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:

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"

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).

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!

The Murder of Sophie Lancaster was a murder case in the United Kingdom in 2007. The victim was brutally attacked along with her boyfriend, Robert Maltby, while walking through Stubbylee Park in Lancashire. As a result of her severe head injuries she went into a coma, never regained consciousness, and later died.

The attack was provoked by the couple wearing gothic fashion and being members of the goth subculture. The Sophie Lancaster Foundation was established to create respect and understanding of subculture in our communities. Produced by creative agency Propaganda, in association with iconic British band, Portishead, the short film Dark Angel is a beautifully haunting rendition of Sophies story.

More information: Sophie Lancaster Foundation.