The year is 2002, I am sitting in front of a computer that 10 years ago would have filled a large bunker and could model the aftershocks of a thermonuclear explosion and I want to find something on this computer.

I have two choices: I can use ‘Start:search:for files or folders’ or I can type something into a browser window. The first will clunk and whir and a couple of seconds later will search the few thousand file names on the computer but will not search the contents of those files. The second will fully search over 3 billion files from other computers and return the answer within 0.2 seconds.

Microsoft Windows is badly designed.

Video link

You couldn’t make up this shit.
Most people have some sympathy for Michael Jackson as someone who has clearly lost all touch with reality - but do you trust this man to bring up healthy, well adjusted kids?
The latest - after dangling a baby that people think ‘may’ be his from a 4th floor window - a visit to the zoo with his kids in veils.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Showbiz | Jackson’s zoo outing

Is it just me? Whenever anyone mentions the word Singapore - some know-it-all (usually a know-it-all like myself) drones “do you know that chewing gum is illegal in Singapore?”

Well apparently it’s true - at least until today, when it will no longer be a criminal offence and will be sold on prescription.

Ananova - Singapore relaxes chewing gum ban

So now that the traditional Singapore chewing gum anecdote is history here’s an alternative gum trivium:

“the ancient Greeks were known to be fond of a gummy substance named mastiche, derived from the resin of the mastic tree. In fact, Dioscorides, a Greek physician and medical botanist of the First Century, refers to the “curative powers” of the mastic in his writing.”

Just one in every seven young Americans could locate Iraq or Iran on a map of the Middle East and Asia.

We may be dumb but the bombs are smart.

Back from Europe - and how nice it was to be back, the sun is shining, nearly 70 degrees in San Francisco and yesterday we took a delightful stroll to Muir beach. So being the miserable git that I am, I’ll have a go at the English:

Plans to increase university tuition fees in the UK are being strongly opposed by the Labour left.

BBC - Short attacks student top-up fees

On the face of it the argument sounds convincing: increases in fees and reduced state subsidy of higher education lead to less people from poorer families receiving higher education.

Wrong - analyze the facts and you realize that what is being argued for amounts to campaigning against tax increases for the wealthy - something which should be an anathema for self-respecting members of the left.

Police Academy

The facts: As the Economist points out, people in the UK are snooty about education, they have seen Britain decline as a military and economic power but still cling to the idea of intellectual prowess without investing in it. Britain’s universities are in crisis, Harvard spends 4 times as much on a student’s education as Oxford and in the UK junior professors are paid the same as rookie cops.

Britain’s universities need more money - quick.
The answer for how to do this comes from Australia, where, since 1989 private funding of education through student loans has been massively increased whilst maintaining similar attendance demographics to primarily state funded higher education. The trick is that student loan repayments are dependant on future income. The Australian government can afford to put its money where its mouth is, since historically there is no better financial investment than a university education.

What this means is that people without a university education are not funding those with one, it also means that richer university educated people pay more. In effect, a tax on wealthy university educated citizens, but the UK left would rather see everyone subsidize them than look beyond the mantra of state funding which is not an option if you want to educate 5 times as many people as we used to in the 60’s.

Creative projects that people take on after the dot com crash - photographs of the entire California coastline:

California Coastal Records Project — Aerial Photographs of the California Coastline

Nick Denton satirizes investment bankers for Management Today. Surely the affects of a recession on bankers were more obvious during the 80’s (as my friend Kamal points out Milken awarded himself a bonus of over $600M in the 80’s and that kind off excess has note been a feature this time round)? However, the patters of this recession, which looks more like Japan’s zero inflation slump than the inflationary 80’s will be felt differently as the ripples hit people who earn less.

David Galbraith says:
the article i would like to see you write - i would try, but am not qualified to - is what is going to be the story this time round as the downturn really hits the population at large - deflation - house prices - anti-war etc.
Nick Denton says:
I doubt it will have any impact on the war
David Galbraith says:
i was thinking more of three general trends - globalization activism, the disappearance [ok - not entirely disappearance] of deterrence from military agenda, the necessary encroachment on civil liberty to combat terrorism, and the fact that activism is rife during periods of deflation (ok not so in japan - but activism rare in Japan), consider the Chartists and threat of revolution in Britain in the 1840’s
David Galbraith says:
more than three
Nick Denton says:
globalization activism is nothing more than the usual spasms of poseurs and conservatives; deterrence is alive and well, and works for pretty much everybody except Osama; and civil liberties are in robust good health, just look at the Republican politicians and judges who block the worst of Ashcroft’s war measures

The commonplace use of permalinks in weblogs has profound implications.
At a recent tech discussion Mark Nottingham pointed out that the real difference between RSS and RDF (the cornerstone of the semantic web initiative) was that RSS was about lists.
On the one hand this is true, however, the term list understates a crucial point about weblogging. Weblogging is designed to deal with nuggets of information that an author creates instead of a page that a publisher publishes. A permalink refers to a unique item, and in terms of the semantic web, indicates a component from which meaning can be extracted. more…

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The press are having a field day in the UK over the latest royals scandal and conspiracy theorists will have a lot to chew on - Diana ready to convert to Islam - the Queen warning Diana’s butler of mysterious powers at work.

Every time the UK royal family picks itself up from humiliation, they are beaten down again by the press. I can’t help thinking that this is an inevitable feature of an anachronistic institution, that was artificially bolstered by Victorian politicians from terminal decline. Lest anyone forget, the royals are no strangers to PR, the very name Windsor was invented to divert attention from the rather German sounding Saksen-Coburg.

Google Search: cluster:Diana