- Iceland to build first Norse gods temple since Viking age so you can worship Thor and Odin – Europe – World – The Independent
Pleasing.
- DevMynd Blog: Pairing with Junior Developers
Really good article on how to use pair programming with junior devs, the key insight being something so simple and obvious it hadn't occurred to me.
Tag: religion
Bookmarks for September 24, 2014
- Mom's Evangelical Christian Rewrite of Harry Potter CANNOT Be Real
"Thank you very much for your concern, sir, but he does not need your religion, he has science and socialism and birthdays." Sadly, other bits of it are considerably madder, but that bit made me laugh. And it is now my new personal statement.
- Raiders of the Lost Ark as a silent B&W film
Steven Soderbergh has made this cut of Raiders available as a means of focusing on the staging of the film. I want to take the time to sit and watch this. When I'm not at work.
Bookmarks for June 29, 2012
- Circumcision ruling condemned by Germany's Muslim and Jewish leaders | World news | guardian.co.uk
Cat, meet pigeons. As an atheist, I do oppose what amounts to mutilation on religious grounds. I mean, I wouldn't be allowed to cut my hypothetical child's earlobes off, just because I believed they were bad, would I? So why should this be different? Hint: if an answer rests on "tradition" it is probably not going to persuade me.
Bookmarks for November 23, 2010
- boilerpipe
Web API for extracting clutter from web pages and just returning the content. Nice!
- New House Climate Czar | Talking Points Memo
Americans! Have you ever wondered why everyone hates you? It's because you elect people like this, and then apparently give them a chance of being in hugely influential of policy areas where they can fuck up the planet for people who didn't get a say in electing them, on the basis of some bullshit religious beliefs, that, in a civilised country, would disqualify them as a candidate for dog catcher. Seriously, America, please get on with reforming your political system and society to get rid of people like this. By force, if necessary.
Bookmarks for September 20, 2010
- Make Games – Finishing a Game
Applicable to just about any creative endeavour, and there are a number of things in here I could do with remembering more often.
- Looxcie Wearable Camcorder: Capture Unexpected Moments
Mildly tempted by this, if they produce an iphone version. It's a bit deep geek, but that's never stopped me from doing anything before. (Not so much interested in it from a sharing-with-the-world POV, more as a personal outboard memory tool – the ability to clip the last 30 secs of my life is potentially useful in a number of contexts.)
- How to get search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN) referal keywords using PHP, php, Steven York.com
Reasonably trivial task, but once I'm going to have to do at work soon, I imagine. No sense re-inventing the wheel, and this looks like some decent code snippets to build into what we'll need.
- DarkPatterns.org
A listing of intentionally bad design patterns – tricks websites use to get you to do things that they want, or that cost you money. I'm happy to say that most of our clients don't ask us to do these, and those that do are usually dissuaded by us. But still, this is a good list of tricks to learn, so you can be aware when various sites might be trying to use them on you.
- A working hypothesis – Charlie's Diary
I had been blaming the decade long rise of extremism and authoritarian clampdowns on some kind of post-millennial fallout – the calendar ticks over, and nothing changes, and all that pent up stress has to go somewhere – but the idea that a significant chunk of the population of the planet might actually be suffering from future shock hadn't occurred to me, but it's an idea worth acknowledging, I think. (And playing connect the dots with – qv. Clay Shirky's Gin and Sitcoms ideas about cognitive surplus as an exacerbating factor.)
Bookmarks for August 10, 2010
- CSI | Bridging the Chasm between Two Cultures
Some good stuff in here – a clear articulation of why the language of skepticism does not get through to the people it most needs to, and how we can do something about that.
- Verizon-Google Legislative Framework Proposal
One to write about later. Short version: I have used Google's mantra of "don't be evil" as a yardstick that I feel they often fail to live up to, mostly through lack of thought. This document, and the changes it proposes are not that. They are active "evil", a very sign of corporations laying the groundwork to maximise their own revenues at the expense of their customers. Whatever Google's founding principles may have been, they are just another corporation now, and worse, they're one who have decided to throw their very considerable weight behind practices that will make life less fair for the consumer. I really, really hope the FCC steps in to stop this – essentially what they doing is saying that "the public internet" should be neutral, and then not properly defining "the public internet" thereby leaving them free to define "the private internet" as anything they want.
Bookmarks for January 4, 2010
- A Form of Madness – Dive Into HTML5
HTML 5 forms. Oh, this is going to make interface design much nicer. In about four of five years, anyway.
- What Could Have Been Entering the Public Domain on January 1, 2010?
Thought it was worth pointing this one out, as there's bound to be another round of copyright extension lobbying fairly soon – when isn't there? Here's a list of what could have been public domain today, were it not for the 1976 extension. Can you find an argument for any of these works not being in the public domain now?
- Atheist Ireland Publishes 25 Blasphemous Quotes | blasphemy.ie
For all I make jokes about being a "good protestant boy", in the years since the Good Friday Agreement, I had more or less come to believe that a united Ireland was a good and desirable thing – the British have unquestionably fucked the place for centuries, and eventually the majority opinion in the North is going to be in favour of a united Ireland. That was until today, when I discovered that Ireland have enacted a law forbidding blasphemy. That's so fucking retrograde it's unreal, and genuinely makes me concerned about a united Ireland again. And if you need a demonstration of why it's stupid, well, take a look here.
Bookmarks for June 22, 2009
- Cole Moreton on how paganism is going mainstream
In short: the hippies and perverts are taking over. (Well done, the hippies and perverts.) Although I am rather laughing at the woman who "works with the Morrigan" and doesn't "target people in [her] spells". Is she talking about the same Morrigan that I'm thinking of – goddess of War or at least of generally being In Fucking Charge? Surely they'd be kind of all about targeting people. I'd hate to be the one trying to hold *that* back. Still, I suppose it's further proof that whatever their denomination, British people prefer their religion to be about tea and scones and jam than whatever their actual gods might have had to say on the matter.
Bookmarks for February 19, 2009
- The Technium: Amish Hackers
Absolutely fascinating article on the adoption of new technologies among Amish communities. It doesn't necessarily seem like such a bad way to live, although obviously they'd need to remove God from the business before I'd sign up.
- London architecture – a set on Flickr
Del linked to this set of lovely photos of various buildings in London. And now I'm doing the same, because she's right, it's ace.