The Night The Hugos Burned
This is a great, reasonably short overall explanation of the fuss with the Hugo Awards
, Sad Puppies, Rabid Puppies, and how scorched earth unfortunately ruled.
History
Religion… Meh
There is positive research on raising religion-free children. This is what we have been doing, and the findings, plus what has long been known in criminology
, don’t surprise me. No offense to my religious friends, but to sell a child on a religion, you are encouraging belief in a fantastical story, a set of “facts” that are circularly supported by faith. Morality exists apart from religion. If religion touts some of the same morality, great. You don’t need religion to tell you to be excellent to each other, not to harm people if you wouldn’t want people to harm you, or that certain things are inherently wrong. You don’t have to suspend your rational mind to be a good person, and you might just be less susceptible to behaving as a bad person due to irrationality. At any rate, interesting stuff.
Science Heroes
Who aved the most lives in history? Fascinating list. I tend to think of Borlaug as the biggie
, credited with saving perhaps billions, but he is in sixth. Of course, numbers like these are always going to be estimated and conjectured. Still
, these are some impressive people. Big Damn Heroes, in fact.
Master Penman
My kids aren’t being taught cursive in school, except if one of the teachers makes an effort to cover it a little, or if one of the kids is curious enough to go out of her way to learn. I agree, that’s sad and mistaken. I love technology as much as anyone, but how can you not teach handwriting? This is a fascinating video, wherever you fall on the penmanship-in-school issue.
Little Pink House
As someone who followed the Kelo case closely and was sorely disappointed by the decision, I am excited to see this.
Business, Government, History, Law, Movies, Policy, Politics, Regulation, Video
One Way to View Laws
The Jews In The Attic Test to evaluate whether a given law or policy would make it harder/impossible to protect the innocent from a government of evil intent.
Up With Down
I had no idea the down jacket was so recent
, or that it had been invented by Eddie Bauer. Heck, I had no idea Eddie Bauer was a person and not a name made up to be a brand.
Almost Losing Columbia Early
Here’s the fascinating story of how the shuttle was almost lost in 1999.
Deja News
Anyone remember Deja News? You wouldn’t, if you were never active on Usenet, which was a big part of the Internet before the web was developed (announced on Usenet, mind you) and became, to most mind, “the Internet.” It was a web site that could be used to access and to search Usenet. Search being the big deal, though it was handy to have something that didn’t require a news reader program.
Google bought Deja News eons ago, which drew mixed expectations that leaned, if I recall correctly, negative. Still, they made some improvements for a while, and used it to promote non-Usenet “groups.” There had been various companies offering those. Ultimately it came down mainly to Yahoo, and groups were and are essentially mailing lists that also have a web archive/interface. Which isn’t so hard to do. I run a little-used mailing list of former colleagues
, using a common mailing list program, and it keeps a web archive/interface members can access, if they know and remember they can. But I digress.
Google has increasingly downplayed Groups, their own and especially Usenet, perhaps even to the point of helping Usenet be forgotten. First you take over an important access point and tool, then you make it obscure…
As it turns out, there is still an alternate Deja search interface out there that can get you the results that may no longer be easy to search for otherwise. Worth knowing about
, if you want to take a look back.