e pur si muove

The rate of the development of science is not the rate at which you make observations alone but, much more important, the rate at which you create new things to test.

- Richard P. Feynman, The meaning of it all

Thanks to The Online Citizen, I watched this amazing piece of media coverage about the poor in Singapore by Al-Jazeera.

Look, it’s Chee Soon Juan and he’s not a rabid monster! And ooh, did she just utter phrases like “tightly-controlled media” and comments about “the government liking criticism even less than it does welfare”? Oh my!

References

1. Laura Kyle, Al-Jazeera, Soaring prices hit Singapore’s poor, 2008-07-27.

This is pretty funny - the PNC investment group releases the 2007 Christmas Price Index, a measure of the cost of True Love as defined in the classic Twelve Days of Christmas carol.

The punch line: due largely to the rising cost of gold and in part to rising labor costs, the cost of getting every item in the song (including appropriate repetitions across all stanzas) will cost consumers a whopping $19,507.19, up 3.1% from last year.

“I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] … Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him… “If I’d known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!”‘ - J. K. Rowling, intervew transcript at Carnegie Hall.

The Christian fundamentalists must be having a field day with this. Not only does Dumbledore represent a prominent figure in witchcraft, he’s a blasphemous homosexual!

Which makes Dumbledore’s existence in Singapore illegal, of course, under Section 377A. Now you know: every single one of those accursed Harry Potter books revels in an authority figure that  controversial and subversive beyond his defiance of established government institutions! How did the censors not catch that, eh?

Reference

1. The Leaky Cauldron, “J. K. Rowling at Carnegie Hall Reveals Dumbledore is Gay; Neville Marries Hannah Abbott, and Much More“, 2007-10-19.