2005 April

Apr 30 2005
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I’m fairly sure this prior art renders Google News patents useless

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I haven’t seen details of Google’s ‘newsrank’ patents, but am pretty sure that Moreover’s ‘source rank’ which does pretty much the same thing, by the sound of it, and which has been made public to clients since 2001, would constitute prior art. BetaNews | Google Plans to Rank News By Quality: “Patents recently filed by search giant Google reveal that it plans to soon rank news stories by the quality and credibility of the source, rather than just by date or relevance as it currently does in its searches.”

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Apr 29 2005
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Put Wists linkrolls on your site

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We’ve added a Wists javacript wizard which allows you to publish and of your Wists linkrolls on your site, matching the look and feel, rather like Flickr’s badges or the headline feeds we used to syndicate at Moreover. You can choose to show Thumbnails and text links, just thumbnails or just text. To fore up the wizard within Wists, click on ‘publish on your site’, next to the XML icon.

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Apr 27 2005
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Manhattan’s ‘highline’ project is a bad idea

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Josh Rubin points to the preliminary designs for Manhattan’s highline, which were unveiled at Monday’s opening at MOMA. Manhattan’s highline project aims to take a 1.5 mile strip of disused overhead railway and turn it into a linear park. It’s a terrible idea. Linear parks were all the rage when I was an architect, because they could use spaces that were generally wastelands, like old railway lines and, more importantly, because the long sweeping shallow curves made it easy to do presentations that looked great and truly modern. The problem is that linear parks don

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Apr 26 2005
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Zen and the Art of Ajax

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Marc Canter had it absolutely right when he cautioned about the fuss over Ajax. Perhaps Ajax is a meme more than a ‘thing’, and like all good meme’s something that is spreading because the environment is ready for it. When I first used Gopher or WAIS and then downloaded Mosaic I was impressed by the architectural simplicity of Internet applications, so much so that I stopped being an architect and started working on web stuff. Here was something in computing that was seemingly a retrograde step – one window instead of many. I spent most of my day at the time in front of a twin screen CAD application that had several hundred palettes. But because that one window opened onto a world of other computers, like a unix terminal, it was so much more elegant. (My favorite new experience with UI has been finally using VI, a text editor…

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Apr 26 2005
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Hydrocarbons found on Titan

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Ancient rivers and sedimentary rocks on Mars. A gravity warmed sea beneath Europa’s crust. Microbe like structures in a Martian meteorite. Planets around distant stars. And now: Cassini Finds Hydrocarbons on Titan The last few years have dramatically changed the notion that life on Earth is unique. With a sample of one, there is way way to be sure, but each new discovery points in the same direction. I would hazard a guess that the universe is indeed teeming with life, as a natural, emergent phenomenon. That seems like a wonderful, awe inspiring thought, and yet we are still arguing as to how life evolved on our own planet. Arguing about evolution itself. There are those who would have the universe be billions of times smaller, thousands of times younger, and with no diversity. Is that more wonderful, more spiritual?

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Apr 25 2005
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I like tabloids

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Tabloids are big in the UK, and its always been a mystery to me why in a country like the US, which is the king of popular culture, there is no real-news tabloid. I like tabloids cos they are funny and I like Sploid even more because it is like Slashdot meets the Onion, edited by Richard Dawkins.

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Apr 22 2005
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Moral relativism means moral progress

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You often hear the term ‘moral relativism’ used pejoratively compared to the continued use of the morality of 2000 years ago. What this needs is a new term – much like the use of the positive word gay instead of homosexual or pro-life instead of anti-abortion. Moral relativism means is that your notion of morality changes over time – but like the arrow of time itself it always moves forward – moral relativism means moral progress, as compared with the static and eventually obsolete morality endorsed by all religions. Quotes by Pope Ratzi: “Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. … Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching,’ looks like the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards.” Indeed it is, and moral progress is better by definition.

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Apr 21 2005
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Greenspan shouts and nobody listens

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Below is the top story on Reuters: it shows a recent trend where Greenspan has had to repeatedly warn against government spending and yet the markets and the party favored by the markets doesn’t react… There was a point when the government and markets would quiver if Greenspan looked like he had got out of bed on the wrong side. Nowadays, idealogy and faith seems to be driving capitalism too – a dangerous thing. Greenspan Warns Deficits Endanger Economy “Much of the Fed chairman’s testimony echoed prior cautions he has made to Capitol Hill lawmakers. He stressed that steps to fix the problem were essential. “As the latest projections from the (Bush) administration and the Congressional Budget Office suggest, our budget position is unlikely to improve substantially in the coming years unless major deficit-reducing actions are taken,” the Fed chief said.” Latest Business News and Financial Information | Reuters.com

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Apr 20 2005
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Androcles and the lyin’. Classical Holy Grail find turns out to be hype.

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Ars Technica takes apart a story in the Independant that has spread widely on blogs, which claimed that a huge number of ancient texts by people such as Sophocles were about to be deciphered. The “classical holy grail” or unholy hype? The Original Story pre-fisking: “Decoded at last: the ‘classical holy grail’ that may rewrite the history of the world. Scientists begin to unlock the secrets of papyrus scraps bearing long-lost words by the literary giants of Greece and Rome… In the past four days alone, Oxford’s classicists have used it to make a series of astonishing discoveries, including writing by Sophocles, Euripides, Hesiod… They even believe they are likely to find lost Christian gospels…Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a “second Renaissance“. “. Ars…

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