Dude, you have no Quran

I'm sure we all remember the Quran book burning threat from a couple of weekends ago. I wanted to comment at the time but other commitments got in the way. Now I have a quieter day so here we go:

Burning books is stupid and ignorant.

Note, I am not saying that all books are sacred, or that any are. Nor am I saying that an individual is forbidden to destroy a possession, so long as it is legally their own or they have suitable permission. But each book has a value greater than that printed on the cover and the combined writings of humanity have a value greater than the summed content of the individual books. That value is context.

Important texts from times past are often difficult to interpret without contemporary texts to set things in a social or linguistic structure. Structures which, 2000 years ago say, have no modern counterpart for comparison. We need the legacy of books from all ages to understand ourselves and how our societies have developed.

Burning any book has the potential to rob the future of a storehouse of historical knowledge. Just think of the attacks on the Library of Alexandria where humanity lost forever texts which, even then, were of great antiquity.

Of course the unadulterated word of Allah has been a previous victim of book burning, and surprisingly Moslems themselves were responsible, as this news report from 653AD informs us. An incalculable loss to religious scholars and historians of every generation since.

So I am glad that the September 11^th Quran burning fizzled out into a non-event: except for one incident in Amarillo, Texas.

Some religious nutter was planning to burn a copy in an Amarillo park when Jacob Isom rescued the kerosene dowsed volume from a barbeque and ran off. In an interview for the local News Channel 10, Isom said he snuck up behind the organiser, David Grisham, liberated the book and said “Dude, you have no Quran”.

The book was delivered unsinged to a local Muslim leader and Jacob Isom is now an internet hero. Well done Sir!

Dude You Have No Quran AUTOTUNE REMIX

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Via Unreasonable Faith Grow into these trousers... >>

Gordon Brown apologises for past treatment of gays.

Hot on the heels of my earlier post, The Prime Minister has issued an apology to Alan Turing and countless other gays victimised by the backward laws of the last century.

"Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction".

"I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue".

Long overdue, but welcome. Read the full statement here. Grow into these trousers... >>

A call for an apology to Alan Turing

In 1952, World War II code-breaking hero and the father of computing Alan Turing was convicted of that most heinous of crimes, being born a homosexual.

Following Turing's prosecution he was further humiliated by having his security privileges withdrawn and by being chemically castrated, then an experimental "treatment", for his non-existent illness. Turing committed suicide in 1954.

There is an online petition to the Prime Minister calling for an apology to Turing and a posthumous pardon. There are currently 30,327 signatories, including myself. The petition reads:

"Alan Turing was the greatest computer scientist ever born in Britain. He laid the foundations of computing, helped break the Nazi Enigma code and told us how to tell whether a machine could think.

He was also gay. He was prosecuted for being gay, chemically castrated as a 'cure', and took his own life, aged 41.

The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing for his treatment and recognize that his work created much of the world we live in and saved us from Nazi Germany. And an apology would recognize the tragic consequences of prejudice that ended this man's life and career".

Please take a moment to go and sign the petition and reflect on Turing's impact on our modern world. That man should have had a knighthood at least, not persecution. Grow into these trousers... >>

The technology that took us to the Moon

The other week delicate flower posted an old photo of a RAND corp. mock-up of a futuristic home computer and asked for our predictions of what things might be like 50 years from now. This is an interesting question but so difficult to speculate on. Who would have predicted Blu-tack 50 years ago? Yet it was developed in 1971.

Just a couple of years before that, Apollo 11 had landed on the moon and the electronics needed to process those communications looks remarkably similar to df's photo, but a bit more stylish and lacking a steering wheel.


It was kit like that which gave us the TV pictures of the first moonwalk, read the full story at Universe Today.

I am reminded of my own first involvements with computers, which must have been ~30 years ago. But therein lies a different tale. Hmm, I might post about that. It will take a series though :) Grow into these trousers... >>