bbc

I don’t know who’s in charge of headline writing at the BBC, but the headlines there usually take one of two forms: either nonsense ‘gems’ with random ‘quotes’ in ‘various places’, or nonsense phrases that are of rather infelicitous construction, such as this:

Great tits cope well with warming

It’s about birds (tits, like ‘tit-willow‘), of course, but who in this day and age is going to read it that way?

Hat-tip: Dan Savage

I’ve been horribly busy the last few days with a research project—it is done for the moment, however, so in the time in between now and when I can calm down enough to write a ‘real’ post, here’s a list of interesting tabs that have been open in my Firefox since a few days ago:

• Sometimes I think my viola-playing belongs in the Really Terrible Orchestra.
• Microsoft executives are not surprised to learn how awful Windows Vista really is.
• Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to be nominated for Vice President and current Clinton hench-person, believes that Obama has got this far only because he’s a black man.
• Some amusing British humour about the U.S. presidential election.
• Required reading: Daniel Gordis’s most recent dispatch regarding how Hayyim Nachman Bialik would be mortified by the State of Israel today.
• Iraq really didn’t have WMDs—can you friggin’ believe it?
• Chris Beam’s excellent insight that the Eliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is more likely to harm the Democratic Party than Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Now I can close all those tabs, and Firefox can stop memory-leaking (ha). Hat-tips all round.

The BBC is reporting that twelve men who had been Coptic Christians, converted to Islam, and re-converted to Christianity will be afforded state recognition of this choice:

The decision overturns a lower court ruling by a lower court, which said the state need not recognise conversions from Islam because of a religious ban.

Translation: Islam forbids apostasy, and many countries impose the death penalty if Muslims convert to any other religion (though see this recent article in the Guardian for a very interesting perspective on recent religious permissiveness in Egypt). However, it is very important to note that what is making the apostasy of these twelve Christians in Egypt possible is the fact that they were originally Christians before they converted to Islam:

This suggests that Egyptians born Muslim will still be unable to convert to other faiths and have those conversions recognised on their identity cards. Many Muslims believe that converting from Islam is wrong, and some believe it is punishable by death.

What a shame. It should be one’s own decision what religion to profess, if one wants to profess any at all, and the state has no business denying people the right to change their minds—and especially should not be allowed to execute them if they do. This issue goes to the heart of free speech and freedom of belief. This particular ruling is worthy of congratulation, but it is worth very little if total freedom of belief is denied.

A photograph recently released by NASA from the Spirit rover on Mars shows what appears to be a humanoid form in a rock formation, curiously similar to the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen. Naturally, the BBC science section, traditionally noted for its stellar science reporting, picked this up and immediately ran it under the headline ‘Mystery image of “life on Mars”‘. Casting this as an even-handed, two-sided report between alien life enthusiasts and dour, grumpy old skeptics, the Beeb reported, apparently in all seriousness, that theories explaining this phenomenon ranged from a garden gnome to Sasquatch to the Virgin Mary. But by far the best comment came from some poster on some site somewhere, which the BBC did not see fit to identify except by the handle ‘Madurobob’, who ’said it was a statue “obviously built by an ancient civilisation that later departed Mars and settled Denmark”.’ There are also some gems to be found in the talking point page on the BBC website.

Bad Astronomy, mentioned in the article but not linked to, has some terrific commentary and follow-up posts.