Linked List: November 2014

Friday, 21 November 2014

Man’s Ideas Upon Divinity ✶: Carl Sagan quoting Holbach in the preface to Cosmos’s Chapter VII, The Backbone of Night, p.167:

If a faithful account was rendered of Man’s ideas upon Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word “gods” has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods… When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon… does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?

— Paul Heinrich Dietrich, Baron von Holbach, Système de la Nature, London, 1770
The Group That Rules the Web ✶: Great piece on the W3C by Paul Ford.

Great Day for Humankind ✶: ‪After a ten year flight, a machine we made has landed on a comet! What wonderful photographs by the orbiter and the lander parting ways! I’m opening a bottle of champagne tonight with love for the Cosmos, then venturing out in Elite: Dangerous!
Tor Project Partnering With Mozilla ✶: Great news.

Django Tip Getting Information Into Your Template’s Context ✶: Great tip from Reinout van Rees.
The Man Who Disobeyed His Boss And Opened The Berlin Wall ✶

Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B ✶: The B Ark is technically named “Golgafrincham Ark Fleet, Ship B”. The Golgafrincham civilization hatched a plan to eliminate its society of its most useless workers, namely its service sector and its paper shufflers. The Golgafrinchans created a legend that their world was about to be destroyed and they needed to build three arks. In Ark A they would put all the high achievers, the scientists, thinkers, artists, and important leaders. In Ark C they would put all the blue-collar workers, the people that build and make things. In Ark B they would put everyone else: hairdressers, TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, and management consultants.

The B Ark was constructed, loaded up, and launched first. However, it was automatically set for a collision course with Earth’s sun, to finally rid Golgafrincham of these twits. And naturally, no A or C ark was ever made.