Links for 2005-12-22

Posted December 22, 2005 12:18 AM.

• A court in the Pennsylvanian town of Dover has declared it unconstitutional to teach Intelligent Design in the town's schools... I think my favourite comment about the whole thing comes from Pat Robertson who said that the move risked provoking the wratch of God - despite the ID prononent's assertion that it wasn't a religious theory...
• "One in 10 UK websites fail to work properly on the open source Firefox web browser, a study shows" And the Odeon website is explicitly named again! That must be years now after they were first taken to task for it. They've made some improvements it's true, but how long will it take for them to realise that it needs root-and-branch rebuilding?
• Kevin Marks explodes Susan Cheever's ludicrous take on the copying of digital artifacts... "It's a strange experience to see your own property so appreciated. It's disorienting and beguiling. You've been quoted. That's how it feels when something of yours suddenly appears in cyberspace..."
• DIY Paper bookmarks This has been all around the web, but still - it's a neat and simple idea. Printable corners that you can stick on books to keep your place or to annotate the content at that point. Annotation is everywhere.
• An awesome post by a Barbelite colleague on "Christmas Trees and the God of Yule" I bloody loved reading this - it's all about Freyr, a Norse god of fertility, one of whose symbols was the Christmas tree - within which each Winter he would be reborn. This is way more fun and spiritually satisfying than Christianity!
• Wikipedia has an awesome article on Freyr full of enticingly obvious symbolism! "The most important Freyr myth relates Freyr's falling in love with the giantess Gerðr. Eventually she becomes his wife but first Freyr has to give away his magical sword."
• "How Google woos the best and brightest" One thing occurs to me is that such structures should either be well known, or kept very secret. All recruitment seems to be a gameable system. Ideally they should be well-known, so that everyone has equal access to the cheats...
• 'Gay weddings' first for Belfast "Two women, Shannon Sickles and Grainne Close, exchanged vows at Belfast City Hall, followed by a gay couple and another lesbian couple." Lovely. And about time, frankly.
• A Flickr photoset of the notes taken during the inaugural ORG meeting, designed to try and capture the major issues that people felt about digital rights... Named, "Digital Rights in the UK: Your Rights, Your Issues", this gets to the heart of many of the core issues that people are worried about w/r/t digital rights, although I'm sure there are more. Probably worth annotating for clarity?