The news that George W Bush has ordered all his senior staff in the White House to take a "refresher course in ethics" smacks seriously of attempting to shut the stable door after the horse has bolted. There’s also the delicious irony of that word "refresher". It presumes that the current denizens of the White House had any ethics to start with.
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Taurids
It’s the time of year when the Taurid meteor shower comes around. There seem to be indications that this could be a good year, producing a higher number of fireball meteors than usual. Watch the skies!Leave a comment
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Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
Here’s a turnup for the books, as it were. Amazon has just announced its Mechanical Turk – what it defines as artificial artificial intelligence. It’s a brilliant idea – but I’ll bet that its network of humans inside the mechanical Turk are outsourced to low cost countries such as India faster than you can say Wolfgang von Kempelen.Leave a comment
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Allan Glenn
I never got to know this young man, and now it’s too late. Life is a lottery, and some draw the short straw through no fault of their own. If life was fair, there would be a special circle of Hell reserved for his health insurance company.Leave a comment
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Vapid Beliefs
Nice article from the ever-dependable Marina Hyde in The Guardian today. She takes aim at idiotic celebrities and their idiotic beliefs. OK, deriding celebrities who are full of themselves is rather like shooting fish in a barrel, but she does it with great panache.Leave a comment
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Perceptual Illusion – #2
Another interesting perceptual illusion. Don’t always think you see what you think you see…Leave a comment
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Pieces of Eight!
My pirate name is:Black Tom FlintLike anyone confronted with the harshness of robbery on the high seas, you can be pessimistic at times. Like the rock flint, you’re hard and sharp. But, also like flint, you’re easily chipped, and sparky. Arr!Leave a comment
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AskPhilosophers
You ask. Philosophers answer. What a good idea – and it has an RSS feed as well. Philosophy enters the 21st century.Leave a comment
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Google Earth
I mentioned the user community that has grown up around the Google Earth application earlier today. As an example of how Google Earth is being used, Frank Taylor, over at the Google Earth Blog, writes about how the spread of avian flu around the globe is being tracked by a member of the Google Earth Community. Here’s a screenshot showing a sample of the data (click to go to the original on Flickr, where you can choose higher resolution versions of the shot for greater clarity).
Update: Frank Taylor, over at the Google Earth Blog reports that Declan Butler, a senior reporter at Nature Magazine, has published a new version of the avian flu outbreak map. He advises this new map be used for accuracy.Leave a comment
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Blurring The Lines…
…between reality and virtual reality. This story, about someone who has bought a virtual space station inside of an online game, simply proves to me that I was born in another age, where fantasy was fantasy, reality was reality, and never the twain should meet.Leave a comment
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Yahoo Maps
A new version of Yahoo Maps was launched yesterday. It uses Flash technology, instead of Ajax (which is used by its rivals, Google Maps and Microsoft’s Virtual Earth.It’s a good thing it’s a beta, because it crashed on me within seconds when I tried to use my mouse’s scroll-wheel to zoom.By the way, one thing that I find supremely irritating is that Google’s use of the scroll wheel to zoom is the exact opposite of the way in which Microsoft and Yahoo use it. Google wins the Donald A. Norman award for piss-poor user interface consistency in my view. They don’t even give you the option to reverse it.Google Maps (despite the user interface cock-up) works the best for me. Microsoft’s offering returns blank map tiles too often for my liking. And all of them are either sketchy or non-existent when it comes to showing maps outside of North America.But my favourite map application is still Google Earth. The combination of the PC application fed by data from Google’s map servers is still a far richer user experience than any browser-based map application that I’ve yet seen. There’s a really vibrant user community adding data to the maps. I’ve recently been visiting all of the locations mentioned by Shakespeare in his plays. All added by enthusiastic users.Leave a comment
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Coffee-Beer
A story in the New Scientist this week about a patent that has been applied for by the Swiss company Nestlé. It’s apparently for a non-alcoholic drink that is a cross between coffee and beer. It doesn’t sound very appetising. Let’s see, the Swiss record on inventions: swiss chocolate – a hit; the swiss army knife – also a hit. The cuckoo clock – a definite miss (although as a child, I desperately wanted one – but now that I’ve grown up, I’ve put away childish things). Coffee-beer – a hit or a miss? Place your bets now.Leave a comment
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Thin? – It’s Anorexic
Thin-client computers were all the rage a few years ago, with some vendors claiming huge savings over the costs of infrastructures built with traditional PCs. Thankfully, the hype has been exposed for what it was, and thin-client technologies have settled in alongside PCs as a useful and sensible alternative in particular situations.Now Chip PC have announced the Jack-PC – a thin client so thin that it’s actually installed inside the wall socket. This is not thin – this is anorexic.Leave a comment
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The Homocaust
Through a chance posting on Usenet, I came across a site that I had not seen before: the Homocaust. It’s a site that collects together the history of the gay victims of the Holocaust. It’s a good site, full of information and links to further resources, and appears to have been a labour of love by Lewis Oswald, who has his own site here.Leave a comment
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Beams and Motes
I usually have a lot of time for Giles Fraser, team rector of Putney and lecturer in philosophy. His occasional columns in the Guardian often contain a lot of common sense (which, as everyone knows, is not very common these days). However, his latest column seemed to me to fall below his usual standard. He seems to be claiming that us atheists are not self-critical enough, and even worse, we are somehow not trendy and fashionable enough.Being the dilettante that I am, I was wondering whether I should comment on the column, but Ophelia, over at ButterfliesAndWheels, has come thundering into the fray with a vitriolic response. Over to you, Ophelia…Leave a comment
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Theo Van Gogh
It is exactly one year ago that Theo van Gogh was murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri. At the moment, there is a remembrance event going on in the Linnaeusstraat in Amsterdam. In a typically satiric touch, in place of a bunch of flowers there is a pot with a cactus plant on the spot where van Gogh was shot and had his throat cut by Bouyeri. There will be further events throughout the day.Van Gogh was no saint, but no-one deserves to die in the manner that he did. Bouyeri has no remorse.2 responses to “Theo Van Gogh”
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loving the space! please check mine out as I am building a new anti-bullying website and need all the feedback I can get! Thanks
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Hayzbetts – thanks for the kind comment!
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Gastronomic Art
Unlike the Darth Vader carved out of butter, I think there is a genuine case for these witty images to claim the title of Art. Not great Art, but Art nonetheless.Leave a comment
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OTT Workstation
The Total Immersion PCE takes the term "couch potato" to new heights. I confess that I wouldn’t mind having a ride on it though.Leave a comment
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