Hereville is the story of an Orthodox Jewish girl who fights a troll.

Nothing Better is about first-years at a Lutheran college.

If you can stand the interface, check out some of Amar Chitra Katha's online offerings (religions considered are mostly Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism).
posted to Ask Metafilter by brainwane at 1:23 PM on November 3, 2009

You say you have zero technical skills, but as long as you're not afraid of breaking something by clicking on it, you have the skills to use and write about end-user open source applications and frameworks. You can report bugs, improve bug reports written by others, write and improve help documentation, write press releases & blog entries about new versions and functionality, reach out to schools and universities to increase the user base, and go to conferences to publicize your product.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by brainwane at 7:39 AM on October 29, 2009

Scrape 'N' Feed?

"Scrape 'N' Feed is a simple Python wrapper around the PyRSS2Gen module. It implements almost all of the code you need to create RSS feeds out of web pages. All you have to rite is the code that actually does the screen-scraping (and Beautiful Soup makes that easy). It stores feed state in a pickle file between invocations, freeing you from having to worry about most of the minor problems that get in the way of scraping RSS feeds.... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by brainwane at 10:45 AM on October 28, 2009

Elliot Aronson's The Social Animal is a fine intro to social psychology -- fun to read, well-organized, and edifying. And its narrative descriptions of experiments and their later permutations give the reader the sense that science is an ongoing process.

Academic nonfiction I enjoyed includes American Taxation, American Slavery by Robin Einhorn. If institutional competence in government agencies interests you, you might like... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by brainwane at 7:17 AM on October 22, 2009

Today's Papers wasn't the same after Scott Shuger passed away.

I find the summaries in The Morning News twice-daily headlines are usually enough that I only click through to 2 or 3 articles from each installment.

Related snarky roundup: InfoMania's weekly We've Got You Covered segment on the week in magazines.

2nding The Week.

Also, if you have a Nintendo Wii, have you checked out its news service?... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by brainwane at 9:21 AM on October 21, 2009 marked best answer

Technology is an ecology. It's a bunch of moving parts that fit together -- sometimes well, sometimes badly. Neal Stephenson said that learning Unix is more like learning anatomy than like learning physics, and I find that true of technical learning in general.

To summarize/expand upon my own advice elsewhere: Skim first, really fast, for the headings/subheadings. Draw an anatomy, a diagram of all the parts and how they fit together. Imagine... [more]
posted to Ask Metafilter by brainwane at 7:06 AM on October 21, 2009