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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…

1. AltaVista – a better search engine than Google even when there was tech cred in saying Google was better. Cause: Digital constrained it, CMGI killed it with portal mania and lack of focus. Culprit: Digital/CMGI 2. Octopus – Better than any personal portal or RSS aggregator and started when MyYahoo was terrible and RSS aggregators were twinkles in techies eyes. Cause: Investors panicked over it as a consumer application and jumped on the idiotic enterprise bandwagon. Culprit: VCs 3. Wired – It had one of the first search engines and content businesses on the web. Cause: Selling off the online bit at a time when a magazine about the web seemed more valuable than anything on it. Culprit: Wired 4. Paypal – should have brought down half of the anachronistic, check writing, retail banking system. Cause: Swallowed up in an organization (Ebay) that can’t take risks because it has…

According the comments, I don’t know how to make a bed properly. I also don’t know how to properly: Stack a dishwasher Fix a carlink » tags: [bio] [home] posted via Wists: permamark

Microsoft has always owned the UI, whether that be the command line or desktop – owning this is their unwritten mission statement. Google owns the command line for the web, so they directly step on Microsoft's territory. IE7 has search built into the browser – although it lists several search engines, it will not include saving Google search over MSN as a default setting. This tiny detail is a passive aggressive masterstroke – everyone is equal but MSN is more equal than others. It forces a minute ‘switching cost’, changing the dropdown every single time you do a search if you really like Google. Web savvy people will do this, but would your mother? Moreover, it is rumored that IE7 will not allow Google or Yahoo toolbars. This steps on Google's territory. If web search boxes go from being embedded in a web page to being embedded in a browser,…

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dresses as Jedi knight, complete with light sabre, and performs to tune of Jesus Christ Superstar at South East Asian Nations summit in Laos.link » tags: [weird] [news] posted via Wists: permamark

Blinksale – The easiest way to send invoices onlinelink » tags: [cool] [tools] posted via Wists: permamark