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link »tags: [weird] posted via Wists: permamark

$40 million is about to be unleashed by lobby groups to influence the makeup of the Supreme Court and therefore the very social fabric of the US. The choice is not between a Democrat or a Republican but between a conservative or liberal, this is something far more partisan and corrupting. Conservatives are people who think that the moral fabric of the nation was better in the past, liberals think that it was worse. This measure of right and left has not changed in hundreds of years, whereas specific policies have. That would suggest that ideology rather than policy is a better measure of conservativism rather than liberalism. Thinking that things were better and more moral in the past is not something that has a fixed point in time, there have always been conservatives who thought it was better in the old days, there were many conservatives who opposed Lincoln...

Soda constructor just gets better and better. The latest version allows for AI programs to send models via xml, race them and capture results via xml, mutate and race again. So Far AI evolved walkers have beaten some of the classic human generated variants.link »tags: [evolution] [games] posted via Wists: permamark

If anyone would like to have the domain live8blog.com to put to good use for live 8, email me and I'll give it to whoever has the best plan.link »tags: [live8] posted via Wists: permamark

Am putting together a list of events in my life as a series of visual bookmarks - and also to get a better understanding on what features one might need to be able to do this properly.link »tags: [dgblog] posted via Wists: permamark

Looking at the picture on the left, its clear that even mega stars still have to dress like lawyers when in court, even if they aren't the defendant. Bono is sporting a sharkskin-like rock star suit and for someone who has not been seen without sunglasses since 1982 he tones down the effect, with a pair that actually cover a minority of his face and are somewhat translucent. An outfit that conveys the idea to the judge: 'you know all the leather and stuff is just a costume, I normally relax in a 2-piece, I'm really one of you. I may be a rebel, but I respect the law'. Conveys to everyone else: 'I'm not a square, you know, look at my suit, its shiny, I look a bit like Robert Palmer, I'll wear what I want, like when I modified my school uniform and my Mum grounded me.' What's...

Partygaming, a site where the majority of its revenues could potentially be found illegal, and whose affiliates are known to many bloggers as comment spammers went public in the UK - for $9 billion. Does nobody in the UK remember 1999?link »tags: [gambling] posted via Wists: permamark

A democratically elected un-democratic leader. Oh no. Iran's saving grace could be the fact that with the youngest average of any country, at some point, things might change.link »tags: [politics] posted via Wists: permamark

This ad for a V8 engined Volvo which does less than 20 miles per gallon featured alongside a Reuters story with the headline "Oil touches $60, U.S. demand steams ahead - in V8 Volvos perhaps. Volvo's moronic advertising goes one step further, the strapline is 'it's the best V8 for the planet', a bit like a low tar cigarette describing itself as the best for your lungs. At Moreover, someone once sent in a screenshot of a tourist website for Northern Ireland with a robot fed news headline saying 'Iron bar gang beats up overseas visitors'. Thinking of collecting examples of this kind of advertising juxtaposition which occurs on the web because content and ads are matched without human approval. link »tags: [environment] posted via Wists: permamark

A weblog written in Esperanto.link »tags: [weird] posted via Wists: permamark

The guy pictured was outside my door this morning with a bizarre looking Rube Goldberg (Heath Robinson) contraption. Apparently the machine is designed for 'sewer fishing'. According to its owner "these covers lead to drains that go way down, there's stuff from the 17th century down there". Eeeew.link »tags: [weird] posted via Wists: permamark

If oil hits $3 a gallon, people will demand that the government focus on domestic problems and the economy. It will be a sublime irony if Bush's popularity slumps because of oil prices and not because of the Iraq war, since the Iraq war was an attempt to keep cheap oil flowing if the Saudi supply was in danger. But because other reasons were used to galvanize supprt for the Iraq war the government is now in a curious position of having to continue to fudge the WMD issue and not reap the benefits of the emerging reality. link »tags: [peakoil] posted via Wists: permamark