OVO

James King, Catholic Church Sues City of Phoenix for Right to Ring Church Bells: In June, a Catholic bishop was sentenced to three years of probation and 10 days in jail (suspended) for violating a noise ordinance by ringing church bells in a Phoenix neighborhood. On August 24, city officials warned St. Mark’s Catholic Church, located near Van Buren Street and 30th Street, that it could be prosecuted “if St. Mark did not reduce the amount of times that it rings its carillon to the satisfaction of certain neighbors,” according to a complaint filed by prosecutors. [...] The churches are asking for nominal damages, declaratory judgment under the First and Fourteenth Amendments, and a permanent injunction so they can ring their bells.

What King describes as ‘ringing church bells’ in his article are recordings that are played hourly.  There’s a different mental image invoked by a weathered bell tower and its sonorous chimes peeling down through history on the one hand and a recording on the other.  There’s no definition of what a religion is in US law – that’s what the Second Amendment does for us – so there’s no legal case for preventing hourly blasts of recorded bells because it isn’t a ‘real’ religious practice.  But it does seem reasonable to compel them to pipe down, in the interest of those whose freedom of religion includes a little peace and quiet.  The bishop fighting for the right to make his joyous noise may not know it, but he is laying the groundwork for any other religious group that wants to bomb their neighborhood with their own recordings.  Say, a Muslim call to prayer five times every day over concert-grade loudspeakers.   You don’t get one without the other.  Think of the “ear-splitting” sound of 4,000 mosques doing just that – five times a day – every day – in Cairo.  Or if Cairo is too far away, think of the problems caused by religious loudspeaker use in London.  Is this really a problem that we need to import to the USA?

Lubna Hussein, When I think of my trial, I pray my fight won’t be in vain: Next week I will stand trial in a Sudanese court, charged along with 12 other women with committing an “indecent act” – wearing trousers in a public place. I will face up to 40 lashes and an unlimited fine if I am convicted of breaching Article 152 of Sudanese law, which prohibits dressing indecently in public. As an employee of the UN I was offered immunity, and the chance to escape trial, but I chose to resign from the UN so that I could face the Sudanese authorities and make them show to the world what they consider justice to be. [The] director of police has admitted that 43,000 women were arrested in Khartoum state in 2008 for clothing offences. When asked, he couldn’t say how many of these women had been flogged. And it’s not just about clothing. After my arrest, two girls were arrested in a public place and the police discovered that their mobile phones had video clips of scenes from the hugely popular Arab soap Noor and Mohannad in which the main characters kiss each other. The girls were charged with pornography and given 40 lashes. [...] When I think of my trial, I pray that my daughters will never live in fear of these “police of security of society”. We will only be secure once the police protect us and these laws are repealed. I also pray that the next generation will see we had the courage to fight for their future before it was too late. We need Arab, African, American and European leaders to stand with us and help us make sure that the next chapter of our history is less bloody and brutal than the last. This will require conviction and boldness from their side. I hope they will display the qualities of those Sudanese men and women I most admire.

Nesrine Malik [bio: Sudanese-born writer and commentator who lives in London and works in the financial sector] wrote “any whiff of visible western practical support for Lubna Hussein for example, would have robbed her campaign of most of its credibility. What will help Muslim women is spending less time and effort being outraged on our behalf and more on differentiating the different faces and needs behind the burqa.”  Malik also wrote “The new date for the trial, 7 September, falls in the middle of Ramadan. This will work in Hussein’s favour. Ramadan is a month when Muslims are supposed to renounce violence and refrain from all intolerant behaviour, dedicating the fast to peaceful contemplation. Perhaps the government will invoke its faux piety and use this as an excuse to delay the trial yet again if no other solution can be negotiated in the meantime. Hopefully, the momentum the case has captured will not ease. Flogged or found innocent, the world will be watching.”  Apparently the West is heeding Malik’s suggestion to observe but not speak of Lubna Hussein’s trail.  Google is unable to find any mention of Lubna Hussein at the National Organization of Women, feminist.com, The Feminist Majority, Feminist Studies, The European Womens Lobby or Amnesty International. [thanks to Klint Finley for pointing out my error: AI does mention Lubna Hussein, here and here].  Against Malik’s wishes, there is a whiff of visible support for Lubna Hussein at Feminist Blogs and Ms. Magazine. Maybe most Western feminists consider dress reform to be old fashioned, having resolved the issue in the 1850s.  If their sisters in the Muslim world are being arrested and flogged for it, well, they just need to get with the times. There’s more support for Lubna Hussein at atheist sites such as Freethinker and OVO than at these feminist sites.  Who’s got your back, and who’s putting a whip across your back?

All praise to Lubna Hussein for her pointed and practical public protest against the contemptible sharia government of the Sudan.  Efforts such as hers, Muslims Against Sharia, the Institution for the Secularization of Islamic Society, Irshad Manji and others are the only way that Islam is worthy of existence in the 21st Century.  Like all religions, it should wither under the twin suns of reason and scorn.  But should Islam accept the secular neutering that Christianity has in the West, it can start to redeem itself.  For its evils past and present, the Muslim world is in need of redemption.

This blog will be videos of people treating me bizarrely. My video camera is mounted to my wheelchair (very discreetly) and I basically just press record whenever I go out and then edit the good stuff for you!

The Deal with Disability

Once an ambiguous look was interpreted, it biased subsequent perception.

Believing Is Seeing: Thoughts Color Perception — Implications From Everyday Misunderstandings To Eyewitness Memory

Until now there have been no reports of regular use of more than one type of tool to prey upon army ants. [Some people call them 'bushmeat.']

Chimpanzees Develop ‘Specialized Tool Kits’ To Catch Army Ants

“There may be much cheaper ways [of cutting emissions], for example by preserving tropical rainforests or decarbonising China and India’s rapid coal-based economic growth,” he says. The EU is relying on renewables, which are underdeveloped and reduced demand

Random Targets And Excessive Profits: Climate Change Policies Not Working

Yes, it’s true! I’m the author of ping for UNIX. Ping is a little thousand-line hack that I wrote in an evening which practically everyone seems to know about.

The Story of the PING Program

BBC: An Arab organisation is to be put on trial in the Netherlands over its publication of a cartoon deemed offensive to Jews, prosecutors say. The cartoon, published by the Arab European League (AEL) on its website, questions the Holocaust. It said the decision to prosecute illustrated bias against Muslims. It said the same standards were not applied to the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who made a film including cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad. Last month prosecutors said they would not put the far-right MP on trial for distributing the controversial Danish cartoons, which caused a storm of protest after their publication in 2005.  However, he is still being investigated separately for inciting hatred against Muslims by making statements comparing Islam to Nazism.

But Dutch prosecutors said the AEL cartoon was “discriminatory” and “offensive to Jews as a group… because it offends Jews on the basis of their race and/or religion”. The cartoon shows two men standing near a pile of bones at “Auswitch” (sic). One says “I don’t think they’re Jews”. The other replies: “We have to get to the six million somehow.” A spokeswoman for the prosecuting authority said the group could be fined up to 4,700 euros (£4,100), though in theory a prison sentence was also possible.

The AEL says it does not deny the facts of the Holocaust but posted the cartoon as an “act of civil disobedience”. It said it had agreed to remove it from its site, but reversed that decision to protest over the failure to prosecute Geert Wilders. “Double standards are being applied,” it said in a statement. [...] Tensions over the Netherlands’ Muslim population have increased in recent years, notably since the killing of a controversial film-maker by a Muslim extremist in 2004.

[Article continues.] Although I often fail I try to speak well of Muslims for those deeds worth speaking well of.  Posting a cartoon on a web page is a civilized act, even if the content of the cartoon is uncivil.  In publishing this cartoon the AEL has shown it understands that the way to counter publication of what it doesn’t like is to publish what it does like.  This is a mature (and, dare I say it, Western) response, or at least a more mature response than what Muslim groups generally offer when they claim to be offended (for a religion that claims to have Allah on its side Muslims sure are a sensitive group).  What sort of response do Muslims generally offer?  When the BBC writes of a “storm of protest” by Muslims in 2005, you should read that as ‘the murder of more than one hundred innocent people.’  When the BBC writes about “the killing of a controversial film-maker by a Muslim extremist” in 2004, you should read that as ‘the murder of someone who wrote a critical article about the Arab European League,’ or perhaps ‘the murder of someone who had just finished a film about someone else murdered by a Muslim.’  If it’s between killing people and publishing offensive cartoons, give me the cartoons every time.  What a shame that the government of the Netherlands is inverting its own values by prosecuting this.  Again, if it’s between killing people and prosecution in court, I’ll take the later.  How much better the world would be if there were more people offended, more people offending, and less murder.  They really are just words and pictures, they aren’t magic and they won’t hurt you.  They won’t hurt your invisible monster that lives in the sky, and they won’t hurt whatever hate speech laws are supposed to protect.

Portland of yesteryear

Flickr: Vintage Portland

This full kaleidoscope of skin colors was a relatively recent evolutionary development, according to biologists, occuring alongside the migration of modern humans out of Africa between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.

Why Did People Become White? | LiveScience

Theater in prison

We are such stuff: As dreams are made on | MetaFilter

A woman accused of killing her four daughters told police in an interview that the girls were possessed by demons and that she got rid of most of the family’s possessions to contain the evil spirits.

DC mom accused of killing 4 daughters cited demons

Meeting Ticker

Nonhuman primates scarcely respond to human music, and instead prefer silence.

Monkeys Get A Groove On, But Only To Monkey Music

Fourth in a series – collect them all! A few more examples of links I’ve posted (harvested in turn from other sources) showing up later at boingboing.net.

Heavy metal monk
posted by David Pescovitz on 18 March 2009.
posted by Trevor Blake on 18 July 2008.

Ritually Stolen Penises and Vaginas – Not a Joke Here
posted by Xeni Jardin on 18 March 2009,
posted by Trevor Blake on 23 April 2008.

Raymond Scott’s Powerhouse Performed by Harmonica Quintet
posted by Mark Frauenfelder on 16 April 2009.
posted by Trevor Blake on 16 July 2008.

Atheists Who’ll Take In Your Pets After the Rapture
posted by Cory Doctorow on 27 August 2009.
posted by Trevor Blake on 1 July 2009.

As J. R. “Bob” Dobbs said, “If you want to be known as a creative, original person, make sure you imitate the right people.” I know I do.  I don’t know where boingboing.net gets its links, and I doubt it is from me.  But I can say where I get mine.  You could do much worse than to spend all of your free time reading metafilter, Dark Roasted Blend, digg and Everlasting Blort.  Places I’d like to see quoted more often are Mutate!, Less Wrong, Overcoming Bias and The Hoover Hog.  And OVO.

Dark Roasted Blend: Unusual and Marvelous Maps

Swarm Bots: Now W/Solar Power, Complex Behaviors! | Boing Boing Gadgets

By applying a method of calculating gravity that was first developed for the moon to data from NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, known as Grace, JPL researchers have found a way to measure the pressure at the bottom of the ocean.

Old Moon Discovery Helps Unlock Earth Ocean Secrets

when researchers described the man as single, 59 percent of single women were interested in pursuing him. However, when they described the exact same man as being in a committed relationship, 90 percent of the women were interested. Men did not show this preference, and neither did women who were already in a relationship.

Study Shows Single Women Prefer to Date Attached Men

goodbye, free time.

Aiwazz Saying | Digital Library