Happy Holidays vs. Merry Christmas →
Multiculturalism, by definition, aims to respect all religious difference and diversity; but political-correctness, by contrast, breeds an innate fear of difference by suggesting that we all ought to be the same (or, at very least, not talk about our differences).
Web programming is the science of coming up with increasingly complicated ways of concatenating strings.
Mining the Language of Science →
The aim of Dr Anna Korhonen and researchers in the Natural Language and Information Processing Group in the University of Cambridge's Computer Laboratory is to develop computers that can understand written language in the same way that humans do. One of the projects she is involved in has recently developed a method of 'text mining' one of the most literature-dependent areas of biomedicine: cancer risk assessment of chemicals.
Dear Congress, It's No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works →
Here we are with a group of elected officials openly supporting a bill they can't explain, and having the temerity to suggest there's no need to "bring in the nerds" to suss out what's actually on it.
How Doctors Die →
It's not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don't die like the rest of us. What's unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little.
Microsoft's New Update Plan Spells the End of IE6 →
If you're still on Windows XP that means you'll be updated to IE 8. Vista and Windows 7 users will move to IE 9.
January 2012 can't come soon enough.
Higgs Boson: The Particle of Faith →
Some tell us that science is about what can be proved. The wise tell us it is really about offering the best explanations of what we see, realising that these explanations often cannot be proved, and may sometimes lie beyond proof. Science often proposes the existence of invisible (and often undetectable) entities – such as dark matter – to explain what can be seen. The reason why the Higgs boson is taken so seriously in science is not because its existence has been proved, but because it makes so much sense of observations that its existence seems assured. In other words, its power to explain is seen as an indicator of its truth.
Just like belief in God.
Opt-Out of Facebook Permissions →
Nice little Chrome plugin that modifies the permissions Facebook apps are asking for so you can opt-out.
(via The 45 Most Powerful Images Of 2011)
Powerful photos from Joplin to Japan, including Occupy Wall Street, Libya, Thailand, and elsewhere.