Kilby's integration

I know so very little about the subtleties of circuit design, but I must say that I love this circuit.

"An oath on the Quran is not a lawful oath under our law."

North Carolina, the state that still enforces laws against unwed cohabitation, is now wrestling with a dispute over whether Muslims can swear on the Quran instead of the Bible when they testify in court:

The state's judges will be asked this week to decide whether witnesses in North Carolina courtrooms can be sworn in on a Quran rather than a Bible.

The move comes after Guilford County judges rejected an offer last week by the Greensboro Islamic center to donate copies of the Quran, the Muslim holy book.

...In a preliminary opinion issued last week, a lawyer for the Administrative Office of the Courts said that state law allows people to be sworn in using a Quran rather than a Bible, Ellis said. But Guilford County judges told officials with the Islamic center Friday that they would not allow that in their courtrooms.

"An oath on the Quran is not a lawful oath under our law," W. Douglas Albright, Guilford's Senior Resident Superior Court judge, said earlier in the week.

There may be a slippery slope afoot with issue. If they decide to allow Muslims to swear on the Quran, might they allow me to swear on Thomas Paine's Age of Reason? Or perhaps many members of a growing new cult would like to swear on a Star Trek DVD. And why not?

Best news of the past two days.

These are my favorite news items of the week so far:

• MSNBC on Dinosaurs: "Creationists, who think dinosaurs died in the Flood, have their own issues with paleontology, as did a Brooklyn rabbi who wrote Norell to complain that if word got out that birds were really dinosaurs, people might decide that chickens weren't kosher."
• Glory Hole turns down bear meat: An Alaskan homeless shelter called "the Glory Hole" is no longer serving casseroles made from bear meat. "A Juneau homeless shelter has stopped serving donated bear meat after learning the state prohibits nonprofit groups from accepting wild game meats such as bear, fox and walrus... The Glory Hole rarely gets offers of deer because venison is more palatable to most people while bear meat has a stronger, wild smell..."
• You can't take the devil out of people with pills: "A Romanian Orthodox monk has been indicted in the death of a nun in an apparent exorcism in which she was allegedly bound to a cross, had a towel stuffed into her mouth and left without food for three days."