I’ve been professionally creating and sending email newsletters for years, and I decided to share my grid template on Github. It’s intended to act as a starting point upon which you can build your own beautiful email templates, and integrate them with your favorite mailinglist management service.
While it’s in a usable state now, watch for updates in the following weeks. I will be doing lots of testing with it.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty for NPR:
Religious conservatives see an escalating war with the Obama White House. One Catholic bishop called it “the most secularist administration in history.” Another bishop says it is an “a-theocracy.”
As far as I can tell, the Obama administration may very well be the most secularist administration in the history of the United States. And yes, it better damn well be an “a-theocracy.” Anything but is a direct violation of the United States Constitution — specifically, Amendment 1 (emphasis on the relivant portion):
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
That means the United States government cannot establish an official religion for the nation, be it any sect of Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Scientology, or anything else. A Theocracy not only establishes an official religion, it’s governance is wholly dictated by the chosen religion. Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, and Somalia are examples of Islamic theocracies today.
Barbara Bradley Hagerty:
Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., who heads the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ new Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, believes the First Amendment is clear: The government cannot make people choose between obeying the law and following their faith.
This is clearly an exaggeration of what the first amendment says. Yes, the government cannot prevent the free exercise of your religion, but there are limitations. The biblical scriptures that call for the execution of homosexuals (Leviticus 20:13) and stoning to death of women who are not virgins on their wedding day (Deuteronomy 22:20-21), for instance, violate US law. These parts of the Christian religion cannot be freely practiced in the United States.
These points aren’t the real issues here, though. The actual situation is that the theocrats here don’t want religious based entities to have to cover contraception, sterilization, and abortion in their benefits packages. They also don’t want religious entities to have to provide their services to people in homosexual relationships. Many of them also want to continue to receive federal dollars to help fund their organizations.
I personally don’t have a problem not forcing religious organizations to provide services that go against their teachings, provided they also do not accept public dollars to run their organizations. To my understanding, this is exactly what the current deal is.
We secular folks find many fundimental religious beliefs to be as horrifyingly immoral as religious folks find our beliefs to be, but we have a secular constitution. If you don’t like it, maybe the United States isn’t for you.
Your code in space.
Fast Company’s round-up of gadgets and applications with creative interfaces. My favorites are the devices that show just how lame the status quo is in an established industry. Namely the Peel, and the Nest thermostat. I’m also partial to the Planetary music app, through.
When you are too high tech for a mortar and pestle.
Plug the coffee grinder into the APC UPS that still has some power left, turn it on, grind the coffee, then turn it off to conserve its power.
I don’t know if this is a fortunate coincidence or a well executed plan, but two of my favorite people have been placed in a small room together and told to talk about astrophysics.
You can listen and learn more about the interview by clicking the title, or simply download the Neil deGrasse Tyson interview by John Hodgman in MP3 format.
Phil Plait on Abell 2744:
… by taking the data from a fleet of telescopes on and above the Earth, telescopes that see across the electromagnetic spectrum well beyond what the eye can perceive, we can piece together a history of an object with hundreds of trillions of stars spanning quintillions of kilometers of space and hundreds of millions of years in time.
And that, my friends, is what scientists do. And that’s pretty cool.
My bass bag was featured on the Bagcheck blog. This site can be pretty addicting.
William Lane Craig wrote a piece that attempts to justify the slaughter of the Canaanites in the Pentateuch. Greta Christina calls him on his terrifying logic and in doing so, beautifully illustrates a favorite bit of religious hypocrisy among us apostates:
And atheists are commonly accused of moral relativism: of thinking that there are no fundamental moral principles, and that all morality can be adapted to suit the needs of the moment.
But it isn’t atheists who are saying, “Well, sure, genocide seems wrong... but under some circumstances, it actually makes a certain amount of sense.” It isn’t atheists who are saying, “Well, sure, infanticide seems wrong... but looked at in a certain light, it really isn’t all that bad.” It isn’t atheists who are prioritizing an attachment to an ancient ideology over the clearest moral principles one can imagine: the principle that entire races ought not to be systematically exterminated, and the principle that children ought not to be slaughtered.
Justifying genocide and/or child murder based on an untestable belief in undetectable beings and an unknowable afterlife is not reasonable behavior. Please be reasonable.
The above is the longest, and quite possibly the best joke I have ever heard. At nearly 11,000 words, the setup may take you a few sessions, but the payoff is epic. (via @mrgan)