Back from the UK so the current hiatus here should be over. Despite the evidence from stocky hirsute Scotsmen like myself recent DNA analysis has all but proved that Human’s did not interbreed with Neanderthals.
Creationist dogma will be taught alongside evolution in a second UK school, despite the fact that even the Pope seems to accept the evidence for evolution these days.
“Evolution will be taught, other theories will be taught and children will be left to take a view of it themselves.”
Creationism may be called a theory by some, but to compare creationism to evolution is not comparing like with like. When scientists refer to a theory, they mean something that there is evidence for. There is no evidence for creationism, it is a hypothesis and a hypothesis for which there are alternatives with evidence - theories.
The earth beneath our feet often looks the same color and texture as bullshit, lets call this the bullshit creation hypothesis. In this case, if children are to be taught all of the hypotheses of creation then we should teach them that the earth may be made entirely and quite literally out of bullshit.
I don’t think we should teach children bullshit theories.
A web browser is at its core a simple thing, a few lines of PERL and you can write a very basic one. What is important about a browser is its elegance and simplicity and its reliance on simple standards like HTML or server logs etc.
Weblog tools can be simple and elegant and they too rely on simple standards however they are not formalized and this is getting scary. At first glance I can think of four key pseudo-standards for the writeable web. Getting these right will surely have huge implications if weblogging is anything like as important as web browsing:
1. The Meta Weblog API - needs to be modular.
2. Pings from posts (make weblogs.com the principal server and post the whole message)
3. RSS - freeze on 2.0 with slightly tweaked core and generic XSLT to create RDF if needed.
4. Permalinks (oh yes) - standardize formats and ability to alias through purl.org etc.
“In principle blogging promises us something close to Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a writeable web because anyone can create their own constantly-updated site.”
It seems that even the mainstream press are now saying that weblogging constitutes something more important than personal online diaries. Weblog tools are how you publish online and are as important for publishing on the Internet as the browser was for, well, browsing. Perhaps just like the word browsing effectively means reading things on the Internet (or we’d be gophering), blogging will mean publishing on the web, publishing anything, not just a diary.
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