As part of an occasional ongoing series, we like to showcase interesting science news. To help us today, we have Bill Nye the Science G--- what? We don't? He had a previous engagement? No problem - I can do this. Just let put on this white lab coat and **oof** aw crap it's backwards... whatever... So let's fire up those bunsen burners and see what's cooking in the land of science!
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41 comments (Latest Comment: 08/27/2010 22:22:10 by livingonli)

FourFreedoms blog has been up and running for nearly 3 yrs now, and it's been starting to show. The overall look and feel has hardly changed since we started and we felt like it was time for a facelift. It was also time to make some useability adjustments, both for our members and casual visitors.

So - here is a list of the major changes:

Stylistic:
- Removed the various colored rounded-corner panels
- Cleaned up the graphics and menus
- Simplified the menu bar
- Lightened the overall shades of color blog-wide
- Changed the comment/blog edit box from white on dark blue to black on white
- Changed the quote boxes to blend better with the new look & feel

Functional:
- Got rid of unused and little used blog features, such as:
    - Polls
    - Advertisement panel
    - TrackBack panel
    - Forum link
- No more right-side panel, so blog makes better use of screen space
- Hiding/Showing blog and menus no longer refreshes entire screen (settings are saved in the background)
- Moved emoticons and audicons to be directly below edit box, so they are always there if you need them (in both cases, they are still the abreviated list, with the complete list still available via popup).
- Emoticons, Audicons, and edit buttons can all be easily and quickly hidden/shown
- When quoting a comment, it simply pops the quote into the edit box without refreshing the entire screen.
- Login and Search are now simple drop downs.
- Change password is now a popup screen
- Search now incorporates a weighted keyword table derived from the blog and comments, speeding the search process.
- Search results are now displayed in a "google"-type list
- When displaying a search result blog, the "search for" word is highlighted.
- Added user options for hiding YouTubes and Flash videos (for faster page loading), just like the "Hide Pictures" option did (displays them as links). And - it works correctly now.
- Added a security-level setting for blog posts, so they can be set to "members only" when necessary (such as for discussing member meetups, or personal details between members).
- The blog description and Fold are now required fields when creating/saving a new blog post.

We also added the Mission Statement and Rules of Conduct from the old Forum.
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75 comments (Latest Comment: 08/26/2010 03:50:14 by BobR)

Good Monday. The community center debate is still raging during the second summer of discontent. Do you remember last summer? Town halls mayhem, tea party protests and the general fanning the flames of anger from the right. This summer it's more of the same, only it's couched in the form of anti-muslim resentment.

America we have a problem. A serious problem. We have an economy that is still trying to recover, unemployment is still staggeringly high. Corporations are still not hiring. Parents are struggling to buy back to school supplies. We still are fighting in Afghanistan and instead the media focuses on a Muslim community center and the faith of the President.
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45 comments (Latest Comment: 08/23/2010 20:32:59 by BobR)

Good Morning.

Much has been made in recent days about the so-called 'sacred ground' at Ground Zero in New York City. You're aware that a vocal minority opposes the building of a community center and neighborhood resource that happens to include a small prayer space. Ordinarily no big deal....but that religion happens to be the followers of Mohammed, not Jesus.

Sacred Ground is a rather broad term. It can mean just about anything to anyone, depending on the usage. The Holy Kaaba and the entire city of Mecca is sacred ground for Muslims. The Sikh Golden Temple springs readily to mind, and of course most of the city of Jerusalem, and indeed nearly all of Israel and the surrounding countries is referred to as the "Holy Lands".

But that's religion. Can anything secular be sacred?

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5 comments (Latest Comment: 08/22/2010 18:30:25 by Raine)

As I’ve said many times, we must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in. We can safely redeploy our combat brigades at a pace that would remove them in 16 months. That would be the summer of 2010 — two years from now, and more than seven years after the war began. After this redeployment, a residual force in Iraq would perform limited missions: going after any remnants of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, protecting American service members and, so long as the Iraqis make political progress, training Iraqi security forces. That would not be a precipitous withdrawal. Then-candidate, Barack Obama in a NYT Op-Ed; July 14, 2008
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51 comments (Latest Comment: 08/19/2010 23:13:04 by Raine)