Last week a real saint died.
Abbe Pierre, was the type of Christian who was in direct opposition to Fox News watching, Christian abortion that is the evangelical right. In other words, he was not the type of person who was more interested in protecting a particular brand of western suburban lifestyle from anyone different, rather than actually helping the unfortunate.
After saving the lives of thousands of Jews and political refugees, working with the French Resistance during WWII, he dedicated his life, as a Catholic priest, to helping the homeless, when he found a destitute, pregnant woman, lying on the mud floor of a shelter in Paris, with two dead children next to her.
He admitted breaking his vows on more than one occasion, saying that the hardest thing to resist was the tenderness of a woman. He survived both a plane crash and a shipwreck.
As an atheist, Abbe Pierre is something I can worship, a real human being.
Abbé Pierre - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A Mac user switches to Vista - MSNBC.com
The kicker comes right at the end - he switches back .
The Wow Starts Now? How about: The Yawn Dawns.
Daniel Tammet is simultaneously extraordinarily gifted and well balanced.
His blog is the best thing I've read in ages. There, I have learned, amongst other things, that the collective noun for collective nouns is a 'peculiar'.
I've put the documentary about him posted on Smashing Telly it's a must see.
Optimnem Blog: The Blog of Daniel Tammet
A pastor in the UK who mentally abused children, accusing them of witchcraft and praying for them to die, cannot be charged, after a 10 month investigation by police, since the law that covers child abuse does not cover mental abuse.
This is the same as the situtation in the US, and is a perfect illustration of why laws against mental abuse of children are needed, to challenge the excesses of extreme religion which specifically target children.
Telegraph | News | Child "witches" case dropped
Here's an idea that has been bugging me for a while: what if the Tit for Tat game theory strategy is not successful in the real world, ever?
Here's why - Tit for Tat works because it creates a (technically unstable) equilibrium. In models of reward/retribution between two players Tit for Tat is always the best option.
But we know that in the real world there are rarely two systems that are isolated, and grievances are normally propagated down generations when retribution is against a different individual that has been strereo-typed as having similar characteristics. This creates a potentially infinite cycle of violence, even when Tit for Tat is used as a strategy by every actor.
I believe this could be modeled very simply by creating a 3 party risk/reward game where a certain percentage of plays from a -> b would randomly affect party c (but the players would not know about this random variation). This is a better simulation of real-life and I believe would show that Tit for Tat does not work without a more altruistic dampening affect.
Tit for Tat - Game Theory .net
Perhaps this is old news, but I just received an email:
"Kevin Bacon Invites You to Join Six Degrees"
Seems they have actually hired the person at the center of the social networking meme. Which is actually pretty good, by email marketing standards.
Darrin sent in this graffiti gem:
"A few years ago, in the men's room in Fanelli's Tavern, downtown Manhattan:"
"(in large letters) I fucked your mother!"
"(below, in a smaller hand) Go home, Dad. You're drunk."
I watched a very disturbing film last night. It was a film about child abuse, about the kind of child abuse that leaves mental scars that take far longer to heal than physical abuse. And this abuse is both legal and widely encouraged, because there are many good people taken in by it.
We have a natural revulsion towards seeing children being forced to act like adults, in that most adult of traits, sexuality. At first I couldn't understand what it was that bothered me most about the interviews with the children of fundamentalist evangelical Christians in the documentary, Jesus Camp then I realized.
They did not sound like children at all, but were spouting off rehearsed indoctrination with adult vocabulary, opinions and mannerisms.
Levi: At five I got saved...
Becky Fischer: Yeah?
Levi: ...because I just wanted more of life.
This is like a line from a world weary reformed drunk in a film noir, not an innocent child.
Their innocence had been removed and they looked either somewhat cold and insincere, or were overcome with emotion, sobbing in a way that you wanted to help these poor kids escape this torture. Only occasionally did their real childish innocence and playfullness shine through.
And if anyone thinks I'm over-reacting, that indoctrinating a child to be an, M16 rifle carrying, fundamentalist Christian radical, is not like indoctrinating a child to be an AK47 rifle carrying, fundamentalist Muslim radical, for example. That this is not child abuse. Then consider this.
Jesus Camp is a film about pre-teen children at a religious summer camp, with no footage of anything that the children themselves weren't exposed to and yet it carries a certificate 13 - it is not considered fit for young children.
Whatever you think of Starbucks, Chinese TV anchorman Rui Chenggang gets things hilariously wrong when trying to stop them opening in the frobidden city.
"Rui said the coffee shop should be as unwelcome in the Forbidden City as it would be at the Taj Mahal in India, the pyramids in Egypt or the Louvre Museum in Paris."
There is in fact now a Starbucks in the Louvre, as I found out to my amusement a couple of weeks ago.
This makes it welcome in the Forbidden city by Rui's criteria.
Starbucks is on uncertain ground in Beijing
Alexa currently shows a 90,000 % increase for Macrumorslive. Taking its rank from 1,264,571 to 3,023.
That kind of fluctuation makes a halloween costume store look like a year round business. It also shows quite how big the cult of Jobs has become.
Related Info for: macrumorslive.com/
Exactitudes is a fantastic project, where a Dutch couple take pictures of people from a similar socio economic background and show how similar they are, particularly in their almost identical attempts at individuality.
via emily
Killian Fox on 'Smashing Telly', in the Observer:
Watch this other space. Better picture quality takes online TV to the next level
Leading Democrats have recently visited Iraq.
Leading Republicans have recently visited Iraq.
Leaders of America's allies have recently visited Iraq.
The son of Prince Charles is going to Iraq and most importantly, the sons and daughters of many ordinary people will be going.
But the person who sent them, President Bush, is not going because 'it is too dangerous'.
White House: We will send more troops in Iraq - CNN.com
Nice simple explanation of Shannon Entropy.
Information, Uncertainty and Shannon Entropy - The Math Introduction at Nonoscience
The phrase 'Information Entropy' is one of the most confusing in science, since entropy is the lack of infomation. But the problem is not with the idea of equating information theory and entropy, just eth sloppy phrasing. Information Entropy means Entropy within the concept of information science (as opposed to thermodynamics, for example).
In 2004 I wrote: I want my iPhone
And boy did they deliver. The iPhone looks like the best Apple product yet.
I'm launching a new site called Smashing Telly.
Over the last 6 months, I have rarely watched regular TV, but did not have the patience to download programs, having found a wealth of timeless classics such as Kenneth Clark's Civilisation (sic) available instantly, as a streamed video of 'good enough' quality.
Smashing Telly is a hand edited collection of the best free TV on the web. Not 30 second clips of a dog on a skateboard, or the millionth person to mime the Numa song, but full length programs.
Over the next week I'll be posting a bunch of new items.
Have been playing around with Wordpress.com - very nice.
For years now people have obsessed with separating style from content and have thought that 'style' is the same as 'layout'. CSS has been used for layout, which it is a very bad language for (unlike many templating languages glancing at a CSS file does not tell you what a page design will look like which ruins the whole 'view source' model that made html so successful).
XML is a much better language for layout, but we are stuck with CSS, and so will have to split CSS into separate layout and style documents.
Andy Skelton & Scott Allan Wallick's Sandbox theme is the first time I've seen something that moves towards separation of style from layout, not just style + layout from content. There is a lot that could be done with that - particularly if the semantic placeholders that have no real 'layout' component are separated out.
If that were done, and there was a convention for class names for specific types of element (e.g. a class for text can have font, size, color properties etc.) a generic css styling wizard could be built against it.
An animated map of the Spread of religion.
One thing it suggests to me is that Judaism and subsequently the other Abrahamic religions are actually based on Hinduism.
After all, Krishna was crucified and rose again and was referred to as Kris (Christ).
[Thanks Keith.]
I like Om Malik and I like what he's doing with GigaOm as a network.
Somehow I think when Web2.0 advertising dries up, there will still be marketing dollars for Malik's blogs which are both niche and important in the long term.
His latest is NewTeeVee and is highly recommended.
Innevitably a visit to Europe always ends up in endless analysis of what better Europe vs the US. This time was partiularly strange, since much of Europe feels more futuristic that the US.
My arrival at Zurich airport epitomized this, the airport having the same atmosphere as the film Gattaca.
In the tunnels for the shuttle between terminals, pinpoint strobes light up 160 light box images of a post modern Heidi such that each frame syncs with the shuttle windows to produce an 8 second flipbook style movie.
1. US loses control of middle east foreign policy.
Israel says will use Nuclear tipped warheads to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, unless the US attacks.
Saudi Arabia says will invade Iraq to protect Sunni Iraqis if the US pulls out.
The president has a mandate for neither of the options allowed to him, domestically.
2. Recession signs.
Weather related losses, over leveraged debt, house price declines a weak dollar and middle east political instability. The sooner the inevitable recession comes, the quicker and milder it will be, 2007 if we are lucky, but probably 2008.
3. Global warming hits reinsurance.
Insurance has traditionally been a guaranteed money maker, you asses the risk and take a premium while the government pays to mitigate much of that risk, with things like the police and fire services and the military. But the weather is different, and the weather will play a bigger factor than ever in Insurance and nobody will have the correct risk model. At the top of this house of cards is re-insurance. Only the biggest will be able to survive and 2007 may see the first collapses.
4. Fox news fires O'Reilly.
Rupert Murdoch is not a Republican. He is someone who produces what people want to hear. Less people will want to hear people like O'Reilly so he will be canned and Fox will move away from the embarrassing failure of neo-conservatism.
5. First web 2.0 flameouts, although bubble keeps growing.
Who will be the new Boo.com. There are too many stupid web 2.0 companies and there will be a die off starting this year, even if the mini bubble continues for another year or so.
6. Microsoft flatlines after initial vista hype wears off.
Microsoft used to own the command line. Now Google do. Millions of dollars of promotional spend on Vista will wear off quickly, a Microsoft 's stock price will start a long slow decline.
7. Socialists win French presidential elections.
Arguable France needs Sarkozy like the UK needed Thatcher in the late 70's, but they won't get him.
8. Bush betrayed by the right. Bush's fate is controlled by his own people, not the Dems. Somewhere there is probably a piece of paper that proves that he lied to go to war in Iraq. If someone decides to slide that to a reporter across a car park floor in DC, then his last days in office will not be the stalemate that the Democrats have in store for him.
9. Gordon brown becomes uk prime minister.
But does win the next election.
10. Democrats make choice between socially liberal fiscally conservative libartarianism and Lou Dobbs style perochial neo-fascism.
Lets hope that the Dobsians don't derail things.