It’s more than 25 years since I’ve had one name, Stilgherrian. That’s plenty of time to get with the program. So from now on I’ll name the businesses and organisations who can’t get it right — starting with the Australian Business Register.
Govt can’t spell “Australia”
The most commonly mis-spelt word on Australian government websites is: Australia. (Reported by an attendee of the Accessibility talk at yesterday’s Web Standards Group meeting in Canberra.)
OTT architecture for Gazprom
Since I’m suffering a bad cold at the moment, I only have energy to passively wonder at the six astounding designs being put forward for a new Gazprom HQ in St Petersburg. The image below shows the proposed design by Daniel Libeskind, but they’re all rather over the top.
Thanks to Signal vs Noise for the tip.
Father Bob responds to Dawkins
Melbourne’s “real Christian” Father Bob Maguire reckons Richard Dawkins is peddling a furphy when he says religion causes, more than any other factor, wars and other horrors.
This culture of war and horror comes in a separate package from religion. It comes from the most primitive parts of the human mind and heart. Religion, at its best, is the ritual and practice of whatever brings us together for the common good.
Richard Dawkins, et al, have built a straw man out of the debris left when religion “pure and undiluted” expels the toxins contained in bad religion, itself an expression of bad culture.
Good religion is only able to be the vehicle of the eternal and infinite God, aka the infinite Relational Matrix.
Follow the comments on Father Bob’s blog.
Random thoughts on being an entrepreneur
Every Monday morning I struggle to make sense of running a small business. It’s not just that weekends are always too short to properly re-charge. It’s mapping out the week ahead and seeing how busy it’ll be. Again. How there’s things I’d like to change — but where’s the time? We’re already flat out working for clients the way we do now, and there’s no time left to implement the changes.
Dawkins on why there’s no God
I finally understood evolution when I read Richard Dawkins‘ books The Blind Watchmaker and The Selfish Gene. But flak he’s faced for his latest book, The God Delusion — probably for telling people their cherished gods are just a delusion — intrigued me.
If you want to skip the book, try this magazine-length version from the man himself, “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God“. It begins:
America, founded in secularism as a beacon of eighteenth century enlightenment, is becoming the victim of religious politics, a circumstance that would have horrified the Founding Fathers. The political ascendancy today values embryonic cells over adult people. It obsesses about gay marriage, ahead of genuinely important issues that actually make a difference to the world. It gains crucial electoral support from a religious constituency whose grip on reality is so tenuous that they expect to be ‘raptured’ up to heaven, leaving their clothes as empty as their minds. More extreme specimens actually long for a world war, which they identify as the ‘Armageddon’ that is to presage the Second Coming.
Dunno that I’d be bothered reading all 592 comments though.