...is the indivisibility of secular law and religious practice: The idea of a separate Indian Muslim state, once it had been formulated couldn't have been resisted. The idea was put forward in 1930 by a revered poet, Sir Mohammed Iqbal (1987-1938), in a speech to the All-Indian Muslim League, th...

...some moron has to go after the pretend ones, too. Sky Blue Radio is an internet radio station catering to the flight simulation community.  They operate both as an ordinary Shoutcast station, and as an in-sim station too.  With the help of a little applet, you can tune a specific freq...

Inspired by this post at Ben's, and just for the hell of it, I decided to search on "for the first time in my life" and see what the Goog-Oracle had to say.  Here's the top ten non-Obama-related results: For the first time in my adult life, I'm in a non-unionized industri...

The Canadian Forces are feeling the strain of their ISAF responsibilities and need another operational pause to set things right: OTTAWA — Canada's army, strained by the military mission in Afghanistan, may need a one-year operational pause to regroup and rebuild when troops withdraw in 2011, ...

Nikah Mut'ah ("pleasure marriage") and Nikah Misyar ("travellers' marriage"). Yes, they are more or less exactly what they sound like.  A means of getting sexual stimulation in exchange for money, outside of the formal, lifelong civil and religious contracts of real...

In the wake of the Turkish Airlines B738 crash yesterday, one question has gripped my mind.  There are women from Turkey named "Jihad"?  And they don't end up on the Turkish version of a no-fly list?  Why not? Another survivor, Jihad Alariachi, said there was no warni...

It always amazes me how much pure garbage gets put out there by the guys calling themselves professional journalists.  Citizen journalism is supposed to be rife with anarchy and lack of standards and so on, but I still see end-product from the Long War Journal that's heads and shoulders be...

Kate Taylor (no relation) recently reviewed the Ontario Science Centre's latest big-ticket exhibit, Sultans of Science , in the Globe & Mail.  The exhibit was originally built for a shopping mall in Dubai—intended to highlight the scientific contributions of Muslim civilisation—but...

The pax on US Airways Flight 1549 are being upgraded to preferred status for a year, in addition to getting $5,000 for lost luggage and full reimbursement of their airfare.  Wonderful PR, and a smart move.  But not enough for some passengers, according to the WSJ and New York Post : Some...

I've come to the conclusion that Popular Mechanics is a lot like the TV show Mythbusters—occasionally entertaining, but prone to screwing up its own product by operating from arbitrary supposition rather than diligent research and hard science. Just about every time I see Adam Savage and Jamie...