November | 2004 | david galbraith

Nov 26 2004

250 year old Holy Grail code cracked

“after months of research, experts believe they may now hold the key to the 250-year-old code, which is carved on a monument at the Earl of Lichfield’s Shugborough Hall estate in Staffordshire. The Shepherd’s Monument, commissioned in 1748 by the then earl, Thomas Anson, features a carved image of a Nicolas Poussin painting with the letters D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. underneath. The cryptic inscription was rumoured to point to the location of the Holy Grail – the cup Jesus is said to have used at the Last Supper.” Two things: 1. Any code this short is difficult to crack without resorting to other clues in the context. 2. There is a huge incentive to subconsciously or consciously accept the context of the connections to the Holy Grail, particularly at a time when the Da Vinci Code book is generating a boatload of cash around Holy Grail seeker tourist sites. Perhaps D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M. means: DaVinci…

Nov 23 2004

Is Firefox the sign of long term problems at Microsoft?

Posted by admin | predictions | No Comments

Microsoft is caught in a potential pincer movement where it will have to: 1. compete in a consumer market where MP3 players, media PC’s and laptops will be sold as luxury goods with value-added hardware and software design, something that is not Microsoft’s strong point. 2. compete in a business market, where the vulnerabilities of buying into a monoculture cost time and money. As Firefox continues to grow its market share, the difference between now and the Netscape days is that Internet Explorer is often a disease ridden product. The advantage of having it preinstalled on most machines is outweighed by genuine benefits of switching, and large corporations have IT staff that will do that for people, to save time and money. It is not hard to imagine a headline – ‘Merrill Lynch to switch to Firefox’. A friend was recently dissing a competitors use of Apple Mac’s for their…

Nov 22 2004

The earth is made of termite shit

Posted by admin | darwinism | No Comments

A Pennsylvania school district has decided that alternative theories to Darwinism must be taught, including Intelligent Design. Since there is no evidence for Intelligent Design (it is a hypothesis not a theory), then presumably other ‘theories’ that are backed by no evidence are equally valid examples to teach. One such theory, as pointed out by Richard Dawkins and held by a certain African tribe is the much more logical creation theory that the earth, the whole thing including the brown stuff under our feet that looks like crap, is actually crap – created from eons of termite defecation.

Nov 21 2004

Official – two thirds of Americans have been brainwashed.

Posted by admin | religion | No Comments

What is astounding about the Gallup poll of belief in evolution is not that, as they conclude in the headline: “Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution Theory” it is that two thirds think that it has not or don’t know. Suppose the same poll were run about a theory that has a similar amount of evidence supporting it, namely that the earth revolves around the sun, and the results were the same. A news headline reporting a Gallup poll on the ‘theory’ of solar orbiting would reflect what would be strange and newsworthy – namely that educating people about a fact (not a theory) has been so manipulated by religious fascists, that a terrifying situation has been created where in an otherwise developed country, the majority of people still hold Bronze Age beliefs. via Kottke

Nov 18 2004

RSS ads

Posted by admin | rss | No Comments

Dave Winer on RSS ads in feeds without full content: “To read the full article you have to click on a link and (listen very carefully now) see an ad as you read the article. In other words, the RSS feed is itself an ad, pulling you in to read a page with a big ad on it.” This is true, but then again, Google makes most if its money by serving up pages of links with ads alongside, the links pointing to pages that in turn are often ad supported. If double-dip advertising works for search engines why shouldn’t it work for feeds?

Nov 18 2004

Racists

Posted by admin | politics | No Comments

A lot of fuss in the news today about a sensible proposal to allow people to check one box labeled ‘multiracial’ under federal requirements for collection of race data for publicly funded universities. The trouble with race classification is that it is scientifically meaningless and empirically racist itself. Statistically we are all ‘illegitimate’ descendants of unknown fathers and racial traits are not always visible. Therefore none of us knows what our ‘race’ is. What you mark on a box indicating race necessarily misleading as any geneticist or genealogist can attest: 1. Because race is an abstract notion attempts to classify it logically are always pseudo science. Hence government forms almost always end up confusing nationality and religious and cultural groupings. (I ended up in a fun argument with a mindless bureaucrat at my local council in the UK because I marked myself down as Irish on a form marked ‘ethnicity’….

Nov 10 2004

I want my iPhone

Posted by admin | technology | No Comments

Given that: 1. All cellphone OS’s suck. 2. Most non PDA cellphone hardware design seems to have stayed the same, apart from the addition of a camera lens, for the last 2 years. 3. Unlike computers, for most people, cellphones are a luxury device where good hardware design is a premium. 4. Apple proved that people would pay for their software and hardware design value-add, in a luxury market, with the iPod. 5. Cellphones & MP3 players make sense and may converge, making a hedge against this a good move for the iPod. 6. The market for cellphone hardware is big but the incumbents are stumbling. 7. Even buying ringtones on cellphones is a $3 billion market (much bigger than the current music download market). 8. The form factor of the iPod mini is the same as a phone, and Apple pretty well invented the PDA (but just got the…

Nov 05 2004

CSS is broken

Posted by admin | technology | No Comments

Designing a site in XHTML/CSS is elegant and good according to many of those who preach web design. But there is a problem: CSS itself is badly designed, not just at the detail level, but in its overall concept. Essentially, CSS is inside out – you don’t want to flow style into content, but to flow content into style (a template). Any blogger or developer of a database driven site knows this. But what about structure? No matter how hard you try to put all of your style and structure into CSS you still end up with some style in an XHTML document. Style and structure are not mutually exclusive, which is why HTML table elements just won’t die. CSS is based on a broken metaphor one which separates style, structure and content. People have naturally gravitated towards separating style from content through template based web design and there is…

Nov 01 2004

They called it freedom. Why a Bush win has a silver lining

Posted by admin | politics | No Comments

When the Democrats became the Republicans, Election results in 52 and 64: I always wondered when the Democrats, who were traditionally a party with an extreme right, racist platform, became the party to the left. What is amazing is how absolute the transformation was, the Democrats basically became the Republicans. Maps of the election results in 52 and 64, illustrate this perfectly, they are almost the inverse of each other. Left and right, conservative and liberal, labels attached to parties are abstract; however conservative is the label that the Republicans want to own. The problem is that the current Republican Party may be socially conservative but fiscally it is careless. But social conservatism is not really what America is about. What made the US special to my mind was that most people, both to the right and left rooted for being socially liberal with a small ‘l’ – they called…

2004 November