What really is "truth"?

Here is a nice quote:

Truth is whatever the crowd decides on the wiki -- Rob Cottingham.

Adil Charkaoui is an immigrant from Morocco who settled in Canada, studied, worked, started a family, then arrested and imprisoned for two years under a security certificate saying he posed a danger. Neither he or his lawyer are allowed to see the evidence against him.

Now, the CBC is reporting that some documents against Charkaoui have been leaked. Charkaoui insists that this is an intentional smear campaign against.

His lawyer Johanne Doyon agrees, saying:

Some time ago, I wrote about why Egypt speaks Arabic and not Egyptian. In it, I touched on why Arabic replaced other Semitic languages in West Asia and North America.

Why Arabic replaced other languages

The reason is that Syriac, Amazigh, Coptic and other Semitic languages were similar enough to Arabic to assimilate or be supplanted by it.

The story behind a book of poetry written by Guantanamo detainees could be as compelling as the poems themselves.

Prisoners, denied pens and paper, wrote some of the poems by scratching
verses onto foam cups with pebbles. Other poems were translated into
English by linguists with security clearances but no literary
credentials.

"It was a long and draining project," said Marc Falkoff, a law professor who represents 18 detainees.

A rising Canadian dollar is posing a challenge for technology
companies, which mainly pay expenses in Canadian currency but sell
their products in U.S. dollars.

In the past three years, the Canadian dollar has risen from 75 cents to 94 cents.

For Ottawa's Elliptic Semiconductor, which sells computer chip designs
to the U.S. and Asia in U.S. dollars, that means fixed costs such as
salaries have risen around 25 per cent relative to income from
individual sales ...

There has always been a running joke in the Drupal community that Dries is secretly working on a Java port of Drupal, using an SVN repository. While it makes for a good occasional laugh, there is some truth to that.

Now, Drupal on Caucho has been benchmarked and found to be 3.5 to 4 X faster than Apache and PHP.

This is a photo of the famous Hungarian classical composer Bela Bartok upon his graduation from high school. I can't help but see the almost identical hair style that Dries uses.Well, not bad for a hair style to come back after a century!

A Slashdot article on a Ruby Gems book review led me to a random site that turned out to be Drupal 4.7. The site is hwacha.net. What is a hwacha? It is a Korean rocket launcher from the 15th century. The site is the blog of a female Korean software developer, with interest in Korean heritage, linguistics, history, and perhaps a dash of rivalry with Japan.

One would think that Israelis would be more welcoming to more financial aid from the USA. It is free money, in the tune of $2.4 billion annually.However, the case is not as simple as just getting money. Rony Bart, a research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv makes a compelling argument for cuts in US aid to Israel. He also notes that Benjamin Netanyahu, the ex-prime minister, has started the trend of cutting aid annually.

Two characters from history, from different places, but a similar deed that earned them an everlasting legacy: each sacrificed his son when asked to compromise his principles.

Al Samaw'al ibn Adiya السموأل بن عاديا

Shmuel was a Jew who lived in northern Arabia in the first half of the 6th century C.E. His mother was of royal descent, being from Ghassan. He had considerable wealth, enabling him to live in a private fort, Al-Ablaq الأبلق founded by his predecessor, Adiya. As with most of his contemporaries, he was also a poet.