jack

When news was slow over Christmas, a spate of newspapers ran one of those "here's an interesting little factoid" articles about a Israeli archaeologist who dug up a different town called Bethlehem in north Israel, quite close to Nazareth and said "hey, I wonder if the bible story about Jesus' birth is about this one, not the one at the other end of the country".

I was sceptical that Jesus was born in any Bethlehem, but I didn't know enough biblical history to know either way. Here's my understanding of the history, can anyone fill in the gaps?

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So, the news all over the headlines today (as I found out when wondering why so many strange tweets are appearing), seems to be "30-year-old married couple expecting baby". I'm not sure why I feel compelled to repeat that.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13701636

I'm not clear on the distinctions in degree in being recognised as a state, but it's a clear step forward to recognise palestine as a state at all (and hopefully good for palestine and israel).

Someone I knew from Cambridge (from LARP, I think), Edward, made... a thing.

http://trotify.com/ (video link)

The video is hilarious, as is the concept. It's a non-kickstarter kickstarter[1]. Watch the video first if you can, it's funnier when you don't know what's coming.

[1] I think "kickstart" has been genericised, possibly in record time? You know what I mean. A site encouraging you to make enough pre-orders to finance production, with money refunded if there aren't enough, using a different intermediary or none.

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Syria rebel factions form an opposition government. It's yet to see if it'll last successfully, but it's a good step, it's seeking international recognition from several other countries (neighbouring countries, France, USA, etc). And generally seems a better hope for the future than, um, whichever murderous bastard was the previous dictator, I can't remember.

Fighting and dying continues.

Does anyone have a better read on the situation in syria? I only know whatever's in the headlines on aljazeera english (which is pretty good at listing the international news with less of a pro-UK/USA bias and with a blessed, blessed absence of celebrity gossip and artificial controversies).

Betteridge's_law_of_headlines says that you can save time by assuming that any news headline that ends in a question can be answered "no". As he put it, "The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bollocks, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it."

Obviously there are some exceptions. But it occurs to me that a probable corollary is that, in a satrical newspaper, the intended answer can probaby be taken as "yes":

"Could The Use Of Flying Death Robots Be Hurting America's Reputation Worldwide?" Onion video

Man freefalls from edge of space 24 miles up, first human to break sound barrier unaided.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19943590

Wait, what? I seemed to have missed all the middle steps. I heard people talking about this, but there's always optimists who thinks things the government does he/she doesn't like are unconstitutional (eg. there's a bizarre array of arguments why income tax is unconstitutional).

I missed all the steps between "someone suggested this idea" and "it was actually before the supreme court". And 4/9 people voted against it!

In fact, it seems like there's some truth in the "lots of things the federal government does aren't really in the spirit of the constitution" idea. I think the framers of the constitution might well be surprised at how centralised America is (even if the states have more autonomy than the divisions in most countries). However, I think the centralisation is probably necessary to run a halfway coherent country, and has positives and negatives for people on all sides of the political spectrum, so I think the wise thing to do is quietly accept it, and not accept it when it works in your favour and try to break things when it goes against.

Seriously, of all the rights the federal government may have infringed, "the right to die of preventable diseases if you get laid off from your job" doesn't seem like the #1 right worth going to the breaches for...? I assure them, lots of other countries have been bumbling along without that and we don't feel terribly oppressed, honest. Not even Stephen Hawking.

I was recently debating in another journal about new suggestions for internet filtering, ostensibly to prevent children seeing child-inappropriate sites. This is normally met with -- imho justified -- cries of doom. However, it does seem likely that there would be ways to approach it which would actually do some good -- if you, as a reasonably technical aware person, were proposing something, what would it be?

Suggestions:

* Not support political censorship
* If it requires a large investment of manpower (eg. great firewall) be upfront about where that comes from
* Should fulfil stated purpose of allowing concerned non-technical parents to protect their children from inappropriate content to at least some extent
* Should not be a massive expensive unworkable pointless joke
* Should be clear if it will work a country at a time (probably not) or be a small but incremental improvement over large classes of website.

Whatever the government is thinking about is almost certainly unworkable. But if there were something NOT ridiculous which could be suggested instead, that would actually be better than just "it doesn't work", or at least make clear to people who DO want a solution that it may be expensive.

It might even have positive side effects if (eg) pure spam domain names were caught in the crossfire.