“Where Is Human Evolution Heading?” is an interesting article by Nancy Shute at USNews.com.

Humans evolve faster then ever before:

Until recently, anthropologists thought that human evolution had slowed down. But last December, Hawks reported that it has actually accelerated 100-fold in the past 5,000 to 10,000 years.

The whole article should be read.

A comment by David of CA stroke me especially:

It’s not regressive either. It’s just small adaptations among gene pools. Evolution never demands to “go” anywhere. It just meanders. We are no better than the humans of the stone age. Just different.

Lifehacker and DownloadSquad wrote a few days ago about a new lightweight dictionary look-up plugin named WikiLook for Firefox.

Over the past years I tried a few different plugins and WikiLook is by far the best in my opinion. Why? Because it’s so light. Less than 20 KB I think.

I used Dictionary Tooltip for example for some time. I paid a few dollars for the advanced version and it was worth it. However it considerably slowed down Firefox and started crashing Firefox 3 after an update.

So I switched to WikiLook.

“Religion is the Opium of the People”

This is one of the most famous quotes be socialist Karl Marx. It’s often used to underline that socialists are people who favour atheism and are against god and the church.

Communists used it as an excuse to act against churches that could pose a threat to them. People listen to to their priests after all.

I always understood this quote in the way that Marx and socialist theory are against religion. An essay by Kurt Vonnegut in “A Man Without a Country” changed this understanding however.

When Marx wrote this sentence in the middle of the 19th century Opium was a normal drug everyone could buy. It was a pain killer. Like aspirin today.

It created relieve and made life for many people bearable.

Seeing it from this angle the understanding of the quote should make a 180° turn. Depending of course on what your position on pain killers is.

Attitudes toward things change over time. Go back a few decades and you could buy Heroin and Cocaine in normal drugstores. The context in that something was done or sad should always be considered.