2006 July

Jul 26 2006
0

Is it time to call bullshit on IQ tests?

Posted by | politics | No Comments

Kottke links to a New York Times piece that suggests that people adopted by higher income families will end up with a higher IQ. If IQ indicates intelligence, as the name suggests, then this is interesting as part of the nature vs nurture debate. On the other hand, if IQ tests are fundamentally flawed and merely represent education, then all this result says is that rich people tend to get a better education. What is more likely? That IQ tests are accurate but that the real world is messed up or that, according to Occams Razor, nature is governed by simple laws but there is a flaw in the measurement? One of the things that is absolutely obvious about an IQ test, is that it doesn’t really test intelligence because it asks all sorts of questions that require such things as a large vocabulary in the language of the test….

Read More
Jul 25 2006
0

Why entrepreneurs should ignore markets.

Posted by | business | No Comments

Old farts like myself, who were tinkering with the Internet in the early 90s will remember that there was a sudden surge in interest in the Internet a year or so before the web. The tendency is to think that the Web was the prime reason for the increased adoption of the Internet, but in fact it is more likely that the Web was actually the result of an evolutionary niche being opened up by the spread of the Internet. Once the Web was born, of course, it did help fuel the growth of the Internet, but like almost any other ‘ecosystem’ from the autocatalytic reactions in a single cell organism, to the money flow in an industrial economy, it was based upon a circular feedback loop, making it difficult to separate the chicken from the egg. The are two other very important examples of cause and effect which were…

Read More
Jul 23 2006
0

Drudge switches sides on Global Warming

Posted by | science | No Comments

… sound of sporadic popping of blood vessels from Redstate.com readers, accompanied by light banjo music: || RedState Summary of the argument against global warming from Redstate.com Its not true. Oh shit, it is true – then it has absolutely nothing to do with my fat-ass pickup truck. Paws off. Like the nice guy who used to work for Exxon explained, there is no link between tobacco and global warming. CO2 is not the problem because thats too complicated and requires math. Its gotten hotter because someone turned up the volume on the sun control. Oh shit – 99% of scientists say they have evidence that my fat-ass pickup is partly to blame. Scientists are all commies, so their views are political and therefore not scientific. We should only take science advice from people who sell fat-ass pickups becuase they are not commies and are therefore unbiased. Bush looks like…

Read More
Jul 21 2006
0

The universe is a giant clock just for humans

Posted by | Uncategorized | No Comments

Rooting around a nutty Christian website, which debunks UFO chasers with stuff that makes the maddest of the tin foil hat people look positively sane: Intelligent Life in Outer Space? “That’s right, one of the reasons that God made the Moon, solar system and stars was to provide a way for us to distinguish the passage of time (days, months and years) and predict the coming of seasons. Without these heavenly bodies, the job of keeping time and navigation would have been far more difficult.” So the reason for creating 99.9999999999999..99% percent of everything was so that the 0.0000000000000…001% have a wristwatch. Thats the best argument for a blind watchmaker I’ve ever heard.

Read More
Jul 20 2006
0

Time based permalinks for video

Posted by | technology | No Comments

An idea that my good friend Simon Perry had a while ago – provide inline links to specific points in video and you create the video web. Without time based web links into binary files, video would be like a web where text links were only to entire websites, not individual pages- useless. Official Google Video Blog: New Feature: Link within a Video

Read More
Jul 06 2006
0

New Googleplex is a Kindergarten

Posted by | architecture | No Comments

Metropolis Magazine reviews Google’s horrid new offices. It takes the ‘working here is so much fun we’re so playful’ spin to its most simplistic architectural representation – bright colors and toys. All of these, of course, are a thin veneer over the reality – a strip lit, cubicle ridden, hell hole, like a parody of The Office. Google’s products are still failry sophisticated – I hope the office environment doesn’t rub off.

Read More