ConEd win this years prize for worst customer service.

Having waited on the phone for half an hour because they don’t take credit card payments over the web (I mean my corner store does that), they don’t take credit cards over the phone - despite the fact that they say they do.

Not just that - but if you change your bank and your payment doesnt go through, in their infinite wisdom, they decide that they will stop you from being able to pay by phone for six months. They basically don’t want your money.

Please, please let Con Edison go bust.

The Wistslist is a metalist, a top ten of top tens.

the Wistslist 2005

“This map of the world is made from sunburnt skin peeled from my backside during a holiday in Central America.”

SkinPieceProject

Don’t read lists of how to be more productive.

The Ironic thing about Steve Rubel’s ‘Google Book Search Hack’, which he jokingly said he was posting because he was in the mood to ‘get Digged’ - and was, is that it contains all the right keywords to attract ‘Diggs’, but no actual information.

Steve’s post is basically a description of how to type words into a search engine.

So the irony is this - by posting a description about how to do something ‘technical’ that isn’t and using words like ‘O’Reilly, hacks, Digg, Google’, you can become one of the top links on a techy links site.

This may seem trivial - but I think it is a good example of why the Digg voting system does not really work in its current form, unless the algorithm for vote weighting is much more sophisticated.

Micro Persuasion: Read Most of O’Reilly’s Hacks Books for Free Using Google

The new version of Kinja is out and its much better, putting all the stats about blogs in one place and allowing recursive discovery of related blogs with continuous clicking.

In fact the only thing I don’t like are what constituted the original Kinja - the digests. The new Kinja is useful as a reading list discovery tool. I’d like it to become the best of breed tool for creating and sharing reading lists, something that noen of the RSS search engines or aggregators have done properly. - The digest (or ‘personalized newspaper’) idea then follows that.

Kinja, the weblog guide

My father and I always look forward to competing on who can finish it first, every year:

Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | And here’s the hard one …

Why would I argue that this is a bad thing when 1. I think that children are better off if they are not fed ideology of any sort in schools and 2. I think that Intelligent Design is clearly religion and therefore ideology?

To begin with, we clearly haven’t heard the end of this. One of the main reasons that the US seems to be the only civilized country with a recent pandemic outbreak of religion is that the left DID go too far in making things like prayers in schools unconstitutional. This makes the constitution a reactionary secular ideological doctrine, similar in form but more diluted from Soviet anti-religious doctrine. What makes a constitutional democracy good is that it is not a doctrine but a process of reason.

If you believe in science, and therefore in reason, then you do not need to legislate from the bench, if you believe that laws are absolute then you have to. God is both judge and law maker, the ultimate legislator from the bench. People who believe in reason should not turn the constitution into ideology, they should defend the process of amendment as being ongoing rather than in order to correct mistakes.

The constitution will always be flawed and should not be worshipped, it is a reflection of current consensus, nothing more. If you believe in progress, then the consensus moves into a better place over time. For America as a whole current consensus is better than when the constitution was written, because the vast majority of people think slavery is wrong. The majority currently do not think that Darwin was right, but they will eventually, if progress in America continues. Without solid consensus the constitution is fragile at the edges and cannot continue to move forward.

Secondly - imagine a virus which spread more when attacked but which was badly built for a current environment, having not mutated much in a couple of thousand years.

If you legislate that someone cannot have their kids taught about the foundation of their entire way of life and moral framework, then that person will look really hard at what their kid is taught. Religion thrives off persecution, in churches around the world people worship in front of the biblical equivalent of an electric chair. If you attack religion it will get stronger.

On the other hand, religion is necessarily poorly adapted to the modern world. Because it is faith based rather than reason based, it doesn’t change much.

The morality of the bible is based in a more primitive era, when society groups were not large enough to learn to tolerate minorities like gay people or transport shellfish quickly enough that it didn’t go bad. If we leave religion alone and offer reasonable alternatives it will look increasingly absurd. Because religious texts are not amendable they will wane in relevance and therefore importance, naturally. As Dawkins points out, we are all atheists in the eyes of an ancient Roman.

I am linking to the very secular Christian Science Monitor coverage, for the irony value:

Banned in biology class: intelligent design | csmonitor.com

Evolution fight puts suburb in spotlight

Evolution controversy in this comfortable Atlanta suburb began with one boy’s fascination with dinosaurs.

“He was really into ‘Jurassic Park’”, his mother recalled. The trouble was, “we kept reading over and over that ‘millions and millions of years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth”, Marjorie Rogers continued. “And that’s where I said, ‘Hmm — wait a second”.

Like others who adhere to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, Rogers, a lawyer, believes that the Earth is several thousand years old.

I find it hard to find decent videos on the open web, so have been drilling through sites like Youtube and Google Video with a view to providing a wists list of good stuff to stream.

Youtube is 99.9% crap and 0.1% memes that have been around for years, or commercials.

Google Video is also mostly crap snippets, but I did manage to find some good programming - stuff on Evolution, and Science and interviews with good people like John Maynard Smith and Steven Pinker.

After searching for practically every architecture, design and science name I know, I kept getting the same content so realized that there is hardly anything in Google video longer than 3 minutes.

When I actually looked at the science stuff, something strange became obvious - a large percentage of it was funded by Intelligent Design groups or religious organizations.

If people are frightened about young people’s minds being corrupted by porn on the Internet, they should also check out what the god squad are pushing.

Perhaps the Internet is for all the things you shouldn’t talk about over dinner, after all - sex, politics and religion.

My google video wist list