Inspiration from Carl Sagan

September 20, 2005 – 5:00 am

Carl Sagan, after he saw an image of the Earth [planetary.org] taken by Voyager wrote:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bright? Daft name, right idea…

September 1, 2005 – 12:00 am

Pop over to The Brights site to find a growing community of people with a naturalistic worldview, free of mumbo-jumbo and suspertition (in its very many forms).

Read the rest of this entry »

Homeopathy

August 26, 2005 – 12:00 am

The Lancet bravely takes on the job of showing what a load of nonsense is the belief that homeopathy “works” in any provable way.

The published study (of which the link above is to the summary abstract) uses conventional scientific methods to show that there is no clinical effect from homeopathic treatments, and that the effects are fully consistent with placebo effects.

Read the rest of this entry »

Quote of the Day

August 24, 2005 – 1:04 pm

The late, great Douglas Adams hits the proverbial nail on the head:

“God is no longer an explanation of anything, but has instead become something that would itself need an insurmountable amount of explaining.”

Nicely put…

Read the rest of this entry »

Saudi Arabia

August 2, 2005 – 8:02 am

The reaction of “World Leaders” to the death of King Fahd of Saudi Arabia has been just as craven and abject as might have been expected.

Read the rest of this entry »

In the name of god

August 2, 2005 – 12:00 am

The recent terrorist attacks in London make one, yet again, wonder how on earth religious beliefs bring people to do such things. Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian a few days ago, captures it well:

This is not about poverty, deprivation or cultural dislocation of second-generation immigrants. There is plenty of that and it is passive. Iraq is the immediate trigger, but this is about religious delusion.

Read the rest of this entry »

Backup for Windows

July 29, 2005 – 10:00 pm

I needed a good backup tool for my (:blush:) Windows XP system at home. Searched high and low. Concluded there was nothing available that was free, and stumped up hard cash for WinBackup v1.
Read the rest of this entry »

Lian Li PC-6070 case

July 29, 2005 – 1:44 pm

Some time back I bought the most beautiful PC case you can imagine: a Lian Li PC-6070.

This thing is elegant, understated, and solid. All brushed aluminium and thumbscrews.

Read the rest of this entry »

Linux distros: a random sampling

July 29, 2005 – 12:38 pm

I’ve been using Linux, in both work and home environments, for about 6 years now. We Linux fans do regularly get the urge to change distros, and I’ve got through a few…!

No offence to the dozens and dozens of distros that I don’t mention here. I’m sure they are fabulous, but I’ve not tried them.

Read the rest of this entry »