"People are, if anything, more touchy about being thought silly than they are about being thought unjust." - E. B. White

***

David Friedrich Strauss - "It was wildly controversial. One reviewer called it "the Iscariotism of our days" and another "the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell.'... What made his book so controversial was his treatment of much of the gospels (especially the miraculous elements) as "mythical" in character. To appreciate his contribution, we must set his argument in the context of the theological and biblical controversies of his day. In the decades prior to Strauss, theologians, scholars, and church people were struggling with the impact of the Enlightenment upon the Bible. Much of the struggle concerned how to understand stories of the miraculous. Two major positions — "rationalist" and "supernaturalist" — warred with each other. "Rationalist" scholars (many of whom were deists) claimed that violations of the laws of nature were impossible, that "miracles" could not happen, and hence sought a natural explanation of the miracle texts. Interestingly, the rationalists accepted a historical basis for the miracle stories in the gospels, but denied that miraculous causation was involved. For example, they affirmed that the disciples really thought they saw Jesus walking on the water, but in fact he was walking on a row of submerged rocks just below the surface of the water... his basic claims—that many of the gospel narratives are mythical in character, and that "myth" is not simply to be equated with "falsehood" — have become part of mainstream scholarship. What was wildly controversial in Strauss's time has now become one of the standard tools of biblical scholars."
ie Before the 20th century fundies, people *did* believe in Bible literalism.

Microsoft to cut WGA 'kill switch' out of Vista - "Product activation, as it's implemented in Windows, is primarily designed to keep families from purchasing one copy of Windows and making a second copy on a kid's PC. For hundreds of years, buyers have enjoyed a legal right to make copies of copyrighted works for personal use only, as I previously described on Mar. 8, 2007. Honoring this principle, various versions of MS Office permit up to three copies to be validated. Windows, which is used by far more people than Office, has never observed a fair-use exemption. The very fact that I need to use the redundant term "mass piracy," when what I mean is "piracy," shows how far lawyers for Microsoft and other large software companies have come in redefining fair use as piracy. By definition, copying isn't piracy unless it's done in quantity and for commercial gain. But this isn't what we hear in the mainstream media about piracy, because Microsoft has a long-running campaign to make personal-use copying of a product that a family has legitimately purchased seem to be piracy. For this reason, I don't consider it accurate to call WGA an "anti-piracy" technology (which is the tagline written into most press accounts). It's certainly an "anti-copying" tool, to use a neutral term, but is arguably more of an "anti-fair-use" scheme. Windows should be seen as improperly restricting age-old consumer rights that have long been explicit in copyright laws."

Perfectionism - "Just about any sports movie, airport paperback or motivational tape delivers a few boilerplate rules for success. Believe in yourself. Don’t take no for an answer. Never quit. Don’t accept second best... several recent studies stand as a warning against taking the platitudes of achievement too seriously. The new research focuses on a familiar type, perfectionists, who panic or blow a fuse when things don’t turn out just so. The findings not only confirm that such purists are often at risk for mental distress... The burden of perfectionist expectations is all too familiar to anyone who has struggled to kick a bad habit. Break down just once — have one smoke, one single drink — and at best it’s a “slip.” At worst it’s a relapse, and more often it’s a fall off the wagon: failure. And if you’ve already fallen, well, may as well pour yourself two or three more... The British have a saying that encourages people to show their skills while mocking the universal fear of failure: Do your worst. If you can’t tolerate your worst, at least once in a while, how true to yourself can you be?"
"No second chances"

Neil Fraser: Software: Image to HTML Converter - "Most web pages are made up of HTML files linked to separate image files. Here's a way to embed an image directly into an HTML file. A table is created which is filled with large numbers of 1x1 cells. Each cell has a background colour of the corresponding pixel in the image. That's all it is; just a massive grid of coloured table cells... So it's big, bloated and slow. What use is this? In its pure form, none. At least none that I can think of."

Get used to this: Umno Youth chief - "The 60-cm-long keris was carried into the hall with much fanfare at the start of the youth assembly and presented to Datuk Seri Hishammuddin on stage. He unsheathed it and kissed it before raising it high to shouts of 'Hidup Umno' (Long Live Umno). It was then sheathed and placed on a stand at the stage... "Selangor delegate Ismail Ahmad was applauded for asking opposition party supporters to leave the country if they were not happy. 'These people, they come to a Malay area and they tell me that our country is not doing well and people are still suffering. Well, I will tell you - you can apply for citizenship in Singapore,' he said."
Malaysia Boleh!

Language Log: The Etiology and Elaboration of a Flagrant Mistranslation - "Here are just two of the countless instances of the GAN1/4 = "fuck" paradigm that have spread throughout in China: Pinyin: GAN1TIAO2 QU1; English: "Fuck to adjust the area"; Correct translation: "Dry Seasonings Section". Note: It is no wonder that machines get confused by this expression (see the less salacious machine translation above, no. 8 of the screen shots, "the stem adjusts area"), since every Chinese to whom I've shown this sign has hesitated in their pronunciation (the second syllable could also be read DIAO4) and in their interpretation of its meaning -- there are many different possibilities."

Annals of Information: Know It All: The New Yorker - "The how-to entries represent territory that the encyclopedia has not claimed since the eighteenth century. You could cure a toothache or make snowshoes using the original Britannica, of 1768-71... It took a devious Frenchman, Pierre Bayle, to conceive of an encyclopedia composed solely of errors. After the idea failed to generate much enthusiasm among potential readers, he instead compiled a “Dictionnaire Historique et Critique,” which consisted almost entirely of footnotes, many highlighting flaws of earlier scholarship... In its seminal Western incarnation, the encyclopedia had been a dangerous book. The Encyclopédie muscled aside religious institutions and orthodoxies to install human reason at the center of the universe—and, for that muscling, briefly earned the book’s publisher a place in the Bastille. As the historian Robert Darnton pointed out, the entry in the Encyclopédie on cannibalism ends with the cross-reference “See Eucharist.”... Who could have guessed that “cheese” would figure among the site’s most contested entries? (The controversy entailed whether in Asia there is a cultural prohibition against eating it.)... Essjay says that he routinely receives death threats. “There are people who take Wikipedia way too seriously,”... What can be said for an encyclopedia that is sometimes right, sometimes wrong, and sometimes illiterate? When I showed the Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam his entry, he was surprised to find it as good as the one in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. He was flabbergasted when he learned how Wikipedia worked. “Obviously, this was the work of experts,” he said. In the nineteen-sixties, William F. Buckley, Jr., said that he would sooner “live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.” On Wikipedia, he might finally have his wish. How was his page? Essentially on target, he said. All the same, Buckley added, he would prefer that those anonymous two thousand souls govern, and leave the encyclopedia writing to the experts."

Man booted from pub by paranoid patrons - "BOUNCERS kicked a man out of a Cairns pub after paranoid patrons complained that he was reading a book called The Unknown Terrorist... The main character of The Unknown Terrorist, a bestseller by Australian novelist Richard Flanagan, is mistaken for a terrorist and subjected to a witch hunt of paranoia and false perceptions."

Scandal will trump science as his legacy - "Before last week, if you Googled the name of UMass researcher Peter Rice, you’d see all sorts of dry medical news about immunology and infectious disease... after his arrest in a prostitution sting... when contacted by a reporter, he claimed he was only “gathering information” when he allegedly offered to pay an undercover police officer $40 for “everything,” which is street slang for intercourse and oral sex, according to police reports... As for his lawyer’s claim that Dr. Rice doesn’t match the profile for a man seeking anonymous sex, the sergeant said, “I found that explanation interesting. We’ve arrested all sorts of people from all walks of life, from blue-collar to white-collar to truck drivers and CEOs. There’s no set criteria for a john.”"

Runaway Wrecking Ball Lands in Trunk - "A 1,500-pound wrecking ball broke loose from a crane cable and raced downhill, smashing into several cars and injuring three people before coming to rest in the trunk of a car at an intersection Monday."
I thought this only happens on TV

The Remarkable Death Of Gary Michael Aldridge - "Gary Michael Aldridge was “51-year-old pastor of Montgomery’s Thorington Road Baptist Church”. He was also a “graduate of Liberty University, and friend of Jerry Falwell“. He died in June, “while apparently in the midst of some autoerotic undertaking”... The deceased was clothed in a diving wet suit, a face mask which has a single vent for breathing, a rubberized head mask having an opening for the mouth and eyes, a second rubberized suit with suspenders, rubberized male underwear, hands and feet have diving gloves and slippers. There were numerous straps and cords restraining the decedent. There is a leather belt around the midriff. There is a series of ligatures extending from the hands to the feet. The hands are bound behind the back. The feet are tied to the hands. There are nylon ligatures holding these in place with leather straps about the wrists and ankles. There are plastic cords also tied about the hands and feet with a single plastic cord extending up to the head and surrounding the lower neck. There is a dildo in the anus covered with a condom."

Erotic Corndog Contest May Be Banished - "“We stress technique,” Pilchen said. “There’s a lot of simulation.” Condiments are available if the women want to get creative, he said. “We had ketchup and mustard, but the big hit was mayonnaise.”"