Some highlights from The year in media errors and corrections:
This post originally quoted photographer Tom Sanders as saying it takes him five years to get on the dance floor. It takes him five beers.
– Slate
– Columbia, S.C. Free-Times Weekly
And possibly the best from The Argus:
I watched The Unbelievers last week, some of it was very interesting but the film as a whole didn’t work for me. I would rather have seen more of Dawkins and Krauss in conversation and fewer shots of aeroplane wings and famous landmarks.
Playing over the credits are excerpts from interviews with famous atheists/agnostics/humanists including Ian McEwan who made a very good comparison that hadn’t really occurred to me before:
I think people don’t really believe in the myths they invent.
I’ve been to many funerals in which the priest has spoken of an afterlife and even the people who are there are sobbing profusely. They don’t really think they’re gonna meet their loved one in five years time. If, on the other hand, you stood on the quayside and watched the Queen Mary set off for New York the people on the quayside are not crying because they know they’re going to see those people again fairly soon.
A funeral is fundamentally different yet it should be the same.
I always knew the ‘el’ in my name meant God (Daniel meaning ‘God is my Judge’ or ‘Judged by God’) – it turns out that embedding the name of a god in a name is called theophory.
The obvious examples are the Els (Elizabeth, Daniel, Samuel etc.), the Yahs (Jonathan, Joshua, Jeremy) and the Abduls (from abd + Allah) but the most random example has to be Martin, as in Mars the God of War.
It would also be pretty cool if the latter part of Jesus’ name was in reference to Zeus.
Justin sent this to me on Monday and it still makes me chuckle. It’s probably as good a way as any to choose your religion (though obviously all you heretics out there are going to be a little screwed* come the afterlife…)
(thx to Tino)
*Or not. Or whatever.
A Roman Catholic bank in Germany has apologised after admitting it bought stocks in defence, tobacco and birth control companies.
Also as headlines go, while accurate, this is perhaps a little misleading to those of a geeky persuasion.