When architects steal terms like Post Modernism or Deconstruction from the, shrouded in bullshit, fringes of philosophy called 'literary criticism' and the like, what they really mean is: 'new buildings with decoration' or 'buildings that look like they are falling apart', respectively.

That does not mean that the buildings aren't beautiful - just that the justification is pointless and the understanding of other people's field's limited. Because of the nature of the scale and function of architecture, architects can pretend to be scientists when they are poor craftsmen and artists when they are bad engineers.

Seed magazine has a new piece on innovations in architecture - its true that composite materials, intelligent skins and energy efficiency concerns have created a scientific edge in some styles, but the combination of the fact that you can pretty much build anything these days with the counter swing against minimalism means that by and large architecture is more art than a science then ever.

The bottom line is that there is something deeply geeky and philistine about needing to find gadgetry in architecture for it to be innovative.

In fact practitioners of the baroque decorative style were more likely to be scientists, such as Guarini who was a mathematician and geometer.

If artists misunderstand science sometimes, then equally scientists misunderstand artists. Here is Seed getting taken in by architects who appropriate scientific jargon, when they never would be hoodwinked like this by research scientists:

"This recent project in Wolfsburg, Germany, from Zaha Hadid's London office, is essentially a study in the displacing of the horizon... the nested lines of diverging parallels; and the exhibition spaces, whose traditional homogeneity is refigured as a quasi-random scattering of particles, like billiard balls on a crooked table. Quantum indeterminacy and undecideability reign."

This is pure metaphor, yet the Wolfsburg project has been described as using 'fractal geometry' as if that is true or even innovative. Fractal geometry in the way that it exists in Hadid's buildings has been used by architects for thousands of years.

Seed: Architecture's Scientific Revolution

The French have a tradition of Bourgeois revolutions and this is no different.

Young, predominantly white students, who are by definition not part of France's growing underclass, are protesting to keep protections that benefit themselves. Trade unions have followed suit, since striking has become a national sport in France - you can't beat a good strike.

What is being proposed is an employment contract that means people don't get the same job protections for their first job. The empirical results of removing benefits at the bottom of the ladder is that employers can take risks, and in a culture with sectors of society with long term unemployment this creates more of a hiring meritocracy.

That is not to say that all benefits should be removed. It would be naive to think that, in a globalized economy, the bottom of the ladder is being filled according to the law. If you live in the US and have ever eaten in a restaurant, you are part of the economy that relies on people who have no job benefits at all. All the more reason to make the legal job environment a balance between incentivizing as many employers to join it as possible, while offering some benefits to employees.

With these actions French students and workers are squandering the crucial powers that legalized trade unions and social activism offer to combat injustice and create a more equal society.

If you are employed in France, you have far more protection than almost any other country - being laid off triggers large redundancy, you have a legally mandated shorter working week and far more paid vacation and benefits than people in the US could dream of.

Extremes produce extremes. Both rational and irrational unfair prejudices are the norm in the hiring process in France. Resumes have photos and marital status and people are regularly asked things like 'are you planning on having children' at job interviews. In the US this is rare.

As a result, if you are a fecund young woman a Muslim or a fifty year old looking for work, France is not the best place to be.

A first time job contract would improve the distribution of wealth in France. Is that not what socialism is about?

Comment is free: Strikes: French national therapy

US based BBC journalist Matt Wells launches his blog - worth checking out.

Rhapsod

Microsoft employee on Vista: "I wouldn't buy it with someone else's money. Then again what do I know, I've only been testing the dog for the last 2-3 yrs".

... and the built in search could be called something lucky like Alta Vista.

PC Pro: News: Microsoft employees call for Ballmer to go

Information Theory Primer With an Appendix on Logarithms Postscript version: ftp://ftp.ncifcrf.gov/pub/delila/primer.ps web versions: http://www.lecb.ncifcrf.gov/toms/paper/primer/

Craig Newmark has a proposal to counter Goodmail. craigblog: a big advance for spam and phishing fighting?

The problem with Craig's proposal - that authorized, digitally signed email passes through spam filters - is that it doesn't create a sender 'cost'. This therefore cannot be a true cure against spam, since spam is a product of almost zero cost for the sender.

As we are seeing, costs are always introduced in any marketplace, and with email being free to send, the self-emergent cost, in dealing with spam, is passed to the receiver.

The postal service did not grow exponentially until it switched from a receiver to a sender pays model, and US cellphone use lags other developed nations because both call sender and recipients pay. If neither sender and recipient pay, as with email it seems that the recipient ends up paying. So the Goodmail solution plays into the way things are in any system.

If people don't like the idea that the big email hubs like AOL will make money from this (since they are making money for not doing much) then perhaps the solution is that this sender tax should only be levied against people who send much more email than they receive, thus cancelling out any charge to most individuals.

The money raised could be donated to a suitable group. My choice would be a range of charities, including the EFF.

When I got home this evening, my wife was all happy because she had made a CD for a work colleague's parents. They had to be conferenced in on a call so they could play a sample to find out who a song was by, they liked it so much. Whereas I had been writing the misanthropic anti-religious rant below. Sometimes I am such a miserable git. So I've put a strike through the post - and am listening to the CD, and its making me happy.

When others do stupid things in computing people say RTFM - read the fucking manual. For some people the bible is their manual but they clearly haven't read it.

More on the Timothy fund on Terry Toledo:

Religious Right Discovers Investment Activism

More evidence that religion in America is a potentially dangerous disease:

"Today's atheists play the role that Catholics, Jews and communists have played in the past they offer a symbolic moral boundary to membership in American society"

"From a telephone sampling of more than 2,000 households, university researchers found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society.” Atheists are also the minority group most Americans are least willing to allow their children to marry."

Atheists identified as Americas most distrusted minority, according to new U of M study

Boing Boing quotes Alan Moore (Creator of V for Vendetta) as saying that the real polar opposites in politics are not right or left but fascist vs. anarchist - i.e. how much government you have.

This clearly does make the political scale less abstract, but the problem is that Anarchy is by definition not really a political stance but an apolitical one.

As another web bubble brews, there was a definite Libertarian smell in the atmosphere at South by Southwest.

By any logical definition of anarchy, Libertarianism is just an erm 'politically correct' term for anarchy.

On the right Libertarianism is pretty simple - its about gun nuts. But it seems that on the left, Libertarianism is often the choice of former liberals who have made lots of money and choose a cause which allows them to support rights which don't cost them anything.

For 'Liberaltarians', supporting the right to smoke pot doesn't cost you anything, but causes such as health or education mean you have to pay taxes for hospitals or schools.

Isn't putting your money where your mouth is, a no bullshit attitude that has much more of the swagger that Libertarians think their apolitics demonstrates?

Next time soemone says they are Libertarian, ask them what their politics are.

Boing Boing: Alan Moore interview (Creator of V for Vendetta)

Most of all the species that have ever existed are extinct and it is certain that human beings will also one day be extinct, or our current cultural history lost through a Dark Age, most probably accelerated by our own doing.

In the spirit of the Internet Archive and the Long Now project, perhaps we should look at mothballing human knowledge somewhere very safe - like on the Moon. A reverse of Arthur C Clarke's 'The Sentinel' - where we put a monolith on the Moon for others.

It seems like a text only archive would be around 30 Terabytes which could be stored in solid state form in a space the size of a large chest.

I wonder how much this would cost, what the requirements would be to protect against radiation and whether a solar powered transmitter could be built to last for an extremely long time?

I would certainly contribute to such a project.

Internet Archive

For the New Version of Gawker Stalker, which launches today, Gawker are using Wists as their blog publishing system.

This allows them to publish items and create maps which show pictures and locations of celebrity sightings in Manahattan and gives a sneak peak into some of the kinds of things that you'll be able to do with the new version of Wists that we are working on.

The Apple Newton showed that form factor is everything. The Newton was pretty cool and ahead of its time - the first PDA. But it was the wrong size.

The Palm Pilot did less (it didn't even try to do full handwriting recognition), but it was the right size. The same form factor as Walkmans and cigarette packets and wallets and iPods, it slipped into existing shirt and jacket pockets, to be carried everywhere.

Good design is about the right choices not technical wizardry. The Segway looked like magic - a two wheeled stable vehicle. But it needed gyros and computing power because its two wheels were next to each other. If its wheels were inline then it would have been a bicycle and the conservation of angular momentum alone would have kept it aloft. The bicycle is a better design for a two wheeled vehicle than a Segway.

The Origami is remarkably similar in size to the Newton - and therefore, even if it packs as much technical innovation as the Segway, unless people start wearing sporrans, the world over, it will die.

Intel shows Origami-like device | CNET News.com

Number of articles in english language version of Wikipedia: 1,000,000
Total articles in Wikipedia: 3,300,000
Total articles in Encylopedia Britannica: 65,000

Number of articles edited per day on Wikipedia: the same number as the total articles in Britannica.

You don't get what you pay for.

Press releases/English Wikipedia Publishes Millionth Article - Wikimedia Foundation