The worst deadly sin – Self-righteousness

Kleinberg does a masterful job of listing the 7 deadly sins that we are all familiar with, explaining how the main Abrahamic religions have interpreted them (and re-interpreted them) and also how they and he have generally committed all of them.
However one the main points of the book is to show how the 8th sin [...]

USA, Canada, the Vatican and the European Union don’t think the blind should be able to read

Posted in its entirety (with encouragement) from Boing Boing:

USA, Canada and the EU attempt to kill treaty to protect blind people’s access to written material
POSTED BY CORY DOCTOROW, MAY 29, 2009 1:52 AM | PERMALINK
Right now, in Geneva, at the UN’s World Intellectual Property Organization, history is being made. For the first time in [...]

Big Boy Rules – Mixed feelings

I have just finished the book – Big Boy Rules by Steve Fainaru.This book requires to be read with an open mind to appreciate the breadth of emotion that the author weaves into his words. It’s a great book.
The book itself is a regular roller coaster ride of emotions. I found myself feeling disgust at [...]

So many predictions, yet so pathetically wrong

Just finished reading Kirsch’s, “A history of the end of the world” and it was a really entertaining and easy read.

It was very balanced in it’s handling of the topic and just went through all those who have predicted the end of the world including touching on a non-god induced ending. Generally speaking it appears [...]

Flat Earth – The history of an infamous idea by C Garwood

This book is a great read.
The author traces the history of how people viewed the shape of the earth from the earliest recorded times to the present day.
Firstly from the belief it was flat to the measurements of the ancient Greeks who determined it was spherical in the 4-3 century BCE.
Then to the next great [...]

Christians taught Stalin and Hitler about torture – The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual, J. Kirsch

Numerous attempts have been made over the years to show atheism as the root cause of the genocidal frenzies that marked the first half of the 20th Century in Europe and the far east in the latter part of the same century.
A lot of commentators and bloggers, myself included, have argued that these totalitarian regimes [...]

Microcosm – Zimmer

Just finished reading this book. It was terrifically well written in language that was easily followed.
It explained a load of concepts found via genetic engineering and opened my eyes to the real state of genetically modified organisms today and just how long that particular genie has been out of the bottle.
The most fascinating part of [...]

Saboteurs – meet 911 and everything that GW Bush has (not?) done

Deja vu is alive and well in the book “Saboteurs: the NAZI raid on America.“

This book by Michael Dobbs is an amazing discovery. It involves a bunch of pretty crappy spies going on a “doomed from the start” mission (the leader was a bit of a dork) and not really being on board with the [...]