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Google pulls Chrome extension used to target Jewish people
Following a detailed investigation by Mic, Google has pulled a Chrome extension that was used by racists to identify and track Jewish people online. The plugin, called "Coincidence Detector," added a series of triple parentheses around the surnames of Jewish writers and celebrities. For instance, visiting the page of Mic writer Cooper Fleishman, you'd see his surname presented as (((Fleishman))) -- turning the symbol into the digital equivalent of the gold star badge used to identify Jews in Nazi Germany. Until Google banned it for violating its policy on hate speech, the plugin had just under 2,500 users and had a list of 8,768 names that were considered worthy of tracking.
Churches increasingly using custom apps
The iPad and iPhone are wildly popular among consumers and influencing both the business and education markets. This is just the tip of the iceberg for the pair of iOS devices -- their popularity will inevitably extend the iPad's reach beyond these core markets and into smaller ones like religion. According to a Wall Street Journal report, an increasing number of church and synagogue leaders are using custom iOS apps as a part of their outreach. Churches are tapping talented congregation members or companies like ROAR or Subsplash, which has over a thousand church-specific titles, to develop apps that'll connect them closer to their members. The apps are used by parents to track their child's progress in Sunday school, listen to sermons when they are unable to attend a service, or connect with other members in a virtual prayer room. It's also a way for churches to reach out to teenagers, a group that is likely to drop their faith when they leave home. It's not just Protestant and evangelical churches that are embracing the iPad and iPhone. Rabbis, like Dan Cohen of the Temple Sharey Tefilo-Israel in N.J., are also using the iPad in their services and developing apps for their synagogue members. Rabbi Cohen is apporaching the idea cautiously, though. Like many religious leaders, he wants to use technology to help people embrace their faith, not turn them away from it.
Scientists inscribe entire Bible onto pinhead
And you thought that fellow who managed to fit your entire name -- middle initial included -- onto a grain of rice was hot stuff. Apparently, a team of nanotechnology experts at the Technion institute in Haifa were able to etch some 300,000 words (Hebrew text of the Jewish Bible) onto a minuscule silicon surface "less than half the size of a grain of sugar." The feat was accomplished by "blasting tiny particles called gallium ions at an object that then rebounded, causing an etching affect," and was reportedly done in order to show that copious quantities of data could eventually be stored on bio-molecules and DNA. Oh, and it only took about sixty minutes to finish the job.[Image courtesy of ChicagoSpots]
Updating calendar.judaic
I recently posted about accessing the calendars in your /usr/share/calendar directory. Jewish readers may have noted that the default calendar.judaic file is sadly out of date. The Jewish year does not line up exactly with the standard Christian calendar. Josef Grosch maintains an up-to-date version of calendar.judaic that you can download at his ftp site. Download a copy, uncompress it (we recommend using the Unarchiver) and replace the standard 2002 version with the latest 2007 (11 Tevet 5767 - 22 Tevet 5768) release to bring your calendar file up to date. April 16 2007 will go from being the 19th day of the Omer (using the 2002 dates) to the 13th (with the 2007 dates).
