Hulleye Comes By!

One of the oldest bloggers I know who I’ve been a fan of since I started reading blogs has produced a marvel of a site. He’s managed to gather pretty much all references he could to Islam within the genre of English science fiction and put them together on a site.

The result.  IslamSciFi.com

Read about how Islam is alluded to in everything from Dune to Star Wars, from Riddick to Arthur C. Clarke, and comics and more. Do spread the word about the site and try and get more people and more contributions to the site if you know of any that exist. At the moment, it is primarily in English and about English arts due to obvious linguistic restrictions. If you know of other languages, genres, people, and authors or works that have alluded to Islam or are related to the scifi genre, you should look this site up and drop some feedback. I know the author would appreciate it a lot.

from bloggs end, comes the link of the day.

ladies and gentlemen, i present the world clock.

Codex Gigas, also known as the Devil’s Bible ? a medieval manuscript said to have been written 800 years ago with the devil’s help ? has returned to Prague after an absence of 359 years.

The priceless piece, considered the biggest medieval book, was taken from the Prague Castle by Swedish troops at the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. It is in Prague on loan from Sweden’s Royal Library in Stockholm. It was put on display under high security at the Czech National Library.

According to myth, a Benedictine monk promised to write the book overnight to atone for his sins. When he realized the task was impossible, he asked the devil for help.

The manuscript was likely written by one monk from the Benedictine monastery in Podlazice located some 100 kilometers (65 miles) east of Prague sometime at the beginning of the 13th century, said Zdenek Uhlir, a specialist on medieval manuscripts at the National Library.

It contains “a sum of the Benedictine order’s knowledge” of the time, including the Old and New Testament, “The War of the Jews” by the first-century historian Josephus Flavius, a list of saints, or a guideline how to determine the date of Easter, Uhlir said.

“I would estimate it took him between 10 and 12 years to write,” he said about the piece, which weighs 75 kilograms (165 pounds).

Only 60 people per hour can enter an air-conditioned room in the library’s medieval complex in downtown Prague for a 10-minutes look at the manuscript, which is inside a specially designed, unbreakable case, she said.

great. now i have to worry about micro-giant green blobs eating away at my brain.

A 14-year-old Lake Havasu boy has become the sixth victim to die nationwide this year of a microscopic organism that attacks the body through the nasal cavity, quickly eating its way to the brain.

The amoeba typically live in lake bottoms, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment. Beach said people become infected when they wade through shallow water and stir up the bottom. If someone allows water to shoot up the nose — say, by doing a cannonball off a cliff — the amoeba can latch onto the person’s olfactory nerve.

The amoeba destroys tissue as it makes its way up to the brain.People who are infected tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers, Beach said. In the later stages, they’ll show signs of brain damage such as hallucinations and behavioral changes.Once infected, most people have little chance of survival. Some drugs have been effective stopping the amoeba in lab experiments, but people who have been attacked rarely survive, Beach said.

feeling scholarly? think you can get into MIT. think you could have gotten in if it was 138 years ago? MIT just released scans of images of their entrance exams for algebra, arithmetic, geometry and english back from 1869. check it out. it’s rather amusing. and moreso the fact that most high school kids today would have this knowledge.

so i’ve blogged before about muslims in space and the conundrums that they will face. looks like there’s a dude from malaysia who’s about to head for the ISS, who will not only have to figure out where mecca is, but will also have to figure out how to fast while figuring out sunets and sunrises. good luck buddy is all i can say.

the olive ream just won the post of the day award.

He had been planning this attack for ages. He waited when she was at her most vulnerable and then raided her home with the intention of invading not just her privacy. He ripped off his scruples, gave into avarice and pounced on her. He tore up her country to usurp her bountiful resource(s). She screamed as he tried to massage her ego by saying this is what she wanted and then planted a big, wet puppet regime on her.

keep reading. it’s worth it.

The first quantum computer chips have been made by two US groups, New Scientist reports. Both NIST and Yale have demonstrated chips where information was transferred between two superconducting qubits using a ‘quantum bus’. The bus is made from a cavity that traps a single microwave photon as a standing wave — the NIST group also managed to use the bus to store data from one qubit for a short time. ‘After encoding information in one qubit, they transferred it into the cavity for 10 nanoseconds before transferring it to the other qubit. Yale’s chip used qubits around 1-micron square built on silicon, while NIST used larger 10-square-micron qubits on top of sapphire. In both prototypes, the bus between the qubits was between five and seven millimeters long.

So this guy recently decided to read the Bible in it’s entirety, and then follow every single rule within it. All 700 or so of them. And he did it for an entire year. This included rules such as the ten commandments to the less obscure living in huts and not cutting side hair, to strict diets. There is an interesting interview about him at Newsweek online. Go and read the answers to questions such as which was the hardest rule, to whether or not it made him any more religious or whether the Bible is a greater learning tool rather than the Encyclopaedia.

found in a retail store in china.

Zahra was most likely still sleeping when her older brother, Fayyez, entered the apartment a short time later, using a stolen key and carrying a dagger. His sister lay on the carpeted floor, on the thin, foam mattress she shared with her husband, so Fayyez must have had to kneel next to Zahra as he raised the dagger and stabbed her five times in the head and back: brutal, tearing thrusts that shattered the base of her skull and nearly severed her spinal column. Leaving the door open, Fayyez walked downstairs and out to the local police station. There, he reportedly turned himself in, telling the officers on duty that he had killed his sister in order to remove the dishonor she had brought on the family by losing her virginity out of wedlock nearly 10 months earlier.

“Fayyez told the police, ‘It is my right to correct this error,’ ” Maha Ali, a Syrian lawyer who knew Zahra and now works pro bono for her husband, told me not long ago. “He said, ‘It’s true that my sister is married now, but we never washed away the shame.’ ”

By now, almost anyone in Syria who follows the news can supply certain basic details about Zahra al-Azzo’s life and death: how the girl, then only 15, was kidnapped in the spring of 2006 near her home in northern Syria, taken to Damascus by her abductor and raped; how the police who discovered her feared that her family, as commonly happens in Syria, would blame Zahra for the rape and kill her; how these authorities then placed Zahra in a prison for girls, believing it the only way to protect her from her relatives.

summing up the entire planet, one photo at a time.

Remember the Transformers movie from this summer? Those were fun times. Here’s a letter to Optimus Prime from his Geico auto insurance agent. “Mr. Prime, I am going to remind you again: Your policy with GEICO only reimburses you for accidents that occur while you are engaged in the reasonable use of your truck and trailer. As I told you when you originally purchased the policy, GEICO does not offer Megatron coverage, Starscream coverage, Soundwave coverage, Decepticon coverage, or Energon-blast coverage. Those are just not the types of damages we would expect from reasonable use.”

Sean Carroll over at Cosmic Variance:

The utility function encapsulates preferences by measuring how happy I would be if I had those goods. If a set of goods A brings me greater utility than a set B, and I have to choose between them, it would be rational for me to choose A. Seems reasonable. But a number of issues arise when we put this kind of philosophy into practice. So here are those that occur to me, over the course of one plane ride across a couple of time zones.

* Utility is non-linear.

This one is so perfectly obvious that I’m sure everyone knows it; nevertheless, it’s what immediately popped into mind upon reading the wine story. We need to distinguish between two different senses of linear. One is that increasing the amount of goods leads to a proportional increase in utility: U(ax) = aU(x), where x is some collection of goods and a is a real number. Everyone really does know better than that; the notion of marginal utility captures the fact that eating five deep-fried sliders does not bring you five times the happiness that eating just one would bring you. (Likely it brings you less.)

fiending for that perfect flash webgame to play at work? behold! here come’s bloxor’z.

i’ve praised ubuntu a lot on this website and tried to push it out to as many users as i could. to be fair though, i should post reviews for people who weren’t as happy using it. here’s one from the wall street journal.

I’ve been testing one of those Dell Ubuntu computers, a laptop called the Inspiron 1420N. I evaluated it strictly from the point of view of an average user, someone who wouldn’t want to enter text commands, hunt the Web for drivers and enabling software, or learn a whole new user interface. I focused on Ubuntu and the software programs that come bundled with it, not on the hardware, which is a pretty typical Dell laptop.

in other news, gutsy gibbon will have compiz enabled by default. i don’t know if i’m gonna be too happy about that as i’ll probably end up needing to upgrade my video card to make use of it. hmm.

the title of the new indy jones film has been revealed. it will be called “indiana jones and the kingdom of the crystal skull”. could make for a semi-decent tongue twister.

courtesy of wikipedia, here is a timeline of invention through known and documented history. it’s fascinating.

a full transcript of the video from FOX News available here or click below.

so you remember the case of the disappearing bee’s (sorry, i didn’t mean to sound like franklin w. dixon there)? well turns out they found a theory behind it.

Scientists have found a new prime suspect in the deaths of about a quarter of America’s honeybees, a mystery that could take a multibillion-dollar toll on the nation’s agricultural industry.

Months of genetic testing have fingered a virus that was first reported in Israel just three years ago and may have passed through Australia on its way to the United States. The correlation between Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus and the mysterious bee disease — known as Colony Collapse Disorder, or CCD — was reported Thursday on the journal Science’s Web site.

so i’m assuming most of my readers know what a fatwa is. if not, you can read up on it here. here’s a list of some of the stupidest fatwa’s that have been passed in previous years. example below.

Who: Ezzat Atiya, a lecturer at Cairo’s al-Azhar University

What: Many Muslims believe that unmarried men and women should not work alone together—a stricture that can pose problems in today’s global economy. So one Islamic scholar came up with a novel solution: If a woman were to breast-feed her male colleague five times, the two could safely be alone together. “A woman at work can take off the veil or reveal her hair in front of someone whom she breast-fed,” he wrote in an opinion issued in May 2007. He based his reasoning—which was quickly and widely derided in the Egyptian press, in the parliament, and on Arabic-language talk shows—on stories from the Prophet Mohammed’s time in which, Atiya maintained, the practice occurred. Although Atiya headed the department dealing with the Prophet’s sayings, al-Azhar University’s higher authorities were not impressed. They suspended the iconoclastic scholar, and he subsequently recanted his ruling as a “bad interpretation of a particular case.”

i swear i am not making this up. forget worrying about big brother for yourself. now cows in india have to carry photo id’s around with them.

Authorities say crime syndicates find it easy to tamper with branding or tattooing of the cattle — hence the idea for photo identity cards which should be difficult to falsify.

Valid for two years, each laminated cattle ID card displays the picture of the animal and its owner. It also carries vital information about the animal, such as its colour, height, sex and length of horns.

It carries the owner’s name and address and sometimes other details about the animal — like one “horn missing” or “half tail lost”.

i’ve mentioned escher before on the blog, but not as much as i should. in any case, mostly everyone knows his most famous paradoxical and symmetrical art pieces. (and if you don’t, what world have you been living in?) anyway, a lego maestro decided to make the picture above into the genius work below.

from peter fonda:

“Great thing about westerns is you can talk more easily about the present by disguising it as the past,” Fonda says. “Take 3:10 to Yuma. I mean, you’ve got this posse trying to bring a bad man to justice and all these crazy guys quoting scriptures shooting at each other. We knew we were making a film about what the religious right is trying to do [in America]. You couldn’t do that in a film set today. But set it in the past, make it a western, you can say whatever the hell you want.”

awesome. chode needs to post here more often.