In a recent blog post, Neil Gaiman discusses the topic of second drafts:

The second draft is where the fun is. In a first draft, you get to explode. The objective (at least for me) is to get it down on paper, somehow. Battle through the laziness and the not-enough-time and the this-is-rubbish and everything else, and just get it written. Whatever it takes. The second draft is where you go and gather together the fragments of the explosion and figure out what it is you did, and make it look like that was what you always meant to do.

The whole post is interesting (and he says more than the above snippet on the subject of second drafts). Also, it includes dancing bees; never a bad thing.

Here:

I’d use these [tips on using Python with vim] if I wasn’t still scarred from the time vim encrypted my file instead of saving it because I had caps lock on by mistake.

Bless.

From BBC news (link):

A British teacher has been found guilty in Sudan of insulting religion after she allowed her primary school class to name a teddy bear Muhammad.

Gillian Gibbons, 54, from Liverpool, has been sentenced to 15 days in prison and will then be deported.

Which is bad enough. I mean it's a teddy bear for heaven's sake. And it was named by children. But oh no, no, this woman deserves to go to jail.

That's not the best bit though. Read on and you'll find:

But Sudan's top clerics had called for the full measure of the law to be used against Mrs Gibbons and labelled her actions part of a Western plot against Islam.

Now, before someone starts telling me how I'm being anti Islamic or failing to understand the religion or some other such nonsense, I'll point out that (again according to the BBC) Sudanese bloggers have roundly condemned the whole business:

Other comments on the site (sudanesethinker.com) criticised Sudanese Islamists: "Once more, Islamic hard-liners are making their religion look ridiculous. How sad."

"Astonishing backwardness, oh people!" said another posting, in Arabic.

"I hate the stupidity of this," one entry on the forum said. "More attention will hopefully mean the release of Ms Gibbons without getting jailed or lashed so bring it please!"

Pretty much everyone who reads this will know that I have little truck with religion, though I've often expressed my envy of those who do believe in supernatural things. But tolerant as I'd like to think I am I have nothing but contempt for people who use their religion as an excuse to mete out unnecessary punishments for crimes that nobody apart from them - and by that I mean nobody in their own religious group, never mind us Godless heathens - recognises as a crime in the first place.

Stephen Law made a good point the other day when he said:

Religion, it seems to me, is a bit like nuclear power. Immensely powerful and (arguably) useful. And, perhaps most of the time, it runs quite happily, doing not much harm.

But unless it is extremely carefully controlled and monitored, it can very quickly run out of control. Indeed, just as with nuclear power, you can predict the unpredicted. Somewhere along the line, something probably will go wrong, and when it does, you have an extremely toxic situation on your hands. A religious Chernobyl.

This isn't quite that bad. Maybe it's more of a religious-fire-at-Buncefield than a Chernobyl, but even so.

Religion can be a wonderful thing and for a lot of people can bring meaning and hope to their lives that they may have struggled to find elsewhere, I'm not denying that. But wherever you find a religion you find someone willing to twist it, even if they're just twisting it into something ludicrous (as in this case) rather than something terrifying (like, say, 7/7 or 9/11).

People, as always, are a problem. 

I've seen posts hovering around the place about Atheism and how we Atheists (or Brights, if you prefer, though I can't say it sits right with me as a label) should or shouldn't try to convert people to our way of thinking.

I came across this comment on, of all places, Facebook, and I think sums things up quite well:

You can't 'convert' someone to atheism. Atheism is like jazz...if it has to be explained to you, you'll never get it. You figure it out on your own, or not at all.

This, by the way, distinguishes it from any other system of belief.

Irshad Manji, a self-titled "Muslim Refusenik" gives her reaction to the whole furore that has exploded over the decision to make Salman Rushdie a Knight of the realm over at the Religion News Blog.

Salman Rushdie is not the problem. Muslims are:

Above all, I am offended that so many other Muslims are not offended enough to demonstrate widely against God’s self-appointed ambassadors. We complain to the world that Islam is being exploited by fundamentalists, yet when reckoning with the opportunity to resist their clamour en masse, we fall curiously silent. In a battle between flaming fundamentalists and mute moderates, who do you think is going to win?

I am not saying that standing up to intimidation is easy. This past spring, the Muslim world made it that much more difficult. A 56-member council of Islamic countries pushed the UN Human Rights Council to adopt a resolution against the “defamation of religion”. Pakistan led the charge. Focused on Islam rather than on faith in general, the resolution allows repressive regimes to squelch freedom of conscience further – and to do so in the guise of international law.