“This map of the world is made from sunburnt skin peeled from my backside during a holiday in Central America.” SkinPieceProject
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Don’t read lists of how to be more productive.
The Ironic thing about Steve Rubel’s ‘Google Book Search Hack’, which he jokingly said he was posting because he was in the mood to ‘get Digged’ – and was, is that it contains all the right keywords to attract ‘Diggs’, but no actual information. Steve’s post is basically a description of how to type words into a search engine. So the irony is this – by posting a description about how to do something ‘technical’ that isn’t and using words like ‘O’Reilly, hacks, Digg, Google’, you can become one of the top links on a techy links site. This may seem trivial – but I think it is a good example of why the Digg voting system does not really work in its current form, unless the algorithm for vote weighting is much more sophisticated. Micro Persuasion: Read Most of O’Reilly’s Hacks Books for Free Using Google
The new version of Kinja is out and its much better, putting all the stats about blogs in one place and allowing recursive discovery of related blogs with continuous clicking. In fact the only thing I don’t like are what constituted the original Kinja – the digests. The new Kinja is useful as a reading list discovery tool. I’d like it to become the best of breed tool for creating and sharing reading lists, something that noen of the RSS search engines or aggregators have done properly. – The digest (or ‘personalized newspaper’) idea then follows that. Kinja, the weblog guide
My father and I always look forward to competing on who can finish it first, every year: Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | And here’s the hard one …
Why would I argue that this is a bad thing when 1. I think that children are better off if they are not fed ideology of any sort in schools and 2. I think that Intelligent Design is clearly religion and therefore ideology? To begin with, we clearly haven’t heard the end of this. One of the main reasons that the US seems to be the only civilized country with a recent pandemic outbreak of religion is that the left DID go too far in making things like prayers in schools unconstitutional. This makes the constitution a reactionary secular ideological doctrine, similar in form but more diluted from Soviet anti-religious doctrine. What makes a constitutional democracy good is that it is not a doctrine but a process of reason. If you believe in science, and therefore in reason, then you do not need to legislate from the bench, if you…
Evolution fight puts suburb in spotlight Evolution controversy in this comfortable Atlanta suburb began with one boy’s fascination with dinosaurs. “He was really into ‘Jurassic Park’”, his mother recalled. The trouble was, “we kept reading over and over that ‘millions and millions of years ago, dinosaurs roamed the Earth”, Marjorie Rogers continued. “And that’s where I said, ‘Hmm — wait a second”. Like others who adhere to a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, Rogers, a lawyer, believes that the Earth is several thousand years old.
I find it hard to find decent videos on the open web, so have been drilling through sites like Youtube and Google Video with a view to providing a wists list of good stuff to stream. Youtube is 99.9% crap and 0.1% memes that have been around for years, or commercials. Google Video is also mostly crap snippets, but I did manage to find some good programming – stuff on Evolution, and Science and interviews with good people like John Maynard Smith and Steven Pinker. After searching for practically every architecture, design and science name I know, I kept getting the same content so realized that there is hardly anything in Google video longer than 3 minutes. When I actually looked at the science stuff, something strange became obvious – a large percentage of it was funded by Intelligent Design groups or religious organizations. If people are frightened about young…
To say that Wikipedia is OK, that it is about as accurate as Britannica, not fantastically better or worse, is not much of a news story. Much more melodramatic to say that Wkipedia is a disaster, a threat to civilization, full of lies etc. The reality is that a system that is open for anyone in the world to try to post a lie, that has only been going for a few years, whose contributors don’t get paid has only managed to produce a couple of pretty obscure hoaxes. The truth is that it is a much more accurate reference tool than the Internet as a whole, than most books and, as has just been suggested in a blind test, its pretty much as accurate as Britannica. Its true that the Britannica test was only for scientific articles – but to be honest, if anybody seriously believes that topics like…
Not yer average gift guide: The Cribcandy holiday gift guide is up – quirky, unusual or good value gifts for around the home, with some good stuff by emerging young designers. Cribcandy – a thumbnail bookmark blog with the best stuff for your home
Build your own search engine with no hardware cost, with Alexa: $1 per CPU hour consumed. $1 per gig of storage used. $1 per 50 gigs of data processed. $1 per gig of data uploaded. John Battelle’s Searchblog: Alexa (Make that Amazon) Looks to Change the Game
Writely continues to add word processing features which are actually useful, unlike Word which takes several thousand options and millions of calculations per second to provide the functionality of a typewriter. It looks like the entire Microsoft edifice is held up by Excel, the only product I can think of that is better than competitors’. Is Excel really worth as much as a medium sized country, in the long term? Web word processor adds PDF conversion | CNET News.com