purplemass.com

🙂

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you’d have good people doing good things and evil people doing bad things, but for good people to do bad things, it takes religion.

Steven Weinberg

Thanks to Amir for sending this one.

behindthename.com

Names. Everyone has one, most people have a vague idea what their own means, but few give them much more thought. The study of names is called onomastics, a field which touches on linguistics, history, anthropology, pyschology, sociology, philology and much more.

When people refer to the “meaning of a name”, they are most likely referring to the etymology, which is the original literal meaning. This website looks at the etymology and history or all types of given names.

Went to see this French animated movie the other day – it’s about an Iranian girl’s life in Iran/Europe.

Totally awesome!

A gallery of illustrations from the marvelous Artforms in Nature, Kunstformen der Natur 1899-1904 by Ernst Haeckel, an eminent, prolific and very controversial German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist, who named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms and coined many terms in biology, including phylum, phylogeny and ecology.

Courtesy of MetaFilter.

Some true gems here!

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/67039/

Some of these are pretty impressive!

Awesome piece of animation:

http://en.qoob.tv/video/clip_view.asp?id=19

GIMP is an Open Source versatile graphics manipulation package similar to Photoshop.

http://www.gimp.org/

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

http://www.inkscape.org/