is inversely related to the amount of fear generated by the environment. Good idea and starts well but ends up sounding a bit like Hari Seldon.

Jyllands Posten editor Flemming Rose defends himself re the mohammed cartoons which idiot Mullah Krekar decried as a “declaration of war” against Islam claiming without apprent irony about Western secularists that “as the losing side, they commit violence.” Unfortunately Rose extends his defense in places to attribute to the “left-wing” positions that may never have [...]

This does seem worth looking at for K-8(+) level online math activities.