Edison, the Man was made in 1940, in it, I have a recollection that a machine stops working because ‘there is a bug in it’. If that is true, this clearly predates the accepted origin when a moth appeared in the Mark I computer at Harvard in 1945. Can anyone confirm?
The phrase ‘what the dickens’, has nothing to do with Dickens, but was ironically coined by Shakespeare hundreds of years earlier. Trivia: Shakespeare top 10
Why does Nature magazine which is not one of the world’s highest traffic websites have a pagerank of 10? With 45,000 inbound links, perhaps the scientific community with its peer review process and history of open collaboration is more adept at mutual linking than webloggers?
Alexa today shows a traffic rank of 1,255 and a 1.5% reach for Burger King’s subservient chicken. Related Info for: subservientchicken.com/ Trying to create an Internet meme like this is hard, but Burger King have pulled it off. What is likely in the future is that savvy advertisers will track sites like Technorati and endorse new memes as they take off.
HotBot’s New Desktop Search Toolbar: “HotBot’s new Desktop Search utility not only searches the web, it indexes files and email on your computer, making them searchable as well.” It’s only a matter of time before Google do this and perhaps what has held them back was fear of being too aggressive against Microsoft. As I’ve said before, it is crazy that we can search millions of other computers, thousands of miles apart, more quickly than our own machine. Microsoft should have done this 8 years ago, we should not have to wait because of the stagnation created by a monopoly.
“Last year Mr Niyazov instituted a holiday in honour of the muskmelon, a relative of the watermelon, complete with lavish festivities” link
Another meme spreads round the web, the Sergey pic is on Hot or Not: Is Sergey HOT or NOT?
The problem with arguing with Creationists and the like is that it is not worth it and no fun. Who can be bothered to read through 5 pages of futile debate? If someone persists in holding a view that they try and defend in quasi scientific terms, despite overwhelming contradictory evidence, then it isn’t likely that rational argument will change anything. A better challenge is to argue against irrational belief from that very standpoint. In order to do this for evolution I have invented the notion of ‘Spiritual Darwinism’ a spiritual challenge to Creationism much as Intelligent Design is an attempt at a scientific challenge to Darwinism. Now you can use religious debating techniques: Creationist: Blah blah blah – goes on for ages. Spiritual Darwinist: You are wrong. Creationist: Prove it. Spiritual Darwinist: God spoke to me and told me that you are wrong. Creationist: No he didn’t. Spiritual Darwinist:…
Kinja launches, well done Meg and Nick. My first impressions: Categorizing weblogs is difficult because weblogs are not often about one subject, so the Kinja categories are not the thing that interests me most. The single thing that I like most about Kinja is the public digest. Weblogs are about people and Kinja allows to me to read what another person is reading arranged how I am used to reading weblogs – as a weblog. In geek terms I can now read the posts from the sites in someone’s blogroll as a weblog. I would like a link at the top of my blogroll that says ‘get on the same page as me’ by reading the sites in my blogroll as a Kinja powered blog. Others could read the daily newspaper that I read and I could read what they do.
Xanga is in the top 200 of all websites, overtook Friendster in January and is growing fast. Is the decentralized weblog world, where people have pages under their own domain, missing something? Xanga, which is a walled garden service, is not only bigger than all the other blogging tools put together but is actually more viral than Friendster.
Apparently former CEO of Yahoo, Tim Koogle will be replacing Johnathan Abrams as CEO of Friendster. Tim Koogle is an investor in Friendster and a heavyweight like this suggests that the investors are confident enough to go the full distance with it. It will be interesting to see if Orkut will bcome Google’s first dud.
Oil futures “There is a precedent for price hikes to compensate for dollar devaluation, and it is not a comfortable one.” “The first oil crisis, although prompted by the political furore over the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and the use of the “oil weapon”, was also a response to the devaluation of the dollar that took place in the course of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in 1971-73.” Saudi is at odds with Kuwait and UAE, Saudi wants to cut oil supply to maintain oil prices. Oil price rises are compounded by fact that OPEC revenues are pegged to dollar and the dollar is very weak and that economic growth in China is increasing demand. Higher gas prices in the US are not good in run up to election. US needs lower oil prices and more control of pricing. Iraq plus Kuwait oil reserves equivalent to…