This scuba diving weblog has lots of pretty pictures. Hawaii seems so much nicer than London. 2006-01-01T23:17:37Z
Oh, how I love DeadBrain's Tony Blair: "And as for my unkind Cabinet colleagues who say the only difference between Hitler and me is that Hitler made the trains run on time well I'll sort that too." 2006-01-01T22:34:24Z
KTBS 3 News (Shreveport, Louisiana) report on an attempted terrorist attack which somehow managed to slip under the radar screens of the world. Might the media silence have something to do with religion? Guess that if you believe in Jesus it isn't terrorism. 2006-01-01T22:21:29Z
The Observer letters page: "[Secularists] object to religious fundamentalists who attempt to hijack virtue and morality for their own pious, self-righteous and arrogant reasons" 2006-01-01T22:09:01Z
Ah, another day, another story about the repulsiveness of the Catholic Church. What do you think about this, Cardinal O'Brien? I don't want to get married and I don't want kids. Does it matter if I'm gay or straight? I don't want a family. Does my desire for a childfree, non-married life undermine your "values"? If not, drop me a postcard and tell me how I can. 2006-01-01T21:53:02Z
Rexblog points to Retrievr, whre you draw in a little box, and it digs up pictures from Flickr. This could be very useful for art students doing supportive research (etc.) 2006-01-01T21:46:25Z
Service Scrubber is an OS X application that removes useless items in the Services menu. And boy, have I got lots of useless crap in mine. 2006-01-01T20:57:35Z
EirePreneur has a post on Dave Winer, OPML, and software: "developing great software isn't about impressing your geeky peers with the technical genius of your 'boil the ocean' vapourware. Rather, its about communicating clearly the benefits of software that does a little, does it well and does it now. A lot of littles can add up to a lot, especially when you have an ardent army of followers to embrace and extend your vision" 2006-01-01T20:54:23Z
My phone company now offer unlimited GPRS access for a day for £1 a day. Since I spend a lot of time in the British Library, this is a pretty good deal - I just hook my phone up to my laptop using the USB cable it comes with, and I've got Internet access. Far cheaper than using the British Library's wifi hotspot which is £10 a day. They also have a 4Mb a month access package for £4, which would be perfect for aggregator scans and email etc. This isn't actually bad. 2006-01-01T20:31:37Z
The PC Doctor: "if only 4% of people are using RSS, then that means that there¹s 96% of people who need introducing to it!" Let's get the word out about new technology. Let's get friends and family using the technology we love. It's free. And it's great. 2006-01-01T20:14:52Z
Jeffrey Shallit (who I didn't realise had a blog) has an entry on not admitting your mistakes pointing, if it's any surprise, at Bill Dembski's No Free Lunch. Read it, then subscribe to Recursivity. 2006-01-01T19:57:33Z
Steve Salerno: " Nowadays, Fortune 500 conglomerates draft business plans with bullet points drawn from Laker coach-cum-inspirational guru Phil Jackson's Zen optimism. Couples write partnership covenants based on the utopian blather of John Gray. Millions of everyday Americans owe their feelings of "personal power" to erstwhile firewalker Tony Robbins, arguably the father of today's mass-market empowerment." (via Prometheus 6) 2006-01-01T17:53:03Z
Dave has a new Tool called flickrRivr.root. It's a Flickr screensaver that uses the OPML Editor and Media RSS. Interesting. 2006-01-01T16:55:43Z
My First Meth Lab. The funny thing is that as a science-loving kid, my parents bought me one of the chemistry sets shown on the right of this picture, but I then promptly lost the book that came with it, meaning I couldn't actually do any of the experiments. I became a philosophy student, so it all evened out in the end. It's probably still up in the loft somewhere. I hope it's evolved in to something cool. Perhaps a pet dragon that I could box up and send to Kent Hovind. I hear he's in to that sort of thing. 2006-01-01T15:20:00Z
The Apple Product Cycle. So much fun had and so many romances destroyed by Macintosh frenzies. But would we trade it in for the Windows development cycle which consists of announcing revolutionary product, shipping sub-par product and then flipping the bird at the users if they complain. (Via WordWorks) 2006-01-01T14:40:08Z
Hate MySpace idiots stealing your bandwidth? Pwnt them! 2006-01-01T14:29:48Z
Ouriel has some tips if you're thinking about watching the new King Kong. I'm not. Loved his Lord of the Rings, but King Kong seems to be a rather tacky indulgence for Peter Jackson. 2006-01-01T14:21:32Z
Nine Planets is a tour of the solar system, the planets and moons, comets, asteroids and meteors. As well, there's pages about astronomy, how planets get named, spacecraft and all sorts of other cool space stuff. 2006-01-01T14:05:36Z
Austin Cline's book of the day is Keith B. Miller's Perspectives on an Evolving Creation. I've read it, and it's pretty good. 2006-01-01T13:51:46Z
Cory Doctorow quits his day-job. The difference, of course, is that Cory's former day job doesn't suck like most day jobs do. Still, he has got a chance to do something most of us just dream about - write for a living. And post funny Internet links. If anyone is willing to pay me to spend my day looking for humourous videos and angry blog posts, I'll be happy to oblige. 
2006-01-01T13:44:24Z
The Flights of Icarus Goodman on the top predicted news story of 2006: "Cable news networks go wild as even more rich white teenage girls go missing. Rational people continue not to care." Preach it, brother. 2006-01-01T05:17:14Z
Uncommon Sense on ID: "High school lab just doesn't give people anywhere near the background needed to understand how bad ID is, as science." A chicken-and-the-egg dilemma. 2006-01-01T05:09:26Z
A London Mind Camp is being organised for the 6th of April 2006. When it happens, I'll be there. Though I do think that it should be renamed. Perhaps "Unconference London" or something along that lines. I mean, we've had OpenTech and NOTCON. It's not like we can't think up good names. 2006-01-01T04:35:29Z
On an equally juvenile note, here's a video of someone lighting their fart. I love the Internet. 2006-01-01T02:11:37Z
Remember Mahir Cagri? The guy with the "I KISS YOU" website? The BBC has an interview with him. 2006-01-01T02:05:20Z
Alex Barnett has a list of predictions for 2006. Now for the important bit. Go down the list, pick something you'd like to see happen. Now go do it. Rinse and repeat. 2006-01-01T01:12:35Z
law.com have an article on Eric Rothschild and Stephen Harvey, the lawyers for the plaintiffs in Kitzmiller. Stephen Harvey: "Intelligent design doesn't even qualify as bad science -- it's not science." 2006-01-01T00:59:31Z
And a happy new year to you all! 2006-01-01T00:00:15Z
Interviews on the meaning of life 2006-01-01T02:41:51Z
Wow, I've just found a whole series of videos of scientists and other people involved in the discussion on evolution. Best of all, the late John Maynard Smith. The Maynard Smith interview covers his loss of faith, game theory and ethology, frequency dependent selection (and gender) and other things.
Ursula Goodenough, author of The Sacred Depths of Nature, talks about the relation between science and religion / spirituality, her father, 'religious naturalism', 'ecospirituality', the Gaia hypothesis, morality and transcendence, meaning-seeking and all sorts of other stuff. Having only read Richard Dawkins vituperative comments on Goodenough's book, she seemed very much down to earth and rather sensible - despite her suggestion that atheists have a belief (atheism isn't strong atheism, though the latter is a form of the former). In a similar vein, Robert Pollack is a biology professor and religious anti-realist who has become religious in spite of the evidence. His book is The Faith of Biology & The Biology of Faith (Amazon UK).
Bearded philosopher Daniel Dennett talks about The Brights, the meaning of atheism and God, the psychological nature of religion and much more. It's a slightly more rowdy interview than some of the others, and the interviewer is often talking at cross purposes with Dennett. There's also been some controversy in the interpretation of some of Dennett's remarks in the video, which seems to be a sideshow. Even the best of us can flounder around on video tape.
On the theological side, there's interviews with Arthur Peacocke, John Haught, Keith Ward and John Polkinghorne. Also, there are interviews of Stephen Pinker, Brian Swimme, Francis Fukuyama, Huston Smith, Joseph Goldstein, Andrew Newberg, Owen Gingerich, Freeman Dyson, Sharon Salzberg and Omid Safi. Full details and other videos are at Meaningoflife.tv. What an interesting collection of interviews. This sort of depth rarely gets any airtime in the MSM.
