Events

As reported earlier, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens do not like the Pope's actions in dealing with child abuse. Dawkins has clarified his remarks: Needless to say, I did NOT say "I will arrest Pope Benedict XVI" or anything so personally grandiloquent. You have to remember that The Sunday Times is a Murdoch newspaper, and that all newspapers follow the odd custom of entrusting headlines to a sub-editor, not the author of the article itself. What I DID say to Marc Horne when he telephoned me...

I discovered this joke from the head of Duke's CCMBA IT department: An accountant is having a hard time sleeping and goes to see his doctor. "Doctor, I just can't get to sleep at night." "Have you tried counting sheep?" "That's the problem - I make a mistake and then spend three hours trying to find it." And 24 hours from now, I'll be somewhere over Minnesota on my way to Shanghai...

Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, whose work I have followed for years, want to arrest the Pope when he visits the U.K. in September: Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, the atheist author, have asked human rights lawyers to produce a case for charging Pope Benedict XVI over his alleged cover-up of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. The pair believe they can exploit the same legal principle used to arrest Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998. Dawkins and...

Darwin's Tears is now available in printed form. (It's been available for Kindle for a couple of weeks.)

Before continuing yesterday's list of Star Wars lines that only a 14-year-old could love, I need to tip my hat to reader AS who found this sparkling diamond of a list. Change one word in a Star Wars quote to "pants" and you get, for example, "I find your lack of pants disturbing," or, "In his pants you will find a new definition of pain and suffering." Fascinating that the list includes lines from all six movies, and yet only lines from the first three made it into the top 20. Here's a clue. Here are...

Did you ever wonder about these lines from the original Star Wars? "She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts, kid." "Curse my metal body, I wasn't fast enough!" "Look at the size of that thing!" "Sorry about the mess..." "You came in that thing? You're braver than I thought." "Aren't you a little short for a storm trooper?" "You've got something jammed in here real good." "Put that thing away before you get us all killed!" "Luke, at that speed, do you think you'll be able to pull out...

Truly stunning news from Russia this morning, with devastating repercussions for Poland: A plane carrying the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, and dozens of the country’s top political and military leaders crashed in a heavy fog in western Russia on Saturday morning, killing everyone aboard. ... Among those on board, according to the Web site of the newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, were [President Lech] Kaczynski; his wife, Maria; former Polish president-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski; the deputy speaker of...

That the governor of Virginia is stupid, or racist? And how well does he actually represent the Virginia Republican Party? This time, he proclaimed April "Confederate History Month," but left out a detail: Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell apologized Wednesday for leaving out any reference to slavery in his recent proclamation designating April as Confederate History Month, calling it a "major omission." "The failure to include any reference to slavery was a mistake, and for that I apologize to any fellow...

Last one today, with two articles on paying cash v. paying with credit cards. First, Ryan Sager at Neuroworld: Every person’s financial situation and mind works differently. For some people, doing many more of their transactions in cash (or check — you have to have some way to pay bills) would be a huge improvement. If you shop a lot recreationally, for instance, this could slow you down. For some people, just using a debit card could be the answer. For me and other people who like a lot of control and...

It turns out, all that pollen covering my car happened in part because of the really pleasant winter we had in Raleigh this year. Really: The N.C. Department of Environment and Natural Resources' Air Quality Division measured a sample of air Wednesday that had 3,524 pollen grains per cubic meter at its Raleigh office. The count normally falls between 1,000 and 1,500 in the spring. The previous peak was on March 27, 2007, when air quality staff over at DENR measured 2,925 pollen grains per cubic meter....