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There is definitely a tendency for certain people to despise wealth and consumption itself rather than its effects. There is no word for this that I know of, schadenfreude is close but not quite right- lets say armenfreude (poorhappy). The armenfreude are the people that like it when everyone can't drive fast cars and buy fancy goods, not really because it will damage the environment and squander resources, but because they possess that dour puritan streak that runs through Anglo-Saxon culture secretly wanting to pee on people's parades. This is the kick-off for Steven Levitt's attack on Peter Maas' piece on peak oil – that one should be skeptical of doomsayers – indeed. But then Levitt's single explanation of why peak oil is not a problem is that everything will be OK because markets are self correcting. I am no economist, but this looks like horseshit to me, it sounds…

Jeff Jarvis reports on the fact that Google are selling: 14,159,265 shares (the value of pi being 3.14159265…) There's a pun there somewhere – pi in the sky? After Om Malik's excellent piece on Google buying dark fiber, I wonder if their pie in the sky plan really is to fill it with ad supported free wireless. This would really make sense, pulling the rug from under Microsoft's feet by making the battle for the home page at a lower level than the desktop – Internet access itself.link » tags: [news] posted via Wists: permamark

The Olympics is obsessed with its identity and making money out of its brand. Except that its identity is entirely schizophrenic it can’t decide whether it is capitalist or socialist, and as such bears the hallmarks of party member vs citizens syndrome. Wannabe diplomat IOC members fly around the world drinking and eating indigenous food samplers and trampolining on 5 star hotel beds, to test them for Olympic springiness standards. Competitors sweat it out on the track and field and 2 star Olympic village barracks, to fight for a single gold coin to dangle round their neck. Words banned by the Olympics for brand infringement: Olympic motto: Citius, Altius, Fortius/Faster, Higher, Stronger, games, medals, gold, silver, bronze, 2012, sponsor, summer Words that could be posted by Bloggers to mess up search engine results: Shittius, Citius, Altius, Fortius, Faster, Higher, Stronger, more drugs, games, tired, old fashioned, medals, gold, embezzlement, silver,…

Genealogy is the second biggest hobby in the US after fishing, in terms of money spent. The size of this market and its rapid increase due to online Genealogy (like the startup I worked on before Moreover, Origins.net) has stimulated the use of mitochondrial and Y-chromosome tests to create family histories. What has long been suspected is now being shown – that a real number percentage of people's fathers are not who they think. This latest test (which is based on paternity claims data and therefore is high) suggests an incredible 4 percent. Even conservative estimates of illegitimacy rates suggest that if you trace your roots back over 100 years (not unusual for a genealogist), your family tree is probably inaccurate. link » tags: [news] [genealogy] posted via Wists: permamark

If Darwinian life was triggered by a huge influx of free energy, then perhaps the Darwinian system of the free flow of capital, through trade and subsequent free flow of ideas was also fueled by the ultimate flexible, portable energy source – oil. If one plotted the number of books written per year against energy consumption there would surely be a correlation. We are now at a stage where the flow of ideas across the ether as bits and bytes uses far less energy than physically moving things. Like the intangible, ideas based, industry of marketing that drives the sales of Nike sneakers in the US that are physically made in South East Asia, the buck for this non scarcity based economics currently stops in a traditional manufacturing economy based upon scarcity. I wonder if the change to 'services' based economies are enough to produce growth without oil, growth of…

Theories of life tend to involve a spark – a lightning flash that provides the trigger for self replicating molecules. This theory provides a bigger bang – that life originated near meteor craters. I have a hunch that what matters is not so much the chemical details of meteor impact sites, but the fact that these impacts create a disruption that creates a system of thermodynamic non-equilibrium. In other words they provide a sudden increase in free energy or negentropy that dissipates unevenly through the formation of systems that feed off negative entropy – life.link » tags: [entropy] posted via Wists: permamark

We've added a discussion group to RSSPing.comlink » tags: [rssping] posted via Wists: permamark

Intelligent Design creates a horrible moral dilema that traditional creationists don't have. By going some way to acknowledging the process of evolution, while saying that its guiding hand is God, the fact that every perfectly adapted species on earth is the result of the cummulative suffering eons of less well adapted forerunners, begs the question: 'whose fault is this'. Intelligent design points this question at God. I have a new theory – Unintelligent Design, which is the same as Intelligent Design, except that the creator is either a moron or Satan. This theory has no less evidence to support it than Intelligent Design, since its mechanisms are identical. This theory is more compatible with religious teachings in that it proposes that suffering happens to creatures made by the devil. This theory is more compatible with Darwinian evolution in that species change through mistakes and random bad design. Above all it…

I've been working on a simple standard to merge RSS style metadata with pings, with Matt Mullenweg of Ping-O-Matic and WordPress, called RSSPing. Combining metadata or full content with a ping allows for truly real-time indexing and search. Click on the logo to view the specs. The first version of RSSPing is designed to be as simple as possible to implement. RSSPing aims to be a step towards what is envisaged by ideas such as Feedmesh. (I’m Blogging this at the exact same moment that the Space Shuttle is landing safely – congrats to NASA and my friend, James, who was computing lead for the repair and worked through most of last week with no sleep)link » tags: [standards] [rss] posted via Wists: permamark

It’s the 60th anniversary of the first A bombing, an event whose impact eclipsed the forgotten months of firebombing beforehand. In a single night in 1945, 100,000 Tokyo civilians were deliberately burned to death, on the justification that this would help end the war in the East, in similar fashion to the deliberate fire bombing of German civilians in cities like Dresden by the British. This pattern of destruction was carried out in dozens of cities before the Hiroshima or Nagasaki bombs. “At 5,000 feet you could smell the flesh burning," he later told Australian broadcaster ABC. "I couldn't eat anything for two or three days.” On this 60th anniversay I am extremely thankful to be part of generation which did not have to fight in a war – a generation which is in the minority and has a responsibility to try all the harder to avoid being seduced by…

Currently, news/blog search and regular web search have completely different architectures and user experiences. News search allows search by date or relevance, web search only the latter. There are only two things that matter for search: freshness and relevance. Pinging adds the former and improves the latter. It is therefore critical. 1. As the web gets older, search by date returns more relevant results. 2. Crawling can never produce real-time indexing for search engines. 3. Pinging with content allows sending metadata to search engines, giving information not necessarily on the page. 4. Pinging with content allows sending just the relevant content not all the other stuff such as sidebar links etc. to the search engine to produce more relevant content. 5. Pinging potentially allows a reputation system to be built to rank and categorize sources to allow searching within a topic or accross reputable news sources.link » tags: [rssping] posted…