As reported in today’s The Telegraph, a sikh teenager who was excluded from school after refusing to take off a religious bangle has won her discrimination case at the High Court.
Sarika Watkins-Singh, 14, was reprimanded for breaking the “no jewellery” rule at Aberdare Girls’ School in South Wales last year.
In court, she said wearing the [...]

/hattip: Pharyngula
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “It is done.”, url: “http://www.nullifidian.net/2008/07/24/it-is-done/” });

Google have now released their Wikipedia competitor, Knol, where a “knol” is defined as:
…an authoritative article about a specific topic.
knol.google.com
Taking a look through a few of the articles (e.g. infertility, diarrhea (sic), athlete’s foot to get a feel for the place, some of them read more like layperson1-friendly entries into journals.
The content does appear to [...]

Christopher Hitchens lets loose with a bit more of that fighting talk that he’s (in)famous for in his article Losing Sight of Progress: How Blind Salamanders Make Nonsense of Creationists’ Claims over at Slate Magazine.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Hitchens on eyes”, url: “http://www.nullifidian.net/2008/07/22/hitchens-on-eyes/” });

Khaled Diab over at The Guardian’s Comment Is Free has written a really interesting article that I can’t find much fault with: Contemplating God-free zones.
Caveat: the comments, as always, are something of a different matter.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “The Guardian CIF: Contemplating God-free zones”, url: “http://www.nullifidian.net/2008/07/11/contemplating-god-free-zones/” });

It never occurred to me that islamic dating could be so fraught with indecision…

/hattip: PhotoBasement
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “You pays your money…”, url: “http://www.nullifidian.net/2008/07/08/you-pays-your-money/” });

I think there might be a deeper truth to this…

More excellent cartoons over at See Mike Draw.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Jesus needs your cash”, url: “http://www.nullifidian.net/2008/07/08/jesus-needs-your-cash/” });

Stephen “dogshit” Green, who I mentioned in an earlier post having lost his private suit against the BBC et al for ‘blasphemy’ and was considering bankrupty has set up a petition to try to shame the BBC into waiving the costs he was ordered to pay by the court.
Another petition has since arisen against his [...]

It’s struck me that, as a secularist, I should be concerned with the current crisis within the anglican church, even though it seems at first glance to be simply a tiff between members of the same club who disagree about the rules as set down by a long absent founder. Which, frankly, it is.
My [...]

Well, it’s a possibly.
A study to be published in August’s Journal of Archaeological Science by Danish archaeologists describes how monks engaged in copying biblical and other religious texts may have been poisoned by mercury in a red ink used in illustrating these manuscripts.

Since the monks, who were buried in the cloister walk of the Cistercian [...]