Understanding the world or explaining phenomena through superstition, dogma and orthodoxy — instead of facts and reason — invariably leads to some very ugly and uncivilized behaviour. The reason for this is fairly straightforward — namely, beliefs that are rooted in superstition, dogma and orthodoxy are not sustainable … sooner or later their veracity will be tested by facts and evidence. Those who need these beliefs to sustain their interests and power therefore must enforce at the point of a sword or remove those who might prove them to be untrue.
Anger as Iran bans women from universities
What do you do if you are a backward-thinking theocracy whose women threaten to overtake the men (who hold the power)?
In a move that has prompted a demand for a UN investigation by Iran’s most celebrated human rights campaigner, the Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, 36 universities have announced that 77 BA and BSc courses in the coming academic year will be “single gender” and effectively exclusive to men.
A couple of weeks ago I built a website for One to Watch using GitHub Pages. It’s incredibly simple to do: just create a website — either static or Jekyll generated — within a branch of your existing GitHub repo called gh-pages. It’s automatically published for you as soon as you push the branch to GitHub. Obviously as it’s hosted by GitHub it’s very fast to load. Even better, there’s no extra cost to using your own domain.
From Pitchfork’s review of Purity Ring’s Shrines. First some context:
Shrines is not about range, instead offering subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. You might think of the album as a sculpture, and each track offers a different vantage point.
Then, pow!
[…] and then “Grandloves”, with unwelcome guest vocals from Isaac Emmanuel of Young Magic, is like having a guy standing between you and the work, and he won’t stop talking on his cell.
What If Social Networks Just Aren’t Profitable?
What if we all realized that social networks are a societal good (at least as good as a local alt [newspaper] weekly) but not necessarily good businesses? We’re all desperately hoping that Twitter or Facebook or Tumblr will figure out the secret ingredient that turns a large-scale community of free members into a cash machine. What if we’re all just waiting for the impossible? Like a business that turns water into gold? We’ve got lots of water, we just need to figure out the gold part…