I’ve switched to ‘outliner style’ for my blog, as default, so that I can post more quick links and to help prevent me from writing boring diatribes.
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When junk mail comes through the door with moneymaking scams like – make $100,000 in 2 months, its typically supported by testimonials that aren’t quite outright falsehoods, but are, lets say – economical with the truth. …It typically goes straight in the trash can. So when one of the worlds biggest business magazines prints an even bolder claim “this kid made $60 million in 18 months” in tabloid sized lettering on its front cover, and it turns out to be an outright falsehood, does Business Week look like something serious investors and business people should subscribe to, or something to put in the trash can? There is nothing actually wrong with the companies or the people mentioned in the piece – they are all interesting. However, Scott Rosenberg etc. are rightly on Business Week’s case. In doing so the tech press may turn this around to make the responsible reaction…
I just saw an ad for a whole roast chicken – for under $2. $2 to raise, kill, prepare and cook an animal. So I did some research to see just how insanely cheap mechanized farming produce has become. In the middle ages, an unplucked, unroasted chicken cost 5/8 of the daily wage of a master mason. This was a very highly paid and esteemed position for the day, but lets be conservative and assume that the equivalent would be someone on a current US salary of $60K per annum. This would mean that a chicken cost around $150. Gives some kind of perpective on what pumping oil into the ground and hormones into mammals can do. The site below has some really interesting data on medieval food. Spices and Their Costs in Medieval Europe
Next/previous, back/forward buttons – the single most important bit of web navigation are being used to mean the opposite to their original use in browsers, because of blogs. ‘Next’ on Technorati means back in time and has an arrow which points to the right. ‘Previous’ on Techcrunch means back in time and has an arrow which points to the left. Web browsers are in many ways as simple as the universal music playing interface that has existed since the cassette player. Music interfaces consist of rewind, fast-forward, stop and play. A browser UI is almost the same and consists of back (rewind), forward (fast-forward), stop (largely redundant in the browser), refresh, home/url-entry (play). Within a web page the back and forward buttons, ‘next and previous’ are ubiquitous for search results and the, increasingly archetypal, blog style UI. Because blogs are reverse chronological lists and search engines equate ‘next’ with less…
Kottke links to a New York Times piece that suggests that people adopted by higher income families will end up with a higher IQ. If IQ indicates intelligence, as the name suggests, then this is interesting as part of the nature vs nurture debate. On the other hand, if IQ tests are fundamentally flawed and merely represent education, then all this result says is that rich people tend to get a better education. What is more likely? That IQ tests are accurate but that the real world is messed up or that, according to Occams Razor, nature is governed by simple laws but there is a flaw in the measurement? One of the things that is absolutely obvious about an IQ test, is that it doesn’t really test intelligence because it asks all sorts of questions that require such things as a large vocabulary in the language of the test….
Old farts like myself, who were tinkering with the Internet in the early 90s will remember that there was a sudden surge in interest in the Internet a year or so before the web. The tendency is to think that the Web was the prime reason for the increased adoption of the Internet, but in fact it is more likely that the Web was actually the result of an evolutionary niche being opened up by the spread of the Internet. Once the Web was born, of course, it did help fuel the growth of the Internet, but like almost any other ‘ecosystem’ from the autocatalytic reactions in a single cell organism, to the money flow in an industrial economy, it was based upon a circular feedback loop, making it difficult to separate the chicken from the egg. The are two other very important examples of cause and effect which were…
Scientists Say They’ve Found a Code Beyond Genetics in DNA – New York Times
Daniel Kottke. Not Leo. If He’s So Smart…Steve Jobs, Apple, and the Limits of Innovation
… sound of sporadic popping of blood vessels from Redstate.com readers, accompanied by light banjo music: || RedState Summary of the argument against global warming from Redstate.com Its not true. Oh shit, it is true – then it has absolutely nothing to do with my fat-ass pickup truck. Paws off. Like the nice guy who used to work for Exxon explained, there is no link between tobacco and global warming. CO2 is not the problem because thats too complicated and requires math. Its gotten hotter because someone turned up the volume on the sun control. Oh shit – 99% of scientists say they have evidence that my fat-ass pickup is partly to blame. Scientists are all commies, so their views are political and therefore not scientific. We should only take science advice from people who sell fat-ass pickups becuase they are not commies and are therefore unbiased. Bush looks like…
Rooting around a nutty Christian website, which debunks UFO chasers with stuff that makes the maddest of the tin foil hat people look positively sane: Intelligent Life in Outer Space? “That’s right, one of the reasons that God made the Moon, solar system and stars was to provide a way for us to distinguish the passage of time (days, months and years) and predict the coming of seasons. Without these heavenly bodies, the job of keeping time and navigation would have been far more difficult.” So the reason for creating 99.9999999999999..99% percent of everything was so that the 0.0000000000000…001% have a wristwatch. Thats the best argument for a blind watchmaker I’ve ever heard.
An idea that my good friend Simon Perry had a while ago – provide inline links to specific points in video and you create the video web. Without time based web links into binary files, video would be like a web where text links were only to entire websites, not individual pages- useless. Official Google Video Blog: New Feature: Link within a Video