Matt Kane resurfaced on Bristol‘s underscore mailing list with this intriguing snippet, after some travels around the middle-east: ” … discovered N95s (not mine) cannot be taken into Syria”. I asked for the backstory, which goes like this: Quite a palaver. Got the train from Istanbul to Syria (amazing trip!). At the border they didn’t [...]
I was really very impressed by Obama’s speech this week. And somewhat suprised to hear a major US politician speak on complex, subtle issues in thoughtful, nuanced terms. For non USAmericans, I think it’s often hard to empathise with US-style patriotism; in particular, the seeming impossibility of seeing the US as anything other than a [...]
Stephanie Booth asks: I vaguely remember somebody telling me about some emerging “standard” (too big a word) for encoding language skills. Or was it a dream? That would’ve been me, showing markup from the FOAFX beta from Paola Di Maio and friends, which explores the extension of FOAF with expertise information. This is part of [...]
Apparently the UK government are revisiting the idea of net censorship, in the context of anti-terrorism. UK Home Secretary Jacqui Smith as reported in the “Guardian, Government targets extremist websites“: Speaking to the BBC’s Radio 4 Today programme before her speech, Smith said there were specific examples of websites that “clearly fall under the category [...]
Googlefight: Word of the living God vs US Constitution (Inspired by the wit and wisdom of Ayatollah Huckabee) Looks like God’s got some HTMLing to do…
Three years ago, we lost Iran from Internet community. I simplify somewhat, but forgivably. Many Iranian ISPs cut off access to blogs and social networking sites, on government order. At the time, Iran was one of the most active nations on Orkut; and Orkut was the network of choice, faster than the then-fading Friendster, but [...]
Twitter-like microblogging seems a nice granularity for following thoughts expressed in languages you don’t speak. In 1988 I passed my French language GCSE exam; it’s been downhill all the way since. A year ago in Argentina, I got to the stage where I could just about express myself in Spanish. But it’s been fading. Nevertheless [...]
My impression remains what it has always been, however: the Postmodern Emperor is not only bereft of clothes. He doesn’t even have a skin. – Richard Dawkins, in comments thread for his review of the excellent Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.
OK, what happens if I put an URL in the Blog text: box? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398037/ And how can I tag this to be in my “conspiracy theory” category? http://danbri.org/words/category/world/conspiracy-theory Do blog posting APIs support categories? I hope at least Atom’s does… From Joost : EMR Stuck in a dead-end job and living alone with his cat, [...]