What are you gonna do, play with your prick for another 30 years? ... George Carlin
7 Essential Skills You Didn't Learn in College | Magazine
Topic: Sports
10:39 pm EDT, Oct 13, 2010
It’s the 21st century. Knowing how to read a novel, craft an essay, and derive the slope of a tangent isn’t enough anymore. You need to know how to swim through the data deluge, optimize your prose for Twitter, and expose statistics that lie. In the following pages, you’ll find our updated core curriculum, which fills in the gaps of your 20th-century education with the tools you need now. Call it the neoliberal arts: higher learning for highly evolved humans.
Student finds tracking device on his car; FBI demands it back | Raw Story
Topic: Society
1:25 pm EDT, Oct 13, 2010
A Silicon Valley college student says the FBI confronted him and threatened to "make things difficult" for him if he didn't hand over a GPS tracking device he found on his car, says a report at Wired.com.
Yasir Afifi, a 20-year-old marketing student at Mission College who is partially of Egyptian extraction, said he found the device last Sunday when he took his car to a mechanic, and saw wires sticking out of the underside, near the exhaust pipe.
He told Wired he had "done nothing to merit attention from authorities."
A friend of Afifi's, identified only as Khaled, posted pictures of the device to Reddit.com, where a user quickly identified it as a Guardian ST820 tracking unit, manufactured by Cobham, which, according to Wired, only sells the device to law enforcement agencies.
As Afifi and Khaled pondered a number of plans for the device -- including selling it on Craigslist or attaching it to another car -- the FBI showed up, admitted it had planted the device, and demanded it back, Afifi told Wired.nullnull
American Thinker Blog: Amanpour Inadvertently Exposes the Real Issue with Islam
Topic: Society
10:45 pm EDT, Oct 12, 2010
Choudary proclaims that he disagrees with the entire focus of the segment, and argues that the notions of moderate Islam or extremist Islam are nonsense. There is only Islam, whose followers "submit to the creator." Then, in an effort to convey that Islam can live in peace with the Western world, he concludes, "We do believe as Muslims that the east and the west will one day be governed by the Sharia. Indeed we believe that one day the flag of Islam will fly over the White House."
It is obvious that his statements reinforce what some Christian panel guests believe to be the truth, and that those statements certainly don't support the notion of peaceful and tolerant Islam.
So a Muslim woman in the panel decided to take Choudary to task for his reckless and inflammatory statements, and she went on to instruct him that Islam is a faith of pluralism, and that it provides an allowance of other faiths to exist in a state of equal importance.
Had she been speaking to the panel's Christian reverend in that moment, she likely could have won the argument just as she has probably won countless others; by merely saying, "I know better than you Christians do about Islam. I'm a Muslim." But my guess is that she forgot that she was speaking with someone who had given far more study to the Quran and Hadith than most Christian theologians.
To her assumption of Islamic tolerance of other faiths and legal systems, Choudary simply suggests that she knows nothing of what Islam desires or requires; she doesn't even have the good sense to cover herself. Doesn't she know that the Quran forbids her appearance in that way? So in his eyes, she is not truly a Muslim, as true Muslims are not granted the liberty to sift through Islamic doctrine and select their preferred methods of religious practice. He even makes the comparison that she is a Muslim in the same way that a person who occasionally eats beef burgers is a vegetarian.
And she cannot argue. The holy book of her faith does explicitly forbid women to present themselves as she does.
In the middle of Gotham, our family of 66 sans serifs, there is a hushed but surprising moment: a fraction whose numerator has a serif. So important was this detail that we decided to offer it as an option for all the other fractions, a decision that ultimately required more than 400 new drawings. Why?
As you'll read below, it's something that we added because we felt it mattered. Even if it helped only a small number of designers solve a subtle and esoteric problem, we couldn't rest knowing that an unsettling typographic moment might otherwise lie in wait. We've always believed that a good typeface is the product of thousands of decisions like these, so we invite you to join us on a behind-the-scenes look at some of the invisible details that go into every font from H&FJ.
New Humanist (Rationalist Association) - discussing humanism, rationalism, atheism and free thought
Topic: Arts
7:09 pm EDT, Oct 8, 2010
Last week, I blogged about the bizarre decision taken by several US newspapers to reject an edition of Wiley Miller's cartoon strip Non Sequitur, which made a joke about the extent of the fear of publishing depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. The joke was that publishers are now so worried that they won't even publish something which hints at depicting Muhammad, even if it doesn't actually depict him. The editors of "upwards of 20" papers responded by refusing to publish the cartoon.
The reason I return to the story is that MediaWatchWatch now have a copy of the cartoon, which I've reproduced here (you might need to click on it for a larger version). Are you offended? There's a giraffe licking a woman's ice cream, so I apologise in advance to ice cream and hygiene lovers.
By all means leave your best suggestions for why this cartoon is offensive in the comments below.
