Tuesday, July 31, 2007

The West's condescending-yet-privileged view of Islam

Dennis Prager hits the nail on the head (and, as usual, Christopher Hitchens goes a little too far.) Why should Islam be singled out among faiths? Why can't we talk about certain issues in Islam without being labeled bigots? Aren't Muslims offended that we treat them with such condescending care and concern that is not afforded other religious groups and essentially infantilizes them? Aren't non-Arab Muslims (read: the majority of Muslims) bothered by the ignorant racial connotation of "Islamophobia?" Do Western Muslims realize that the reason we don't criticize Islam in public is because we're afraid of being blown up? Isn't that more offensive to them? Ugh. This is how Western culture is cannibalizing itself...

Sunday, July 29, 2007

Two things I found

This is pretty disconnected information, but I thought they were interesting: the last World War I veteran (as Mark Kurlansky wrote "Warfare produces peace activists. A group of veterans is a likely place to find peace activists.") And where Americans think we go when we die (not 100% for some reason...)

Friday, July 27, 2007

Finding the gaps

This is pretty amazing... find correlations between various demographics. (Requires Flash)

Thursday, July 26, 2007

A collection of stupid pictures

Every now and again, dumb pictures accumulate on my desktop. Here are a few (two with a sort of attribution!):




Thursday, July 19, 2007

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

RIAA are you listening?

The future of music: NES cartridges. This blurb implies that NES cartridges are a way to get around bootleggers. Now, it is certainly true that ripping a CD is pretty easy, but it's not exactly impossible to make a ROM of an NES cartridge. From there, record the music through your sound card, encode to the format you prefer, and voilĂ .

I hate "education"

Here is a funny essay on how awful college politics is. And, as someone who has gone to college for far too long and has a degree in political science, this guy could not be more right. (Note: language a bit strong; not for the faint of heart.)

Another reason to hate/love the Interwebs

The owner of http://iphone.com/ is now a millionaire.