Good news. Geert Wilders was found not guilty in The Netherlands. It is a small victory against the forces of censorship and creeping Sharia in Europe, but a victory nonetheless. Free speech has to be protected if we value our freedom. Otherwise we will end up like those Islamic countries where people are strung up for speaking up. India’s situation continues to worsen with regards free speech — especially speech that upsets the “secularists,” who no doubt count the imam Bukhari as one of their own. The imam was in …

Go check out the videos shortlisted for playing at YouTube Play celebration event at the Guggenheim Museum. What’s that?

Hi from Philadelphia, PA.
“Blasphemous bras, heretical heels, yoga and me,” a funny opinion piece by Julia Suryakusuma for The Jakarta Post (Dec. 3, 2008) on a not-funny subject:
Yesterday morning I woke up early as usual and got ready for my early morning meditational yoga. It’s something I’ve been doing since 1981, clearing my mind and reinvigorating myself for the day ahead. It’s like getting your cell phone recharged, as simple as that.
But then I remembered reading that the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI) is thinking of issuing a fatwa declaring …

Exciting new and improved feature on this blog!! Finally, a way to kill more time for you.
An Interview With E.O. Wilson, the Father of the Encyclopedia of Life. From the NYTimes. (Link thanks to Suhit.)
DR. E.O. WILSON: I’ve been in systematics and the mapping of biological diversity all my life. And a little more than ten years ago, I thought the time had come to undertake a complete mapping of the world’s fauna and flora.
Because remarkably–and this is little known even in the scientific community–we’ve only begun to …