Back from the UK so the current hiatus here should be over. Despite the evidence from stocky hirsute Scotsmen like myself recent DNA analysis has all but proved that Human’s did not interbreed with Neanderthals. Blow to “human-Neanderthal inter-breeding” theory
Creationist dogma will be taught alongside evolution in a second UK school, despite the fact that even the Pope seems to accept the evidence for evolution these days. “Evolution will be taught, other theories will be taught and children will be left to take a view of it themselves.” Creationism may be called a theory by some, but to compare creationism to evolution is not comparing like with like. When scientists refer to a theory, they mean something that there is evidence for. There is no evidence for creationism, it is a hypothesis and a hypothesis for which there are alternatives with evidence – theories. The earth beneath our feet often looks the same color and texture as bullshit, lets call this the bullshit creation hypothesis. In this case, if children are to be taught all of the hypotheses of creation then we should teach them that the earth may…
A web browser is at its core a simple thing, a few lines of PERL and you can write a very basic one. What is important about a browser is its elegance and simplicity and its reliance on simple standards like HTML or server logs etc. Weblog tools can be simple and elegant and they too rely on simple standards however they are not formalized and this is getting scary. At first glance I can think of four key pseudo-standards for the writeable web. Getting these right will surely have huge implications if weblogging is anything like as important as web browsing: 1. The Meta Weblog API – needs to be modular. 2. Pings from posts (make weblogs.com the principal server and post the whole message) 3. RSS – freeze on 2.0 with slightly tweaked core and generic XSLT to create RDF if needed. 4. Permalinks (oh yes) – standardize…
“In principle blogging promises us something close to Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of a writeable web because anyone can create their own constantly-updated site.” BBC: Gagging the bloggers It seems that even the mainstream press are now saying that weblogging constitutes something more important than personal online diaries. Weblog tools are how you publish online and are as important for publishing on the Internet as the browser was for, well, browsing. Perhaps just like the word browsing effectively means reading things on the Internet (or we’d be gophering), blogging will mean publishing on the web, publishing anything, not just a diary.
… the Netherlands according to this: “The CGD/FP Commitment to Development Index ranks 21 of the world’s richest countries according to how much their policies help or hinder the economic and social development of poor nations.” Foreign Policy
Apple Music Store is out. Three years after Napster there is finally a pay-per-song, jukebox-style application and, like everything Apple do, it looks beautifully executed. But is this a good deal? Each song costs 99c. An average CD has 10 tracks. CD list price: $19 CD wholesale price: c $12 Ave. cost of pressing and shipping: $2 Looking at these numbers, the music industry has only been prepared to discount the music by the actual cost of manufacturing and shipping the CD. In other words the arrogance and stupidity of the music labels is unabated, they still refuse to admit that online music changes the economics and mechanics of the marketing and distribution of music beyond removing the costs of a physical storage medium. Perhaps this isn’t so much the death of the CD, but another step towards their own suicide. Follow the money: who’s really making the dough.
Today is the 50th anniversary of the publication of the discovery of the structure of DNA by Francis Crick and James Watson. They received international recognition and Nobel prizes. The discovery relied upon research by Rosalind Franklin who did not receive any such recognition and died at the age of 37. Use the power of the web and make this Remember Rosalind Franklin Day by posting about her. HoustonChronicle.com – ‘Photo 51’ examines the unsung heroine of DNA
Condoms are usually used to prevent life: Examiner: Condom was key to DNA discovery
Esther Dyson (who is nobody’s fool) asks why Google have bought Applied Semantics. Craig Silverstein replies that it has to do with advertising, so Esther asks if it has anything to do with the ‘Application of Semantics’. Craig has nothing to add – and a murmur sweeps the room as if to say, ah they are up to something with the Semantic Web… crap. 1. Applied Semantics and fancy fuzzy search or categorization has nothing to do with the Semantic Web. If anything the polar opposite type of search technology is required – something that takes advantage of semi-structured documents such as an XML or RDF database. 2. Google is an advertising company. Search is a fairly finite field in computing – and Google’s research team is now bigger than any University’s – they have this area sewn up. What they don’t have sewn up is the technology and services…
Craig Silverstein from Google is talking at ETech, he asks ‘how many of you would normally be asleep at this time (note this is 10:30 not 7:30). About one third of the people in the room put up their hands. Craig admitted that he normally got to work around noon. Imagine if this had been a sales convention, if the talk had been at 5:30 in the morning and the same question were asked, there probably wouldn’t have been a single hand shown. So on the one hand the number of hands shown is a good measure of the geek factor of the crowd, but even more so, I suspect it is a measure of the ‘hacker factor’ i.e. the percentage of creative engineers. It seems that there is a direct correlation between extraversion and morning people and introversion and night owls. There is also a connection between introversion and…
Saw a demo of Chandler 0.1 today. The most impressive aspect so far was that everything in Chandler has a URI and that any URI can be opened up and shared in real-time with other users. This seems to be extremely powerful and elegant
The article below claims that Google has invested in the ‘Semantic Web’ with the acquisition of Applied Semantics. The only connection I can see is the word Semantic in the name of the company. What this does seem to show is that Google is building up its armory of weapons to deal with analyzing content to produce better targeted advertising and that its core relevance ranking software isn’t enough. Google Invests in the Semantic Web – search engine news blog