The Monkey's Digest - Links posted in March
Three Monkeys is committed to producing interesting and eclectic material online, but also to the finding and highlighting of great online content. The Monkey's Digest is our own small contribution to rewarding the thousands of sites that are committed to producing intelligent, interesting, and unique material online, that too-often gets hidden behind the rubbish heap of dancing-chipmunk videos or latest Paris Hilton headline.
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Alan Sokal - Beyond the hoax
At least when it comes to religious superstition or other discourses which don’t even pretend to be rational, we can point to an objective standard of proof and evidence through scientific enquiry in response. When it comes to the very corruption of
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Terry Pratchett would eat the arse of a dead mole if...
Terry Pratchett talks frankly about being diagnosed with Alzheimers. "I'm confused, irascible, disjointed, just as I always have been," Pratchett tells the Guardian
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Arthur C.Clarke and the Face of God
The nine billion names of God, by the late Arthur C.Clarke, printed in full."Luckily it will be a simple matter to adapt your automatic sequence computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly it will permute each letter in turn an
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Publish cultural league tables and be done with it
Nick Hornby takes a swipe at cultural absolutists, and argues that nobody who's ever listened to a particular early Springsteen bootleg has ever bombed a country
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Jailed and tortured for being a Facebook Prince
Novelist Laila Lalami, at The Nation, tells the story of Fouad Mourtada, a software engineer tortured and jailed for having created a Facebook profile of Morocco's Prince Moulay Rachid
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What occupied territories?
Yonatan Mendel, in the London Review of Books, goes through the words Isaeli journalists do and don't use when reporting on relations between Israelis and Palestinians
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Ian Paisley and the Papish Broadcasting Corporation
Reflecting on Ian Paisley's political legacy, Oliver Kamm (via Slugger O'Toole) reminds readers of an emblematic incident between Paisley and the BBC's Martin Bell
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New Technology Utopianism
"Online publications can't possibly be cheaper when our metric for preservation is not years but centuries. Paper lasts and is far cheaper in the long run", says Cathy Davidson while writing about the open access plans for Gutenberg
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Mourning the man who killed the novel
Stephen Marche profiles the late Alain Robbe-Grillet, the most famous novelist in history to never have written a famous novel
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Climate Change and the Commons
The solution to climate change is to view the atmosphere as a commons, and introduce carbon caps and emissions-trading, argues Peter Barnes
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EU legal experts warn against Slovak Concordat
EU legal experts have issued a report warning of the dangers of a special treaty between the Slovak state and the Vatican, stabilising terms, amongst other things, for Doctors to deny abortion & contraception on grounds of conscience
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Bad luck Socrates & Aristotle
A.C.Grayling takes on the Theists, arguing that to suggest a variation on the popular mortal-girl-impregnated-by-the-gods theme is solely responsible for Western Civilisation merits no more than a horse-laugh
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'Coming out' as an atheist on Facebook
Though 61 per cent of Americans polled would find it difficult to vote for a Presidential candidate who doesn't believe in God, more and more person are parading their non-belief on social networking sites like Facebook
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A beginer's guide to Muslim bio-ethics
How do Muslim bio-ethicists face up to the challenges of developoing technologies? Wired magazine asked that very question, and got some answers involving in-vitro fertilisation and gene-therapy
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Mourning the man who killed the novel
Stephen Marche profiles the late Alain Robbe-Grillet, the most famous novelist in history to never have written a famous novel
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A beginer's guide to Muslim bio-ethics
How do Muslim bio-ethicists face up to the challenges of developoing technologies? Wired magazine asked that very question, and got some answers involving in-vitro fertilisation and gene-therapy
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Climate Change and the Commons
The solution to climate change is to view the atmosphere as a commons, and introduce carbon caps and emissions-trading, argues Peter Barnes
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EU legal experts warn against Slovak Concordat
EU legal experts have issued a report warning of the dangers of a special treaty between the Slovak state and the Vatican, stabilising terms, amongst other things, for Doctors to deny abortion & contraception on grounds of conscience
-
Bad luck Socrates & Aristotle
A.C.Grayling takes on the Theists, arguing that to suggest a variation on the popular mortal-girl-impregnated-by-the-gods theme is solely responsible for Western Civilisation merits no more than a horse-laugh
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'Coming out' as an atheist on Facebook
Though 61 per cent of Americans polled would find it difficult to vote for a Presidential candidate who doesn't believe in God, more and more person are parading their non-belief on social networking sites like Facebook
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It's not just about the Prozac
Bad Science's Ben Goldacre argues , in the wake of publication of studies suggesting a number of anti-depressants have clinically insignificant benefits, that drug companies be forced to publish all trial results publicly
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Teaching the Holocaust
French President Sarkozy's recent proposals on how to teach the Holocaust to schoolchildren provokes debate and a reconsideration of how the subject has thus far been taught
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Exporting automatic censorship
A thumbnail image of Michaelangelo's 'David' can be enough to bounce a website into a list of banned sites for nudity, and the 'smart' technology responsible is being exported to countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia to help keep the net 'clean'
