“Is Iraq in civil war?…I have no more idea what is going on in Iraq from here in Baghdad, than from back in London”

Sobering, must see, Channel 4 documentary about what’s really going on in Iraq. One of the conclusions is that much of the only reporting outside the green zone is coming from bloggers:

There may or may not be much to moan about ‘Web 2.0′, but one person, Michael Arrington has clearly become its nexus, through TechCrunch.

With that fact is something that restores my faith in the inherent meritocracy of the web, because the mystery, special sauce that makes TechCrunch successful is that its just plain good.

A list of recent web design trends that are about to jump the shark:

1. Obsession with rounded corners everywhere.

2. Pastel colors.

3. Linear blends.

4. Fonts bigger than 15 pixels.

5. Avoiding tables, when they are the best solution.

6. Stretchable text columns that are too wide to read comfortably.

7. Ajax use that makes things difficult to link to.

These things are so commonplace now that sites designed this way seem like the web design equivalent of a fashion victim. When the bubble bursts there will be big pastel shade mess.

‘The Da Vinci Code’: Is it worthy?

“Experts can’t figure out how Dan Brown’s so-so writing has produced such a blockbuster.”

The success of the Da Vinci Code has nothing to do with the writing, but the fact that it is a mutation of a very successful and ancient meme.

There is another book that is inexplicably successful, depite being an incoherent mishmash of styles, often not that well written and full of plot inconsistencies and contradictions - the Bible.

Of all the possible stories that resonate with the human mind, the Bible does so very successfully, giving the appearance of its success being testament to its truth, something that is obviously very helpful for a book based on teleological argument. To suggest that the Bible is the truth because it is so successful, however, is the result of looking the wrong way down the funnel of time.

The fact that one thing may be more successful than others over time is what makes the selfish gene appear selfish and the Bible appear deliberate. Instead it is merely the archetypal story that fits a pre-existing niche in our consciousness.

That niche has been previously inhabited by other stories, from Amun Ra to Zeus, but more interestingly a weaker but persistent species of christianity has been around for half a millennium and the Da Vinci Code is its latest mutant, pop culture variety.

Umberto Eco pointed out that this species includes myths surrounding the Rosicrucians and the Masons - and more disturbingly, by the lie that is the ‘Protocol of the Elders of Zion’. They are variants not of the same story but the same meme, the exact plot or details, being analogous to the relation between genotype and phenotype.

The Da Vinci code is a work of fiction, its a story about these memes rather than one of them itself. In practice, however, with powerful memes, there is no distinction and this is something that the Catholic church knows, because its in the business. Some people have a tendency to actually start to believe some types of pure fiction.

If you take the Da Vinci Code as the latest mutation of the Rosicrucian Myth then it is a strain which attacks the core nervous system of Christianity and in particular the Catholic variety.

Catholicism has a very successful infrastructure, because it is based upon geometric accrual of money and mindshare distributed to and via and arithmetic number of proselytizers. It does this through an a sexual priesthood and infrastructure.

This asexuality is justified, or at least sanctified, because the Christian Idol - Jesus, doesn’t marry or have kids. (In fact he even manages to de-sexualize the Pagan Easter fertility rite, eggs and all, with asexual birth through resurrection.)

Here, in a so-so piece of pulp fiction the type you might pick up at an airport, you have the same religious idea that appealed to the masses, being used to undermine one of the core tenets of that original idea. The Da Vinci Code is more of a threat to the Catholic church, than Gallileo or the truth ever was because it can infect minds that are already closed to the truth.

Of course the Da Vinci Code will probably not amount to much, but the Vatican is not so dumb in its seemingly alarmist assessment.

John Resig has a very nice RSS to JSON converter.

We’ve been working on a JSON output to Solr (Lucene) for Wists’ search and I’m now convinced that JSON is the way forward for RSS and webservices in general.

John Resig - RSS to JSON Convertor

Architects are good at building brands without people noticing that thats what they are doing, but mostly bad at capitalizing on them by doing mass produced items, such as furniture collections or hardware elements.

The Slate article below covers a very interesting topic but the conclusions are completely wrong.

“neither Foster nor Piano has a house style; their designs vary considerably from project to project”

If anyone has a house style, it is Foster. When I was there someone nearly got fired for not specifying the wrong door handles on a building - they weren’t Elementer.

The main reason that Foster or Piano buildings vary in style is that they didnt design them all - if you are a big architecture practice its just not possible for the founder to design everything. That not deception, just a function of scale. What keeps the integrity of design is precisely the house style.

Unfortunately, in the same way that art historians squabble over whether a Rembrant is authentic (as if there were a clear boundary) because they desperately want to believe in the myth of authorship, the same is true of architects, and that is precisely why they have strong brands. People want to believe in signatures.

How architects build brands. By Witold Rybczynski