One day, a little while after this, Satan appeared again. We were always watching out for him, for life was never very stagnant when he was by. He came upon us at that place in the woods where we had first met him. Being boys, we wanted to be entertained; we asked him to do a show for us.

"Very well," he said; "would you like to see a history of the progress of the human race? -- its development of that product which it calls civilization?"

Mark Twain "A History of War" from The Mysterious Stranger

"On Monday, April 17th, 2000 at about 8:30 am near the corner of 18th and K I was beaten by a plainclothes officer (not sure if fed or mpd) after photographing him going crazy though the streets hitting people over the headwith his baton. At the time I didn't even think it wasa cop! Wearing my Independent Media Center badge, I photographed this man, who I believed was an motorist angry about the traffic disruptions. After seeing me about to take the photograph of him, he lunged towards my neck with his hands and proceeded to club me at least two times with this club like device and pushed me to the ground. He then hit me several more times and wrestled the camera from my hands. I called for police to arrest this man still believing this was a case of road rage. Upon arrival the police officer (not sure if MPD,secret service or another agency) informed me that the man was a plainclothes officer."
More... and more...

parodies of Chick tracts, for your fundie friends

No, really, how much would could a woodchuck chuck?

How to Give Up Hope - An Exile Guide

August Strindberg in "Absinthe and Women"

Leon Trotsky's "FASCISM: What it is and how to fight it"

Paul Laffoley
Biography from the Kent Gallery in NYC

Fucking scary

"Ideas are more dangerous than guns. We don't allow our enemies guns, so why should we allow them ideas." --Joseph Stalin

KittyFan

"Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances." --Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 1867)

"All is mystery; but he is a slave who will not struggle to penetrate the dark veil." --Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881)

Fake voice recordings easy to make, hard to detect

"People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." --Soren Kierkegaard

Debunking the "Expensive Procedure Call" Myth
or Procedure Call Implementations Considered Harmful
or Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO

netselect, an ultrafast intelligent parallelizing binary-search implementation of "ping."

"Put a spot of ink upon paper, fix your eye upon that spot, and retire to such a distance, that at last you lose sight of it; 'tis plain, that the moment before it vanish'd the image or impression was perfectly indivisible." --David Hume, 1739

"Astute observers of history are aware that for every notable event there will usually be at least one, often several wild conspiracy theories which spring up around it. "The CIA killed Hendrix" " The Pope had John Lennon murdered ", "Hitler was half Werewolf", "Space aliens replaced Nixon with a clone" etc,etc. The bigger the event, the more ridiculous and more numerous are the fanciful rantings which circulate in relation to it..."

"One of the wilder stories circulating about Sept 11, and one that has attracted something of a cult following amongst conspiracy buffs is that it was carried out by 19 fanatical Arab hijackers, masterminded by an evil genius named Osama bin Laden, with no apparent motivation other than that they 'hate our freedoms.'"

OO vs modules in functional programming (especially OCaml)

New Noam Chomsky interview, concerning Iraq

Civilian Victims

Seldom mentioned consequences of the Iraq war.

Wars, Massacres and Atrocities of the Twentieth Century: Year-by-Year Death Toll

A blacklisting project, Campus Watch hopes to do for students and professors what Project TIPS would have done for mail carriers and plumbers.

"The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than the Great War, known today as World War I (WWI), at somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four-years of the Black Death Bubonic Plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as "Spanish Flu" or "La Grippe" the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster."

The executive producer of a CBS miniseries about Adolf Hitler's rise to power has been fired after giving an interview in which he compared the current mood of Americans to that of the Germans who helped Hitler rise to power

"It basically boils down to an entire nation gripped by fear, who ultimately chose to give up their civil rights and plunged the whole nation into war," Gernon said in the interview. "I can't think of a better time to examine this history than now."

How to be a Programmer

Stelarc

"If a distinguished but elderly scientist says something can be done he is probably right. On the other hand, if he says somthing cannot be done he is almost certainly wrong." --Arthur C. Clarke

comp.ai.philosophy faq

How to get the most out of conferences

Procrastination

"oh, fuck it"

Programmers and Flow

Survival Tips for Black Hole Travelers

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

On the (Im)possibility of Obfuscating Programs

"Britain reserves the right to bomb niggers"
(Thanks to Mike)

PeaceBlogs - 855 blogs from 39 countries

What are wikis and how can you build them?

Rainwater Harvesting and Purification System

Why do volunteer work at an animal shelter?

At first glance one might think that the following statement - "Police occasionally resorted to torture and physical beatings of prisoners ... The government generally did not permit prison visits by local or international human rights groups ... Arbitrary arrests and detentions continued to be problems" - was describing US practices, but it is in fact the US State Department's description of notoriously repressive Eritrea, made in a report condemning human rights abuses around the world. The report also said that in Israel "there were no reports of political killings during the year"

You're living in an artificially induced state of consciousness that resembles sleep.

"It is the great characteristic of the ancient world, revealing itself in many divergent guises and seldom fully intelligible to modern men; faith in the absolute supremacy of the inward life over things external" --Gilbert Murray, historian of Greek religion

A Warmonger Educates A Peacenik

"Roger Penrose's "Shadows of the Mind" contain a future dialog between a human identified as "Albert Imperator" and an advanced robot, the "Mathematically Justified Cybersystem," allegedly Albert's creation... The dialog ends melodramatically as the robot, apparently unhinged by this revelation, claims to be a messenger of god, and the human shuts it down with a secret control... Severe incongruities in the dialog's logic and characterization suggest the following continuation..."

"The Penrose house robot has a module that observes and reasons about the mental state of its master (advertising slogan: "Our Robots Care!"). For reasons best known to its manufacturer, this particular model registers trouble whenever the psychology module infers that the master does not believe the robot is conscious. One slow day the reflective process stirs, and notes a major trouble report of this kind. It runs the human interaction problem solver to find an ameliorating strategy. This produces a plan to initiate a pleading conversation with Roger, with nonverbal cues. So the robot trundles up, stares with its big brown eyes, cocks its head, and begins to speak..."

Missing Man Pages Poject

Why the artificial intelligence community hates the Loebner Prize