The myth of religious violence | Karen Armstrong | World news | The Guardian
The popular belief that religion is the cause of the world’s bloodiest conflicts is central to our modern conviction that faith and politics should never mix. But the messy history of their separation suggests it was never so simple
Yahoo killing off Yahoo after 20 years of hierarchical organization | Ars Technica
The Yahoo Directory will be retired at the end of the year.
Mongolia dinosaur fossils: Oyungerel Tsevedvamba fights poaching of stolen paleontological specimens.
Oyungerel Tsedevdamba is minister of culture, sports, and tourism for Mongolia. She is also president of the Democratic Women’s Union of Mongolia and an adviser on human rights to Mongolian president Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj. She has studied at Stanford University and at Yale University. Though illegal for more than a century, looting Mongolian dinosaur fossils was commonplace—until Tsedevdamba stepped in.
(146) Interesting read – The Good Ones – Quora
From its early days the big question about this site has been "can an almost unlimited supply of SiliconValley cash and hype turn a mediocre idea into a success?" The question certainly needs to be addressed again now that Quora has made yet another desperate business model pivot into a blogging platform.Before that Quora was going to be a Pinterest knock-off. Before that it was going to be a Q&A site to compete with Wikipedia. There have been one or two other lesser pivots that I have lost track of since 2009, but you get the picture. This executive team is clueless. It's really been no secret in the Valley that Quora's been a slow motion train wreck since pretty much 2010.
Errata Security: The shockingly obsolete code of bash
One of the problems with bash is that it's simply obsolete code. We have modern objective standards about code quality, and bash doesn't meet those standards. In this post, I'm going to review the code, starting with the function that is at the heart of the #shellshock bug, initialize_shell_variables().
BBC News – India’s Mars mission: Picture that spoke 1,000 words
When the crowded command control room of India's Mars mission exploded into applause after it successfully put a satellite into orbit around the Red Planet, photographer Manjunath Kiran of the AFP news agency clicked this remarkable image of scientists congratulating each other.
Anthony Bourdain Has Become The Future Of Cable News, And He Couldn’t Care Less | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
A meal out with Bourdain typically involves three things. There will be engaging conversation, possibly touching on such subjects as the essays of Michel de Montaigne, 1920s surrealist films, and mixed-martial-arts combat. There will be booze, although perhaps in more modest quantities than his reputation suggests. And there will be food–some strange, all carefully prepared, and a certain amount involving animal innards that seem better suited to ninth-grade biology class than the dinner table.
Aral Balkan — Ello, goodbye.
When you take venture capital, it is not a matter of if you’re going to sell your users, you already have. It’s called an exit plan. And no investor will give you venture capital without one. In the myopic and upside-down world of venture capital, exits precede the building of the actual thing itself. It would be a comedy if the repercussions of this toxic system were not so tragic.
Internet Trolls Are Narcissists, Psychopaths, and Sadists | Psychology Today
"… the associations between sadism and GAIT (Global Assessment of Internet Trolling) scores were so strong that it might be said that online trolls are prototypical everyday sadists."
Should Airplanes Be Flying Themselves? | Vanity Fair
Airline pilots were once the heroes of the skies. Today, in the quest for safety, airplanes are meant to largely fly themselves. Which is why the 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, which killed 228 people, remains so perplexing and significant. William Langewiesche explores how a series of small errors turned a state-of-the-art cockpit into a death trap.
Sinquefield Cup: One of the most amazing feats in chess history just happened, and no one noticed.
FIDE is, by all accounts, comically corrupt, in the vein of other fishy global sporting bodies like FIFA and the IOC. Its Russian president, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, who has hunkered in office for nearly two decades now, was once abducted by a group of space aliens dressed in yellow costumes who transported him to a faraway star. Though I am relying here on Ilyumzhinov’s personal attestations, I have no reason to doubt him, as this is something about which he has spoken quite extensively. He is of the firm belief that chess was invented by extraterrestrials, and further “insists that there is ‘some kind of code’ in chess, evidence for which he finds in the fact that there are 64 squares on the chessboard and 64 codons in human DNA.”