"after months of research, experts believe they may now hold the key to the 250-year-old code, which is carved on a monument at the Earl of Lichfield's Shugborough Hall estate in Staffordshire.

The Shepherd's Monument, commissioned in 1748 by the then earl, Thomas Anson, features a carved image of a Nicolas Poussin painting with the letters D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. underneath.

The cryptic inscription was rumoured to point to the location of the Holy Grail - the cup Jesus is said to have used at the Last Supper."

Two things:

1. Any code this short is difficult to crack without resorting to other clues in the context.

2. There is a huge incentive to subconsciously or consciously accept the context of the connections to the Holy Grail, particularly at a time when the Da Vinci Code book is generating a boatload of cash around Holy Grail seeker tourist sites.

Perhaps D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. means:

DaVinci Owes Us Our Share Verify A Very Valuable Message

Scotsman.com News - Top Stories - Code cracked as hunt for Grail goes on

Microsoft is caught in a potential pincer movement where it will have to:

1. compete in a consumer market where MP3 players, media PC's and laptops will be sold as luxury goods with value-added hardware and software design, something that is not Microsoft's strong point.

2. compete in a business market, where the vulnerabilities of buying into a monoculture cost time and money.

As Firefox continues to grow its market share, the difference between now and the Netscape days is that Internet Explorer is often a disease ridden product. The advantage of having it preinstalled on most machines is outweighed by genuine benefits of switching, and large corporations have IT staff that will do that for people, to save time and money. It is not hard to imagine a headline - 'Merrill Lynch to switch to Firefox'.

A friend was recently dissing a competitors use of Apple Mac's for their Internet cafe business, why would they use a niche product, which is more expensive.

Well, these days a Mac is less costly because it is less prone to viruses, spyware and adware.

Microsoft's business was built on the fact that if you had the same OS and software as other people, it was easier to share information with other people and things were easier and cheaper to maintain. Monopolies were a good thing in software and users benefited.

Then came the Internet, and monopoly software was open to attack from around the word.

These days most communication is over a network that doesn't care what plaform you use and documents based on standards that can be used by any vendor's application.

As the proprietary standards culture has migrated to the open standards culture driven by the Internet, proprietary software has become victim to the innevitable problems of a monoculture - it is vulnerable to disease and therefore costly to insure against attack.

There is nothing new in stating that Microsoft has problems with its virtual monopoly. However businesses will still buy Microsoft's products - or maybe not, it seems that the real threat is that the people who can save most money by switching to rival platforms are not individuals but large corporations, Microsoft's bread and butter.

A Pennsylvania school district has decided that alternative theories to Darwinism must be taught, including Intelligent Design.

Since there is no evidence for Intelligent Design (it is a hypothesis not a theory), then presumably other 'theories' that are backed by no evidence are equally valid examples to teach.

One such theory, as pointed out by Richard Dawkins and held by a certain African tribe is the much more logical creation theory that the earth, the whole thing including the brown stuff under our feet that looks like crap, is actually crap - created from eons of termite defecation.

What is astounding about the Gallup poll of belief in evolution is not that, as they conclude in the headline: "Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin's Evolution Theory" it is that two thirds think that it has not or don't know.

Suppose the same poll were run about a theory that has a similar amount of evidence supporting it, namely that the earth revolves around the sun, and the results were the same.

A news headline reporting a Gallup poll on the 'theory' of solar orbiting would reflect what would be strange and newsworthy - namely that educating people about a fact (not a theory) has been so manipulated by religious fascists, that a terrifying situation has been created where in an otherwise developed country, the majority of people still hold Bronze Age beliefs.

via Kottke

Dave Winer on RSS ads in feeds without full content:

"To read the full article you have to click on a link and (listen very carefully now) see an ad as you read the article. In other words, the RSS feed is itself an ad, pulling you in to read a page with a big ad on it."

This is true, but then again, Google makes most if its money by serving up pages of links with ads alongside, the links pointing to pages that in turn are often ad supported.

If double-dip advertising works for search engines why shouldn't it work for feeds?

A lot of fuss in the news today about a sensible proposal to allow people to check one box labeled 'multiracial' under federal requirements for collection of race data for publicly funded universities.

The trouble with race classification is that it is scientifically meaningless and empirically racist itself.

Statistically we are all 'illegitimate' descendants of unknown fathers and racial traits are not always visible. Therefore none of us knows what our 'race' is.

What you mark on a box indicating race necessarily misleading as any geneticist or genealogist can attest:

1. Because race is an abstract notion attempts to classify it logically are always pseudo science. Hence government forms almost always end up confusing nationality and religious and cultural groupings.

(I ended up in a fun argument with a mindless bureaucrat at my local council in the UK because I marked myself down as Irish on a form marked 'ethnicity'. I pointed out that despite having absolutely no connection to Irish nationality, since the form was marked 'ethnicity', being 'Celtic' meant that 'Irish' was a closer match than 'White'.)

2. People's definition of race is usually based upon visual stereotypes. If you have an African American father and an Anglo Saxon American (the term is no more preposterous and patronising than African American) mother you will receive genes from both, you may or receive the gene that determines skin color from either parent you may be 'black' and your sister 'white' but you are not necessarily any more African American than her.

3. Genetic Genealogy based upon Y-Chromosome tests shows that a couple of percent of us are illegitimate without knowing it (this word is a offensive as bastard). If you compound this rate over several generations then we are all illegitimate.

4. Visible traits are biased to whatever is considered preferable by racists. If you are mixed race you are more often called black than white. Bob Marley, whose father was white, was rarely called white.

Oakland Tribune Online - Local & Regional News

Given that:

1. All cellphone OS's suck.

2. Most non PDA cellphone hardware design seems to have stayed the same, apart from the addition of a camera lens, for the last 2 years.

3. Unlike computers, for most people, cellphones are a luxury device where good hardware design is a premium.

4. Apple proved that people would pay for their software and hardware design value-add, in a luxury market, with the iPod.

5. Cellphones & MP3 players make sense and may converge, making a hedge against this a good move for the iPod.

6. The market for cellphone hardware is big but the incumbents are stumbling.

7. Even buying ringtones on cellphones is a $3 billion market (much bigger than the current music download market).

8. The form factor of the iPod mini is the same as a phone, and Apple pretty well invented the PDA (but just got the form factor wrong with the Newton).

9. Apple is particularly good at media apps. Wireless cellular iTunes, iCal and iPhoto would be very nice, thank you.

Why can't I have a nice, shiny, white iPhone from Apple?

Designing a site in XHTML/CSS is elegant and good according to many of those who preach web design.

But there is a problem: CSS itself is badly designed, not just at the detail level, but in its overall concept.

Essentially, CSS is inside out - you don't want to flow style into content, but to flow content into style (a template). Any blogger or developer of a database driven site knows this.

But what about structure? No matter how hard you try to put all of your style and structure into CSS you still end up with some style in an XHTML document. Style and structure are not mutually exclusive, which is why HTML table elements just won't die.

CSS is based on a broken metaphor one which separates style, structure and content. People have naturally gravitated towards separating style from content through template based web design and there is no need for a third component of a complexity to be enforced. CSS is only useful to remove redundancy in styles used over and over, but that can be handled in other ways.

What would I do about it? Well:

1. Make CSS instructions HTML tags - it's completely mad that CSS isn't a tagged language.

2. Allow anything with a div or a span tag to reference an individual component of an tagged CSS template, anywhere on the web (i.e. a tag can reference another tag from a template anywhere in the world). This way you could style pages by referencing individual styles from other sites.

3. Allow div and span tags to be treated like triples, allowing them to be restyled on the fly by referencing div/span and permalink associated with div/span. This would make it easier for others to restyle your pages on the fly - for use in mobile devices etc. You can do this currently, but it sucks.

4. Make attributes have closing tags i.e. div class=x has equivalent closing tags (at the moment you have to put empty 'class' closing tags). This way you would be able to read XHTML and understand what the hell is going on. Web design kicked off originally because HTML was easy to view and understand, despite its flaws.

When the Democrats became the Republicans, Election results in 52 and 64:

I always wondered when the Democrats, who were traditionally a party with an extreme right, racist platform, became the party to the left.

What is amazing is how absolute the transformation was, the Democrats basically became the Republicans. Maps of the election results in 52 and 64, illustrate this perfectly, they are almost the inverse of each other.

Left and right, conservative and liberal, labels attached to parties are abstract; however conservative is the label that the Republicans want to own. The problem is that the current Republican Party may be socially conservative but fiscally it is careless.

But social conservatism is not really what America is about. What made the US special to my mind was that most people, both to the right and left rooted for being socially liberal with a small 'l' - they called it freedom. One the left this means gay marriage rights and on the right the option to carry a gun. These are socially liberal attitudes - the government doesn't meddle - and these are enshrined in the US constitution from freedom of speech to the separation of church and state.

Fiscally conservative = low government spending, socially liberal = low government meddling. What these things equate to are sometimes called libertarianism, a political ethos that is particularly American and is centered around small government.

Four more years of a radical republicanism, big on spending, big on saying what you can and can't do and the Democrats may have an opportunity to reinvent themselves. By seizing the small government platform, with enough protectionism and welfare to allow local economies to adjust to globalization related changes in employment and to mitigate against the growing disparity between rich and poor (after all these are cheaper than the size of military required by going it on your own all the time), they would have something which resonates well with people to the left and right in the US, compassionate, pragmatic liberalism.

Perhaps the Democrats could flip the US again and win a landslide next time round. If they win this time it may just be more of the same.