A quarter of everything that exists has just been found. BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Team finds ‘proof’ of dark matter
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Jonathan Miller’s: A Brief History of Disbelief Pt. 1 “God is an essence we know nothing of, until this awful blasphemy is got rid of, there will never be any liberal science in the world.” John Adams US President 1797 – 1801 “The clergy believe that any power confided in me will be exerted in opposition to their schemes – and they believe rightly.” Thomas Jefferson US President 1801 – 1809 “I have seldom met an intelligent person whose views were not narrowed and distorted by religion.” James Buchanan US President 1857 – 1861 “My earlier views on the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation have become clearer and stronger with advancing years.” Abraham Lincoln US President 1861 – 1865
You occasionally get Cricket stories on the front page of Google news (because, as Digg has proven – news driven by robots is crap compared to human editorial), but on the New York Times front page! The New York Times – Breaking News, World News & Multimedia
Fakes on a plane – was the online buzz faked? “After months of online buildup and frenzied media attention, Snakes on a Plane turned out to be just another horror flick…The R-rated thriller became an Internet and media darling by catering to bloggers and online fans” I suspect that Snakes on a Plane went one step further than Subservient Chicken, to try and create buzz from the ground up, by seeding online communities with fake blog postings. Wherever you looked, all the talk about Snakes on a Plane was smattered with superlatives – ‘best movie title ever’ etc. – it smelled as if those comments were being seeded by flacks. If I’m right, then there is hope that webloggers are actually less brainwashable than mainstream media, because the excercise looks like it may have failed. USATODAY.com – ‘Snakes’ rattles Web hype
One Nation under God, upholding democracy and the principals of the Ten Commandments? – Actually no, America was founded on the opposite, and was all the better for it. Which country has a constitution which declares ‘one nation under God’, America or Iran? Iran Were the majority of the people on the Mayflower fleeing religious persecution? No. (Most people who fled to America were fleeing persecution FROM religious people. By 1776 America was a secular as modern Europe, while Europe was as religious as current day America.) Does American law contradict the Ten Commandments? Yes, capitalism is based upon the idea that coveting things is not that bad after all. Did the American Constitution mention God? No Is the American Constitution based upon purely democratic principles (i.e. majority rule)? No, it specifically protects minorities from majority voted laws which persecute. Is America a Christian Nation?
Dolphins have had a rough time lately, they used to be considered intelligent and kind – then researchers pointed out that they gang rape females to death when mating. Now it turns out they they may not even be intelligent. In fact they may be not be much smarter than a goldfish. Their big brains are mostly fat with very few neurons. Research shows dolphins dimwitted but happy
Michael Dell once said that to fix Apple, they should: “shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders”. Apple is doing just fine, it survives on true innovation, but perhaps Dell should be shut down now. Profit Falls by Half at Dell – New York Times Three days after its announcement of a vast safety recall, Dell reported little but bad news yesterday: profits down by half, and an informal Securities and Exchange Commission investigation into its accounting.
Dapper fills a perfect niche. People forget that before RSS there was screenscraping. And that after RSS there is still screenscraping. Most of Google News is scraped and does not come from RSS. Amazingly, because nobody really puts any useful metadata in RSS, you still need to screenscrape to produce useful aggregation services. Other than enterprise companies such as WebMethods which had a scraping tool as part of a web services builder, or the innovative Junglee that was snapped up by Amazon before the last .com boom got underway, nobody has built an online screen scraping tool, despite the fact that its actually a massive gaping hole in fundamental services of the web. At Moreover.com, RSS was largely useless to us, because you can’t build a news search engine without full text, and the bigger news sources don’t want to output full text RSS, without prior negotiation. So, like Google…
Want to work out compound interest rates in your head? Use the Rule of 72 ln 2 is 69.3% – which is approximately equal to 70 which is close to 72 – which has many factors making it easy to do mental division. So to work out compound interests rates’ doubling times divide 72 by the Interest rate. At 6% $100 becomes $200 in 72/6 = 12 years
Is Fox News Anti-Semitic? Martin Luther, one of the founders of the Christian branch (protestantism) that dominates neo-conservatism was a rabid anti-semite. But it wasn’t always that way, in fact Luther was fluent in Hebrew and a renowned scholar of Hebrew text. Luther’s anti-semititic volte face came when he realized that his belief that Jews would accept Christ prior to the Last Judgement was hopelessly naiive. And so he turned his energy towards hatred. Last week I saw a Fox News ‘anchor’ reporting from Northern Israel, as a rocket had just landed injuring a civilian. Around him, everyone was wearing normal clothes, however he was wearing a helmet and full body armour, it would be less worrying if this were cowardice rather than showmanship. As the injured woman was lead into an ambulance, she desperately tried to wave the camera crew away, she was covered in blood and did not…
Thermodynamic entropy vs information entropy – Advanced Physics Forums “We can choose to look at thermodynamic entropy in two different ways. One approach would say that a high entropy state is information poor because there is so much disorder, and the disorder is essentially random. The other approach would say that a high entropy state is information rich because to truly describe the exact state of randomness in all its gory detail would require lots of information.” This outlines the confusion of the difference in the ‘sign’ between Shannon and Boltzmann entropy. It is basically a confusion over the difference between a state which has meaning to a particular observer, and the notion of absolute meaning where bits of information are stored in the smallest possible moving (hence thermodynamic) particles. What if the latter case were subjective? There is possibly no such thing as absolute entropy, or energy or information…