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James Randi: a million dollars to any "psychic" able to prove his/her powers

I just saw this TED talk by James Randi: he start by taking a fatal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills onstage, and then ...

Sharing is Necessary

This is an excellent video about the right to quote, based on the Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge 2.0 of the Free Culture Forum:

Atheist podcasts

I have been enjoying two great podcasts about free thinking, they are both excellent, and different to each other -- I definitively recommend to subscribe to both.

Reasonable Doubts [website|rss|itunes] is a weekly radio show with 3 hosts (doubtcasters) that discuss different aspects of religion including a commentary of current events. The show, that lasts about one hour, includes interviews and sometimes recordings from talks. It is very well done and well documented, and tries to stay factual while still being quite incisive. "Reasonable Doubts...for those who won't just take things on faith."


Pat Condell's Godless Comedy [website|rss|itunes] this is a funny, ironic, and enjoyable monthly rant that says everything in 7-10 minutes. The "show" is an audio version of his youtube channel which is also available with captions on dotsub. "Hi, I'm Pat Condell. I don't respect your beliefs and I don't care if you're offended. Now that we've got the formalities out of the way, welcome to Godless Comedy"

Earthquake in Chile

30 hours after the earthquake, I confirmed my parents, siblings and son are all well. Also Fabiola's family in Chile are OK; we have been able to contact most of our friends and they are also fine.

More information in Manzana Mecánica (in Spanish).

Unacknowledgements

The Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA) is one of the top venues in computer science. In this year's edition SODA'10, there is a paper by Flavio Chierichetti, Silvio Lattanzi and Alessandro Panconesi: "Rumour Spreading and Graph Conductance".

In the paper, there is a very interesting footnote in the front page:

For the role of the Italian Ministry of University and Research please see the Unacknowledgements.

This is what you find at the end of the paper (emphasis added):

Unacknowledgements: This work is ostensibly supported by the the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the FIRB program, project RBIN047MH9-000. The Ministry however has not paid its dues and it is not known whether it will ever do.

I hope the Ministry will pay now!

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