Fatwa launched against cosmonaut hopefuls

Published on February 21, 2014

Quickies

Pro­ject print­ing Wikipedia on one mil­lion pages

We've all used Wikipedia, but we no man has ever truly 'seen' it. Crowd fund­ing plat­form In­diegogo has just started a pro­ject to trans­form the vir­tual trea­sure of knowl­edge into phys­i­cal form- one mil­lion pages in 1000 books to be pre­cise. Up­dates will be printed on a con­tin­u­ally run­ning print­ing press, for the ex­hibit will of course be out­dated within sec­onds. They have raised $2000 of the $50, 000 re­quired.

Read on theguardian.​com 21/02.

No Mus­lims on Mars! Fatwa against would be cos­mo­nauts

A fatwa has been an­nounced against any­one plan­ning a trip to Mars. 200, 000 peo­ple have al­ready ap­plied for the trip to the red planet being or­gan­ised by Dutch com­pany Mars One. If the thou­sands of cos­mic hope­fuls have not been de­terred by an av­er­age tem­per­a­ture of -55°C or an at­mos­phere which is 95% car­bon diox­ide, it seems un­likely they will give a shit about the Arab Emi­rates' fatwa. The fatwa al­legedly has the as­tro­nauts best in­ter­ests at heart- such a dan­ger­ous mis­sion is ap­par­ently tan­ta­mount to sui­cide which is for­bid­den in the Koran.

Read on lemonde.​fr 21/02.