purplemass.com

Reformist law makers in Iran called the controlled February 20th elections there a “sham” that “Deprived the people there of the most basic right — the right to choose and be chosen.” More than two thousand reform candidates were blocked from running for Parliament by the twelve-member Guardian Council, an unelected group that wields enormous power in Iran’s theocratic system. Parliamentary leaders wrote a six-page open letter to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that said bluntly: “You lead a system in which legitimate freedoms and the rights of the people are being trampled on in the name of Islam.” The lawmakers called the election “unfair” and “vastly illegal”. Many others announced a boycott.

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A short Flash movie showing how the main 5 religions spread throughout the world over the past 5000 years or so.

http://mapsofwar.com/ind/history-of-religion.html

This article in the NY Times is a pretty good read along the same lines.

From slashdot.org

A couple of times a year, I pull up the following and read it, trying to realign my thinking process. I don’t know who originally wrote it; I’ve had it for years. I apologize for the long post, but it’s worth it:

Some time ago I received a call from a colleague. He was about to give a student a zero for his answer to a physics question, while the student claimed a perfect score. The instructor and the student agreed to an impartial arbiter, and I was selected.

I read the examination question: “SHOW HOW IT IS POSSIBLE TO DETERMINE THE HEIGHT OF A TALL BUILDING WITH THE AID OF A BAROMETER.”

The student had answered, “Take the barometer to the top of the building, attach a long rope to it,lower it to the street, and then bring it up, measuring the length of the rope. The length of the rope is the height of the building.” The student really had a strong case for full credit since he had really answered the question completely and correctly! On the other hand, if full credit were given, it could well contribute to a high grade in his physics course and to certify competence in physics, but the answer did not confirm this.

I suggested that the student have another try. I gave the student six minutes to answer the question with the warning that the answer should show some knowledge of physics. At the end of five minutes, he had not written anything. I asked if he wished to give up, but he said he had many answers to this problem; he was just thinking of the best one.

I excused myself for interrupting him and asked him to please go on. In the next minute, he dashed off his answer which read: “Take the barometer to the top of the building and lean over the edge of the roof. Drop the barometer, timing its fall with a stopwatch.Then, using the formula x=0.5*a*t^^2, calculate the height of the building.”

At this point, I asked my colleague if he would give up. He conceded,and gave the student almost full credit.

While leaving my colleague’s office, I recalled that the student had said that he had other answers to the problem, so I asked him what they were. “Well,” said the student, “there are many ways of getting the height of a tall building with the aid of a barometer. For example, you could take the barometer out on a sunny day and measure the height of the barometer, the length of its shadow, and the length of the shadow of the building,and by the use of simple proportion, determine the height of the building.”

“Fine,” I said, “and others?”

“Yes,” said the student, “there is a very basic measurement method you will like. In this method, you take the barometer and begin to walk up the stairs. As you climb the stairs, you mark off the length of the barometer along the wall. You then count the number of marks, and this will give you the height of the building in barometer units.”

“A very direct method.”

“Of course. If you want a more sophisticated method, you can tie the barometer to the end of a string, swing it as a pendulum, and determine the value of g at the street level and at the top of principle, can be calculated.”

“On this same tact, you could take the barometer to the top of the building,attach a long rope to it, lower it to just above the street, and then swing it as a pendulum. You could then calculate the height of the building by the period of the precession”.

“Finally,” he concluded, “there are many other ways of solving the problem. Probably the best,” he said, “is to take the barometer to the basement and knock on the superintendent’s door. When the superintendent answers, you speak to him as follows: ‘Mr. Superintendent, here is a fine barometer. If you will tell me the height of the building, I will give you this barometer.”

At this point, I asked the student if he really did not know the conventional answer to this question. He admitted that he did, but said that he was fed up with high school and college instructors trying to teach him how to think.

The student was Neils Bohr.

David Phinney thought he’d struck journalistic gold. The veteran reporter, who has done freelance work for PBS, ABC, The New York Times, and other news companies, learned from a disgusted American contractor that the Kuwaiti company hired to build the U.S. embassy in Iraq was using forced laborers trafficked in from Asia.

He pitched the story to several news organizations and then waited months to hear back from them. Only NBC responded, but the network was only interested in his sources — so they could produce their own version of the story.

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Earlier this year the American Film Institute re-voted their top 100 American movies of all time. The first list, compiled in 1998 sparked a great discussion, several TV specials and got people talking about some old classics they hadn’t seen in a while.

This year that list was updated to see how the films of the last 10 years would be ranked and to see how our tastes in culture had changed.

Click here for the list

From: news.com.au

Do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses logic
detail oriented
facts rule
words and language
present and past
math and science
can comprehend
knowing
acknowledges
order/pattern perception
knows object name
reality based
forms strategies
practical
safe

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
uses feeling
“big picture” oriented
imagination rules
symbols and images
present and future
philosophy & religion
can “get it” (i.e. meaning)
believes
appreciates
spatial perception
knows object function
fantasy based
presents possibilities
impetuous
risk taking

From findinglisp.com

I spent a while last night reading about Tim Bray’s adventures with Erlang. Tim started investigating Erlang as a part of his “Wide Finder Project” in which he’s looking for programming languages that will help accelerate common tasks on the soon-to-be-very-popular CPUs with many cores but slower clock rates.

Tim works at Sun, and so this question and project makes perfect sense in light of Sun’s Niagra and T2 processors with many cores and CMT. It also makes perfect sense in light of Intel’s Tera-scale computing initiative where they have demonstrated chips with 80 cores. In short, the future is going to be very, very parallel, and we had better come to terms with that.

Continued

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