Austin Cline has another excellent article, this time on Existentialism and Darwinism. 
The BBC ask a question with about the simplest answer possible. Female (and male) genital mutilation are abhorrent practices based in religious superstition and lust for power.
Ian has accepted a new position as the Senior Producer at BBC Backstage.
Thanks for the link, Ophelia and/or Jeremy!
Mark Perakh has a review of a chapter from Jonathan Wells' most-likely appalling new book.
Encryption Now! 
Cory has just pointed to the best thing ever: FreeEnigma, a GPG client that works with Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. The biggest challenge for Internet security is to get independently-produced, military-strength public key encryption in to the hands of everybody. It is there already, so we really should use it for all of our communications, to prevent possible abuse by the government.
I've been waiting for FreeEnigma for a while. My only complaint about Gmail is the lack of strong encryption support. Although there will be some problems attached to using strong encryption in Gmail (like, once you start using it, you are tied to Firefox and can't use other browsers - Safari or the Blazer client on Palm, to pick two important examples), I think the benefits outweigh the costs by miles.
Here in the UK, the government are waging a "war on encryption". But we must assert our right to privacy by using strong encryption as much as possible.
Hand-indexed
I am now hand indexing my blog entries. Mad? Well, sort of. I have always appreciated a really good index in books. The lack of an index, and slap-dash indices, annoy me. I really want a good index.
And I've got a lot of stuff to index. With a couple of hundred words every day posted on my blog, I've probably got at least 100,000 words amassed in the last eight or nine months.
While geeks can use complex Google queries and navigate the intricacies of Technorati, Icerocket and so on, ordinary users can't. But most users who are smart enough to be reading blogs also read books, and books have these great bits at the end called an index. It's intuitively grokable, see?
So, from now on, I am indexing all my blog entries in to an evolving guide-on-the-side (you can find it in the Grazr window under "About My Blog > Blog Index"). I am also slowly stepping back through the previous entries on my blog and indexing them. (It's also another cool use for OPML and Grazr, but you should expect that... 
)
A few objections though. Why not simply let people use Google? Because Google is a concordance and not an index. An index requires the use of a lot of judgement - Gesunder Menschenverstand. Google lacks the ability to understand. It's a great search engine, but it's not an agent herméneutique.
Why not use some other mechanical index? Again, it would be a concordance - of tags or simply of words. I don't want that. I want an index. It's a different thing, but only subtelty.
On that note, I'll leave you with some words of wisdom from David Crystal (from this page on the American Society of Indexers):
Indexers are in effect trying to provide answers to a host of unasked questions. Indexers therefore need to work as if their audience is present. But there are two snags: first, in most cases they do not know who this audience will be; second, in most cases they do not receive any feedback as to whether their judgments have been successful. From a communicative point of view, there is probably no more isolated intellectual task than indexing. The twilight howl of the indexer might well be Is there anybody there?
