Et tu, Cthulhu

My parents know how to make me feel homesick. Case in point, the pictures they sent me today.

How cruel. I… want… to… go… skiing. But it’s a 10,000km trip.

Once in a while, there’s an amazingly well-written and informative comment on Slashdot, generally in response to a stupid question you were too afraid to ask yourself. Like, why don’t medics use blood samples more aggressively to screen for horrible diseases?

Thanks to Alterslash, I come across nuggets like that while avoiding the 99.9% remainder.

Casting my vote, in case anyone cares:

First, I think file manager icons should never rely on text to convey important information. When I’m scanning icons, that’s because I don’t want to read. Text adds visual noise that, over time, gives me a headache. It’s not that I’m dumb or scared of file types. It’s that little text blobs in primary colors distract me. To me, the file type blobs meant that when I was visually scanning a directory, the information I processed first was whether the files were, say, GIFs or PNGs, when I was more interested in separating pictures from source code.

Second, I think the debate is a bit off base. We should be asking ourselves, what important information that was previously conveyed by embedded text, has now become unscanneable in a file listing? There are a couple of things we can do here. For instance, we could make the icons for lossy image formats be slightly different from non-lossy ones. Likewise, if the functionality offered by various sharing protocols is significantly different, we could change those icons to indicate what general functionality is offered - and the name of the protocol is not a good indicator of the functionality it offers.

It’s been hard not to notice how one crudely drawn Danish newspaper page has managed to attract a lot of attention lately.

Yes, I mean the one about Mohammad. Many Muslims were outraged by it, then the conservative media and the usual Islam-bashing blogger kids were outraged by that… and the circus number is now underway. The killer clowns are loose, they fling pies laden with razor blades.

This takes me back to the days when I used to worry about religion. Since I’m an atheist, my irrational beliefs are restricted to human dignity, justice and respect for others. It’s up to us. Thus it’s hard for me to understand how someone who considers him- or herself my friend can look at me and see someone who’s destined for eternal torture. Someone who deserves eternal torture, even. I mean, that’s just plain rude.

I was, of course, referring to Christianity. Granted, on the surface Islam is harsher, but those other guys aren’t kidding around either. It’s just that hundreds of years of secular conditioning has softened them to the point where they’ll only threaten to break your legs.

And, speaking of Jesusdance, maybe it’s finally time for an equally cheerful Mohammaddance?

…Sorry, I’m still working on that “respect for others” bit.