DUBAI (Reuters) - Exploding buildings, booby-trapped cars and bloodied victims are making their debut on Arab satellite television in daring dramas that deal with Islamist militancy in al Qaeda's main breeding ground.

The shows' producers say they are another battleground in the war on home-grown religious zealotry, which many Middle East governments are confronting by crackdowns and media campaigns.

"Al Tareeq Al-Waer", or "The Rugged Path", and "Al-Hur Al-Ayn", or "The Beautiful Maidens", have been airing during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, a time of peak viewing in the Middle East.

They both deal with intransigent interpretations of Islam, such as the one espoused by Saudi-born al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, and the social problems that push some to extremism.

Editor's Choice News Article | Reuters.co.uk

TEHRAN, Iran -- Iran's hard-line government said Wednesday it was removing 40 ambassadors and senior diplomats, including supporters of warmer ties with the West, from their posts in a shake-up that comes as the Islamic republic takes a more confrontational international stance.

Iran Removes 40 Envoys in Shake-Up

In a step toward reconciliation on the divided Korean Peninsula, North and South Korea agreed today to compete as a single nation for the first time at the 2006 Asian Games and at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a South Korean Olympic official said.

This is positive, if superficial.

The endgame for Korea is reunification, just like Germany. Sooner or later, the DPRK regime is going to fold. Just get it over with, already!

absolutely

Two Koreas to Compete as Single Nation at Olympics

Acidus wrote:

Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems

Tom will be talking about some enhancements he is working on for Wikipedia at Phreaknic. Looks like this issue is only growing.

Ironically, the original poster suffers from having looked at a particular article at a particularly bad timeslice and gotten an ugly result. The present text of the Bill Gates article is greatly improved. Interestingly, this is exactly the sort of problem that my wikipedia talk looks toward addressing.

Furthermore, its important to understand what wikipedia is and what it is not. Wikipedia is not a replacement for a traditional encyclopedia. This does not mean it isn't useful. A famous engineer's cynicism is: Cost, Speed, or Quality, pick one. An Encyclopedia is a model that picks Quality. Encyclopedias are slow and expensive, but the results are good. Wikipedias are fast and cheap, and the results are not as good.

If you want to teach 11 year olds about the history of Greece, you don't want wikipedia. They may get bad information, they can't easily reference a particular revision (most people don't understand how to do that with wikipedia), and they are going to be exposed to poor grammar and poor structure at a time when you are trying to teach them how to communicate effectively.

If you want to learn about a terrorist incident that occured two months ago, an encyclopedia is of no use. You could turn to the press, but old press articles are hard to find, and Wikipedia is often a vastly more useful resource, because it presents information in a matter of fact way and often draws from a wider array of resources (including press reports which form a primary source material).

Wikipedia fills the gap between the bleeding edge of the headlines and the cast in stone of dusty reference materials in a way that no other resource can. The sooner people realise that every tool doesn't have to solve every problem the better they'll be at figuring out how to make their tools really succeed at the particular things they are well suited for.

it suddenly occured to me that as there needs to be a way of judging, other than the facility of editing it, the quality of ( or usefulness, or a variety of criteria) of articles on wikipedia.
how about a simple facility of voting for articles and obviously articles which consistantly score badly should pop up for review.
although should each edit deserve a fresh score or should past editions be included but weighted according to the edit
that way adding a comma won't remove a particularly good set of scores and thus discourage edits or adding a comma set to zero a deservely bad score.
plus a scoring system is in accordance with wikipedia's democratic philosophy and adds an element of meritocracy.
systems need feedback
plus different writers could get, like the reputation agent, different scores

RE: Wikipedia founder admits to serious quality problems | The Register

Nearly exact self-similar fractal forms occur do in nature, but I'd never seen such a beautiful and perfect example until, some time after moving to Switzerland, I came across a chou Romanesco like the one above in a grocery store. This is so visually stunning an object that on first encounter it's hard to imagine you're looking at a garden vegetable rather than an alien artefact created with molecular nanotechnology.

Coolest vegetable ever.

Fractal Food

Buster the German Shepherd could have had a great career as a British police dog had it not been for one flaw: his complete lack of interest in fighting crime.

Lazy British Police Dog Relieved of Duties - Yahoo! News

Jello wrote:

Xia Zhang of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and colleagues decided to see what effects a synthetic cannabinoid called HU210 had on rats' brains.

They tested a synthetic cannabinoid that is NOT present in marijuana.

In another study, Barr Jacobs, a neuroscientist at Princeton University, gave mice the natural cannabinoid found in marijuana, THC (D9-tetrahydrocannabinol)). But he says he detected no neurogenesis, no matter what dose he gave or the length of time he gave it for. He will present his results at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in Washington DC in November.

Tests with the real deal show no such signs of 'cell growth in the brain.'

Emphasis on might here.

there are also studies which suggest a link between mental health problems and marijuana
having been a heavy marijuana user in my early 20s and having suffered over the past 12 years bouts of mental health difficulties ranging from psychotic episodes to suicide attempts i would urge caution.
I don't know catagorically that there is a causal link ( i did have mental health problems prior to my drug use) however just as some people are susceptable to becoming alcoholics i believe my drug use triggered problems. I also believe that for the majority marijuana, like alcohol, is not a problem and can be used harmlessly and should be legalised subject to health warnings.

RE: New Scientist Breaking News - Marijuana might cause new cell growth in the brain

If you spend any time on the Internet sending e-mail or browsing the Web, then you use domain name servers without even realizing it. Domain name servers, or DNS, are an incredibly important but completely hidden part of the Internet, and they are fascinating! The DNS system forms one of the largest and most active distributed databases on the planet. Without DNS, the Internet would shut down very quickly.

In this edition of HowStuffWorks, we will take a look at the DNS system so you can understand how it works and appreciate its amazing capabilities.

DNS for Dummies

Howstuffworks

It is important to note that the absence of a two-way conversation in American television also means that there is no "meritocracy of ideas" on television. To the extent that there is a "marketplace" of any kind for ideas on television, it is a rigged market, an oligopoly, with imposing barriers to entry that exclude the average citizen. The German philosopher, Jurgen Habermas, describes what has happened as "the refeudalization of the public sphere." That may sound like gobbledygook, but it's a phrase that packs a lot of meaning. The feudal system which thrived before the printing press democratized knowledge and made the idea of America thinkable, was a system in which wealth and power were intimately intertwined, and where knowledge played no mediating role whatsoever. The great mass of the people were ignorant. And their powerlessness was born of their ignorance.

Good read. Only... I wish it could be packed into a 5 second blurb, so it might actually have some effect.

You know what Google Ads put up for this article? 'Pet Cremation Services.'

Pet Cremation Services.

Al Gore tells it like it is

When people ask me why I blog, the answer is that it helps me organize my thoughts, memorialize them, work them out.

In short, to discover what I think.

The Big Picture: Why Write ?