Well done Schwarzenegger. Smack bottom Bush.
Science News Article | Reuters.com
The only channel I ever watch on TV is PBS. I ditched Cable, because the only channel I ever watched was HBO. I like the Tivo interface, but there is no way that I'm paying a rental fee or premium for TV listings, as a very occasional viewer. I also don't have a land line telephone.
The Toshiba PVR with DVD burner, below is ideal - it gets free listings from TV guide, directly from within the channel 13 signal, so you buy it and stick a co-ax cable into it and you're done. No signup with any service and no phone connection required. Works with Cable but not Dish services, if you are into paying a mortgage for TV. Cheap: $320
Toshiba | RD-XS35: Multi-Drive DVD Recorder with 160GB Hard Drive
What is both rare and everywhere?
- Uranium is rare, but everywhere.
One ton of an ordinary rock, such as granite, contains 16g of Thorium and Uranium.
A kilogram of Uranium is equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, which is approx. the same as the energy potential of 20,000 tons of gasoline.
One ton of common-or-garden rock contains the equivalent fuel of 320 tons of gasoline. It could take a lot less than that to extract it.
Until recently, what did environmentalists and Car/Oil companies have in common?
- A reason to hate nuclear power.
It used to be very easy to make a case against nuclear energy, and if you are either a treehugger or a oil exec. you would be historically allied.
Its like watching a real life version of the Risk board game.
Google is telling the other players, 'I won't attack you for the next ten moves' as it prepares to roll the dice and line up all its armies next to Microsoft who will also do the same.
Because a Microsoft/Google battle royal is kind of innevitable, Google wants to avoid any other trouble.
Its caving on personal media with an Apple board seat for Google's CEO and holding off a PayPal and listings assault on Ebay, with a 'partnership'.
Both companies will lose in the medium term, in the long run one will survive.
Remember what happened to Novell, IBM, Commadore?
I think Google will win in 'three rounds', but nothing is certain. Its a game of dice , after all.
Microsoft: 'We Are Watching Google'
CNN.com - Rep. Harris: Church-state separation 'a lie' - Aug 28, 2006
"Katherine Harris told a religious journal that separation of church and state is "a lie" and God and the nation's founding fathers did not intend the country be "a nation of secular laws."
Why are Americans putting up with this crap? Katherine Harris is exactly what they fought the war in 1776 to escape.
Evan williams has a great post on why Pageviews are Obsolete
In summary he shows that Page Views are often lower for better designed sites, and this therefore lowers Alexa rank.
Last week I posted that Alexa was only 5% accurate for sites outside the top 1000, as a relative measure, based on the sampling error being so high outside of this range. The Page View problem further reduces this accuracy.
In short, if you want to appear low in Alexa, appeal to an audience of non-techies and have a well designed site. (Etsy's real traffic data is porbably spectacular, by this measure).
This problem, however, is not just an esoteric one. Page views are being replaced by Ajax 'page flakes' but there is no advertising system for Ajax.
To do this for Google Adsense, would require creating a complete ad preloading and caching system which would violate Google T&C's.
Blogging showed that ITEMS were more important than PAGES, from a semantic perspective. The rise of Video and audio is also changing this view for obvious reasons. This now extends to an application perspective.
Here's a lazyweb idea - an 'item view' stats package, with an ad serving system directly geared around Ajax driven sites.
In a sense this could seem hopelessly naiive - to try and re-educate advertisers around a new paradigm. But its not advertisers that need re-educated its techies. Advertisers measure IMPRESSIONS - and most page refreshes on sites like Myspace are not impressions, if the content remains the same, when you request some functionality, like an 'email this' form.
The sometimes delusional cycle of Web 2.0 companies and VCs looking at Alexa rankings, does often acknowledge that Alexa is a bit skewed, as if its out by perhaps 50%.
Well its a boat load skewed, Alexa is actually only about 5% accurate if one uses data from Gawker.
Because Gawker is transparent about page views, and has a property whose readership is part of the Web 2.0 scene, Valleywag (Trivia fact - I chose the name Valleywag) and one that definitely isn't, Deadspin, Alexa's accuracy can be correlated to real data other than Comscore.
Valleywag traffic: 600 thousand page views per month
Deadspin traffic: 4.5 million page views per month
According to Alexa, however, Valleywag ranks twice as highly as Deadspin, with a rank of 5,000, compared to Deadspin's 10,000 ranking.
Which means that Alexa skews tech. sites such as Web 2.0 favs by a huge factor of 15 even within the top 10,000 sites where the accuracy is higher.
In short, Alexa is almost useless for websites outside of the top 1000, and no sensible investment or reporting should be influenced by it.
Website Statistics and Traffic Graphs comparing www.valleywag.com and www.deadspin.com
War-Torn Middle East Seeks Solace In Religion
The Relativist is an hilarious piss-take of New York Times Magazine's priggish, pompous ass, 'The Ethicist'.
Very structured, short-form content like lists or questions and answers work well on the web, so the Agony Aunt format is a great idea for a blog.
"I recently instructed law officers to deport an immigrant to his home country, where he was to be interrogated until he provided information useful to our government. I’ve now discovered that law enforcement was directed to the wrong address, and arrested a man named Fred who is a native born certified financial planner."
Amazon's EC2 is the most exciting thing I've seen in a while - If it were Google that had launched this, I imagine there would have been more fuss.
EC2 allows you to put a disk image of a Linux machine onto Amazon S3 (their remote storage service) and create a virtual machine by installing from there onto EC2. From there on you pay only for CPU time and bandwidth.
This is the grid computing that Oracle has been bullshitting about, and chenges the landscape for hosting - allowing instant, on-demand scaleability and no upfront hardware costs, or per unit rackspace fees.
I need to investigate more. However, for startups this potentially solves the 'launch' problem, where you need extra horsepower for a traffic boost at launch, but the cost of setting it up is prohibitive if you only need that level of service for a couple of weeks.
I can't help thinking that Amazons naming is a bit bland or too clever - Mechanical Turk, EC2, S3.
Perhaps they should buy anywhere.com off me for EC2.
Amazon.com Amazon Web Services Store: Amazon EC2 / Amazon Web Services
Has Digg Been Hijacked, by FUD
Today a largely factually based story with referenced quotes and run by the Associated Press, which was also reported in most US newspapers is flagged by Digg as potentially Inacurate.
I've noticed recently that a large number of political stories, particularly left of center ones, get slapped with the 'Warning: The Content in this Article May be Inacurate" - Because enough people who want to deliberately create uncertainty in light of the truth, say so.
This is the way wikipedia does it, and to be honest, with no other option for wikipedia, it means that Wikipedia is largely useless and hopelessly banal for contentious political issues.
But news is not like Wikipedia - users are directly linking to a source not editing it. If people on the political fringes moan, that does not necessarily mean that the source is innacurate.
The Wikipedia reputation system does not work on Digg.
digg - "Bush Misled America" - John McCain
Average house price in the US, Aug 2006:
$230,000
Average house price in the UK, Aug 2006: $376,600
Average gas price per gallon in the US, Aug 2006: $3.04
Average gas price per gallon in the UK, Aug 2006: $6.46
There will almost certainly be a recession in the US soon, caused primarily by inflated gas and house prices. One will continue to go up and the other will crash - a problem for people who own houses and drive cars, i.e. are long in real estate and short on gas.
But these prices are actually very, very cheap compared to places like the UK, which didn't go into recession with much larger costs and similar wages. The principal difference being the rate of consumption.
average home sales prices in all regions of the united states
Percentage of Americans who identified themseves as 'church members':
1776: 17%
1990: 62%
The statistics for Britain now (10%) and at the height of Empire (possibly 70%), are similar. It is possible that Christianity in America today is a form of nationalism rather than spiritualism, rather like Victorian Britain.
Dave is right on to keep banging on about the morbid obsession with the JonBenet story.
My take is that this is somewhat apallingly taking the place of a light relief story, like a dog on a skateboard clip.
Current geopolitical stories in the Middle East in particular are difficult to grapple with or find a clear cut answer to - so when a Paedophile is wheeled in, people find no moral ambiguity there, and just react on gut without having to think, venting their anger with a 'burn the witch' chorus.
To saturate the news with this makes Paedophile baiting a form of light entertainment distraction, although nobody will admit to the fact, which is very disturbing.
Kathy Young for Capital News 9:
"By the end of the week, the universe could be expanding, with the addition of three new planets to our solar system."
Hilarious. Given the relative size of the known Universe to our solar system, this is the equivalent of saying: "By the end of the week, the earth could be expanding, with the addition of three grains of sand on a beach in Florida."
Capital News 9 | 24 Hour Local News | HEADLINES | A cosmic change
My wife has put together a Wist of bathroom and makeup products, such as solid shampoo, that should be allowed in carry-on luggage, with the no liquids ban.
Wists - non liquid carry on products.
A quarter of everything that exists has just been found.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Team finds 'proof' of dark matter
Jonathan Miller's: A Brief History of Disbelief Pt. 1
"God is an essence we know nothing of, until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there will never be any liberal science in the world."
John Adams US President 1797 - 1801
"The clergy believe that any power confided in me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes - and they believe rightly."
Thomas Jefferson US President 1801 - 1809
"I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion."
James Buchanan US President 1857 - 1861
"My earlier views on the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation have become clearer and stronger with advancing years."
Abraham Lincoln US President 1861 - 1865
You occasionally get Cricket stories on the front page of Google news (because, as Digg has proven - news driven by robots is crap compared to human editorial), but on the New York Times front page!
The New York Times - Breaking News, World News & Multimedia
Fakes on a plane - was the online buzz faked?
"After months of online buildup and frenzied media attention, Snakes on a Plane turned out to be just another horror flick...The R-rated thriller became an Internet and media darling by catering to bloggers and online fans"
I suspect that Snakes on a Plane went one step further than Subservient Chicken, to try and create buzz from the ground up, by seeding online communities with fake blog postings.
Wherever you looked, all the talk about Snakes on a Plane was smattered with superlatives - 'best movie title ever' etc. - it smelled as if those comments were being seeded by flacks.
If I'm right, then there is hope that webloggers are actually less brainwashable than mainstream media, because the excercise looks like it may have failed.
USATODAY.com - 'Snakes' rattles Web hype
One Nation under God, upholding democracy and the principals of the Ten Commandments? -
Actually no, America was founded on the opposite, and was all the better for it.
Which country has a constitution which declares 'one nation under God', America or Iran?
Iran
Were the majority of the people on the Mayflower fleeing religious persecution?
No. (Most people who fled to America were fleeing persecution FROM religious people. By 1776 America was a secular as modern Europe, while Europe was as religious as current day America.)
Does American law contradict the Ten Commandments?
Yes, capitalism is based upon the idea that coveting things is not that bad after all.
Did the American Constitution mention God?
No
Is the American Constitution based upon purely democratic principles (i.e. majority rule)?
No, it specifically protects minorities from majority voted laws which persecute.
Is America a Christian Nation?
Dolphins have had a rough time lately, they used to be considered intelligent and kind - then researchers pointed out that they gang rape females to death when mating.
Now it turns out they they may not even be intelligent. In fact they may be not be much smarter than a goldfish.
Their big brains are mostly fat with very few neurons.
Research shows dolphins dimwitted but happy
Michael Dell once said that to fix Apple, they should: "shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders".
Apple is doing just fine, it survives on true innovation, but perhaps Dell should be shut down now.
Profit Falls by Half at Dell - New York Times
Three days after its announcement of a vast safety recall, Dell reported little but bad news yesterday: profits down by half, and an informal Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its accounting.
I never wanted to be your stupid governor anyway! » The Allen Almanac:
"No person who denies the being of a God shall hold any office in the civil departments of this State [Arkansas] , nor be competent to testify as a witness in any court."
Hah. Time to go on the offensive:
1. Any person that is an atheist will be more likely to get a job from me. On the grounds that they display better skills of reason - a principal job requirement.
2. Any person that agrees with the Arkansas Constitution will not be eligible to work for me on the grounds of their religious discrimination.
Dapper fills a perfect niche.
People forget that before RSS there was screenscraping. And that after RSS there is still screenscraping. Most of Google News is scraped and does not come from RSS.
Amazingly, because nobody really puts any useful metadata in RSS, you still need to screenscrape to produce useful aggregation services.
Other than enterprise companies such as WebMethods which had a scraping tool as part of a web services builder, or the innovative Junglee that was snapped up by Amazon before the last .com boom got underway, nobody has built an online screen scraping tool, despite the fact that its actually a massive gaping hole in fundamental services of the web.
At Moreover.com, RSS was largely useless to us, because you can't build a news search engine without full text, and the bigger news sources don't want to output full text RSS, without prior negotiation. So, like Google News, we were managing tens of thousands of scrapers, for search engines like MSN and Yahoo, - which is a pain in the ass.
Because this is a pain in the ass, Dapper is a damn good idea, but because people imagine that RSS is something its not, people may not realize.
If the right people get to using it, Dapper could become a prime mover in making RSS be what people think it is, allowing people to build good vertical search services such as real estate where you want to search by number of rooms etc.
Waiting around for people to create a real estate module for RSS may not be practical. It would be better to scrape and then make the module yourself, using Dapper.
For Dapper to succeed I'd guess that they need to focus on a community of content aggregators, rather than be purely a software service.
Want to work out compound interest rates in your head?
Use the Rule of 72
ln 2 is 69.3% - which is approximately equal to 70 which is close to 72 - which has many factors making it easy to do mental division.
So to work out compound interests rates' doubling times divide 72 by the Interest rate.
At 6% $100 becomes $200 in 72/6 = 12 years
Is Fox News Anti-Semitic?
Martin Luther, one of the founders of the Christian branch (protestantism) that dominates neo-conservatism was a rabid anti-semite. But it wasn't always that way, in fact Luther was fluent in Hebrew and a renowned scholar of Hebrew text.
Luther's anti-semititic volte face came when he realized that his belief that Jews would accept Christ prior to the Last Judgement was hopelessly naiive. And so he turned his energy towards hatred.
Last week I saw a Fox News 'anchor' reporting from Northern Israel, as a rocket had just landed injuring a civilian. Around him, everyone was wearing normal clothes, however he was wearing a helmet and full body armour, it would be less worrying if this were cowardice rather than showmanship.
As the injured woman was lead into an ambulance, she desperately tried to wave the camera crew away, she was covered in blood and did not want to be on TV.
Ignoring this single injured woman's wishes for dignity, to promote a political agenda, which may or may not co-incide with that woman's political beliefs seemed to be a metaphor for Luther ignoring the beliefs of Jews for his own.
The problem is that this is not a metaphor. Fox news depends on a political slant that is characterized by a political shift towards the same beliefs as Luther.
Thermodynamic entropy vs information entropy - Advanced Physics Forums
"We can choose to look at thermodynamic entropy in two different ways. One approach would say that a high entropy state is information poor because there is so much disorder, and the disorder is essentially random. The other approach would say that a high entropy state is information rich because to truly describe the exact state of randomness in all its gory detail would require lots of information."
This outlines the confusion of the difference in the 'sign' between Shannon and Boltzmann entropy.
It is basically a confusion over the difference between a state which has meaning to a particular observer, and the notion of absolute meaning where bits of information are stored in the smallest possible moving (hence thermodynamic) particles. What if the latter case were subjective?
There is possibly no such thing as absolute entropy, or energy or information for that matter, merely the capacity to interact with a decoder or remote system. This is possibly explained in terms of entropy by comparing microstates to macrostates (think numbered balls vs a bunch of similar marbles).
(Sorry for the slightly random rant - I'm using this blog for public notes about entropy, in case anyone else is interested in this stuff)
Nice explanation of diff between Shannon and Boltzmann etropy.
Thermodynamic entropy vs information entropy - Advanced Physics Forums
The information entropy is the log of the number of accesible states, and is dimensionless.
The thermodynamic entropy is equal to the information entropy times the Boltzman (sic) constant. (kB = 1.38x10^-23 J/K) so the thermodynamic entropy has units of energy per degree kelvin.
It is worth noting that present day computers process so little information compared to the number of equivalent thermodynamic states accesible to them, that the information entropy of the device is insignificant compared to the thermal entropy. I believe this means that present day computers operate nowhere near the thermodynamic limits of computation, so in a certain sense the equivalence of the two forms of entropy is irrelevant except that it does allow one to place theoretical limits on the process of computation.
The Panda's Thumb: Entropy: Common pitfalls
A bigger threat to your life than suicide bombers.
We've moved Wists to hardware with five times the horsepower and into new datacenters. the overall speed is several times faster than just before the move.
Traffic has been doubling every two and a half months (interestingly with no reflection of this on Alexa - oh well), and we're getting ready for the roll out of Wists rev 2!
Since its such a pain for people to install bookmarklets in Internet Explorer, we've automated the process with an installer.
Wists, top web picks from for all. Wists, social shopping scrapbook, wishlist
Would capsules of pig fat in plane seats deter an Islamic Fundamentalist suicide bomber?
Urban Legends Reference Pages: Rumors of War (Pershing the Thought)
The logic of an irrational deterrent, such as pig fat, which is really an imaginary weapon unless god is a nasty piece of work himself, seems at first glance to be less of a moral dilemma to me than other inevitable anti-muslim stereotyping and encroachment on civil liberty that a less stable society brings with it.
However, I suspect that, because religious beliefs are irrational, they are actually based often on subconscious convenience.
In other words, if being covered in pig fat prevented you from being a martyr, the belief system of people who conveniently distort the very nature of a loving god by killing in his name would evolve around this inconvenient fact and it would only be a deterrent against the majority of moderate muslims - who would be the recipients of prejudice.
Some people from The Twelve Tribes : The Commonwealth of Israel parked up three really nicely restored old 50s buses in Washington Square last night.
I think they are Christans, but are playing 'Irish/ Israeli' folk music in NYC next week. I would suggest that they should be called Oi Vay Maria.
Anyway, I learned this really interesting fact - If you are a hippy traveller, the best place to park up your trailer for free, is the car park at a mega Walmart.
Hippies and ultra-consumer capitalism have a symbiotic relationship after all.
"Divebars. Jukeboxes. Allen Iverson. Beerball. Super Mario Kart. NetFlix. LiveFuckingJournal. The way my girl looks in that skirt."
Very well written piece about loving America for the good things, after seeing it fresh after backpacking abroad. The Musty Man - Hating America
The National Review has a list of the most harmful books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Its next to an ad for Ann Coulter's book, so these guys are clearly literature experts.
(Its a little known fact that (M)Ann Coulter is actually a drag act - check out the give away jaw line.)
My top ten most dangerous books, period:
1. The Tanakh
2. The New Testament
3. The Koran
4. Mein Kampf (these guys can't have a monopoly on it)
5. Atlas Shrugged
6. Pedigree Dogs
7. The Art of War
8. Barbara Cartland's Book of Etiquette
9. High Availability MySQL Clusters for Absolute Beginners
10. Grimms Fairy Tales
Table of inflation adjusted (dec 2005 prices) oil prices. Today's shutdown of the US's biggest and most geopolitically stable oil source puts oil at $77 a barrel. It is still more than 10% cheaper than in 1980 - but the climate and the political climate is much more unstable. At this point, a recession is innevitable, and is probably the least of our worries for anyone who has read a history book.
Civilians targetted in bombing raid - unbelievable casualties, 220,000 men, women and children dead.
I've switched to 'outliner style' for my blog, as default, so that I can post more quick links and to help prevent me from writing boring diatribes.
When junk mail comes through the door with moneymaking scams like - make $100,000 in 2 months, its typically supported by testimonials that aren't quite outright falsehoods, but are, lets say - economical with the truth.
...It typically goes straight in the trash can.
So when one of the worlds biggest business magazines prints an even bolder claim "this kid made $60 million in 18 months" in tabloid sized lettering on its front cover, and it turns out to be an outright falsehood, does Business Week look like something serious investors and business people should subscribe to, or something to put in the trash can?
There is nothing actually wrong with the companies or the people mentioned in the piece - they are all interesting.
However, Scott Rosenberg etc. are rightly on Business Week's case.
In doing so the tech press may turn this around to make the responsible reaction to the piece, rather the the article itself a defining moment of web 2.0 and the refusal to fall for 1999 style hysteria.
Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard » Blog Archive » Business Week on Digg: Smells like bubble spirit
I just saw an ad for a whole roast chicken - for under $2. $2 to raise, kill, prepare and cook an animal. So I did some research to see just how insanely cheap mechanized farming produce has become.
In the middle ages, an unplucked, unroasted chicken cost 5/8 of the daily wage of a master mason. This was a very highly paid and esteemed position for the day, but lets be conservative and assume that the equivalent would be someone on a current US salary of $60K per annum.
This would mean that a chicken cost around $150.
Gives some kind of perpective on what pumping oil into the ground and hormones into mammals can do.
The site below has some really interesting data on medieval food.
Spices and Their Costs in Medieval Europe
Next/previous, back/forward buttons - the single most important bit of web navigation are being used to mean the opposite to their original use in browsers, because of blogs.
'Next' on Technorati means back in time and has an arrow which points to the right. 'Previous' on Techcrunch means back in time and has an arrow which points to the left.
Web browsers are in many ways as simple as the universal music playing interface that has existed since the cassette player.
Music interfaces consist of rewind, fast-forward, stop and play.
A browser UI is almost the same and consists of back (rewind), forward (fast-forward), stop (largely redundant in the browser), refresh, home/url-entry (play).
Within a web page the back and forward buttons, 'next and previous' are ubiquitous for search results and the, increasingly archetypal, blog style UI.
Because blogs are reverse chronological lists and search engines equate 'next' with less relevant or less timely they do exactly the opposite of what browsers do.
The problem is that websites are increasingly following the browser model rather than the search engine one.
For Google or most blogs 'next' means back in relevance or time and 'previous' means back in browsing history.
Because blogs happen to have reverse chronological postings the 'next' 'previous' model seems like it is compatible with a browser's history. It is, but only for this specific case.
It means that 'previous' can mean back in browsing history but more recent in time - which is confusing, to say the least.
The solution, I think, should be to assume that the browsers got their first, and that navigation history should be left/right arrows, where left is back in time.
For blog style navigation, where the very simple vertical list was developed, I would suggest that the arrows should be up or down, where back in time is a 'down' arrow and more recent is an up arrow.
If this convention were followed, there would be no ambiguity, and a single navigation device with left right and up down arrows, could be used.