Yesterday, boingboing.net had a link to an open letter to the Kansas authorities regarding teaching Intelligent Design in schools, which mocks the whole concept (and which many will find deeply offensive). Read the rest »
This would be really funny if it did no remind me of the ‘Be ready to build and defend the socialist homeland!’ (to which all children replied ‘Always ready!’) ritual that we had to go through behind the Iron Curtain. But at least we only went through it on special occasions, not as part of our day-to-day schooling. The amount of overlap between the old Soviet mentality and that of the US state machinery never stops amazing me.
This morning I have succeeded in getting the maemo platform running inside scratchbox and installing on it the AbiWord package provided by Nokia. Next step is to try to build CVS Head in the scratch box. (Contrary to what the maemo docs suggest, maemo does not seem to be able to run inside xnest; Renato Filho suggested I run it in xvnc, using ‘Xvnc -depth 16 -ac -dpi 96 -geometry 800×480 :1′ to start the server and ‘vncviewer 127.0.0.1:1′ to start the client; it works fine this way.)
[T]he music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. … There is another art which imitates by means of language alone … The poet being an imitator, like a painter or any other artist, must of necessity imitate one of three objects: things as they were or are, things as they are said or thought to be, or things as they ought to be. [Aristotle, Poetics, Ch. i & xxv] Read the rest »
This morning I came across this list of 10 most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries (via jfleck’s blog via planet GNOME). I wonder where I can reserve tickets for the book-burning party; if these people had their way, there would be one coming to the neighbourhood near you real soon. Read the rest »