Phil Spector in court, looking like he has just grabbed the end of a stray 1,000,000 Volt cable.link » tags: [weird] [dgblog] permamark in: Wists
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HuffPo scoops Richard Dawkin's first weblog post. I am waiting for the day he has his own blog. Dawkins on creationists: The standard methodology of creationists is to find some phenomenon in nature which Darwinism cannot readily explain. Darwin said: "If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down." Creationists mine ignorance and uncertainty in order to abuse his challenge. "Bet you canâ
Great account by David Corn of his Fox news confrontation with the Family Research Council, an Unchristian Wrong lobby group: Fighting the Family Research Council in the Religious War. It includes a tragi-comic description of government funded contraception group that not only believes that sex is dirty but that you can only practice abstinence if you believe in Jesus – otherwise you will, apparently, burn in hell, forever. (Off Fuck and Die?) The FRC are one of the main lobby groups pushing for no compromise in the 1.5% of judicial nominations that couldn’t get through, thus causing the current constitutional mess. It is easy to blame the standoff on the executive branch and Jeff blames it on the Senate, but the real problem is that the marginal extremists are throwing such a hissy fit that the government is being bullied by them. Moderate Republicans are being bitch slapped by the…
Having finally got to meet my all time favorite tech writer, Jon Udell at the Syndicate conference last week, I said how much I enjoyed his screencast tutorials. In light of that am putting together a some screencasts of how to use Wists. This one is the most simple, showing how to add a bookmark while browsing. (A trick overlooked by most people is being able to highlight and drag text from the page being bookmarked to the bookmarklet description field). I’ll post more screencasts to the Wists blog, although we are working on redoing the Wists UI, so more on that shortly.
One of the things that the unchristian wrong are good at is making sure that a significant portion of safe surfing products for children also block out sites which promote science or political thinking that doesn’t tally with their own medieval sense of morality. By providing free software they tailor the web to their own ideology. Hmm, time to fight back. I’d personally rather have any child of mine be able to learn about things on the web as well as block porn – so I’d be interested in creating an alternative family filter for people who want their kids to be educated. For example it could block sites such as WorldNetDaily, Jerry Falwell properties, Creationist drivel etc. etc.
Google are launching a personalizable portal as their homepage later today – this post links to the mockup. This is the critical step for Google – get it right and they have jumped over the interface complexity hurdle the Yahoo passed years ago, but then Yahoo was never minimalist. with personalization people are less likely to switch from Google if another, better, search engine comes along. Get it wrong and, well, remember what happened to AltaVista when CMGI made that a portal. via Nick Aster link » tags: [google] [scoop] [news] permamark in: Wists
“…hundreds of thousands of young Americans are now patrolling and guarding hazardous frontiers in Afghanistan and Iraq. Is there a single thinking person who does not hope that secular forces arise in both countries, and who does not realize that the success of our cause depends on a wall of separation, in Islamic society, between church and state? How can we maintain this cause abroad and subvert it at home?” The piece is by Hitchens who skillfully tears a bunch of arseholes a new bunch of arseholes. While I sometimes wonder about Hitchen’s integrity – he does seem to now be digging himself out of the pit he has created for himself over the last 2 years, by supporting secular libertarianism, which is surely the future for US politics. Hitchens is a good writer, his pen as dangerous a weapon when he was on the left as on the right….
What we are seeing is a very interesting form of meme, a meme that is propagated in the exact same form, unmutated, by hosts who both support and oppose the idea coveyed by the meme itself. Republicans have tried to refer to filibuster amendment as the ‘Byrd option’ or the ‘constitutional option’. Josh Marshall points to a memo urging Republicans not to use the ‘nuclear option’ epithet. What is interesting is that both sides cannot help but use the term, despite the fact that it looks like a purely pejorative phrase. This is an unusually viral phrase because of its dual appeal. It appeals to Republicans because of its viscerally combative stance and to Democrats because of its alarmist quality. If one looks at memes such as religious ideas, they obviously transfer from one believer to another. Imagine an entire idea system as perfectly symmetrical as the ‘nuclear option’ phrase…
The spin: On the face of it, it looks like it is the Democrats that are being stubborn by threatening to filibuster judicial nominees. The reality: The numbers show something different, the Senate agreed to approve all but 1.5% of judicial nominees, and the Republicans are threatening to change one of the fundamental checks and balances on government to have things 100% instead of 98.5% their own way. “Since Bush took office, he has made 218 judicial nominations and the Senate has confirmed 208 of them. Ten, including Owen, failed to win confirmation because of Democratic filibusters. Seven of those 10 were renominated at the start of this year. Of those seven, Democrats have indicated that they would be willing to confirm as many as four to avoid the showdown.” Neither side blinks as Senate starts debate on judicial nominees
It seems that everything is topsy turvy: Everything that is bad for you is good for you and everything that is old is new again. Irony aside, this is something of a web 2.0 reboot, with some lessons learned by coming full circle with technologies that are right for the web. SOAP vs CORBA, RSS vs ICE, PHP vs Some weirdo proprietary stuff. The changes: RSS hits the mainstream and is built into consumer portals – 10 years after it was a by-product of, er, a consumer portal, MyNetscape. Scripting interfaces to enterprise aps – the first web enabled version of enterprise aps were scripting language based e.g. Sybase was Perl based. Ajax, or DHTML as Flickr mercifully put it. In 94 you could navigate a 3d world on the web, in realtime with talking Avatars that made absolutely no money (The is nothing comparable to Onlive Traveller even today)….