Plato's Beard » 2006

Plato's Beard » 2006 » May

Plato's Beard » 2006 » May

•

May 30th, 2006 by ravi

Democrats protest E-voting supplier

Business Week reports that Democrats are protesting the use of a particular company for supplying voting machines for U.S elections. Before you get all excited that the Dems have grown a spine… no, they are not talking about Diebold and their CEOs promise to deliver Ohio to Bush, but about a Venezuelan company, no doubt under the control of that leftist rogue Hugo Chavez!

•

May 30th, 2006 by ravi

Mandelian evolution

Over at Business Week, wunderkind gets all radical and suggests we throw open the border. Funny thing with liberal ideas that sit around long enough… they get picked up by conservatives and neo-liberals ;-). We have been calling for action against Saddam for a few decades. Bush thinks of the same thing, for the first time ever, and decimates the country. We have been talking about the environment for ages. Now the evangelicals adopting the platform but from the funny perspective of stewardship. And now we have Mandel:

•

May 30th, 2006 by ravi

Geek fight clubs

CNN reports that geeks are now joining fight clubs to liberate their inner macho child:

I wonder what would happen to these dudes if some real men showed up to the fight?

•

May 26th, 2006 by ravi

Values confusion!

Below is a snippet of a Gallup poll on values, via PollingReport. Read the whole thing. There's plenty of bad news: if you are an animal rights proponent, like me, then there is the disappointing bit that 60+% approve of animal testing and even wearing fur. Then we have the righteous disapproval of homosexuality. And more. Read on.

So, if get this right: the public does not approve of suicide, but they approve of the death penalty. In other words, they want do kill you rather than let you kill yourself. So if you want to commit suicide, your best bet is to kill someone else, including (as the above indicates) the not yet human foetus inside a woman — then turn yourself in, and they will kill you. But make sure you don't kill a homo since the public doesn't care much for that sort of people.

•

May 26th, 2006 by ravi

Net neutrality moves forward in Congress

•

May 24th, 2006 by ravi

Opera 9 Beta

You can now download a Beta of the Opera browser 9. If you have never used Opera, give it a whirl. Its wicked fast, provides easy keyboard navigation, did tab-like stuff before Mozilla, and now, again beating Mozilla to it, does the latest fad: widgets! Sweet!

Download Opera Web Browser

•

May 24th, 2006 by ravi

Genetic inheritence through RNA

Next time you meet a reductionist, you can wave this bit of news at him!

•

May 24th, 2006 by ravi

Apropos to the Kaavya Affair

[A question to English usage types: is "Apropos of" or "Apropos to" the right usage in this title? My initial urge was "of" but on further thought I felt "to" is more apropos!]

I have already posted on the Kaavya Viswanathan affair (plagiarization by the young Indian-American author), though I did not quite articulate what it is that bothered me about her. Below is an article from the Guardian that describes the difficulty that minorities have in getting published. A comment towards the qend of the quoted text describes my uneasiness: that minority writers are further disadvantaged by those (otherwise privileged) who play upon their minority status to open doors.

•

May 23rd, 2006 by ravi

AlterNet reviews Singer’s latest