binaryslate

Just stumbled across a news story about the Freethought Association of Canada president being assaulted at Ryerson University.

Why is it always those who are ‘religious’ and preach for peace who are the ones who resort to the lowest levels to defend their ‘religious ideals’? It worries me a lot. It’s not as if the guy is trying to push an ideal onto some other individual in the same way as religious individuals do towards atheists. He’s just trying to push the idea that hey maybe you should at least be allowed to question religion.

When was the last time an atheist nation/person started a war?

Red tape has given way to black marker tape for thousands of bemused civil servants as part of a £7 million paperclip revolution aimed at ensuring that they keep the tools of their trade in the right place.

Office workers have been given the tape to mark out where they should put their pens and pencils, their computer keyboards and to indicate where to place their phones.

“We had a situation in some offices in Scotland where staff were asked, ‘Is that banana on your desk active or inactive?’, meaning were they going to eat it? If not, it had to be cleared away.�

The scariest point in all this is that these kind of stories seem no longer out of the ordinary. The government seems to excel in finding pointless ways of spending money. It’s almost Lord Irvine’s wallpaper all over again, although seems ironic that wallpaper only cost £650K and black tape costs £7.4m.

tip: Times Online

Watching BBC Breakfast this morning, they showed a clip of Richard Hammond’s first TV interview since the big accident.

He’s on ‘Friday Night with Jonathan Ross’ tonight. The gist of the interview seems to be that he’s fully recovered ‘without a scratch’ and, the best news of all, he’ll back with Top Gear in January, Hurrah!

He does say ‘I’ll only be allowed to test drive sofas though’

Author JK Rowling has revealed the title of the seventh and final Harry Potter book.

It will be called Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The announcement was made on the writer’s official website.

Really looking forward to reading this. As the title is now known I suppose I should get a pre-order on Amazon, they’ll be flying straight off the shelves.

tip: BBC

The steel-and-glass Skywalk, seen in this artist’s conception, will jut 70 feet (21 meters) from the canyon wall and sit 4,000 feet (1,220 meters) above the Colorado River.

The Native American tribe building the walkway hopes to bring in valuable tourist dollars that will bolster the local economy. But some members and residents worry that the structure will be doomed by its support system—steel poles drilled 40 feet (12 meters) into the porous canyon wall.

I’m not too sure? Are you brave enough?

tip: National Geographic

Beeb is reporting that 1200-year-old problem is ‘easy’ and has been solved.

Computers simply cannot divide by zero. Try it on your calculator and you’ll get an error message.

But Dr Anderson has come up with a theory that proposes a new number - ‘nullity’ - which sits outside the conventional number line (stretching from negative infinity, through zero, to positive infinity).

I’m intrigued, it would certainly making coding a lot simpler. But I guess it’ll take a few generations of CPUs before this becomes the standard.

p.s.

I really want to watch the videos supplied with the BBC story but the BBC still insists on doing its streaming with realplayer, why? It’s a piece of crap, I hate installing it, adverts everywhere. Please BBC, just host wmv, or mpg, or avi or anything!