Once again I have to express how much I love firefox and all the great plugin that exist for it. I just discovered WikiLook which allows you to search for dictionary definitions of various words in the text you are reading on the fly.All you do is press the shift button and move over the word you want to lookup and presto.
I can just imagine how useful this will be my online debates where it is quite often that I have to lookup the exact definition of a word in order not to look like a dunce and generally to avoid or see through equivocations and the like.
Not only that but it translates foreign text on the fly as well! For someone like me, who is in the middle of learning a new language this can really help when attempting to read. I generally couldn’t be bollocksed tryint to read online articles in german as it took too long to look up every word I did not know.
I can’t say I’m surprised as it was only a matter of time until the constand foot-shooting and shoddy work MS is known for, finally caught up with them.
I’m only surprised they managed to last this long.
I’ve recently started taking a more active role in the Atheist Nexus (A|N for short from now on) which has recently reached 2200 members.
It all started when I decided to promote Get Satisfaction as a better place for support than the fora. Brother Richard picked it up and after some discussion and simple coding, we implemented it on the sidebar and started urging people to use it. I took the admin role in it and that was my trigger to take a more active role in the whole thing.
So currently there’s a few things going on. First of all, there is a new group for people who want to volunteer for the improvement of the Nexus. Currently they are just asking who wants to participate (in the various categories( but they’re not doing anything specific. My fear is that if they don’t step up and start asking for specific things to do, people are just going to lose interest. I’ve voiced my concerns and ideas on it but all I can do at the moment is wait for further news.
To tell the truth, I think it’s wrong to wait for instructions from “higher up”. We all know how disorganised and argumentative Atheists are so expecting them to take orders is a recipe for failure. We need to employ a way to use that to our advantage. My idea is that we should have a very decentralized concept of organization. People should be free to do what they wish to promote, help and expand the nexus. We should be promoting creativity unbound and ways to allow people to do absolutely what they want, how they want in order to build their networks or their projects. All that the nexus should be doing is serving as the hub and now and then giving the necessary sparks of activity to jump-start more of these.
At the moment unfortunately there’s only discussions in the fora going on, which is not very different than a regular message board like the Internet Infidels. While this is all well and good, it does not provide anything new or exciting and unless something more social or unique is created soon, people will stop bothering, especially since the forum engine is not the best I’ve seen.We need to start doing exciting stuff while iron is still hot!
I have an idea on what might make the Nexus stand out from all the other social networks and I’ve taken a first step by starting a group on it and I have had a moderate interest in it but I need more solid tools in order to make it work. The basic group options are just not sufficient.
Last thing I’ve been trying to have is to open the A|N to search crawlers and have it indexed in order to increase the SEO and discoverability. The others seem not to agree so much with my idea mostly because there is a general feeling of persecution going on (understandably in some cases). However having the A|N private does not provide any more security and it still stops people from linking to it. Anyone following a link to forum discussion or whatnot, will end up on a wall asking him to register and few would take the hassle, especially if they are not atheists. Thus, any interesting discussion outcomes or whatnot, are effectively closed off.
Another thing that I did manage to arrange from there is to discover more Atheists who use Twitter. I’ve started following most of the ones that I knew of and I’ve found that it is a good way to have some quick answers or conversations. I suggest that if you use twitter, add the rest of us and if you know other Atheists on it, tag them so that we can find them.
Anyway, currently there is still a lot of activity at the A|N but I have already noticed that most people who registered at the start don’t even bother logging in anymore. Hell, we’ve got 2k members and I can only ever see about a dozen or two online at any one time. I only hope that this will not die out before it even gets off the ground.
Alright, I finally succumbed to the promotion to see the Dr. Horrible and let me tell you. I’m glad I did. Once again Joss does not let you down.
In truth I was initially turned off when watching the first few minutes of Act 1 as it seemed to me that it was going to be all monologue but after today I took the time to watch it in full, that turned out to be false.
The musical is great, and I loved the whole superhero setting making fun of classic comics where the bad guys always seem to be able to go free after their mischiefs. The humor was also great.
Anyway, I hope to see more of these in the future although I really do hope that instead of continuing the story of Dr.Horrible and Hammer, Joss creates a totally new 3-part storyline and promotes it in the same way as Dr.Horrible.
I want to see different characters. I want to see Different storylines and most importantly, I want to see more Firefly cast taking roles in them 😀
PS: I can’t believe he is still working with Fox for his new series after THEY CANCELED FIREFLY! Argh!
I just saw this picture at Astronomy Picture of the Day and I had to post it. They Call it the Eagle Nebula but to me it looks more like a giant hand extending to grasp a piece of Cosmos.
So the Pharyngula has finally decided to grace the Atheist Nexus with his presense and as soon as he gave the OK, the results were obvious. Around a 100 new members joined in less than 2 hours and I’m guessing more will as the day goes on.
I guess we’re lucky his attention didn’t bring the server down 🙂
I just found a new search site (launched two days ago) which seems promising. The name is Scour and it it is a search aggregator for Google, Yahoo and MSN which pays you for searching.
The way it works is that you earn points for searching, voting and commenting on the results and thus you help improve them. Once you earn enough points, you can use them to get a gift certificate. I won’t go into details but suffice to say that it’s an interesting concept. Since it aggregates the most popular searches, doesn’t bother you with adds and might even give you a small bonus for doing what you’re already doing, why not use it?
The page provides a small toolbar to use it but since I hate installing stuff for searching, and I also hate installing toolbars, I discovered the Firefox search engine. Why they don’t have a firefox plugin or something, I don’t know…
In any case, If you like the concept, you can register and start earning those points. Even if you don’t use them, you have nothing to lose and two months from now you may find out that you’re eligible for a gift 🙂
Soon after I implemented the member pages in the ACP I noticed something interesting. It seems that most people who are irreligious, atheist or generally freethinkers have a tendency to orientate to the left libertarian quadrant of the political compass. This was further solidified when Waldheri, who noticing the same trend, inquired on it at the Atheist Nexus fora.
The results were impressive. From out of the 20 people who took the test, 80% were in the left-libertarian quadrant, with a lot of them being on the far left/libertarian end, three were in the right and just one firmly in the middle. All of them were in the libertarian quadrant.
To me this is quite…invigorating (for lack of a better word). It means that most atheists are indeed free spirits and have an intense dislike for authority. I cannot claim to know the reasons but it seems to me that this is quite probably because we are always at odds with the authority of organised religion and have realised that authority is always at odds with freethought.
Even though libertarianism was a bit to be expected, the amount of socialist-leaning freethinkers is the real news in this case. I am immensely happy that most of us realise the inherent superiority of socialistic principles over the “free market” and that contrary to the Objectivist claims of growing popularity, the economic leanings of most Atheists are to the left[1. This also explains why the Libertarian party of the US is so weak. Many Atheist must be turned off by the far-right political leanings it has, even though it is libertarian].
I guess that is another reason for U.S. Atheists to be disheartened, since they are living in a country where there is no left & right but rather right & extreme right. 😛
So I’ve been thinking. If so many of us are in that quadrant, shouldn’t we have an appropriate name? Unfortunately “libertarian” has been hijacked by the right-libertarians and generally when one hears that, they immediately imagine laisez-faire capitalism.
We have the other terms for our disposal of course: Libertarian Socialist, Anarcho-Communist etc, but due to the McCarthyist propaganda the immediate negative connotations (especially for US Americans) are too large. Furthermore, these are all two-word descriptions and I’d really like to see a description that is distinguishable and easily digestable.
Personally, I believe that Communist is the most appropriate term but due to people being in the habit of confusing Communism with Stalinism or Maoism, that would probably do more harm than good (I’m also curious to see how many of the people who took the test realised how close they are to true Communism – No that’s not a “True Scotsman” fallacy).
I’m afraid that at this point I don’t have any suggestion for a better name but I’ll keep you posted if I think of anything.
Most importantly however, this is the first actual common point a majority of atheists seem to have. If indeed there are many of us like this, this could be a way to deal with the “Herding Cats” problem that seems to be plaguing us. An actual political focal point that is absolutely different than all the other political movements out there could be what we need to start having a common voice heard.
In any case, I’d love to hear what the rest of you opine on this subject? Do you think/believe/agree that most of the Freethinkers are leftist libertarian? Do you have a good idea for a left libertarian political label that rolls of the tongue? Finally, can we use this as a way to organise and form the political muscle that is needed?
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I just found a new search site (launched two days ago) which seems promising. The name is 
