Playlist from April’s Casanova lounge session: Uppers | Nick Rossi and David Galbraith @ The Turnaround, April 2004

Anyone welcome to show up for the next scintillating installment.

Edison, the Man was made in 1940, in it, I have a recollection that a machine stops working because ‘there is a bug in it’.

If that is true, this clearly predates the accepted origin when a moth appeared in the Mark I computer at Harvard in 1945.

Can anyone confirm?

The phrase ‘what the dickens’, has nothing to do with Dickens, but was ironically coined by Shakespeare hundreds of years earlier.

Trivia: Shakespeare top 10

Why does Nature magazine which is not one of the world’s highest traffic websites have a pagerank of 10?

With 45,000 inbound links, perhaps the scientific community with its peer review process and history of open collaboration is more adept at mutual linking than webloggers?

Alexa today shows a traffic rank of 1,255 and a 1.5% reach for Burger King’s subservient chicken. Related Info for: subservientchicken.com/

Trying to create an Internet meme like this is hard, but Burger King have pulled it off.

What is likely in the future is that savvy advertisers will track sites like Technorati and endorse new memes as they take off.

HotBot’s New Desktop Search Toolbar:

“HotBot’s new Desktop Search utility not only searches the web, it indexes files and email on your computer, making them searchable as well.”

It’s only a matter of time before Google do this and perhaps what has held them back was fear of being too aggressive against Microsoft.

As I’ve said before, it is crazy that we can search millions of other computers, thousands of miles apart, more quickly than our own machine.

Microsoft should have done this 8 years ago, we should not have to wait because of the stagnation created by a monopoly.

“Last year Mr Niyazov instituted a holiday in honour of the muskmelon, a relative of the watermelon, complete with lavish festivities”

link

Another meme spreads round the web, the Sergey pic is on Hot or Not:

Is Sergey HOT or NOT?

The problem with arguing with Creationists and the like is that it is not worth it and no fun. Who can be bothered to read through 5 pages of futile debate?

If someone persists in holding a view that they try and defend in quasi scientific terms, despite overwhelming contradictory evidence, then it isn’t likely that rational argument will change anything. A better challenge is to argue against irrational belief from that very standpoint.

In order to do this for evolution I have invented the notion of ‘Spiritual Darwinism’ a spiritual challenge to Creationism much as Intelligent Design is an attempt at a scientific challenge to Darwinism. Now you can use religious debating techniques:

Creationist: Blah blah blah - goes on for ages.

Spiritual Darwinist: You are wrong.

Creationist: Prove it.

Spiritual Darwinist: God spoke to me and told me that you are wrong.

Creationist: No he didn’t.

Spiritual Darwinist: You do not respect my faith - and you are wrong. Lucky for you that we Spiritual Darwinists do not burn heretics.

Kinja launches, well done Meg and Nick.

My first impressions:

Categorizing weblogs is difficult because weblogs are not often about one subject, so the Kinja categories are not the thing that interests me most.

The single thing that I like most about Kinja is the public digest. Weblogs are about people and Kinja allows to me to read what another person is reading arranged how I am used to reading weblogs - as a weblog. In geek terms I can now read the posts from the sites in someone’s blogroll as a weblog.

I would like a link at the top of my blogroll that says ‘get on the same page as me’ by reading the sites in my blogroll as a Kinja powered blog. Others could read the daily newspaper that I read and I could read what they do.