Saturday, April 3, 2010

Improving Islams Image with Comic Books

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHErXmjgLHo

Superheroes save the world every day. But could they also change the way the rest of the world sees Islam? Naif-Al-Mutawa, a psychologist and writer from Kuwait, believes they can. He has developed a successful comic book series that features 99 Islamic superheroes battling for a better world.
The number 99 is no accident: each of the 99 superheroes embodies a virtue or name attributed to Allah. In a region where suicide-bombers are sometimes portrayed as role models, the comics offer a non-violent alternative for conflict resolution. That has angered some conservatives, but has not prevented the comic books from growing in popularity. In 2009, about one million of the comic books were sold world-wide. There's also an accompanying theme park in Kuwait and an animated cartoon series as well

Thursday, March 18, 2010

The Mad Hatter's Secret Ingredient: Math



The first numbers that come to mind when thinking about Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland might be how much money the movie is raking in at the box office.

But numbers also appear to be woven in among the talking rabbits and smoking caterpillars of the original stories. Author Lewis Carroll was also a math teacher in Oxford, England, and mathematicians say the Alice books are full of algebraic lessons — such as why a raven is like a writing desk.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124632317

NPR
March 13, 2010

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Comics

http://xkcd.com/

A webcomic of romance,
sarcasm, math, and language.

Friday, February 12, 2010

20 years


It's an anniversary!

Taken in 1990 by NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, the "pale blue dot" photo shows what our planet looks like from four billion miles away. Earth is the tiny speck of light indicated by the arrow, and enlarged in the upper left-hand corner. The pale streak over Earth is an artifact of sunlight scattering in the camera's optics.


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123614938