The cartoonist from my hometown pokes fun at the media frenzy in the town where I live now.

The distinction between past and future is just a consequence of the peculiar part of the universe we inhabit, not a necessary physical law:

The very beginning of time found our universe in an extremely unnatural and highly organized low-entropy state. It is the process by which it is inevitably relaxing into a more naturally disordered and messy configuration that imprints the unmistakable difference between past and future that we perceive.

This idea is fascinating; it remind me of some of what Roger Penrose says in The Emperor's New Mind. But I'm not sure I buy it.

Trying to keep religion from interfering with politics means that the government has to monitor, and in some ways censor, religious expression.

It's too easy to make fun of rich liberals for being hypocrites. This article looks at Al Gore's inconvenient carbon footprint, and this review turns a sarcastic eye on one writer's "year without shopping." It's too easy, but it's still fun; the second link in particular is an enjoyable hatchet job.

As humanity becomes more mature, the superstition of religion will fade away into enlightened secularism. Or not:

The belief that outbreaks of politicized religion are temporary detours on the road to secularization was plausible in 1976, 1986, or even 1996. Today, the argument is untenable. As a framework for explaining and predicting the course of global politics, secularism is increasingly unsound. God is winning in global politics. And modernization, democratization, and globalization have only made him stronger.

After all, even this atheist philosopher sounds like he's becoming a pagan.

Can't remember the new planets? My Very Excellent Mother Could Just Send Us Nine Cheerleaders Playing Xylophones, courtesy of Language Log.

The Field Medal winners have been announced.

While you're deciding who to vote for in November, take a look at your representatives' Darfur scores.

Grigory Perelman has proven the Poincare Conjecture but doesn't want the million dollar prize. This article seems to confuse the Fields Medal and the Millenium Prizes, but it's still interesting.

Filling your car with ethanol makes your chicken dinner more expensive.

Seed is running a series of articles about HIV/AIDS on its grim 25th anniversary - I linked part of it earlier but there is much more. There's also this (shorter) retrospective from Reason.

The days of female computers:

Respected mathematicians would blithely approximate the problem-solving horsepower of computing machines in “girl-years” and describe a unit of machine labor as equal to one “kilo-girl.”

André Glucksmann has an interesting article that offers more questions than answers. The questions are very good, though:

Why do the 200,000 slaughtered Muslims of Darfur not arouse even half a quarter of the fury caused by 200-times fewer dead in Lebanon?

and

Have our sages gone crazy? Do they really believe that sans Israeli-Palestinian conflict nothing bad would have happened, neither the deadly Khomeini Revolution, nor the bloody Baathist dictatorships in Syria and Iraq, nor the decade of Islamic terrorism in Algeria, nor the Taliban in Afghanistan, nor the angry warriors of God the world over?

Fossil fuels are going away. Technology is the solution:

If there is anything to be learned from history, it's that we need to face the harsh reality of fossil fuel scarcity and begin something like a Manhattan project to develop clean, economical and preferably sustainable new sources of energy. Just as important, we need to innovate on the side of conservation and efficiency.

A short look at 25 years of AIDS.

"It's not my fault, officer, I'm infected with toxoplasma gondii." There's evidence that this bug may make people more aggressive; and not just individuals, maybe entire cultures.

The United States no longer cares about international development.

Air-conditioning is taking over - and destroying - the earth:

Kuujjuaq, an Eskimo village 1,000 miles north of Montreal, just bought 10 air conditioners. According to the mayor, it's been getting hot lately.

While the spread of air-conditioning may be a bad thing for the environment, Eskimos using it says more about society and economics than it does about the climate.

Also on the climate change beat, Andrew Sullivan says environmentalism is an inherently conservative cause:

The earth is something none of us can own or control. It is something far older than our limited minds can even imagine. Our task is therefore a modest one: of stewardship, the quintessential conservative occupation.

An interesting article about how to exercise your willpower - and how to give it sufficient rest.

Help lies in seeing willpower as a muscle, recent research suggests. The "moral muscle", as it has been called, powers all of the difficult and taxing mental tasks that you set yourself. It is the moral muscle that is flexing and straining as you keep attention focused on a dry academic article, bite back an angry retort to your boss, or decline a helping of your favourite dessert. And herein lies the problem: these acts of restraint all drain the same pool of mental reserves.

If you're good-looking, you're more likely to have a daughter; if you're a mathematician, you're more likely to have a son. Since I'm a good-looking mathematician, I figure it's a wash.

New York City has proved that the key to lowering crime is not social programs, but old-fashioned, intensive, police work:

Left-wing academics deny that law-abiding inner-city residents desire an orderly environment as fiercely as the wealthy. Enforcing loitering ordinances or open-container rules in minority neighborhoods, they charge, is simply a racist attack on the oppressed. Many such academics have obviously spoken to very few poor people, so as not to disrupt their fantasy of a revolutionary vanguard ready to attack bourgeois conventions.

Relax, Wal-Mart is not taking over the world.

Analogy is the key to understanding - well, everything.