Round, up

My browser (Safari) has been running for 20 days, and is starting to feel a bit slow, so I thought it time to restart. In the process of restarting, I revisited all those windows that I've been minimizing for the past two weeks, with a vague hope of revisiting. This made for an excellent round-up opportunity.

To begin with, I have 3 from 3qd to present. 3quarksdaily (which seriously features some of the best journalism on the internet) ran an article on online gaming worlds and Virtual Sweat Shops, Virtual Gold. I've visited the topic here before, but yet another bang on the gong of internet immensity.

3qd also featured an article by J.M. Tyree (my second favorite J.M.) comparing Pope Ratzinger and Sayyid Qutb, "the philosopher of Al Queda."

A comparative investigation of Ratzinger and Qutb must focus upon their shared horror of modern life and its putative ethical decay. For Qutb this involved the “hideous schizophrenia” he saw at the core of modernity, which broke apart the sacred and secular realms of existence, disrupting a meaningful view of creation, the individual’s role in life, and his or her relationship with God. Thus Islam, which in Qutb’s native Egypt had begun rapid modernization under Nasser, must radically reject “the European mentality,” because it cannot provide salvation. Thus Islamists are encouraged to get free of freedom, at least the pernicious model of freedom offered by the tempting but vacuous illusions of consumer capitalism. Ratzinger’s views strike a similar chord. “We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism,” he warned fellow cardinals before they elected him in conclave, “which does not recognize anything as certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.” In fact, either man could have written these lines. Qutb’s own remarks are: “This religion is really a universal declaration of the freedom of man from servitude to other men and from servitude to his own desires.”

A very interesting survey of modern fundamentalism in politics, in the general sense, though I refuse to say "in the political."

Also, a light and very readable piece regarding regret.
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For some reason, I marked these problems as revisit-worthy. The first is fairly easy (which is to say, I could solve it), though contains a critical creative idea. The second one I'm hoping to revisit at the end of the current Algorithm-theory class I'm taking.
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Somewhere I found this online reproduction of an old 1930s fraternity gag catalog. The grandfathers of the world aren't as clean as they may claim.
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I earmarked this article from Crooked Timber because I've been meaning to tap into arxiv, but haven't yet, and they now have RSS features. Which, by the way, has completely changed my life. More on that later.
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Europe is investing in a laser fusion facility. No idea if it's a sustainable idea, but all options are worth investigating at this point. Somewhere in Brussels, an Exxon/Mobil assassin lurks. (via /.)
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Here are two (at this point terribly dated) commentarys about the New Orleans un-natural disaster: one over at Slate on the immediate social aftermath in the disaster zone, and another over at Crooked Timber about American the mythically beautiful.
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And oh yes, there's more, but I'm fighting a cold and feeling pretty feverish.