Well done Schwarzenegger. Smack bottom Bush.

Science News Article | Reuters.com

The only channel I ever watch on TV is PBS. I ditched Cable, because the only channel I ever watched was HBO. I like the Tivo interface, but there is no way that I’m paying a rental fee or premium for TV listings, as a very occasional viewer. I also don’t have a land line telephone.

The Toshiba PVR with DVD burner, below is ideal - it gets free listings from TV guide, directly from within the channel 13 signal, so you buy it and stick a co-ax cable into it and you’re done. No signup with any service and no phone connection required. Works with Cable but not Dish services, if you are into paying a mortgage for TV. Cheap: $320

Toshiba | RD-XS35: Multi-Drive DVD Recorder with 160GB Hard Drive

What is both rare and everywhere?

- Uranium is rare, but everywhere.

One ton of an ordinary rock, such as granite, contains 16g of Thorium and Uranium.

A kilogram of Uranium is equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT, which is approx. the same as the energy potential of 20,000 tons of gasoline.

One ton of common-or-garden rock contains the equivalent fuel of 320 tons of gasoline. It could take a lot less than that to extract it.

Until recently, what did environmentalists and Car/Oil companies have in common?

- A reason to hate nuclear power.

It used to be very easy to make a case against nuclear energy, and if you are either a treehugger or a oil exec. you would be historically allied.

Its like watching a real life version of the Risk board game.

Google is telling the other players, ‘I won’t attack you for the next ten moves’ as it prepares to roll the dice and line up all its armies next to Microsoft who will also do the same.

Because a Microsoft/Google battle royal is kind of innevitable, Google wants to avoid any other trouble.

Its caving on personal media with an Apple board seat for Google’s CEO and holding off a PayPal and listings assault on Ebay, with a ‘partnership’.

Both companies will lose in the medium term, in the long run one will survive.

Remember what happened to Novell, IBM, Commadore?

I think Google will win in ‘three rounds’, but nothing is certain. Its a game of dice , after all.

Microsoft: ‘We Are Watching Google’

CNN.com - Rep. Harris: Church-state separation ‘a lie’ - Aug 28, 2006

“Katherine Harris told a religious journal that separation of church and state is “a lie” and God and the nation’s founding fathers did not intend the country be “a nation of secular laws.”

Why are Americans putting up with this crap? Katherine Harris is exactly what they fought the war in 1776 to escape.

Evan williams has a great post on why Pageviews are Obsolete

In summary he shows that Page Views are often lower for better designed sites, and this therefore lowers Alexa rank.

Last week I posted that Alexa was only 5% accurate for sites outside the top 1000, as a relative measure, based on the sampling error being so high outside of this range. The Page View problem further reduces this accuracy.

In short, if you want to appear low in Alexa, appeal to an audience of non-techies and have a well designed site. (Etsy’s real traffic data is porbably spectacular, by this measure).

This problem, however, is not just an esoteric one. Page views are being replaced by Ajax ‘page flakes’ but there is no advertising system for Ajax.

To do this for Google Adsense, would require creating a complete ad preloading and caching system which would violate Google T&C’s.

Blogging showed that ITEMS were more important than PAGES, from a semantic perspective. The rise of Video and audio is also changing this view for obvious reasons. This now extends to an application perspective.

Here’s a lazyweb idea - an ‘item view’ stats package, with an ad serving system directly geared around Ajax driven sites.

In a sense this could seem hopelessly naiive - to try and re-educate advertisers around a new paradigm. But its not advertisers that need re-educated its techies. Advertisers measure IMPRESSIONS - and most page refreshes on sites like Myspace are not impressions, if the content remains the same, when you request some functionality, like an ‘email this’ form.

The sometimes delusional cycle of Web 2.0 companies and VCs looking at Alexa rankings, does often acknowledge that Alexa is a bit skewed, as if its out by perhaps 50%.

Well its a boat load skewed, Alexa is actually only about 5% accurate if one uses data from Gawker.

Because Gawker is transparent about page views, and has a property whose readership is part of the Web 2.0 scene, Valleywag (Trivia fact - I chose the name Valleywag) and one that definitely isn’t, Deadspin, Alexa’s accuracy can be correlated to real data other than Comscore.

Valleywag traffic: 600 thousand page views per month
Deadspin traffic: 4.5 million page views per month

According to Alexa, however, Valleywag ranks twice as highly as Deadspin, with a rank of 5,000, compared to Deadspin’s 10,000 ranking.

Which means that Alexa skews tech. sites such as Web 2.0 favs by a huge factor of 15 even within the top 10,000 sites where the accuracy is higher.

In short, Alexa is almost useless for websites outside of the top 1000, and no sensible investment or reporting should be influenced by it.

Website Statistics and Traffic Graphs comparing www.valleywag.com and www.deadspin.com

War-Torn Middle East Seeks Solace In Religion

The Relativist is an hilarious piss-take of New York Times Magazine’s priggish, pompous ass, ‘The Ethicist’.

Very structured, short-form content like lists or questions and answers work well on the web, so the Agony Aunt format is a great idea for a blog.

“I recently instructed law officers to deport an immigrant to his home country, where he was to be interrogated until he provided information useful to our government. I