Linky

In an effort to point out the obvious if you want to find out more about what's going on at the AAS meeting there are plenty of people blogging away, and you can check out a few via the google blog search. Of the more well known blogger's that are here there's Phil Plait here and Chris Lintott here.

A little to the right

Read this recent post from Cosmic Variance. It's about a new rival to wikipedia, called conservapedia, that doesn't hold too much hat with all the woolly liberal views that wikipedia expounds. By God, they aim to set things right and they'll do it by ridding entries of the scourge of liberal non-American spelling (see conservapedia commandment number 5) - non-American spelling leads to homosexuality, rape, and cruelty to cats, or something like that! Some of the entries detailed in Sean's CV post and comments sections are obvious piss takes and have been removed, however the posts on Atheism, Einstein and "Anything Goes" are still as stated - I think they might be serious! I know that wikipedia can sometimes have some dubious statements and citations for articles (which you're free to correct), but how's about this for a "true and verifiable" (commandment numero uno) statement:

"Since atheists have no God, as a philosophical framework atheism simply provides no logical basis for any moral standard. They live their lives according to the rule that "anything goes". In recent years, this has led to a large rise in crime[1], drug use,pre-marital sex, teenage pregnancy,[2] pedophilia[3] and bestiality."

Particularly amusing/disturbing is that the citation [1] is to a website called www.creationtheory.org.

Express yourself

Tony Blair's an arse! The Queen's a crack ho! Christianity smells! God's a bastard!

Now I like the fact that I can say and write these things, even if they're insulting to people. I like the fact that I can write them as my honest opinion, or as a joke. I like the fact that I can criticise people or institutions that I don't agree with. However, I might think differently if I was in Eygpt, as a blogger who expressed his opinion has just been sent to prison for four years. His crime was "for contempt of religion, insulting the president and spreading false information.", or basically speaking out against an establishment he felt was deserving of some criticism. This type of state censorship/punishment isn't limited to Eygpt (see the UK religious hatred laws for example), but I hope that it wont spread too far and too wide. There's a huge amount that has already been written about freedom of speech and civil liberties, but I just thought I'd bring up this case as a recent example of where things can lead. You can see more about the Egyptian blogger Kareem here.

Second home

In an effort to write-up my research/ideas/to-do-lists on a regular basis I've created a research blog. I did have a very basic version previously, but it was just a simple html webpage and had no features whatsoever. For this blog I've made use of wordpress as it has very easily installable software - I only had to get out local sys admin to do one thing which was set up a mySQL database for me. Hopefully this will encourage me to keep regular research notes, which will now be handily archived and tagged depending on the subject.