More on the Indonesian atheist jailed for saying “No God” on facebook

As I’m sure you are already aware, an Indonesian non-believer called Alexander Aan was sentenced to 2.5 years in jail for posting “God doesn’t exist” on his Facebook page apparently because under Indonesian law, not believing in God is illegal. Well, there is a nice article in the Christian Post about an effort to help … Read more

Douchebag Rising

This I love … over on Pharyngula PZ gives a very nice sequence of events that illustrates an example of a Douchebag of epic proportions … truly hilarious. The brief summary is … oh heck no, I’ll not spoil the fun, just go read it. You can also read more about it here. Least you wonder, … Read more

Catholic Homophobia in Scotland

The news is that the Equality Network (a group that works for equality and human rights in Scotland) commissioned Ipsos-MORI to survey Scottish attitudes towards marriage and found that of 1,003 people asked, 64 percent supported the idea of allowing gay and straight couples an equal right to marry. Hey, that’s quite good news. Ah but not everybody thinks … Read more

Is X a good movie? – Forget the critics, pay attention to Internet Chatter

A team of smart folks in Japan have found a mathematical model for the ‘hit’ phenomenon in entertainment. It basically uses the advertisement budget time distribution and also word-of-mouth (WOM) to  work things out. Oh wait, how the heck do you measure WOM? Well they went for the number of posts on social network systems such as … Read more

Common Religious Claim: “No true Scotsman …”

When you confront some believers with examples of truly outrageous religious behaviour, the common rebuttal is “Ah but they are not real believers, no true believer from my faith would …“. Now that indeed might be factually correct, but they are missing the key point, so let us now take a quick look at all this. First, what … Read more