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 Radio1 - The Body
Provided By: Achriel
Composer: Castalia
Title: The Lady's Song
Radio2 - The Mind
Radio3 - The Soul
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Canadian nationalism is a subtle, easily misunderstood but powerful reality, expressed in a way that is not to state directed - something like a beer commercial or the death of a significant Canadian figure.
-- Paul Kopas
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· Using Witchvox – a walkthrough
(Sep 02, 2009)
· Nutritionist Stephen Heuer Arrested in FDA Raid
(Jan 19, 2009)
· Spelling it like it isn't
(Aug 09, 2008)
· Funding the pagans
(Mar 08, 2008)
· Giuliani gets Robertson Endorsement
(Nov 12, 2007)
· The Dangers Of Feminism
(Aug 30, 2007)
· The secrets behind crazy airfare prices
(Aug 27, 2007)
· Petition To Rename Stretch Of 401 'Highway Of Heroes'
(Aug 24, 2007)
· Mummified Toronto child a newborn boy
(Jul 27, 2007)
· Quick Summer Meals without all the heat!
(Jul 18, 2007)
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 Topic: Computer, Technology & Internet
The new items published under this topic are as follows.
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New Landscape of the Religion Blogosphere
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Posted by: Makarios on Wednesday, March 03, 2010 - 06:00 PM
178 Reads
Social Science Research Council
Blogs have given occasion to a whole new set of conversations about religion in public life. They represent a tremendous opportunity for publication, discussion, cross-fertilization, and critique of a kind never seen before. In principle, at least, the Internet offers an opportunity to break down old barriers and engender new communities. While the promise is vast, the actuality is only what those taking part happen to make of it.
This report surveys nearly 100 of the most influential blogs that contribute to an online discussion about religion in the public sphere and the academy. It places this religion blogosphere in the context of the blogosphere as a whole, maps out its contours, and presents the voices of some of the bloggers themselves. For those new to the world of blogs, there is an overview of what blogging is and represents (section 1). The already-initiated can proceed directly to the in-depth analyses of academic blogging (section 2), where religion blogs stand now, and where they may go in the future (sections 3 and 4).
The purpose at hand is to foster a more self-reflective, collaborative, and mutually-aware religion blogosphere. Ideally, this report will spark discussion among religion bloggers that will take their work further, while also inviting new voices from outside existing networks to join in and take part.
Read the complete article: Social Science Research Council
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19th-Century Mathematician Finally Proves Himself
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Posted by: Makarios on Friday, December 18, 2009 - 12:00 PM
240 Reads
By Laura Sydell
Charles Babbage, the man whom many consider to be the father of modern computing, never got to complete any of his life's work. The Victorian gentleman was a brilliant mathematician, but he wasn't very good at politics and fundraising, so he never got the financial backing to finish any of his elaborate machine designs. For decades, even his fans weren't certain whether his computing machines would have worked.
But Doron Swade, a former curator at the Science Museum in London, has proven that Babbage wasn't just an eccentric dreamer. Using nothing but materials that would have been available to Babbage in the 1840s, Swade and a group of engineers successfully built Babbage's Difference Engine — and a version is now on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
The Difference Engine fills half a gallery and stands taller than most men. It's 5 tons of cast iron, steel and bronze woven together from 8,000 distinct parts. Though it looks like it could be a sculpture, the machine is essentially a giant calculator. Tim Robinson, a docent at the museum, says it's "the first automatic calculating machine."
Read the complete article: NPR
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My Own List Of Twitter Don’ts
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Posted by: Makarios on Wednesday, November 25, 2009 - 10:00 AM
214 Reads
By Angela
There are alot of sites touting the do’s and don’ts of Twitter. These are usually pretty generic and, in my humble opinion, full of common sense that we all should already possess. However, I see some things that happen on twitter that should be adressed.
Spamming then claiming it’s not spam. Ok seriously, if your posting the same tweet repeatedly throughout the day…you are spamming. One tweeter claimed s/he wanted to make sure to hit all the time zones of her/his followers. Ok, but two or at most three of the same tweet per day will reach your followers in all the time zones. Anything more than that is spam. Admit it, accept it, then stop. It ruins the engagement of what Twitter is supposed to be about. If you really want to post ads that reach across time zones, create a newsletter that people can sign up for. Than you will find out who really IS interested in your ad.
Read the complete article: The Pagan Mom
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School district discriminates against atheists, gays, and witches
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Posted by: Copperwoman on Saturday, November 14, 2009 - 05:00 PM
370 Reads
by Trina Hoaks
The Freedom From Religion Foundation, responding to complaints from concerned Indianapolis taxpayers, has sent a letter of strong objection to the Indianapolis Public School system for its policy of censorship of web content that promotes or provides information about "atheistic views." This policy, which also censors Wicca, Witchcraft, "voodoo rituals or any other for of mysticism," is unlawful because it violates the Free Speech Clause as unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination, FFRF charges.
This policy does not prohibit or even mention religious views such as Christianity. A website like FFRF.org, which educates on freethought and nontheism, would, however, be blocked under this policy. This promotes religion over nonreligion, which is forbidden under the Establishment Clause.
Read the complete article: National Examiner
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Online Etiquette--A Primer That Shouldn't Need to Be Written But Does
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Posted by: Makarios on Friday, September 25, 2009 - 08:00 AM
314 Reads
By Sitara Haye
This is for everyone, not just Wiccans and Pagans. However, since Pagans and Wiccans spend such a great deal of time online reading, researching, networking, connecting, and trying to make sense of this path through the internet portal, I feel it’s more than time something like this was put out there for people to read. No, not just read — really understand and apply to personal online interactions.
<snip> ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THIS SCREEN IS A PERSON. Even if it’s not a person you are speaking directly to, even if it’s just an observer or another reader or a casual surfer, there is a person there as real as you. They have thoughts and feelings and lives that need tending and things to do other than be online. They are connected to you and open to what you have to say without the benefit of previous relationships to establish trust. You have a person in one of the most fragile states they can be in — wide open to visual input — and a blank cheque for your own actions. And they are, in turn, connected to other people who are going to have to pick up the pieces if you hurt them, who may have children who are relying on them to be at their best and not dealing with being attacked or wounded from an online battle. Talk about potential for serious damage… there it is. Rippling out to every person connected to the person with whom you are speaking online.
PEOPLE HAVE WEAKNESSES AND UNHEALED WOUNDS. You know yours. Imagine getting kicked repeatedly in a place that hurts you. Now imagine that happening by someone who is invisible, from whom you cannot defend yourself, and whom you may not even know…
Read the complete article: Sitara Haye
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Wikipedia Cracks Down On Cult Propagandists
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Posted by: sawwhet on Saturday, August 15, 2009 - 11:15 AM
455 Reads
One of my pastimes is writing on Wikipedia. It's almost unavoidable since I use the encyclopedia daily and keep running into stuff to correct -- facts, spelling, stylistic mishaps. In the past, though, I've been really discouraged when trying to improve the articles about Falun Gong (a.k.a. Chinese Scientology). They used to be a battleground between Chinese Communist Party loyalists and Falun Gong devotees, both sides trying to cram as much propaganda into the articles as possible. Then the FGers managed to get the CCP guys banned from editing, which was excellent in itself. Unfortunately it led to a prolonged situation where the articles were entirely taken over by cult propagandists, some of whom checked the articles five times a day.
But back in May, English Wikipedia barred all users on servers belonging to the Church of Scientology from editing the encyclopedia, and two dozen individual user accounts on Wikipedia were zapped too because they had been used extensively to push the Scientology agenda.
Read the complete article: scienceblogs
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Outing An Online Outlaw
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Posted by: sawwhet on Friday, August 14, 2009 - 09:00 AM
360 Reads
At 4:15 AM on a recent Tuesday, on a quiet, darkened street in Windsor, Ontario, a man was wrapping up another long day tormenting and terrorizing strangers on the telephone. Working from a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment in a ramshackle building a block from the Detroit River, the man, nicknamed "Dex", heads a network of so-called pranksters who have spent more than a year engaged in an orgy of criminal activity--vandalism, threats, harassment, impersonation, hacking, and other assorted felonies and misdemeanors--targeting U.S. businesses and residents.
Coalescing in an online chat room, members of the group, known as Pranknet, use the telephone to carry out cruel and outrageous hoaxes, which they broadcast live around-the-clock on the Internet.
Read the complete article: thesmokinggun
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Which religion has the best cell phone?
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Posted by: Makarios on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 - 02:00 PM
597 Reads
Religious devotees around the world enjoy expressing their faith with customized cell phones, which may play religious ring tones; carry scriptures; or provide guidance, content filtering and other services specific to each religion. These phones are customized and marketed directly to religious communities in various parts of the world.
Which of the world's most popular religions, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism and Judaism (listed in order of size), has the world's greatest cell phone?
While researching this article, I was unable to find a single Christian, Hindu or Sikh cell phone. I'm not saying they're not out there somewhere, just that I'm "agnostic" on the point. I just don't know.
Read the complete article: Computerworld
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The Great Pagan Web Purge Approaches!
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Posted by: Copperwoman on Saturday, April 25, 2009 - 11:00 AM
648 Reads
by Jason Pitzl-Waters
Some time ago, in the time before blogs, social networking services, and Twitter, the primary means towards getting your message out on the web was to build your own web site. Many found this process quite daunting, and so a number of companies emerged that offered free, streamlined, methods of building and maintaining a web site. One of the most popular was GeoCities. Founded in the mid-1990s, the service was a phenomenon, and quickly became a major hub of the then-nascent Pagan web. Even today, nearly 15 years later, you can find a wide array of Pagan sites still hosted there (though many of them are no doubt abandoned by this point). Well, later this year it is all coming to an end. Yahoo (who bought GeoCities in the late 1990s) has announced that new accounts are frozen and that the site is being taken down. While this development will no doubt be met with wistful sadness by some, many web-savvy Pagans are no doubt wondering what took so long for this relic to be taken off life support.
“Yahoo! is hammering the nail in the coffin of GeoCities, a web site building service that hasn’t been updated in nearly as long. Yahoo! has already stopped accepting new account registrations, but existing GeoCities pages won’t be pulled down until later this year. The company hasn’t offered a simple path for migrating your data yet, but Yahoo! is suggesting users upgrades to paid Yahoo! web hosting accounts. There are no plans to offer a free web hosting service in the future.”
Read the complete article: Wild Hunt
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Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery
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Posted by: Copperwoman on Friday, April 24, 2009 - 01:00 PM
551 Reads
 By Brandon Keim
An ancient script that's defied generations of archaeologists has yielded some of its secrets to artificially intelligent computers. Computational analysis of symbols used 4,000 years ago by a long-lost Indus Valley civilization suggests they represent a spoken language. Some frustrated linguists thought the symbols were merely pretty pictures. "The underlying grammatical structure seems similar to what's found in many languages," said University of Washington computer scientist Rajesh Rao. Rao's team used pattern-analyzing software running what's known as a Markov model, a computational tool used to map system dynamics.
The Indus script, used between 2,600 and 1,900 B.C. in what is now eastern Pakistan and northwest India, belonged to a civilization as sophisticated as its Mesopotamian and Egyptian contemporaries. However, it left fewer linguistic remains. Archaeologists have uncovered about 1,500 unique inscriptions from fragments of pottery, tablets and seals. The longest inscription is just 27 signs long. Among the languages linked to the mysterious script are Chinese Lolo, Sumerian, Egyptian, Dravidian, Indo-Aryan, Old Slavic, even Easter Island — and, finally, no language at all. In 2004, linguist Steve Farmer published a paper asserting that the Indus script was nothing more than political and religious symbols.
Read the complete article: Wired
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A Peek into the Pagan Twittersphere
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Posted by: Copperwoman on Monday, March 16, 2009 - 11:00 AM
584 Reads
by Jason Pitzl-Waters
It looks like the micro-blogging service Twitter has finally hit the mainstream. NPR journalists participate and discuss it on the radio, mega-stars like Ellen Degeneres plug their accounts in an attempt to get a million followers, and politicians across the ideological spectrum are “tweeting” to their constituents in an attempt to stay relevant. So it would stand to reason that the Pagan community would also coalesce around this social networking phenomenon. It would be madness and folly to try and give any sort of definitive list of Pagans using the service (as there are probably thousands), but I can give some “highlights” for newcomers just starting to dip their toe into the service.
First, two of the largest Pagan/occult publishers Llewellyn and Weiser have Twitter feeds (and their follower lists are a fairly decent way to find other Pagans at the site) that are regularly updated. In addition to the publishers, several notable Pagan and esoteric authors, writers, and leaders are utilizing Twitter. This includes Corrine Kenner, Mama Donna Henes, Damh the Bard,Kerr Cuhulain,and the famous ancient Greek philosopher Bias of Priene. If that isn’t enough, you can also find a variety of Pagan vendors using Twitter, including Lodestone and Lady’s Mantle, Bell, Book, and Candle Supply, and Pagan Wholesale (just to name a few). You can also track Pagan conversations on Twitter through the PaganFeed, a gathering of Pagan-tagged tweets.
Read the complete article: Wild Hunt
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The Apple iPhone: The Newest Ritual Tool?
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Posted by: Copperwoman on Friday, February 27, 2009 - 09:00 AM
737 Reads
by Jason Pitzl-Waters
Before we begin, I recommend playing this song in the background to experience the full effect of this blog post. I should also mention that I don’t own an Apple iPhone, and have no intention of purchasing one in the near future. So having said all that, let’s get into the topic at hand: is the Apple iPhone the new killer app for Pagan and occult practitioners? I don’t simply mean Pagans using them as script prompters during ritual, I mean using this hot tech item to cast spells, practice divination, and even curse your enemies.
The iPhone helps you manage your e-mail, listen to your music, stay connected, and—every now again—make a phone call or two. Now, with the assistance of two recent arrivals at the App Store, it can also help you master the dark arts. Oh, sure—VooDude bills itself as an entertainment app, but I think we can see through its facade. The app, from Aspyr Media lets you create your very own voodoo doll, which you can then poke with your finger, shake using the built-in accelerometer, or (virtually) set on fire. Aspyr calls Voo Dude a “stress relief buddy,” and I’m sure it’s all fun and games—until someone uses the app’s customization feature to create a VooDude who looks suspiciously like you. (You can use pictures from the image library on the iPhone or iPod touch to personalize your voodoo doll.)
Read the complete article: Wild Hunt
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Google Maps: a Leyhunter’s tool
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Posted by: Makarios on Thursday, November 06, 2008 - 04:00 PM
786 Reads
The exciting thing about working with ancient sacred sites is that, despite many sites having been destroyed, there are an astonishing number still waiting to be found, or at least recognised as sites of energetic interest, even if their name and usage has faded from common knowledge. There are many out there to be discovered still, and not all have been catalogued despite the wonderful efforts of collating them by sites such as The Megalithic Portal and The Modern Antiquarian.
If you are wondering how we manage to find some of the sacred sites that we have listed in our blog section entitled, un-mysteriously “Sacred Sites”, then we can reveal that the simple answer is Google Maps. We don’t use Google Map because they do particularly great maps (other sites are as good if not arguably better) but because of their simple facility to draw a straight line on a map and store that map for later use.
In combination with sites such as MultiMap’s utterly fantastic Ordnance Survey mapping it is possible to trace a line between known sacred sites, save it, and then use MultiMap’s OS detail layer to find out if your new line crosses any known ancient placements such as tumuli (barrows), circles, standing stones, hilltops, hill forts, sacred wells, and all the rest.
Read the complete article: The Hedge Druid
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Techonopaganism - Using New Technology to Study Old Religions
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Posted by: Makarios on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 - 10:00 AM
793 Reads
<snip> For Pagans and Wiccans, who just a few decades ago were all in the broom closet, the Internet has provided a means to network and learn that we never would have imagined twenty years ago. It's created a way that we can meet other people, we can order books, we can read texts online, we can share information in ways that we never would have dreamed of back in the day.
Let's talk a little bit about networking, because I think ultimately that's one of the most important aspects of Paganism and Wicca. In addition to all the other stuff -- following the Wheel of the Year, honoring the God and Goddess, and so forth -- there is also such a strong sense of community among Pagan and Wiccan groups, which I'm not entirely sure you see in other spiritual paths. Sure, we all want to honor the deities of our traditions, and celebrate our Sabbats, but one nearly universal thread that is common to nearly all Pagans is a need to find other Pagans to talk to. Why is that?
Well, it's because everyone -- no matter what their spiritual path -- wants to share ideas with like-minded people. My Catholic sister-in-law has Bingo Night, my Lutheran neighbors have their Sunday afternoon potluck. It's human nature. And if you happen to be Pagan in a town full of non-Pagans, you've got to look elsewhere, seeking outside your own neighborhood, for that sense of community that we all instinctively crave.
Read the complete article: About dot com
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By Corinne Alcazar
By Ferne Arfin
