“Last year Mr Niyazov instituted a holiday in honour of the muskmelon, a relative of the watermelon, complete with lavish festivities” link
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Another meme spreads round the web, the Sergey pic is on Hot or Not: Is Sergey HOT or NOT?
The problem with arguing with Creationists and the like is that it is not worth it and no fun. Who can be bothered to read through 5 pages of futile debate? If someone persists in holding a view that they try and defend in quasi scientific terms, despite overwhelming contradictory evidence, then it isn’t likely that rational argument will change anything. A better challenge is to argue against irrational belief from that very standpoint. In order to do this for evolution I have invented the notion of ‘Spiritual Darwinism’ a spiritual challenge to Creationism much as Intelligent Design is an attempt at a scientific challenge to Darwinism. Now you can use religious debating techniques: Creationist: Blah blah blah – goes on for ages. Spiritual Darwinist: You are wrong. Creationist: Prove it. Spiritual Darwinist: God spoke to me and told me that you are wrong. Creationist: No he didn’t. Spiritual Darwinist:…
Kinja launches, well done Meg and Nick. My first impressions: Categorizing weblogs is difficult because weblogs are not often about one subject, so the Kinja categories are not the thing that interests me most. The single thing that I like most about Kinja is the public digest. Weblogs are about people and Kinja allows to me to read what another person is reading arranged how I am used to reading weblogs – as a weblog. In geek terms I can now read the posts from the sites in someone’s blogroll as a weblog. I would like a link at the top of my blogroll that says ‘get on the same page as me’ by reading the sites in my blogroll as a Kinja powered blog. Others could read the daily newspaper that I read and I could read what they do.
Xanga is in the top 200 of all websites, overtook Friendster in January and is growing fast. Is the decentralized weblog world, where people have pages under their own domain, missing something? Xanga, which is a walled garden service, is not only bigger than all the other blogging tools put together but is actually more viral than Friendster.
Apparently former CEO of Yahoo, Tim Koogle will be replacing Johnathan Abrams as CEO of Friendster. Tim Koogle is an investor in Friendster and a heavyweight like this suggests that the investors are confident enough to go the full distance with it. It will be interesting to see if Orkut will bcome Google’s first dud.
Oil futures “There is a precedent for price hikes to compensate for dollar devaluation, and it is not a comfortable one.” “The first oil crisis, although prompted by the political furore over the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, and the use of the “oil weapon”, was also a response to the devaluation of the dollar that took place in the course of the breakdown of the Bretton Woods fixed exchange rate system in 1971-73.” Saudi is at odds with Kuwait and UAE, Saudi wants to cut oil supply to maintain oil prices. Oil price rises are compounded by fact that OPEC revenues are pegged to dollar and the dollar is very weak and that economic growth in China is increasing demand. Higher gas prices in the US are not good in run up to election. US needs lower oil prices and more control of pricing. Iraq plus Kuwait oil reserves equivalent to…
Coke has had to recall Dasani feared to be contaminated with a carcinogen. Coke started by selling drink with narcotics, last century. It then took the narcotics out, building a brand by selling sugared water at a massive premium. It then launched Dasani, removing the sugar and selling water at a massive premium. It turned out that Dasani isn’t a mineral water, but is purified tap water, selling at a massive premium. With this recall, they were selling lipsmackin, thirstquenchin contaminated, non-mineral, unsugared, ‘coke’ free water.
In the English speaking world Ebay looks unstoppable, but check out Alibaba.com and sister site Taobao.com, the Chinese Ebay. A Chinese owned, English language site, Alibaba.com is the biggest supplier portal on the Internet – import/export for the wired age. While Ariba, the poster child of the once fashionable B2B space, has retrenched into enterprise procurement, the main action is going offshore. Alibaba, which is in the top 100 high traffic sites with hockey stick growth is an example of how the Internet fits into the outsourced economy. Alibaba raised $82 million in VC money last month. How many Silicon Valley Internet companies raised that amount recently?
McDonald’s Wi-Fi: “none of the 20-odd patrons scattered about the restaurant’s two dining areas appears to have a laptop computer or wireless PDA on hand” A McDonalds rep says: “Why would these customers use this service when they can go back to their offices to use their computers?” Is this the real reason, or is it the fact that McDonalds architecture is designed to have people pass through quickly, with harsh lighting and hard seating? McDonalds is the artithesis of an environment where you would want to hang out.
In April 1937, Hitler deliberately bombed civilian targets in a small Northern Spanish town on behalf of his friend Franco. One thousand people were brutally murdered, inspiring the most famous anti-war painting, Picasso’s Guernica. Guernica was a Basque town and the atrocity was used to justify further barbaric atrocities by Basque separatist terrorists, ETA. Guernica Introduction
Swiss bank account money scams are one of the rare delights of spam email, if only for the reason that somehow everyone involved seems to use a particularly obsequious form of convoluted Victorian English that is usually reserved for UK civil servants. “It is of great importance that I would require your humble help in assisting me to claim a deposited consignment at swiszerland.” Swizerland – classic