TrendWagon

Eureka's Top 30 Science Blogs

2010-02-20T02:59:00.000-08:00

Whether you are new to blogs or a practised poster, Eureka’s Top 30 Science Blogs will not disappoint. After much heated debate, the Eureka team have picked 30 of their favourite science, environment, health and technology blogs. If you want to know more about the latest NHS catastrophe or climate change scandal, someone on our list will have it covered.

So, now we’ve shown you ours, we want you to show us yours. We know our 30 blogs are not exhaustive; they’re a subjective take on the best bloggers out there. We’d like you to help us us to compile the definitive list, the Top 100 Science Blogs. Send the name and url of your favourites to eureka@thetimes.co.uk, with “Best blogs” in the subject line.

Inexpensive, Highly Efficient and Flexible Solar Cells Developed at Caltech

2010-02-18T06:59:00.000-08:00

A team of scientists at the California Institute of technology (Caltech) have just published their research on solar cells that will be thinner, lighter, more flexible and cheaper than existing commercial solar cells.

Instead of using conventional sheets of silicon semiconductor the team created long thin silicon wires and embedded them in a polymer substrate - rather like spaghetti placed vertically inside a gelatine solution and left to set. Such a silicon-wire array has proved to be highly efficient at absorbing sunlight. Absorbing 85% of all collectible sunlight, it is the most efficient solar cell microstructure to date.

"These solar cells have, for the first time, surpassed the conventional light-trapping limit for absorbing materials," says Harry Atwater, professor and director of Caltech's Resnick Institute, which focuses on sustainability research.

One of the limitations of current solar cells is that some of the incident sunlight is scattered off the silicon wafer, essentially bouncing off the material rather than interacting with an electron inside. In this new silicon wire array much of the scattered light from one silicon strand is then absorbed by a nearby strand, hence the significant increase in absorption.

But the really important thing is that such absorbed light is actually useful in generating electricity. In order for that to happen a photon of light must interact with an electron thereby creating a charge carrier which is the source of an electric current. This array is able to convert a staggering 90-100% of incident photons into charge carriers.

"It's an important advance." says Atwater, modestly, and all the more impressive in that this is not the development of a new material as such but an ingenious use of existing materials into a novel structure. And, if being so highly efficient wasn't enough, these solar cells are also likely to be flexible and cheaper than existing flat solar cells. The polymer sheet makes the material flexible which means it can be manufactured as a huge roll, making it a much cheaper process than manufacturing brittle flat sheets.

It always seems as if solar power is about to become ubiquitous and yet it never quite happens. Hopefully, it won't be long before our buildings are gift-wrapped in a layer of super-efficient solar cells.

Is Pluto a Planet? Vote Now!

2010-02-15T09:08:00.000-08:00

Pluto was discovered in February 1930, making this month its 80th anniversary. Unfortunately, Pluto is not in such a festive mood as its status was downgraded in 2006 from a fully blown planet to a mere dwarf planet. This is a bit like telling one of your kids that sadly they were adopted and therefore have been left out of the family will. However, the rumblings over a solid definition of a planet have continued to this day, and some people want Pluto back into our family of planets - at which point we could upgrade all the other dwarf planets to full status.

So what defines a planet anyway? Well, I'm going to write a longer article on this very soon, but the thing that got Pluto downgraded is that its orbit not only overlaps with Neptune but is also in a different plane to the other eight major planets. Strangely, NASA still has Pluto in its own planet category and hasn't placed it alongside the other dwarf planets, or planetoids.

Anyway, do you think Pluto should be a planet? You can vote on it during February.

The above image (courtesy of NASA) shows the Earth and Moon, with Pluto and one of its moons (Charon) at the bottom, plus Eris and Ceres (both dwarf planets, with Eris being slightly larger than Pluto). The image is to scale. Thus, if Pluto is a planet then so is Eris. Ceres could be a planet but it hasn't cleared its orbit of all the other asteroids. For the moment, all 3 are dwarf planets.

Stocks of Greek Puns Make Headline News

2010-02-12T02:59:00.000-08:00

Stocks of Greek puns have seen a phenomenal rise this past week. As bankers and government officials squabble over the minor details of Greek debt, its refinancing and its effect on the price of moussaka, headline writers have been buying up dormant puns. 'Greece is the word' only works for the nostalgia buffs, but when 'Grecian Earns' came to the market the groans and public shaking of the head could be felt on the floor of the stock exchange.

"Greek headlines have woefully underperformed until recently," laments Papandreou Aristophanes, editor of The Watermelon, a Greek satirical magazine,"but Greece is such an obvious homophone that writers could not resist slipping in those sad puns."

"we have not lost our marbles!" Exclaims an unapologetic journalist (who wished to remain anonymous). "We know the market is awash with sub-pun headlines, but we have a reputation to uphold and a triple-A rating to maintain."

"This is the typical behaviour of banksters manipulating our pun market. They pump and dump these lame phrases leaving the hapless reader stranded with bland financial headlines and worthless old newspapers." The old geezers agreed with their comrade and demanded another bottle of Ouzo for the quote.

"The government is considering austerity measures such as trimming the font size of headlines." The Finance Minister, George Georgiou confided. "The ECB seems to be angry with me, but what can I do? I never read the financial press as it's all Greek to me!"

Politicians across Europe are worried about a domino effect kicking in and are holding secret meetings to establish if their own country could be under attack. They fear that bad puns destroy public confidence in the very existence of their governments. Those most at risk may take the drastic measure of changing their country's name to something less toxic.

A senior British comedian let slip that,"We are looking seriously at the feasibility of renaming the island of St Kitts as 'Great Britain' and giving them all our sub-pun debts whilst at the same time calling ourselves 'Little Britain'." The markets remained po-faced at the revelation.

How Your Computer Can Help Map Our Galaxy: Join Milky Way at Home

2010-02-12T00:07:00.000-08:00

Since its launch in 2006, over 45,000 people have given their spare personal computing capacity to help map the details of our Milky Way. The sheer volume of data coming from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey meant that some astronomers were going to be waiting light years to process their bit of the cosmos. So the smarts at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute decided to use the crowd computing power of BOINC to speed up the process.

The project, MilkyWay@Home, uses the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, which is widely known for the SETI@home project used to search for signs of extraterrestrial life. Today, MilkyWay@Home has outgrown even this famous project, in terms of speed, making it the fastest computing project on the BOINC platform and perhaps the second fastest public distributed computing program ever in operation (just behind Folding@home).

With some 17,000 active members, Milkyway@Home is generating highly accurate three dimensional models of the Sagittarius stream, which provides knowledge about how the Milky Way galaxy was formed and how tidal tails are created when galaxies merge.

You too can join MilkyWay@Home.

How to Write a Check or Cheque

2010-02-10T06:23:00.000-08:00

The ability to write a cheque (or check) seems to have been flushed down the toilet along with being able to spell, write by hand and walk to the bank. So here's what you need to do with that bright new cheque book.

Firstly you'll need a pen... remember pens? No, that's a pencil and can be rubbed out. Yes that's a pen... no it's not broken, you just have to press the top and the nib comes out... very good! Let's start with the easy part: the date. Mmm... you don't spell February like that... no the universe does not come with a psychic spell checker. Yes, I know, June and July are short and easy. OK, now who are you going to write the cheque to? That's nice but "my mum" is not really her name... what's her name? Just "mum", OK, perhaps you can ask her one day. Erm... that big space there is to write out the number in words so let's not run before you can walk, let's put a number in that big box there. This is just an exercise, so any number will do... except a zillion... and there is no way you're going to have a googol in the bank either. Yes, they're funny... marginally. OK, that looks likely, now for the PhD level part of this: writing that number out in words! Yes, words! .......... (!!!) ......... One thing, you also need to practise your signature. Good... and this one... and this one... you're good at this bit, aren't you! OK, that's wonderful, let me keep this for you until the next cheque writing lesson. Right, here's a bit of plastic, don't chew it or try to open locked doors with it.

If you really need help with writing a cheque (or check) then this might help.

Full Body Scanners at Heathrow and Coming to Your Airport Soon

2010-02-03T01:05:00.000-08:00

Full body scanners are now part of airport security at both Heathrow and Manchester airports. Another step in Britain's march towards renaming itself Airstrip One. The usual pros and cons are tediously aired in the Daily Mail article's comments. There are, however, some ludicrous official guidelines on their use. Passengers are chosen at random for a full body scan, and this now includes children, but we are assured that people will not be targetted because of creed or colour - perhaps only those that merely look suspicious. If you refuse to reveal yourself you will be barred from boarding your flight. I figure it won't be long before such scans are as compulsory as metal detector scans and x-rays. Britain is also the perfect police state experiment as there is nowhere to go without boarding a plane - nowhere worth going to, anyway. The scaremongering about "boob bombs" obviously worked and interesting to see the two articles separated by mere days when in reality these scanners have been tested for a while.

One solution to all this invasion of personal space is to be a good citizen and get yourself tagged with an RFID implant so you can be tracked everywhere you go, the beauty being that you will never notice. It'll come... sooner rather than later.

from Xomba.

I See Rude People - The Battle Against Metropolitan Anger

2010-01-31T20:36:00.000-08:00

"Buy and read Amy Alkon’s new book "I See Rude People: One Woman’s Battle to Beat Some Manners into Impolite Society". It will be the funniest book you read this decade. " So says Satoshi Kanazawa, evolutionary psychologist at the LSE.

Actually, what caught my attention was the description in the review of why so many people are rude and ignorant in our sprawling metropolises. The idea from evolutionary psychology is that we once lived in small communities in which everyone was somehow related to everyone else. Avoiding perpetual family feuds leads to a kind of social lubricant to keep the community together. In contrast, people from other communities could be raided and abused as needed. Nowadays, few of us live in such incestuous villages but rather we're surrounded by millions of anonymous people who all count as "others". They are not family, so they can be abused with impunity. I can see this in action here in Thailand where any show of emotion is frowned upon and being a fool is tolerated within the villages, but come to Bangkok and pushing people out of the way is the norm if you want to get anything done before sundown.

Blondes Have More Balls

2010-01-31T19:46:00.000-08:00

The Sunday Times recently published an article with the headline “Blonde women born to be warrior princesses.” The article reported that “Researchers claim that blondes are more likely to display a “warlike” streak because they attract more attention than other women and are used to getting their own way – the so-called “princess effect.”” The Sunday Times article quotes the evolutionary psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Aaron Sell. Sadly, none of it is true, or at least not according to Sell.

The Scientific Fundamentalist blog written by Satoshi Kanazawa has a field day slamming British newspapers for routinely publishing fiction. Yes, headlines are designed to grab your attention - they may even lure you with a false promise - but the content should still have some link to real news. If journalists can't get a scientist to utter a few sentences on the phone that they can then distort or publish out of context they will just resort to making up stories. The right to free speech seems to be the right to distort reality - anything to sell papers. These are the same people crying over a loss of revenue to the new online media. Your support for them rather depends on whether you want news or fiction.

I have a little experience of British newspapers and my advice to anybody who is on the receiving end of journalistic charm and flattery is to write down a statement and email it to them. Spoken words are ephemeral and you will have a hard time proving that you didn't say something. Write your own press release and if you're still misquoted you'll have a stronger case for the Press Complaints Commission to adjudicate on. As Kanazawa says "[...] it is their job as British journalists to make things up. They don’t care if it’s true or not." Strong stuff... now where's that article about blondes?

Global Warming Scientist Admits No Data For Glacier Alarm

2010-01-25T21:29:00.000-08:00

The reputation of the IPCC is melting away faster than a Himalayan glacier. The repercussions rumble on after the discovery that the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 was pure speculation backed by zero science.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: "It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action. [...] It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in."

In other words, this was a political statement masquerading as science. Dr Lal then tries to spread the blame thinly by saying that none of the 500 external reviewers picked up on this bogus claim at the time. This too, appears to be very far from the truth.

Professor Georg Kaser, a glacier expert from Austria, who was lead author of a different chapter in the IPCC report, said when he became aware of the 2035 claim a few months before the report was published, he wrote to Dr Lal, urging him to withdraw it as patently untrue. Dr Lal claimed he never received this letter.

Having been forced to apologise over the 2035 claim, Dr Raj Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, blamed Dr Lal, saying his team had failed to apply IPCC procedures. The mud-slinging has started and everyone is running for cover.

The UN report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) won a Nobel Prize - but it wasn't for Literature. Good to see that science has not yet been totally destroyed and become a mere tool to fool the world. The bad news is that nobody has been sacked, and nobody will be as at heart they are political not scientific appointments.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a new body founded by former British Chancellor Nigel Lawson is also entering the fray. Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, said the affair suggested the IPCC review process was ‘skewed by a bias towards alarmist assessments’. More on that coming soon.

Female Teachers Can Transfer Fear of Mathematics to Their Female Students

2010-01-25T18:43:00.000-08:00

Female elementary school teachers can pass on their anxiety and stereotypes about mathematics to female students, and girls who adopt this outlook perform worse at mathematics, research at the University of Chicago shows. In contrast, boys seem to be immune from their female teacher's phobia.

The findings come from a paper, “Female Teachers’ Math Anxiety Affects Girls’ Math Achievement,” published in the 25 January 2010 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The research was conducted in the USA where more than 90% of primary school teachers are women, and I suspect many countries have the same tradition that early years learning is left largely in the hands of women. That is not in itself a problem but it becomes one when so many bring their fears of mathematics and science into the classroom. After all, we're talking here about basic arithmetic and geometry, not calculus courses.

"The authors suggest that elementary teacher preparation programs could be strengthened by requiring more mathematics preparation for teachers and by addressing their issues of math attitudes and anxiety." My own solution would be slightly different. I think a modern school system should finally do away with the view that primary teachers are like nannies with a whiteboard. The idea that one teacher can effectively teach everything merely because the level is low and the children young is completely false. As this study shows, individual teachers have their preferences and few primary teachers do an adequate job of teaching mathematics and the sciences. Those that are good at teaching the sciences should become 'primary science teachers'. Primary schools will often have specialist teachers in subjects such as music, art and sport. I think the solution is to split primary teaching into the sciences and the humanities. Then teachers will convey their enthusiasm and not inflict their prejudices onto their students.

To see what happens when girls are not fed false stereotypes, at the last college in the UK I taught the advanced mathematics and physics classes had an almost 50-50 split between male and female students. Brains are not governed by gender.

Apple's iSlate, The Grown-up Kindle: Will It Save The Publishing Industry?

2010-01-25T01:38:00.000-08:00

On January 27th, Apple will unveil its latest creation which is widely expected to be a touchscreen tablet computer. With a screen size of perhaps 10 to 11 inches across it is a magazine-reader compared to the Kindle's paperback 6-inch screen. Indeed Apple is going head-to-head with Amazon's Kindle DX which has a similar sized screen.

Publishers around the world are hoping that they can finally start charging readers again as in the good old days of printing. "Both the iPhone and the Kindle have proven that people are willing to buy the devices, read on the devices, and pay for content," said Greg Hano of Bonnier Technology Group, which publishes Popular Science and other notable titles. "We already have a proof of concept." [Yahoo]

One potentially important advantage of the iSlate over the Kindle is the terms of service. Amazon does not allow its downloaded publications to be read on any other device, whereas Zinio, a digital publishing technology company, has recently released its eReader as an iPhone app that allows the user to read the same magazine on multiple devices whilst paying for just the one download. Yes, Kindle books can be viewed on other devices but only for another download fee.

People do seem to be more prepared to pay for content on their mobile devices than for web content. As computing becomes more mobile and communication devices become more powerful, it becomes difficult to justify these two contrasting consumer experiences. Perhaps this is just what publishers have been looking for.

How to Help Your Children Avoid Social Rejection

2010-01-20T20:46:00.000-08:00

A new study by neurobehavioural researchers at Rush University Medical Center has found three key factors in a child's behaviour that can lead to social rejection. The results have recently been published in the Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology.

“Children’s ability to develop positive peer relationships is critical to their well-being,” said Dr. Clark McKown, the study's principal investigator. “Compared to children who are accepted by their peers, socially rejected children are at substantially elevated risk for later adjustment troubles.”

The three factors are:

The inability to pick up on non-verbal or social cues;

The inability to attach meaning to such cues, even if the cues are picked up; and

The inability to reason about social problems and behave accordingly.

Sadly, the press release does not mention the ages of the children in the study. The above factors do seem a lot to expect from, say, a 5 year-old but certainly not from a teenager. However, with some 13% of school age children diagnosed with social-emotional learning difficulties this is a serious problem. Or is it?

If one looks at a classic bell-shaped curve for IQ then it is perfectly natural that the bottom 15% are very different to the top 15% - this is just part of natural variability. If there was an easy way to measure a social-emotional index we may well find a similar variability. This is not to say that those with problems do not need some assistance, just that in a population with variable characteristics it is not so shocking that there are winners and losers, at least in terms of raw abilities rather than any social measure of success.

The researchers hope that such data will lead to fairly simple tests that can pinpoint children at risk and offer help before the problem becomes chronic. I also think that these are precisely the skills that should be nurtured in the home rather than expecting an often chaotic environment such as a school to teach them. Such findings should also help parents in being more sensitive to how their sons and daughters behave.

One other thing strikes me, though: the idea of peers. As adults, we do not see ourselves as part of one huge homogeneous human family. We have all split into various groups based on education, work, background, hobbies and so on. Hopefully, we see others in such groups as peers and our social behaviour largely conforms to that particular group. Some people may even feel uncomfortable stepping outside of their groups. This is not to condone a lack of social graces but to note that being comfortable within one's peer group does not always translate into feeling at ease outside it.

One can see this happening at school too, with groups and cliques forming, sometimes around special interests but also around social clubs - yes, even gangs. Should we expect a child to conform to a group of which they do not want to be members? Before labelling a child with some social-emotional problem I would look very closely as to whether the child is happy to be who they are, and that is the task of the loving parents.

How Has the Internet Changed the Way You Think?

2010-01-18T23:22:00.000-08:00

The Edge's big question for 2010 is "How Has the Internet Changed the Way You Think?" In a quest for thoroughness it has enlisted 170 brains who have collectively produced 132,000 words.

Quite a number of neuroscientists and psychologists took to sabotaging the question.

"How has the Internet changed the way I think? I can't really say, because I have no direct knowledge of what influences my thinking." says Emily Pronin, Associate Professor of Psychology, Princeton.

"The idea that my own mental processes are impenetrable to me is a tough one to swallow. It's hard to accept that, at a very basic level, I don't know what's going on in my own head. At the same time, the idea has a certain obviousness to it — of course I can't recount the enormous complexity of biochemical processes and neural firing that gives rise to my thoughts. The typical neuron in my brain has 1000s of synaptic connections to other neurons. Sound familiar?
[...]
My thinking may be influenced by unexpected search hits and extraneous words and images that are derived via a process beyond my comprehension and control. So while I have the feeling that it's me driving the machine, perhaps it's more the machine driving me. But wait, hasn't that always been the case? Same process, different machine." Well, that pulled the rug from under all those peddlers of motivational courses.

Back on message, Tor Norretranders (science writer) supplies us with a social web mantra,"The more you give, the more you get. The more you share, the more they care. The more you dare, the more is there for you. Dare, care and share."

But Marc D. Hauser (psychologist and biologist at Harvard) makes the point that for all the connections and social interactions one still can't hold hands in a chatroom. Touching is important in many cultures and Hauser thinks we may be in danger of losing something crucial in human interactions. For all those who like to accumulate online friends perhaps renaming them 'ipals' might give a better perspective on how many of them are true friends.

June Cohen (Director of Media at TED) is less worried about this and sees this mass of communications as the essentially human trait for storytelling - and that one-way mass media was an anomaly. Gone is the campfire and gone is the need to pick fleas off each other but the eternal gossip mill keeps turning.

Coming back to thinking rather than socializing, Michael Shermer's contribution is the kind of thing every blogger and struggling writer wants to hear. The internet saved him from the hard shoulder of academia and gave him the means through which to forge his own intellectual career as the founder of the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine.

"Starting with no money, no backers, and no affiliation with elite institutions, the Internet made it possible for us to succeed by making knowledge accessible and searchable to me and my editors and writers on a scale never previously available. The intellectual playing field was being leveled and the Internet changed the way I think about the very real possibility of fairness and opportunity in a world that has for too long been rigged to favor the elite." Shermer closes with,"This is real power, and I feel that power as never before."

What many have commented upon is that their own skills have moved away from acquiring knowledge, as that has become relatively easy to find, to manipulating knowledge. There is no longer the need to remember facts but rather to find previously unexpected connections between them. There may be a future of smart agents to make such connections but for the moment that's a very human skill.

For real insights or flashes of inspiration it has always been necessary to switch off for a while, relax and let the still somewhat obscure algorithms of our own unconscious do the searching. If thinking is about making connections then the wetware between our ears is our very own intranet. However, those connections haven't changed and the internet hasn't changed them either.

Indeed, a rare bit of insight comes from Daniel Haun (of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology). Humans believe what is repeated to them. This is the primary method of advertsing, be it in the name of consumer choice or political propaganda, repetition works. But most search engine algorithms include a weighting connected to the number of incoming links a particular webpage or website has - this is but codified repetition. The internet won't change the way you think because it is programmed to resemble it.

In contrast, physicist Nigel Goldenfeld feels that the sheer speed of using the internet to collaborate has increased the pace of new insights. "I'm starting to think like the Internet, starting to think like biology. My thinking is better, faster, cheaper and more evolvable because of the Internet. And so is yours. You just don't know it yet."

Many themes, however, seem to crop up with the annoying frequency of a viral retweet.

The internet is great.
The internet is full of stuff.
The internet is full of crap too.
Knowing what's crap and what's useful requires yogic mind training.
The internet has nothing on yogic mind training.
Go read a book, even an ebook.
Long live the internet!

You can read the whole thing at The Edge. Let me finish with the funniest quip I could find.

"Some people say the Internet has made us more efficient. I waste many hours each day being efficient." Emanuel Derman (financial engineer).

How Has the Internet Changed the Way You Think?

Bored? Try Project Implicit Psychology Tests

2010-01-18T01:46:00.000-08:00

Bored with taking dull product surveys online, or just plain bored to tears? Here's something that will stimulate a few comatose braincells, give you something to tweet about and possibly get into a few arguments over.

Those fiendish psychologists at Harvard have devised a test that tries to shed some light on the darkest recesses of people's innate prejudices - the difference between what you think you think and what you truly think.

"It is well known that people don't always 'speak their minds', and it is suspected that people don't always 'know their minds'. Understanding such divergences is important to scientific psychology.

This web site presents a method that demonstrates the conscious-unconscious divergences much more convincingly than has been possible with previous methods. This new method is called the Implicit Association Test, or IAT for short.

In addition, this site contains various related information. The value of this information may be greatest if you try at least one test first."

Oh yeah, and you have to agree that,"I am aware of the possibility of encountering interpretations of my IAT test performance with which I may not agree." So all that unconscious bigotry, prejudice, intolerance, irrational hostility plus a myriad phobias may well come out in the wash. In which case, deal with it!

I said it would stop you getting bored! Well, at least for 15 minutes or so.

Mark McGwire Swings Into Contrition Mode Over Drugs

2010-01-12T00:21:00.000-08:00

Up steps Mark McGwire to take his place in this week's media contrition event. He needs his job, he needs his salary, a few tears should do the trick.

McGwire admitted in 1998 that he was using androstenedione, a steroid precursor that turns into testosterone in men. This performance enhancing drug was perfectly legal back then and didn't become a controlled substance till 2004. However, it was already banned by the NFL and the IOC so the dragnet was already closing in. So who cares? Obviously some puritans in the baseball industry are jealous that the drug may have worked too well and assisted McGwire in hitting a record home runs - not quite cricket (or baseball)!

So much so that McGwire has been black-balled from the Hall of Fame no less than four times. After crawling under a rock for a few years he is due back as the hitting coach for the Cardinals. Hence the admissions of mea culpa and an interview with AP where he recounted breaking the news to his son, who is now 22.

"He's very, very understandable [understanding]. So are my parents," McGwire said. "The biggest thing that they said is they're very proud of me, that I'm doing this. They all believe it's for the better. And then I just hope we can move on from this and start my new career as a coach." [HP]

The drug was not illegal at the time, so what's the real reason behind this cry-and-tell? Well, Bic Mac had been rather economical with the truth back at a congressional hearing on disinfecting the baseball industry.

"He knows he owes the baseball world an explanation," said former Rep. Tom Davis, the Virginia Republican who chaired the congressional hearing in 2005. "I think we all knew this. I don't think anybody's surprised by this. He was one of hundreds of players who used steroids during this time. ... This was so widespread. Had we not held these hearings and put the fear of God into baseball, it would still be going on."

So Little Mac gets to be contrite and perhaps avoid the charge of perjury, all for the sake of a game. And history can be rewritten for the Minstry of Baseball and everyone can go back to counting their money.

In 2002 Mark McGwire married Stephanie Slemer, a former pharmaceutical sales representative.

The Tapeworm Diet: How Do I Sign Up?

2009-12-30T06:20:00.000-08:00

The first step towards an effective diet is to learn some basic arithmetic. Not only will this launch you towards being a calorie controlled geek but is also great for querying restaurant bills. Sadly, it won't get you onto any chat shows as stating the blindingly obvious is reserved for professors of philosophy. Designing something that is more repulsive than a king size happy meal is the way to go.

Now, people have tapeworms removed after experiencing third world farming techniques or forgetting that meat is best served cooked. The normal experience is one of revulsion, rather like finding a nest of rats have been living under your bed. The Tapeworm Diet seeks to rehabilitate this loathed parasite by turning it into your personal pet.

The idea is fairly simple. Ingest the cysts of a tapeworm, provide five-star luxury accommodation for your pet parasite and it will feed on all those excess calories you shovel into your mouth. It will soon resemble one of those unwelcome guests who raids your fridge of your favourite snacks and then waits for you to restock. Although you will be fooling yourself and the rest of the world that you are eating as much as usual you will actually be slowly starving yourself. As your pet tapeworm makes itself at home and stretches out to fill your intestine you will lose weight, but you will also be losing a lot of essential nutrients. Your live-in parasite eats indiscriminately and will devour your vintage wine and gourmet meals as well as all the junk food. Your body will be deprived of vitamins and minerals and will eventually show signs of malnutrition.

Once your guest has outstayed its welcome you can evict it with a simple oral pill. You are now free to carry on eating as before and start to balloon again! This is surely the ultimate irony of the Tapeworm Diet: as it isn't really a diet and you have done nothing to change your eating habits you are sure to carry on eating for two even though you now have only one mouth to feed.

If the idea of having a pet parasite still freaks you out, there are also tapeworm diet pills available to the more credulous and scientifically illiterate. In a culture where popping pills has become a reflex action, this seems the obvious solution. However, few living things do very much eating once they're dead and this applies to parasites too. Whatever is in such pills is more likely to stick in your throat for being dumb enough to have bought them rather than stick to your gut. However, Megaslim, a product consisting of tapeworm eggs kept in a gelatine solution seemed to have got the miraculous approval of the FDA only to find that Fly By Night Inc's flagship product is now nowhere to be found. The solution to this paradox may lie in the fact that The MQ is a (sometimes) satirical student magazine.

So you're back to contemplating having a 20 foot tapeworm living in your gut as the ultimate slim-as-you-eat accessory. There is one slight problem: feeding people tapeworms is illegal in most countries. Even taking one for a drive is frowned upon by the FDA, or your local guardian of food safety and friend of the pharmacology lobby. I have found one company that has a suitably named Tapeworm Diet website. They have a reservoir in Africa (where else?) and a clinic in Mexico. You could, of course, venture out on your own parasite-seeking tour but note that not all tapeworms are friendly. This therapy uses the beef tapeworm (T. saginata) and avoids the malevolent porcine variety (T. solium). One slight problem is that the pork tapeworm can be found within cattle and you're unlikely to be in a situation to interview your prospective dining mate and distinguish the two.

Another website, Worm Therapy, has an interesting theory. As societies become more affluent they seem to suffer from more autoimmune problems such as allergies whilst at the same time showing a sharp drop in cases of tapeworms. This is brought into sharp relief in those countries with a small newly-wealthy elite surrounded by peasants in medieval poverty. A correlation does not prove causation, but as our digestive system already hosts whole colonies of parasites and bacteria are we being unfair on the poor tapeworm just for being so darn ugly?

Back to fat. Back to that calorie calculator. As tapeworms cannot be patented, I figure we'll just wait 10 years for the pharmacos to figure out what's going on and sell you a pill instead. In the meantime, you could contemplate that trip to Mexico - the cost of the treatment alone should save you a ton of calories.

How to Intercept and Read Data From a US Predator Drone

2009-12-22T17:52:00.000-08:00

This document has come to light after reports that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan have been intercepting video feeds from US Predator drones, or Unmanned Arial Vehicles (UAV). Not only can they capture and save images and videos but also any mission control data that is carried in the same stream. The video is compressed using an MPEG algorithm with the data embedded in the stream. Amazingly the transmission is not encrypted. Pure military genius!

Check out the pdf file.

Chocolate Day

2009-10-28T07:37:00.000-07:00

October 28 may look like a pretty dull date and you could be forgiven for just hanging around waiting for Halloween. However, it is also Chocolate Day!

Indeed, it is one of many Chocolate Days! Just take a look at this list (courtesy of Thinkquest's Bizarre Food Holidays):

American Chocolate Week--March 14-20
National Chocolate Day--October 28 [why?]
National Chocolate Day--December 28 [why?]
National Chocolate Day--December 29 [and why??]
National Milk Chocolate Day--July 28
National Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds Day--November 7
National Chocolate Mint Day--February 19
National Chocolate Chip Day--May 15
National Chocolate Eclair Day--June 22
National Chocolate Covered Anything Day--December 16 [this one is asking for serious trouble!]
National Chocolate Covered Raisins Day--March 24
National Chocolate Custard Month--May 1-31 [a whole month! bizarre]
National Chocolate Pudding Day--June 26
National Chocolate Ice Cream Day--June 7
National Chocolate Milkshake Day--September 12

I guess Easter should also be included as an unofficial Chocolate Day.

So what's so great about chocolate? Well, chocolate, or rather the cacao bean, contains three principal active ingredients: caffeine; theobromine; and phenylethylamine. Theobromine, the main chemical that characterizes chocolate is a very close relative of caffeine and both act as a stimulant. Phenylethylamine is related to amphetamines and is also known as the 'love drug' as it mimics the brain's chemistry when in love. In essence, chocolate triggers the brain's endorphins to create a sense of both heightened awareness and well-being.

However, most commercial chocolates are fairly useless in that they have precious little cacao bean left in them, if any at all! If you want to switch on those pleasure circuits then buy yourself the darkest chocolate you can get - cooking chocolate doesn't get so many advertising bucks thrown at it so is the cheapest chocolate with the highest levels of active chemicals.

If you wish to wear your chocolate addiction on your chest there are some geeky T-shirts highlighting the theobromine molecule.

It's OK, don't worry, there are bound to be some Diabetes Days and Obesity Days lurking in the calendar. However, the health concerns over chocolate indulgences hide the fact that this has little to do with the cacao bean and its chemical cocktail and a lot to do with the manufacture of cheap chocolate laden with sugar and extra fats. Leave the milk chocolate to the newbies and move over to the dark side.

How Drunk Do You Have To Be To Find Me Attractive?

2009-07-26T01:49:00.000-07:00

Researchers at Manchester University have been getting drunk in the name of science. How does an alcoholic haze turn the plainest of people into stunning beauties? Although beauty is in the eye of the beer-holder, other factors are also important, such as whether the person is in focus or not, how much smoke envelopes the atmosphere and whether there is any lighting in the bar.

The research was commissioned by eyecare firm Bausch & Lomb PureVision, so they have little interest in selling alcohol or promoting sober driving. Indeed, the highly scientific-looking formula that accompanies the research has four 'visual' parameters and just one for alcoholic consumption. Perhaps in the spirit of the joke X-ray specs the company could also develop bullshit-detector goggles.

Using Pseudo-Scientific Surveys as Linkbait and Marketing

2009-07-26T01:26:00.000-07:00

Pseudo-science is the linkbait of the future. In order to gain nationwide publicity for your brand, all you need is a survey, a 'scientist' and a 'formula'. The good people at Fuse Optimisation have compiled a list of their favourite experiments in social gullibility. Squirm at the inane formulas, from the perfect wiggle of the hips to how sexy someone looks when you're drunk. These wouldn't even qualify for the Ig Nobel Prize as they are merely puff pieces with a scientific cherry on top.

This has, of course, been going on for a long time - just take a close look at cosmetics adverts. Even real science is often held hostage by corporate interests as the bottom line over-rides the truth. So just sit back and enjoy these rather harmless ventures in the science of selling. Or not...

Ben Goldacre took a dim view of the "Jessica Alba has the perfect wiggle" research. He was initially asked to prostitute himself as the expert scientist for the study. Although he declined he kept a perverse interest in seeing who would swallow the bait. The story of how the PR company cobbled together the final story is a good example of how scientists should stay clear of lending their name to anything over which they do not have final editorial control. Salvaging one's shattered reputation can take more energy than the consultancy fee could ever cover.

AVG Antivirus Detects iTunes as a Trojan Horse: What To Do.

2009-07-24T20:27:00.000-07:00

The antivirus software AVG has caused a bit of a panic by warning its users that iTunes is a trojan horse that they are calling Small.BOG. This has led many iTunes users to uninstall the software. If one follows the AVG warning and quarantine the files iTunes.dll and iTunesRegistry.dll it will also make iTunes inoperable. Apple has said there is no problem with iTunes and there is no virus in their system.

It is totally possible that AVG has misdiagnosed the problem and there is a glitch in their own algorithm. This seems likely as other antivirus companies are not reporting the same problem. It is also possible that iTunes has changed something and although not a virus and not dangerous it has triggered AVG's Resident Shield.

If you are using AVG, as either a paid or free version, and use iTunes then to avoid the warnings popping up all the time just go to the Advanced Settings for the Resident Shield and click Exceptions. This is where you can specify files and folders that AVG can ignore. Add the path to your iTunes folder, usually C:\Program Files\iTunes\ and Save.

If you have accidentally quarantined the two dll files then just go to the Virus Vault section of AVG and you can recover them.

Do Not Panic!

How to Learn Any Language in 3 Months

2009-07-18T23:05:00.000-07:00

Learning a language in one hour was, admittedly, a bit of a tease but the analysis done in that hour will set you up in how to really learn your new language. Tim Ferriss's research on language acquisition at Princeton and his practical methods for becoming proficient as quickly as possible tear up most other learning methods.

The method consists in three simple steps: Priority, Interest and Process.

For most of us the most immediate priority is in speaking a foreign language. Whether you're a tourist, on business or studying abroad the first skill you need as your plane lands is to speak. This article has a useful list of the 100 most common words in spoken English. As a comparison there is also a list of the 100 most common written English words. Perhaps surprisingly, there is only a 60% overlap between the two lists. Here is another useful word list generator. If you need to be understood by a native speaker then learning to read is not the way to achieve this.

If you're currently learning another language then it is a good exercise to input these word lists into, say, Google Translate and see how many words you need to know. Word lists for spoken languages are pretty consistent as people do pretty much the same things around the world. But once beyond the most common 300 words how do you progress from there? This is where your interests are fundamental. It really doesn't matter what that is - it could be learning judo, going fishing, listening to music, the history of architecture, the football results, whatever - just so long as you have the desire to learn and communicate.

The problem with most language courses is that they largely ignore this fundamental motivation. For example, learning Thai grammar from magazines on Buddhist talismans and sculptures is far more interesting (to me) than paying a school to teach me how to plan a train journey in four different tenses. I can figure that out myself; after all, I'm an adult! And this is one major quibble that Ferriss has with many courses that somehow try to teach a language in a similar way to how a native child would learn it. Adults already possess mastery of at least one language so can make connections between their native tongue and their new target language. Even if your topic of interest is really obscure the grammar remains identical - negotiating the price of a bronze statuette is the same as negotiating a taxi fare to the local zoo. However, how many zoos am I likely to visit?

The third step, the process, is simply the act of repetition. If you're in the actual country whose language you're learning then you have little choice. If, however, you're trying to learn a language in your home country then it's obviously a bit more difficult but there are now lots of free resources online. Listen to music or watch films in your target language. Merely hearing the correct pronunciation helps tremendously in the long run. It may sound like complete gobbledegook at first but you will start to pick up words amid the noise. You will also start to notice common phrases that your textbook has ignored. I carry around a low-tech paper notebook and jot down anything that sounds common and ask a friend what it means.

Most Thais are shy of making any social gaffes, and this includes showing up their poor English. But after a few drinks it is amazing how much English they can dredge up from their school-days. I make enough mistakes in Thai and laugh it off so they can make a few in English. Some Thais will actually speak pretty fair English but were too embarrassed to try with a native speaker yet then seem more interested in perfecting their rekindled English rather than my Thai! So the conversation turns into a bilingual game so that both sides alternate as student and teacher. Mastering a new language is ego-crushing - if that scares the pants off of you then best stay at home! I myself avoided this for a long time as I could get by with very few Thai words.

In terms of sheer volume, the vocabulary of any language seems daunting compared to the grammar. But once you have the nuts and bolts of sentence construction the act of acquiring new vocabulary is pretty easy. Just 300 words make up 65% of written English. With just 1,000 words you can be understood in most situations. Word lists make the adult learning of a new language much more efficient than ploughing through textbooks of often useless situations and unnatural conversations.

The internet has made language learning more accessible. These methods will make your language acquisition more efficient, more relevant and hopefully more enjoyable.

This article is also published at Tales from a Thai Village.

How to Learn Any Language in One Hour

2009-07-18T19:55:00.000-07:00

Learn a language in just one hour? Must be a joke or a cheap sales pitch, right? Well, the full title is "How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour", so this isn't a miracle method but rather one intense hour dissecting the basics of your chosen target language. With just six simple phrases translated from English plus a look at your target alphabet and pronunciation should be able to answer one simple yet fundamental question: can I learn this language quickly?

This simple exercise will also highlight any serious problems that can arise. For example, I am fluent in English and Italian and proficient in a couple of other European languages. However, I'm currently trying to learn Thai, which is totally alien. So let's learn some Thai in one hour!

Completely different script - OK, that can be learnt.

Although the script is read left-to-right words are constructed as 'consonant clusters' so that a vowel spoken after a consonant may actually we written before it, or even above it! OK, that can be learnt too but is a bit weird!

The grammar is relatively straightforward - phew!!

Thai is a tonal language with 5 different tones - nightmare!! This needs some serious immersion as it is almost impossible to distinguish many words that to a European ear sound identical. For the casual tourist it may be worth forgetting to learn Thai at this point and just learn enough to get by. If living in Thailand then the logical consequence of this is to learn the Thai script. The written language includes tone marks so one can start to group together words with the same tone. Most Thais will forgive the lax foreigner as the correct word can often be guessed from the context. Trying to learn Thai just using the English transliterations is a waste of time.

Thus a quick analysis of Thai immediately reveals how to best proceed with learning it: learn the script and chat to Thai friends who will appreciate you're learning their language while they have a good laugh at the mess you'll make of the five tones.

One other consequence of this analysis is that the syntax of Thai is more similar to Italian than to English; for example, "red bus" becomes "bus red". Sadly, I don't have a 'learn Thai for Italians' book!

Is anybody else learning a fiendishly difficult language?

This article is also published at Tales from a Thai Village.

Are Three Eyes Better Than Two?

2009-07-10T00:25:00.000-07:00

What factors govern the intelligence of humans and other animals? One theory claims that it is not merely the size of the brain but also the number of inputs - the number of perceptions. Add an extra sensory organ linked to the brain and the brain will create new areas of sensory perception. Similarly, take away one of the senses and that part of the brain will shrivel in significance and possibly be assigned other tasks. This isn't the place to argue about IQ tests and, having taken a few, I think there are some good ones and some poor ones. I feel that intelligence is correlated to the ability to create connections, especially new connections. Memory may help in this but in itself is merely the ability to recall information rather than processing it. Anyway, what's all this got to do with eyes?

Paul Pietsch and Carl Schneider ran some interesting experiments to test the above theory using salamanders and their eyes. You can read Pietsch's own amusing description of the experiments at his website. The idea was to add a third eye to embryonic salamanders and link it to their brain so that it would (hopefully) become functional as the creatures grew. To test all the different scenarios they developed a number of 'hybrids'. The Triclops was the main subject, with two normal eyes plus a third one in its forehead - pretty much where humans have their 'third eye' just in front of the pineal gland. A Cyclops was also created with the third eye but without its two normal eyes, as was a one-eyed version with just one normal eye but without the third one. One normal subject was also used as the base level reactions as well as one totally blind so as to remove effects from light sensations that are non-visual such as heat.

The experiment itself involved using a light source and training the salamanders to avoid the light with small shocks applied then measuring how long this Pavlovian training took to be mastered. The ability to learn was thus taken as a sign of intelligence. Using the normal salamander as the control they translated their data into a numerical value using the IQ scale, thereby fixing the normal creature at 100. Pietsch and Schneider must have felt pretty smug with themselves; the Triclops, with the third eye, achieved an IQ of 117, whereas the one-eyed salamander came in at 80. On the surface it looked as if the theory linking intelligence to sensory inputs was validated. The removal and addition of one eye seemed to correlate strongly with a difference of about 20 points. However, the scientists had one huge shock to contend with - the Cyclops, the salamander with just one central eye, had achieved an IQ of 173!

The salamander with just one eye - and that eye not even being one of its normal ones - had come top of the class. It wasn't a question about whether three eyes were better than two; it seemed like one 'third eye' was the best of the lot! This needed some serious rethinking.

To cut to the chase, it looks as if the brain not only processes our senses but also mediates them. To live in reaction to raw data is to live in permanent over-stimulation. The difference here is between optimum perception and maximum - they are not necessarily the same. I think it would have been interesting if Pietsch and Schneider had continued their experiments to see if the Cyclops would grow to develop its own mental editor, thereby sacrificing its 'raw intelligence' for a more subtle, more adaptive - and yes, perhaps slower - mode of response.

For humans, this mediation of sensory inputs has both positive and negative consequences. The brain tries to filter out what it perceives as unimportant and yet by doing so may miss critical information. Sometimes we need to clear out this mass of feedback mechanisms and return to the raw source. That doesn't mean that we can live in a world bombarded by sensory inputs, but sometimes it is worth flushing out this mental cache so that we can see the world, and ourselves, in a more revealing light.

Sperm Travels Faster Towards Attractive Females

2009-07-10T00:09:00.000-07:00

Recent research has added to a growing body of evidence that in promiscuous animals, including humans, the mechanism for successful reproduction is far more subtle than merely hoping for the best. The female of the specie may be picky about their sexual partner but the male may have the last say as the quality and quantity of sperm correlates strongly with how attractive the female mate is perceived to be.

This research was conducted on red junglefowl - an ancestor of the chicken - because female attractiveness is easy to measure and directly related to her fertility. Researchers found that the quantity and speed of the sperm produced by the male were strongly correlated to the attractiveness of the female. The mechanism that triggers this remains a mystery but the method by which the amount of sperm can be altered is known: males have two ejaculatory ducts that can fire independently so that attractive females get a shot from both barrels.

Is intriguing to speculate whether this mechanism is unleashed out of pure excitement or fear that the male is not going to get another chance!

Cybercrooks Increase Credit Crunch Scams

2009-07-01T02:10:00.000-07:00

Perhaps not surprisingly cybercrooks are focussing the global economic crisis to create scams based on refinancing and unemployment. A survey by brand protection firm MarkMonitor reveals an increase since September 2008 on domain cybersquatting and phishing scams based on terms such as foreclosure and mortgage refinancing, with "credit crunch relief" getting particular attention.

It obviously needs to be stressed over and over again not to click links within emails and to look very carefully at whether you are on the correct website. If you find something claiming to be from a well-known brand with a special offer then just do a search and find their genuine website. If there is a special deal, it will be on their website. Phishing works because there are always enough dumb people to make it profitable.

It's OK, I wouldn't remember me either.

2009-06-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

Google Hot Trends can be a thoroughly depressing page. Unfortunately, Google insist on only having the Hot Trends for the USA, which is doubly depressing as there is no comparison with other countries. Celebrities, sport and stupidity seem to be its main staple. Admittedly, this only shows sudden bursts of interest outside of the normal fare of sex and money, health and celebrities, sport and stupidity. Today's menu includes multiple helpings of golf; a game designed to dislocate various joints in the body when a stroll in the park would be more pleasurable.

The only thing that caught my eye today was "it’s okay. i wouldn’t remember me either." The way the results are organised means it is impossible to tell what people were actually searching for. No, one doesn't have to be a psychic as Google has the data of what these explorers actually clicked.

Not really rich in keywords, but two entries stood out. One was a wannabe starlet MySpace profile - it's OK (or okay), you can click it and be her friend. The other was a line from American Beauty, which I then figured is where everybody else got the quote from.

For Hollywood, American Beauty was a good film. Kevin Spacey was perfect as the seemingly mild-mannered suburban drone who was thrown off the up-escalator and realised that his life really sucked. However, the moral of the film must be that anybody who bucks the system has to pay a price. They just couldn't have Lester Burnham ride off in his 1970 Pontiac Firebird waving one finger at his wife - there are probably far too many Lesters who'd take the cue. Instead, he has to suffer for his short spell of freedom. In the end, nobody really learns anything as tragedy scythes the film to a close. The suburbs may be rotten but a fresh lick of paint should suffice to hide all the cracks.

Interview with Forbidden Science Creator: Do Clones Have More Fun?

2009-06-22T03:50:00.001-07:00

Forbidden Science is a sexy, late-night series somewhat like a low budget mashup of Flash Gordon campiness and contemporary posthuman scifi. Julia, the clone of a dead woman, searches for her place in a world where you can inherit somebody's identity and memories, but not their property. A sex droid named Max is abused by his demanding owner. And Bethany, a new hire at mysterious clone and android development company 4Ever Innovations, is more than a little disturbed by some her company's secret projects. Meanwhile, chief geek Penny keeps trying to invent the ultimate sexbot (erm... what's the point when there are flesh-and-blood clones?)

This is an interview with Doug Brode, creator of Forbidden Science, currently showing on Cinemax.

Would You Clone A Baby?

2009-06-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

The idea of human cloning never seems very far from the news. The reality of cloning a baby is already here, with only a little nudge needed to make the practice 'acceptable'.

Fertility expert Panayiotis Zavos, founder of the Zavos Organization in Lexington, Kentucky, said to The Independent that "the cloned child is coming... There is absolutely no way that it will not happen." You can even watch the video of Zavos creating the embryos before injecting them into the wombs of women wanting cloned babies.

Transferring cloned human embryos into a womb is currently illegal in many countries, such as the UK and USA, but not in many other countries. Italian Severino Antinori told Oggi magazine that there are already three living human clones, all aged nine years old and living in Eastern Europe. The world is thus split on whether human cloning should go ahead or not. However, why would anybody want to clone a human?

The media loves to spread false futures. A picture of a girl killed in a car crash with the headline "The little girl who could 'live' again" spread the myth that a human clone is a perfect copy of a lost child. the loss of a child is tragic, but that unique individual human being has gone for ever. The motivations for cloning can actually be quite bizarre. For example, there are enquiries from couples who are infertile to clone the person with the fertility problem so that the new copy can possibly be fertile and therefore have children naturally. This latter logic is twisted and ironic in the extreme. It is also a very long wait to be legally able to procreate with the clone.

Cloning a dead child is not going to bring that child back. Yes, they may be genetically identical but we cannot, as yet, duplicate a person's mind so that the clone is really the same person. As soon as an embryo is created its development is subject to environmental influences, from the chemicals ingested by the mother to the experiences of childhood and life itself. The clone of a child may look the same but to live with the attitude that it is 'my dead baby come back to life' is to live with a major delusion that could be psychologically harmful to both the parents and the child.

My Life is Meaningless Says Shia LaBeouf

2009-06-11T22:43:00.000-07:00

This is a refreshingly candid point of view from Shia LaBeouf, 22-year old star of "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." he has money, he has fame, his parents love him, but deep inside is a little voice that tells him it's all a fluke.

"Most actors on most days don’t think they’re worthy. I have no idea where this insecurity comes from, but it’s a God-sized hole. If I knew, I’d fill it, and I’d be on my way." Well, it's obvious why actors are insecure - they crave recognition but sadly they get it by being someone else. Insecurity is an actor's number one best buddy; after all, people watch you for being someone you're not. Don't give up the day job as you'll miss the money, but just do something else on the side, then fans will love you for yourself. Jeez, that was hard!

“Actors are dependent on being validated by other people’s opinions. I don’t understand what it is I do that people want. [...] I don’t know what I’m doing. To my mind, talent doesn’t really exist. Talent is like a card player’s luck. It is motivation, ambition, and luck. I think acting is a con game.”

Hey, I like this guy! Who is he?

Chomsky on Obama's Rhetoric on Israel and the Middle East

2009-06-10T00:34:00.000-07:00

Quoting the Israeli journalist Amira Hass, a leading specialist on Gaza: "The total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics, whose overarching objective is to prevent a solution based on international decisions and understandings and instead dictate an arrangement based on Israel's military superiority."

One aspect of the destruction of Gaza that is never reported is the naval blockade which has been driving back Palestinian fishermen since 2000. Not unrelated is the discovery of a rich source of natural gas in the same waters, which Israel is buying from British Gas and zero going to the supposedly Palestinian-controlled Gaza strip. The lack of media attention to this probably makes it of primary importance as, once again, we see politics as a method of obfuscating a real war over natural resources.

As always, Chomsky is good at highlighting the political newspeak and repeatedly points out that behind every initiative is a list of conditions that make them all largely worthless. Israel, backed by the United States, will do whatever it takes to avoid a Palestinian state. Chomsky picks through Obama's Cairo speech and finds numerous restatements of past US positions. All UN resolutions against Israel will be ignored as America pretends it is being an 'honest broker' whilst funding one side.

On nuclear weapons Obama again called for nations to adhere to the Non-Proliferation Treaty whilst failing to mention that Israel is not a signatory to the NPT. In contrast, Iran should be allowed "access" to nuclear technology, meaning access from the outside rather than running its own research and development. The "threat" Iran poses is not of a suicidal first strike against Israel but as a deterrent against further Israeli expansion. The double standards go on and, I suspect, the decades-long deadlock now serves as the pretext for the illusional war on terror, which in itself is really yet another war to control natural resources.

You can read the full Chomsky article here.

Hank Paulson: American Idol or Public Enemy?

2009-06-09T04:07:00.000-07:00

AlterNet rarely pulls its punches and in this case the vitriol is aimed squarely at Hank Paulson, former Treasury Secretary, former Goldman Sachs director and professional conman. What sparked this venom was a eulogy to Hank in the Wall Street Journal by one Evan Newmark, who claims "The Wall Street crisis is over." and that Hank Paulson is a "National Hero". What the WSJ fails to mention is that Newmark is also a former Goldman Sucks managing director.

"Exactly what part of Paulson's record is heroic, Evan? The part where he called up SEC director William Donaldson in 2004 and quietly arranged to get the state to drop capital requirements for the country's top five investment banks? You remember that business, right, Evan? [...] Bear Stearns in just a few years had a debt-to-equity ration of 33-1! Lehman's went to 32-1. By an amazing coincidence, both of these companies exploded just a few years after that meeting, and all of the rest of us, Evan, ended up footing the bill, thanks to a state-sponsored rescue of Bear and a much larger massive bailout of Wall Street in general, necessitated in large part by the damage caused by the chaos surrounding Lehman's collapse." The article goes on to list numerous screw-ups that Paulson then had to cover up with public money. Disgraceful, but I'm certain he has no shame as it is all just business to destroy what little democracy is left in the USA.

I guess the financial criminals in the USA will never be tried or convicted. The media likes to chew on a few small fish to draw the venom from a stung public without ever going after the real targets. As everyone along the chain of incompetence gets paid there is nobody left to push for some justice - all the public is left with is direct action, but I guess American Idol is more important.

Need a Job? Join the Shady Lady Ranch as a Male Entertainer

2009-06-09T03:07:00.000-07:00

Tired of applying for boring jobs with little satisfaction save for a pay cheque? Broaden your horizons and you too could become a male sex worker! Yes, the Shady Lady Ranch in Nevada's Nye County is accepting male applicants to entertain their female customers. Here's the advert:

The Shady Lady Ranch is Looking for a few good men.

The Shady Lady Ranch will start interviewing Men to entertain women.
We will be looking for men in their early thirty's to mid fifty's.
Have a Good Work Ethic.
Must be Service Oriented.
Have a Willingness to Please.
Have a Positive Attitude.
If you think you have what it takes.
Please send pictures to shadyladyranch
No nudes.
We need to see your body type, shorts no shirts as well as suit or clubbing ware (Dress to impress.)

Some other club owners have poured cold water on the idea, saying that women in general want more than a 'quickie' and therefore could be staring at $500 for a minimum of 2 hours of entertainment up to $2,000 for an all night romp. I'm not sure what the cut is for the male sex worker!

George Flint, spokesman for the Nevada Brothel Association, also points out that there are legal problems with hiring men in that "All of the Nevada Administrative Code is built on the female anatomy." I'll leave it to you to find out the ins and outs of the business.

Hackers Arrested in China After Gaming Feud Causes Major Outage

2009-06-09T02:28:00.000-07:00

Four individuals have been arrested in China after an alleged denial-of-service "war" between underground gaming services spun out of control, according to Xinhua News Agency.

The suspects allegedly launched a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against the servers of DNSPod, a Chinese DNS provider and domain registrar. This was motivated by fierce competition between unauthorized online gaming service providers, which lure gamers from official providers with less limited and free access. In order to sabotage "competitors," the suspects began an attack against DNSPod, which provides access to some of those unauthorized gaming sites. Unfortunately DNSPod servers are also used by Baofeng, a very popular video streaming service. As video requests were denied they were passed on to higher level servers causing a chain reaction as these servers didn't know how to handle the requests.

This actually seems an odd story. The DDoS attack was one thing, but the outage was due to rubbish software of Baofeng - who have since recalled their junkware. The authorities are laughing as it will speed up the erection of China's private intranet so that Chinese citizens can sleep safely in the knowledge they will only be hacked by their compatriots.

Win Tickets to Sold-Out Glastonbury Festival

2009-06-03T01:10:00.001-07:00

The Guardian is giving away 50 pairs of tickets to this year's Glastonbury Festival.

All you have to do is go to this Win Glastonbury Tickets page, fill in a very quick form and then hope for the best! The closing date is midnight Thursday 4 June 2009. The winners will be notified by telephone on Friday 5 June.

The Glastonbury festival runs from 24th to 29th June 2009.

Headliners include Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Blur, Bloc Party, Franz Ferdinand, Prodigy, Doves,Jarvis Cocker, Echo and the Bunnymen, Rolf Harris and many many more. Full Glastonbury Festival line-up also available at The Guardian.

Google Wave Makes a Splash: A Complete Guide

2009-06-03T00:46:00.000-07:00

Google Wave was announced yesterday and will start to make waves as it goes public in a few months. Google Waves is essentially a real-time communication platform. This article from Mashable is probably the simplest and yet most complete guide at the moment.

It goes into the details of what precisely a Google Wave is plus all the terminology, from wave to wavelet to blip! A Wave is very much like having a global threaded instant messaging history but with the added ability to go back and edit parts of the thread. A Wave can be constructed by a single individual or a group of people, or even by automated robots. Google Wave will be open source so watch out for numerous applications and extensions.

How Much Science Can You Take? The Sorry State of Science Journalism

2009-05-22T12:15:00.000-07:00

Every time a science story hits the mainstream media there comes into life a parallel universe where science writers beat their breasts about the woeful state of science journalism.

It just isn't enough to bring the public into the normally incomprehensible world of science; it has to be done with extra sugar and whipped cream on top. What with the 'God particle', the 'God spot' and creationists one could be mistaken for thinking we were in a Medieval theocracy - not yet anyway!

Media corporations just care about eye-balls and advertising revenue - truth is an arcane concept best left to philosophers. Science journalists blame their bosses who desperately want readers, and they blame the public too for being scientifically illiterate and easily bored and confused. The public blames the media because they believe what they read and then feel insulted when it turns out that what they read was rubbish.

Science writers, as distinct from science journalists, try their best to unspin the spin. From what I've seen, the best science writing these days is on the internet in places such as ScienceBlogs.com. Science journalism has become as lazy and partisan as every other form of journalism.

So who's to blame for the spiced-up dumbed-down science news?

Children Taught to Spy on Their Neighbours

2009-05-20T22:53:00.000-07:00

Councils in Britain are training an army of children to spy on their neighbours. As the UK shuffles into its Orwellian dystopia these 'citizen snoopers' are being taught how to take photos, note down car number plates and all relevant information that can be used in a prosecution - and on how to do it in secret. The Neighbourhood Watch schemes have been around for decades and were designed to stop criminals, especially thieves. But when families can be fined £100 for having their bin slightly too full this is no longer about crime but rather a fundamental shift in the powers of local councils. People already pay for things like waste collection and policing in their taxes but councils now see their populations as a source of revenue rather than as recipients of public services.

The councils indoctrinate these children into believing they are 'environment volunteers'- note that the kiddie-police are not paid a penny. How long will it be before they are victimized at school? Have the councils considered this backlash? The destruction of communities and civic behaviour is a tried and trusted method of totalitarian communism and a hallmark of Airstrip One.

Matthew Elliott, chief executive of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'Community spirit is one thing, spying on your neighbours is quite another.

How To Get Your Twitter Account Suspended

2009-05-20T09:26:00.000-07:00

I managed to get my Twitter account suspended! No idea why, and no big deal as I'd only recently started to use it, but has given me the opportunity to delve into the more unseemly side of Twitter. Every social networking site is full of antisocial behaviour and every website has systems in place to try and mitigate its effects on the average user. Twitter is no different, but the number of aggrieved people who have had their accounts suspended means that Twitter needs to have a long hard look at the systems they have in place. The issues below are a summary of some of the cases I have found online.

The first place to look to see what behaviour can get you banned is the Twitter Terms of Service. There are some fairly obvious things not to do, such as impersonating a real person (although satirical spoofs are accepted so long as it is obvious), publishing or linking to pornography or any other illegal activity, publishing people's private details and, of course, spamming. But it is this latter category that seems filled with potentially nebulous definitions that can get you labelled as 'antisocial' by the Twitter corporation.

Many users have found their accounts suspended for being antisocial. This is somewhat ironic for a social website but all Brothers and Sisters must conform or be banished from the social organism! But let's have a close look at what it takes to be a social outcast.

From Twitter's definition of spam: "If your updates consist mainly of links, and not personal updates." This is the most worrying one. Anybody who uses Twitter to send updates about their blog or website is going to fall foul of this, and yet, follow any mainstream website and all you get are links to their articles. This is a huge case of double standards. Are these corporate websites paying to send out their spam? Is any of it really spam if people are willingly following you? Sending out garbage that nobody reads is a waste of time. Many of the people I was following just sent out links to interesting stuff. Twitter demands that anybody who uses Twitter solely for marketing links must contact them to request to do so. Anybody who has not made such an official request is liable at some point to fall foul of this rule. To show how random this can be, one guy was accused of having all his links point to one site. When he told Twitter that was obviously because it was his blog they reinstated his account!

"If you have followed a large amount of users in a short amount of time." No numbers are given but this could mean anything. Getting followers is a long and sometimes tedious process of building a network from users you already follow. There is always someone who follows first, then the person followed can decide whether to follow their follower... or not. Following on Twitter is a one-way arrow and not the same as the two-way 'friends' thing on Facebook. It is easy to follow a trail of people each of whom follows the previous user. How many does one have to follow in one sitting to fall foul of the Twitter police? Nobody knows.

One consequence of the above rule is that anybody who doesn't like what you write about can flag you as a spammer just for accidentally joining them. I'm not saying most people act this way but I am saying that this can happen and from what I've read, Twitter acts first and then thinks about it in their own sweet time. The internet is full of low-level information warfare that many people are just not aware of. Whether it is Anonymous v $cientology or Christians v Atheists there are spam wars out there to remove or promote content on various social websites. In the instant world of Twitter's follow/unfollow it shouldn't be a sin to follow the wrong person. If after a few tweets you find someone isn't of interest it is a simple matter to unfollow. No ill feelings, no harm done.

However, if one combines the previous definition with the fact that "The number of spam complaints that have been filed against you" also count, then you can easily become a target for people who don't like you. "If a large number of people are blocking you" is also a way to flag an account without formally sending admins a spam report. The lesson here is perhaps to have a good long read of a user's tweets and not just look at their cryptic profile. For example, imagine you're an atheist geek and tweet about both. You follow someone because you've seen some interesting geeky tweets; he then follows you back. He suddenly reads your atheist tweets and gets offended because he's a Christian. Who's fault is that? Does that warrant being flagged as a spammer? Just unfollow and walk away.

I found one user accused of being part of a spam ring. Twitter did reinstate their account on this occasion but the reason is revealing. One spammer is less effective than a whole group. Following each other may, on the face of it, seem pointless but it does give each of them a veneer of sociability that a lone spammer needs to work hard to achieve. If you accidentally find yourself following a few of them Twitter's spam algorithm may well flag you as part of the ring. It may seem strange that someone would willingly join a spam ring but there are many areas in which legitimate information and spam can easily blend. Areas such as personal finance and health are filled with both information and spam. Again, don't just follow people for the sake of it - take a long hard look at how long they've been on Twitter and what their recent tweets look like.

"If you have a small number of followers compared to the amount of people you are following." This could be the profile of a spammer, but what use is it unless you send private messages to all those people, and then you will surely be blocked or flagged for spam. But if, for example, you've started using Twitter as a kind of aggregated RSS feed for lots of news channels then don't expect those accounts to follow you back. You could easily end up following over a hundred twitters without any of them following you back. The lesson here is to build up who you follow slowly and more or less in step with the number of people following you.

I'm sure Twitter doesn't take any one solitary condition as a trigger to suspend accounts - at least I hope not! But there are enough bemused users out there to show that the current system is far from perfect. A real spammer isn't going to bother to complain; they'll just open another account with a new name and fresh email address. Just be careful you're not the target of Twitter's shoot first policy.

Twitter Account Suspended? What to do next.

2009-05-20T05:09:00.000-07:00

What To Do If Your Twitter Account Has Been Suspended

Your Twitter account has been suspended. You're confused and angry and want answers. You're not alone; this is becoming a frequent occurrence and Twitter admin like to hide behind some fairly nebulous terms of service.

The bottom line is that Twitter reserves the right “to refuse service to anyone for any reason at anytime.”. They can suspend your account for any reason without telling you why. If you know why you're account has been suspended then you probably won't need to read this and can merrily go ahead and create another account. If you're afraid of losing the network you have established and any reputation you feel you have gained then read on.

Twitter has gone from a lowly start-up to a major online presence in a short time, but their resources are just not keeping up with their new status. This seems to be affecting both their physical resources such as servers and bandwidth as well as their human resources such as their help system. If you feel that you need to use Twitter then you will have to protect yourself from account suspension and the consequences that arise from it, but that's for another article.

One example of this is that Twitter's help pages have a number of dead links. This look bad and means having to go the long way round to find out how to complain about your account suspension. There seem to be two ways to seek to get your account reinstated.

Twitter Support

Twitter Support currently uses the Zendesk platform to generate help tickets and (hopefully) answer them. This means they have two URLs that point to the same place:

http://help.twitter.com/entries
http://twitter.zendesk.com/entries

If they ever stop using Zendesk then the first URL should still work.

If your account has recently been suspended and has not been deleted then you can login to this helpdesk with the same details as your Twitter account. Some people have found it expedient to create another Twitter account and use those details to open tickets about their suspended account. This can be useful as some users have found they can no longer login to the helpdesk if their Twitter account was terminated. The downside is that if Twitter upholds the original account suspension then you may find your new account also targeted. This choice is yours.

Online companies often hide behind the anonymity the internet affords them and Twitter is no different. You will firstly receive an automated response, which merely means a human may eventually look at your case. Most people's reaction is to then send an angry reply. From reading some people's stories the best way to get your suspended account reinstated is to make a clear logical case that you have done nothing against Twitter's TOS.

Mistakes happen and there are unpleasant people out there who want to take you off the net just because they don't like your politics, religion, race, sexual orientation or whatever. There are also spam rings on Twitter and if you unfortunately follow one of them accidentally you may be flagged as part of the ring. Whatever the reason for your suspension you might, or might not, get to know and can then act upon it either with a new account or your reinstated account.

Get Satisfaction

The second place where you can complain about your Twitter account suspension is at Get Satisfaction. This is similar to Zendesk but has the advantage that it is also a forum and other users can comment on your case and share experiences. This means you're not alone in dealing with Twitter and can see who has been reinstated and who hasn't.

Get satisfaction also has a section of Twitter Known Issues. This lists known bugs on Twitter that have led to various account problems such as the inability to login, tweets or followers gone missing and accounts accidentally blocked. If you had a lot of followers you can try to get them to support your reinstatement here. That, however, assumes you've kept an offline list of your followers: how many people do that?

Will you get your Twitter account reinstated?
Maybe, maybe not.

How long will it take?
How long is an elastic band? They seem woefully under-staffed and have seen accounts reinstated after 2 months!

Is it worth the aggravation?
That really depends on how much effort you've put into your Twitter community. If you really feel you haven't done anything wrong then it is worth pursuing as otherwise you're likely to fall into the same trap with a new account.

Where can I find Twitter's Terms of Service?
Here are Twitter's Terms of Service and Rules Policies. The section that probably affects most people is their Twitter Rules page.

Good luck... just don't hold your breath waiting.

Edgar Allen Poe 3D Film - The Fall of the House of Usher

2009-05-19T10:51:00.000-07:00

Indie company Green Knight Ventures will be producing a remake of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall Of The House Of Usher’ according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Published in 1839, this gothic short story centres on the crumbling spirit of Roderick Usher as he is haunted by the burial of his sister, only to succumb to his worst nightmare.

The working title of the film is 'The Ushers'. The Ushers? What possessed them to change a famous title? Is this a film about an escort or usherette? Or is it going to be turned into the Munsters? Let's wait and see if this project ever sees the light of day or gets buried alive.

In the meantime, you can always read The Fall of the House of Usher at poestories.com.

Risks of Buying Erectile Dysfunction Treatments Online

2009-05-19T02:01:00.000-07:00

The US FDA has a long article on "Hidden Risks of Erectile Dysfunction "Treatments" Sold Online". Many consumers perceive these products as safe because they appear to be properly labelled and promoted as all-natural alternatives to prescription drugs. However, FDA testing has revealed that some of these products actually contain sildenafil or vardenafil - the active ingredients in Viagra and Levitra respectively.

There are a few issues here. The FDA has a vested interest in protecting the pharmaceutical industry so they will do whatever they can to trash competing products. To pretend that Viagra, and similar products, are used purely for medical purposes and not as a recreational drug is to live in a fantasy world. People who have had their online Viagra purchases confiscated will look for alternatives. Keeping prices high by maintaining a monopoly only hits those people who live in the USA. So one "risk" of buying online medicines is that they will be confiscated by customs.

Having said that, there are people for whom taking Viagra can have serious unwanted side-effects and therefore they should inform themselves of what the real ingredients are in these alternative treatments. People with diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or heart disease are often prescribed drugs containing nitrates, and men with these conditions commonly suffer from erectile dysfunction, but unfortunately sildenafil interacts with these drugs in a way that could potentially lower blood pressure to dangerous levels.

The article includes a long list of products that the FDA considers undesirable within the US market. The lesson here is that whenever buying anything online just do a bit of due diligence and background checks through search engines and forums. You may not believe everything the FDA says but be aware of what exactly it is that you're going to put in your body.

Genetically Engineered Puppies Glow In The Dark - You're Next

2009-05-19T00:55:00.000-07:00

A team at Seoul National University located in South Korea has successfully created a new breed of beagle capable of fluorescing under ultraviolet light. There's even a video to brighten up your day. Why, you might ask? Some species, such as fireflies and plankton, can create light naturally but genetic engineers have been keen to develop luminescence in other animals. This transgenic canine, named Ruby Red, had a gene inserted into its DNA that creates a fluorescent protein when in contact with ultraviolet light. If placed in the dark with a UV source the puppy glows bright red.

So, apart from possibly creating a fad for luminescent tattoos, is there any real use for this? Do you really need to look for a stray dog armed with a UV ray? Scientists claim that if they could tag various cell types with different fluorescing genes then that could help locate things such as tumours and cancers. Sounds tenuous to me. The most obvious application is in tagging people. Maybe it won't be enough to have a radio frequency microchip implant but just for good measure you could have different classes of people emit a different colour. I'd say it would be impossible for a person to hack into their own genes. Your new fluorescent colour will run much deeper than your mere skin colour.

WHO Insists "Concern over flu pandemic justified"

2009-05-18T11:45:00.000-07:00

The Director-General of the World unHealth Organization gave a speech to the World Health Assembly in Geneva today. The lengthy speech was designed to show the world that the WHO is trying to level the delivery of healthcare in spite of a wide gulf in the resources of countries.

If there is a disease that would warrant the term 'pandemic' then that is surely HIV/AIDS, and yet that is mentioned as a mere epidemic. There is enough evidence to show that HIV was also manufactured, but the DG was obviously silent on this.

One section caught my eye, however:

"For five long years, outbreaks of highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza in poultry, and sporadic frequently fatal cases in humans, have conditioned the world to expect an influenza pandemic, and a highly lethal one. As a result of these long years of conditioning, the world is better prepared, and very scared."

Pavlov is still alive and in the service of medicine. Perhaps Dr Margaret Chan is unaware of how "very scared" people on the net are and that the "conditioning" is not really working very well.

The southern hemisphere is entering its flu vaccine season, but we shall probably have to wait for the north to cool down before the swine flu vaccine gets smuggled into the annual jab.

Draft National Institutes of Health Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research - First Comments

2009-05-17T04:23:00.000-07:00

The National Institutes of Health has just released its draft guidelines on future stem cell research in the USA. It is also seeking public debate on these guidelines with a view to establishing firm guidelines for funding bodies giving grants to stem cell researchers.

Here is what seems to be the crucial conclusions of the current stem cell research draft guidelines:

"These draft Guidelines would allow funding for research using only those human embryonic stem cells that were derived from embryos created by in vitro fertilization (IVF) for reproductive purposes and were no longer needed for that purpose. Funding will continue to be allowed for human stem cell research using adult stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells. Specifically, these Guidelines describe the conditions and informed consent procedures that would have been required during the derivation of human embryonic stem cells for research using these cells to be funded by the NIH. NIH funding for research using human embryonic stem cells derived from other sources, including somatic cell nuclear transfer, parthenogenesis, and/or IVF embryos created for research purposes, is not allowed under these Guidelines."

On first reading, the NIH has tried to placate both the research community and the largely Christian right-wing anti embryonic stem cell research lobby. After all, the arguments are largely about embryonic stem cells but here we find that essentially the same embryonic stem cells from two different IVF sources are treated in two different ways. There seems no logic as to why spare embryos from an IVF clinic should be treated differently to an IVF embryo created specifically for research purposes. It also opens up a way around the proposed legislation by encouraging IVF so as to harvest the resulting embryos rather than primarily for fertility reasons. Shoddy piece of logic and, from what I've seen so far, both sides are up in arms.

Embryonic Stem Cell Research NIH Guidelines Released and Public Opinions Wanted

2009-05-17T04:01:00.000-07:00

Stem cell researchers seemed happy when President Obama lifted Bush's ban on certain types of research. However, what Obama did was to instruct the National Institutes for Health to set up stem cell research guidelines. Those guidelines have now been published and there is only a 14-day period to solicit public responses. However, the guidelines are far more conservative than some had hoped, and opponents of the research are systematically flooding the comment process. You too can join in!

here you can find the open letter from the ESCR plus all other relevant links.

Are the Trending Topics on Twitter a Waste of Time?

2009-05-14T03:51:00.000-07:00

Twitter has been busy messing around with its user interface. It recently added the latest Trending Topics in its right-hand column, just below the Search box. The Trending Topics shows the top ten keywords currently in use. If one looks at a third-party application such as Twopular you'll get a more detailed view of the trends but it is fairly consistent with Twitter's own calculations. However, how useful is Twitter Trends and how does it compare to Google Trends?

Google's own Hot Trends is based on actual searches. The full algorithm is somewhat of a secret and the data given does not indicate how this calculation is performed. What one can assume is that the Hot Trends are those keywords whose search numbers are above their norm. They therefore tend to be news-related keywords and even a small but sudden increase in searches can lead to a listing in the Hot Trends. Apart from a serious burst of viral marketing it isn't easy to manipulate what Google is tracking. After all, once you click on a keyword there is absolutely no reason to then go and search for the same word unless you really want some further background information that is not available at the links already provided by Google.

In contrast, if you click on a keyword in Twitter's Trends what you'll see are dozens of identical tweets, often retweeting (RT) the same message over and over again. However, what you also find are lots of spammy tweets that have taken the trending keyword and then inserted it into a tweet about something completely different! On Twitter there are two types of keywords: one is a keyword string extracted from tweet texts, somewhat like Google does; and the other are hash tags such as #hottrends. The hash tags are useful for defining a subject across many tweets but what one finds is that most trending keywords on twitter are hash tags rather than contextual keywords.

Finding short-term trends can be useful to those writers who like to ambulance-chase the latest buzzy topics in the hope of increased traffic and earnings. But this somewhat relies on the trending data being genuine and not subject to mass manipulation. Tweets are so short that it is impossible to tell whether a message is really about the keyword or not. As often happens with any list across the web, such as social bookmarking lists, there is always a tipping point. If you can sneak into the bottom of the list this often gives you a leg up to the next level. Hover just below this cut-off point and you could easily fall back down again. people are lazy - they'll look at the most obvious thing first.

But on Twitter, getting a subject on its Trending Topics is liable to be swamped with spam and unrelated garbage. Yes, you will also find the original tweet being resent by lots of people but what you don't seem to get is a stream of any discussion that is taking place. Perhaps I'm the only one who thinks this is a problem, but what was supposed to be a good idea is just too easy to abuse.

Is Hand-Shaking Old-Fashioned and Unhygienic?

2009-05-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

Michael Arrington has a problem: he hates shaking hands when meeting people. Why he should choose to air this on TechCrunch has baffled most commenters. What Arrington really hates is the idea of catching a disease off some sweaty palm. He frequently has to excuse himself and go to the nearest toilet to wash his hands. This sounds like he's morphing into Howard Hughes and he should see someone about this (without shaking hands).

However, he has tried to turn a personal obsessive-compulsive disorder into a mini-crusade against the whole cultural proclivity for shaking hands. His idea of promoting 'fist bumps' is puerile, potentially painful and still includes skin contact. He has even posted a second article claiming partial victory as one company claims to have held a board meeting without shaking hands - irritatingly they engaged in a round of... yes, fist bumps!

Thing is, not everyone in the world engages in hand-shaking as a form of greeting. Here in Thailand people 'wai' to each other; hands held together as if in prayer and with a slight nod of the head. If you're carrying something then the equivalent one-hand-clapping gesture is acceptable, and amongst friends often a simple nod is sufficient. In Japan people greet each other with a simple bow, although this can become exaggerated if there is a huge difference in social standing.

Anyway, the point is that hand-shaking is not universal. Should we dispense with it and accept a nod or a bow of recognition as sufficient greeting etiquette? Are there any other ways that humans greet each other?

As for Arrington, he could go down the politician's route of using Prevex hand-cream to form a protective chemical barrier against unwanted germs.

A Child's Severed Finger Will Amazingly Grow Back Spontaneously

2009-05-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

It is fairly common knowledge that certain reptiles, such as the salamander, are able to regrow severed limbs. Such an ability has always been though impossible in mammals, including humans. But pioneering research by Robert O. Becker has shown that such an ability to regenerate limbs does exist in humans, albeit to a limited extent.

One of the most common reasons for children being admitted to hospital is the loss of a finger from some accident such as being wedged in a car door or sliced off by a fan. The standard technique is to just stitch some skin over the wound or, if the tip of the finger is still available, to rebuild the finger using microsurgery. Neither method results in a fully-functioning finger.

However, by pure accident Cynthia Illingworth at the Sheffield Children's Hospital noticed that in some children the finger would grow back. Just by doing nothing and letting the body heal itself, by 1974 Illingworth had documented hundreds of cases of regenerated fingers in children.

The criteria for this to happen are that just the tip of the finger be lost – the region from the fingernail down to the very first joint – and that the child be under eleven years of age. If the finger is sliced below the first joint then regeneration does not take place. If the skin is stitched back over the cut the finger will also not grow back. Also, the younger the child the quicker is the regrowth.

A small number of physicians took up this technique but further research was not funded. The term 'stem cell' is now in common use and this regeneration is the amazing ability of cells to not only differentiate from being a stem cell to one specific type, such as bone or cartilage or blood, but the ability for some cells to dedifferentiate from a specific type back into stem cells and then transform themselves into a different cell type. In the 1970's this was considered heretical, but even today the non-invasive techniques pioneered by Becker have been left to rot.

The Body Electric is a great book about what it is like to be a real scientist in pursuit of knowledge to help humanity. The grand thesis is that we are not just flesh and bones but also a complex and subtle electromagnetic system. The regeneration of a child's fingertip was proof that humans and salamanders had some common mechanisms. Becker was able to heal severely broken bones that would not heal naturally by the simple stimulation with a very low electric current. He was also able to destroy bacterial infections without antibiotics using similar methods. Read the book – it is eye-opening stuff.

Such simple yet powerful techniques should by now be in widespread use. Sadly they are not. We can all speculate on what vested interests are served by using complex surgery and pharmaceuticals instead of gently stimulating the body electric.

Twitter Tweak Ruffles Feathers

2009-05-13T04:17:00.000-07:00

A small tweak in Twitter's default settings has many users up in arms. Most newbies will probably not even know what all the fuss is about.

Before the recent change, the default setting for what you could see included tweets between two people if you were already following both of them, but not if you were just following one of them. However, Twitter did include the option of changing this default to allow users to see all the correspondence sent out by those they were following. For many, this was too much stream of consciousness, but others enjoyed watching a whole debate develop. This latter option has been removed!

What this also does is remove the more serendipitous nature of finding people with common interests and views. It is often the case that seeing a reply from A to B - where you're following A - will lead to looking at B's profile and possibly thereby following B as well. The new changes mean this will happen less. The full feed is available if one goes to A's user profile or the global timeline, but that isn't the best way of using Twitter.

Nobody seems entirely sure why Twitter has done this. Bandwidth problems?! But the Twitter management is now finding their communication tool being directed at them.

Get Paid to be a "Go Game" Actor or Plant

2009-05-13T03:12:00.000-07:00

"Have you always dreamed of soaring through a city in a Batman suit? Do you practice your pirate accent daily in your eye patch and boots? Does the idea of dressing up like a 70's gym teacher and leading people in aerobics sound like the time of your life?

If you enjoy being the center of attention and showing people a good time, The Go Game is looking for you! We are constantly hiring fun, reliable, talented people to act in our games in locations all over the USA, UK and Europe."

The Go Game is a cutting-edge company that helps other companies succeed through innovative, technology-driven team building games. At the core of all of our products is the belief that technology should facilitate real, meaningful interactions that foster creativity, collaboration and above all, fun.

If this sounds like your kind of insanity then go to either The Go Game USA or The Go Game UK for more details.

Playboy Has No Clothes

2009-05-11T22:41:00.000-07:00

The Playboy business is going into freefall. To pull out of this, Playboy are going to increase prices and print fewer copies of the flagship magazine. Smart Bunnies!

from TechCrunch.

Would you pay to read online newspapers?

2009-05-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

Rupert Murdoch expects to start charging for access to News Corporation's newspaper websites within a year. 'The current days of the internet will soon be over,' he said, as the media strived to fix a 'malfunctioning' business model. Would you pay to read papers online?

The sub-headline from The Guardian says it all. For Murdoch 'free' is a nasty four-letter word and he will do everything in his power to turn the internet into a money-grabbing mirror of his off-line businesses. Just have a look at his media interests, from The Times, The Sun and Sky in the UK to Fox Network and Dow Jones in the USA, and many many more. Oh yeah, he owns MySpace too.

Just don't become dependent on any one platform in case you're suddenly trapped into paying for the privilege or closing your account. The internet is changing from the idealist information superhighway to the social web 2.0 to the corporate pay-per-net. But without users these sites have no influence and hence little advertising. This will be a great test to see how fast people will flee from a subscription news site. But, what if they don't?

Would you pay to read the news online? As newspapers have always sold a particular political spin, rather than any raw news, would you pay to read news that's spun to your liking?

Take our TrendWagon poll at the top-right corner of this page. (Closes 15 May 2009)

Crap Names For Pubs

2009-05-06T05:05:00.000-07:00

OK, you're bored, you're tired, you've had a hard day at work, or a hard night's sleep. What you want is some mindless amusement that still tickles a few braincells. Well, join the wags at Twitter to come up with some really crap names for pubs.

In the UK there is this trend for corporate pubs to come up with ever-more stupid names for their drinking dens.

The whole thing may indeed be funnier if you already have a bottle of your favourite tipple open. Cheers!

Every Intelligent Man Dreams of Being a Gangster

2009-05-06T02:43:00.000-07:00

The quote is from the French existentialist author Albert Camus:"The truth is that every intelligent man, as you know, dreams of being a gangster and of ruling over society by force alone."

Perhaps too many people cling on to their morals as an antidote to the news. As swine flu has infected our consciousness it has also sidelined the continuing financial crisis. But both are manifestations of the same covert quest for power and control.

Paul Farrell predicts the new film Public Enemies will be a big hit because it will tap into what many people would love to do to all those who have been ripping us off for years - be they bankers, politicians or pharmaceuticals.

Unfortunately, the truth is that it is us who are staring down the wrong end of the barrel. "Yes, this time the banks are the gangsters. They're robbing Main Street's Treasury. And it's an inside job. Hank Paulson, the "Goldman Conspiracy's" Trojan Horse, plays a "Dillinger," leading a much bigger conspiracy, the "Happy Conspiracy," that robbed America's 300 million citizens and taxpayers. They made off with trillions, while our "guards," a clueless Congress, laid down their guns and surrendered the keys to the vault."

Except that in our oh-so-civilized world we see no guns, no masks, no hold-ups - just the silent theft of our ration of freedoms. Whether it is the WHO or the SEC, the first lesson is that none of these organizations exist for your benefit; they are funded, often covertly, by people for whom your well-being is measured in how much profit you can make for them. The consequence is that your future depends on disempowering these public enemies of their trade.

Forget computer games, forget virtual reality, here is a game we can all play. The targets are shadows, behind which lurk real people with flesh and bile. But the shadows are worth chasing for without them the shadow-masters would have to step into the light of day. Remember how effective was the boycott against South African goods all those years ago? Yes, it was politically approved by the media, which made it easier, but it still shows the power of the masses when focussed.

We can all train our sights on these shadows that darken our lives. We all need to protect those dear to us. Camus was not so wide of the mark.

RSS RIP, Hail Twitter!

2009-05-05T23:58:00.000-07:00

I get the feeling that TechCrunch must have some pecuniary interest in Twitter as there is an almost daily propaganda piece. This article suggests the demise of RSS feeds as they will be overtaken by following tweets.

I think this is complete crap. Ever tried reading tweets? the joy of an RSS reader is being able to scan articles and pick what to read. If a full RSS feed you never even have to go to the originating site. Very unlike Twitter where one has to forever click to open a new page only to then discover whether it was worth reading or not.

What RSS doesn't do is facilitate a two-way (or group) chat on a topic. Then again, RSS is a syndication service and never designed to be a text messaging service. But I, for one, am not closing my RSS reader, whatever TechCrunch might believe.

Stephen Wolfram on Wolfram Alpha Knowledge Search Engine

2009-05-05T07:42:00.000-07:00

Wolfram Alpha will go public in May 2009. It has already been hyped as the first serious challenge to Google and traditional search engines. This may be true in the future but for now Wolfram has set his sights on making his computational knowledge engine do precisely what it claims to do - to turn the raw information on the web into real understandable knowledge.

Wolfram Alpha brings together two of Stephen's most famous products: Wolfram's Mathematica software and his work on cellular automata published in A New Kind of Science. Both are fundamentally about performing computations on formally defined structures - be they mathematical integrals or chaotic cellular systems. What would be really useful is to perform computations on knowledge structures as written in human language. After all, isn't this what computers were supposed to do?

This is where Wolfram Alpha is very different to our current batch of search engines. Rather than being just a sophisticated concordance of the web, this knowledge engine will turn plain text into human language structures, then convert these into computational language structures that can be queried, and finally turn the output back into a readable human form. Answering simple questions has never been so difficult!

Some techie websites have had access to this new Wolfram Alpha and are generally impressed, although keen to stress that this engine will have some limitations at first. The data it uses has been curated and will therefore expand only as fast as this process allows. Because of this, some think this is more likely to be a challenge to the likes of Wikipedia than to Google.

Now, this bit is impressive:"Another query with a very sophisticated result was "uncle's uncle's brother's son." Now if you type that into Google, the result will be a useless list of sites that don't even answer this specific question, but Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the 'blood relationship fraction,' for example (3.125% in this case)."

I, for one, look forward to tryin it out.

Happy Star Wars Day! May The Fourth Be With You!

2009-05-04T01:29:00.000-07:00

May the 4th is Star Wars Day.

Was the first Star Wars film released on 4 May 1977? Nope! The whole thing is one big joke based on a pun. The first film was actually released on 25 May 1977 and, believe it or not, the Los Angeles City Council declared this day in 2007 as Star Wars Day, thereby ruining the joke. But a good joke is hard to kill, and any excuse to replay the whole Star Wars saga.

May The Force Be With You!

There are supposed to be events marking this slightly tongue-in-cheek celebration - if you know of any then let us know. The alternative is to invite a few friends round and enjoy those DVDs!

Hamthrax - the unofficial new name for swine flu virus!

2009-05-01T22:57:00.000-07:00

As the swine flu hysteria turns hysterical, the good folks of the internet have been trying to help the World unHealth Organisation pin down a really good name for swine flu.

Israel was first off the starting blocks, complaining that as pork is not kosher then language itself has to be changed. In the tradition of blaming the wrong target they chose to call it Mexico flu. Can a virus be kosher?

The US administration has tried for days to ban the offensive "swine" from the media but without any effect. Calling it Baxter flu was off the menu.

Finally the WHO stepped in to officially call it the A(H1N1) virus. So what's wrong with pigs? They didn't rename avian flu. Actually, this isn't a rebranding but has been the scientific name for some time. However, it does hide the fact that this strain has 4 different genetic components.

One problem with suddenly renaming a virus with such public health spotlight is that most information will already have the "swine flu" tag, so people searching for A(H1N1) are likely to find less diverse information.

Anyway, into the breach steps the ever-inventive denizens of the internet with a better name: Hamthrax.

Great name! Can't trace where Hamthrax came from, but who cares - better than the mouth-twisting A(H1N1), right?

Can I Catch Swine Flu From Eating Parma Ham or Salami?

2009-04-29T09:06:00.000-07:00

In the grip of this virulent news meme known as swine flu there are some serious dietary questions that need to be considered.

Can I catch swine flu from eating pork products?

Not if you cook them properly, all the way through. The virus is destroyed above 160 F (85 C) so that even boiling it will kill any virus or bacteria that had made a comfortable home lodged in the flesh. The US Center for Disease Control is disingenuous here, firstly flatly stating that one cannot catch swine flu from any pork product, then covering its back saying best to cook it.

Can I catch swine flu from eating cured pork products like Parma ham and salami?

Good question; so much so that the Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma (Parma Ham Consortium) had to issue a public statement reassuring consumers that Parma ham was absolutely safe to eat. You can read it here, if you can read Italian.

The press release gave three reasons why their ham is safe to eat. Firstly, there is no research linking the swine flu virus with transmission through eating pork. True, but see the previous advice. Secondly, the designation "Parma Ham" - or more accurately "Prosciutto di Parma" - is a protected name with many rules and regulations regarding quality control, including the source of the pigs themselves. So, trust us, our pigs are healthy and safe to eat! However, the best reason is saved till last: that the curing process destroys any viruses that may have been present. Parma ham is cured for at least 12 months and from research done viruses die in such an environment after 3 to 6 months. Again, no research has been done on this particular swine flu virus.

So in some respects this is good news for Parma as it trumpets its own superior quality. As to other cured meats just make sure they've been cured for at least 6 months to be safe. Cooking Parma ham is a sheer waste of an expensive delicacy but one can quickly fry salami - slam in a couple of eggs and I've been told it's a popular breakfast in Mexico, of all places! Any product that is on the shelves at the moment is going to have been produced months if not years ago so is almost certainly safe. With regards to any pork product made by Smithfield Foods... erm... the decision is entirely yours!

Just hoping the price of Parma ham drops during this period.

Swine Flu Meme Spreading at the Speed of Panic

2009-04-28T21:18:00.000-07:00

Swine flu is this week's big hype. The information meme is spreading faster than the biological virus. This has all the symptoms of another engineered social experiment. As the viral meme is faster than the virus, one would hope that an informed public would act rationally and head off the virus at the next pass - wrong!

Here are a few facts.

Every year in the USA alone some 25-35,000 people die from flu - that's about 80 people every day. The corporate media are silent on this. Sure, these are largely old people and young children, the most vulnerable people to flu. I haven't yet found any data on how many of these deaths are actually due to flu vaccines, but that's another story.

So before swine flu is tagged as a "pandemic" it has to do a bit more outreach work. The media love "pandemics", with their end of the world connotations compared to the rather boring but more accurate "epidemics".

Swine flu symptoms are pretty much the same as any other human flu. Given the levels of panic, if you know of anybody with the sniffles then they should go to a doctor immediately rather than hanging around waiting for it to run its course. Remember, doctors always tell us that antibiotics do not work against the flu as it is caused by a virus rather than a bacterium.

Actually there are two products that are alleged by the Center for Disease Control (CDC) to work on this swine flu: oseltamivir and zanamivir. However, a look at research for oseltamivir (Tamiflu) is less than conclusive. A Vietnamese study conducted on avian flu victims concluded that the drug was "useless". The psychological and neuropsychatric problems from taking oseltamivir have been well-documented in Japan, the country that has swallowed the majority of the world's production of this drug. Self-harm and suicides have been documented, especially among younger patients. Roche's typically stone-walling response is that influenza itself may cause psychological problems. Yeah, sure, many people commit suicide after a few sneezes - the loss of balance during a sneeze can cause disorientation and an inability to see on-coming traffic!

Also, just take a step back... go on... slowly back away from the hype, the media, the government. Try it, it's good for the soul.

“It makes me think back to 1976, the first year I served in the Congress,” Ron Paul has said in a video update. “We had a vote on the swine flu. Back then there was panic, they said it was going to sweep the nation and they rapidly came up with some flu shots and the government was going to inoculate everybody and save the world from this disaster.”

“It turned out that our instincts were correct.” the Congressman, also a medical physician, commented. “… the flu came, the flu went and one person died, except for those individuals that died from getting the flu vaccine.” At the time, Ron Paul was one of only two Congressmen to vote down the vaccination program - just two! And note, most people died from the vaccine!

Read Swine Flu Expose by Eleanora I. McBean, PhD, ND.

"A radio newscast (Jan. 77) reported that one of the paralyzed swine flu victims has filed a $5,000,000 suit against the vaccine promoters for causing his paralysis in December of 1976. His suit is against the instigators of the flu epidemic scare, who are Dr. David Sencer of CDC (Center for Disease Control) who spearheaded the vaccine campaign, and Dr. Theodore Cooper of WHO (World Health Organization), the Health Departments which promoted the shots and the six drug houses making the swine flu vaccine. (Why not Ford also and his Congress who financed it?) His complaint was that they had put out propaganda promising that the vaccine had been thoroughly tested and was perfectly safe, and that the swine flu was contagious and people could die if they didn’t get vaccinated, and that they would be protected if they had the shots, and that the side effects, if any were "inconsequential."" Ring any bells?!

So what is an individual to do?

DON'T PANIC!

The numbers are really small - you can keep track of this "pandemic" at wikipedia. If you have flu symptoms then go the doctor sooner rather than later. There are enough medicines (on the assumption they work) to treat those with flu symptoms - there are not enough for a mass preventative prescription, although given the side-effects would you really want to? There are no vaccines yet for this particular strain.

If you think that face masks are going to be the new must-have fashion accessory than make sure they are certified N99 and not the cheaper off the shelf ones numbered N95. Is there a crime such as "coughing with intent to infect"?

If you're lucky the schools will close, the transport system will be empty and you can take a short holiday.

Stay alert but not alarmed.

You Might Be Rich! Find Out at Dateline NBC

2009-04-26T20:59:00.000-07:00

In the midst of a recession, unemployment and stock market turmoil it would be a dream come true if you suddenly discovered there was a pot of gold hidden away, just for you!

Dateline NBC avoids asking serious questions about the current wealth destruction by selling pipe dreams. Yes, there is unclaimed money lurking in various databases - not surprising as people move. Yes, probably worth a quick check... this is like a free lottery ticket, right?! Then most people can go back to figuring out what to do with their lives.

Seems like some people are still falling for the old scam that to get hold of your money you need to pay an agent. If nothing else, this programme should remind everyone that if there is a pot of gold with your name on it, then it's yours for free - no agent required.

Be Careful What You Blog - FBI Arrest Twitt

2009-04-26T20:15:00.000-07:00

A man from Oklahoma has been arrested for wild threats made against the authorities on Twitter.

Daniel Knight Hayden, 52, was arrested by FBI agents who identified him as the Twitter user CitizenQuasar. In a series of tweets beginning April 11, CitizenQuasar vowed to start a “war” against the government on the steps of the Oklahoma City Capitol building, the site of that city’s version of the national “Tea Party” protests promoted by the conservative-leaning Fox News.

His challenge to the authorities was: “Send the cops around. I will cut their heads off the[ir] heads and throw the[m] on the State Capitol steps.” Hayden’s MySpace page is filled with conspiracy and surveillance links - not in itself a crime given that so many governments are on the path of control by stealth.

Hayden was arrested at his home on the 15th April. He was arraigned on the 16th, and ordered released to a halfway house pending trial — a move that suggests the magistrate judge does not consider him a genuine threat. At least a judge showed some sanity as Hayden's rants have all the signs of mental instability.

But what is important here is that the authorities really do track the stream of words that are the internet. For anybody who thinks this is pure paranoia this is incontrovertible proof. When I wrote on flash mob techniques used by demonstrators - again using Twitter - I voiced my scepticism that this would be but a minor irritation to security forces as they too would be tracking the public messages. Keeping secrets secret needs to be a bit more ingenious.

The FBI have successfully added another non-entity to their War on Ghosts. But make sure you keep idle threats to yourself rather than blabbing them on the net - unless a visit from the feds will brighten up an otherwise dull day.

Downloaders of Free Music Are Also the Most Likely to Pay Too

2009-04-25T00:50:00.000-07:00

This bit of news is no news at all if one looks all the way back to vinyl records. The people most likely to download from free P2P services are also the very same people most likely to pay for new music. People who enjoy music... enjoy music! People will pay for what they feel is worth paying.

I can remember the days of vinyl records and cassette tapes. Friends would each buy a record and then make copies for each other. The simple fact is that we couldn't individually afford to buy the whole collection. Without the tapes we would probably each have the same number of records. Both mediums were lossy, in that records got scratched and tape quality deteriorated over time. Those same people paid to upgrade to CD when they became available - Dark Side of the Moon being the most famous example. Now those same people have the same music downloaded to their MP3 player. How many times must one pay for the same song?

The research now says exactly the same thing as it did back in those analogue days. Music lovers will have a mixture of paid and copied content. Remove the copied content and they will not necessarily pay for it. The real problem globally is in those countries where apparently genuine products are actually themselves copies. But why go for the real targets when music corporations can try to make individuals feel like criminals?

And by doing so they alienate their fans even further. Music lovers enjoy the music, they don't really care what the record label is. There is further research showing that online sales are growing especially in the direct channels with musicians and fans enjoying a closer relationship and therefore bypassing the music industry channels.

As technology increases the distribution of the creative arts so corporations always try to grab back control to further their profits. Nobody will remember this, but there was a time when there was no recorded music - everything was live, or silence ruled. Enjoy the music!

Geocities and Compuserve to Close - do you care?

2009-04-23T09:18:00.000-07:00

Yahoo has finally decided to bury its dreadful Geocities free websites. Finally! If I see a URL with geocities in it I generally avoid it. To be assaulted by their crappy adverts and pop-ins on every page is just no fun. With the growth of blogs there really is no excuse for anyone to use such a user-unfriendly service. Surprised it has taken Yahoo so long to bury this great idea from the 1990s.

Compuserve is also adding itself to the dinosaur graveyard. I'm not even sure what their primary objective is these days. I remember it from the days of private networks like AOL, CIX (even the URL cix.com is parked!) Claranet and so on. The idea was to dial into the network and you then got access to whole internet as part of the package. I never saw the point. perhaps London has been fortunate in always having cheap no-thrills direct internet access. These companies should have gone into managing corporate intranets.

I can't say I'll miss either Geocities or Compuserve. Will you?

YouTube Goes RealTime - Get an Invitation and Share Videos Live

2009-04-22T23:28:00.000-07:00

YouTube has a new real-time product that adds an extra social layer to YouTube, allowing friends to share the videos they’re watching with each other in real time, without having to turn to outside chat programs or Twitter.

Before now, there was no particularly good reason to create friends on YouTube apart from subscribing to new uploads from a user whose videos you liked. The viral marketing of YouTube videos generally took place off-site through instant messaging, Twitter and social bookmarking websites. All that has now changed.

RealTime appears as a toolbar at the bottom of every YouTube page. The Online Friends tab shows which videos your friends are currently watching. It also allows you to send an invitation to come and watch the video you are currently watching. This invitation will pop up on their screen - and this feature can be turned off if annoying - thereby allowing instant sharing of videos.

RealTime is still in public beta and YouTube are using an invitation system, similar to the early days of Gmail, to spread the word. Every user to get invited gets 25 invites of their own. This means that as of now you'll need to beg for an invitation! This seems a strange marketing method but, on second thoughts, I wonder if this is also a way to test the system as it grows exponentially.

So... if you have a spare invite please post it below or, perhaps easier, if you want an invite just post your YouTube username and beg! :-)

What's a Freegan?

2009-04-19T06:02:00.000-07:00

Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed.

After years of trying to boycott products from unethical corporations responsible for human rights violations, environmental destruction, and animal abuse, many of us found that no matter what we bought we ended up supporting something deplorable. We came to realize that the problem isn’t just a few bad corporations but the entire system itself.

The word freegan is compounded from “free” and “vegan”. Vegans are people who avoid products from animal sources or products tested on animals in an effort to avoid harming animals. Freegans take this a step further by recognizing that in a complex, industrial, mass-production economy driven by profit, abuses of humans, animals, and the earth abound at all levels of production (from acquisition to raw materials to production to transportation) and in just about every product we buy.

Perhaps the most notorious freegan strategy is what is commonly called “urban foraging” or “dumpster diving”. This technique involves rummaging through the garbage of retailers, residences, offices, and other facilities for useful goods. Despite our society’s stereotypes about garbage, the goods recovered by freegans are safe, usable, clean, and in perfect or near-perfect condition, a symptom of a throwaway culture that encourages us to constantly replace our older goods with newer ones, and where retailers plan high-volume product disposal as part of their economic model.

Product Planner Maps Out How Popular Sites Function

2009-04-19T02:11:00.000-07:00

When it comes to building a website, one of the key factors in establishing a sizable user base is your site’s ability to ‘go viral’. While there isn’t any magic secret to accomplishing this, there are a few things that can help - namely, making it as easy as possible for your users to sign up, and helping them invite their friends. But this is easier said than done, and determining exactly how to implement these seemingly obvious steps can play a huge role in a site’s success.

Product Planner, a new site that launched this week, is looking to help companies tackle this issue. The site has visually mapped out over 100 ‘flows’ that visually depict exactly how many of the web’s most popular services operate. For example, Gmail’s signup flow consists of inviting a visitor to first click ‘Sign Up for Gmail’, followed by a form asking for information, and finally a confirmation button that says ’show me my account’. It may sound simple, but being able to see each of these side by side can be invaluable when it comes to actually building your site. (TC)

Easy! A great tool for webmasters. However, what is more important than knowing the flow structure is that the user actually has that flow visibly available. Hugely irritating signing up for something to then find there is another page of crap to fill in! Knowing it in advance means one can decide whether to go ahead. Of course, for some sites getting the user stuck in the flow is part of their... erm... charm.

Having said that, Product Planner does little to show its depths. Navigation is largely iconic and only by clicking deeper do you find out that there links to useful articles about specific aspects of the flow; be it about viral marketing or click through rates. So, ironically, it's not just about flow, but also about looking down at the plumbing.

The Pirate Bay Found Guilty

2009-04-17T08:41:00.000-07:00

The four co-founders of website The Pirate Bay have been found guilty of assisting the distribution of illegal content online by a Swedish court today and have been sentenced to a year in jail and a $3.6m (£2.4m) fine.

"Stay calm – nothing will happen to TPB, us personally or filesharing what so ever. This is just a theatre for the media," said one of the founders. They all plan to appeal. This seems like the kind of verdict where everyone claims some kind of victory and yet nobody is entirely happy.

Thing is, can't the charge of "assisting making available copyrighted content" be levelled at search engines too? What about Usenet? Anyway, with servers in Russia it is unlikely the corporate media will try a similar trial there. They actually held a party in Moscow to "celebrate". Why were they celebrating?

A nice timeline of the whole Pirate bay trial is here at Dipity.

Population Growth and Fertility Controls

2009-04-17T05:07:00.000-07:00

This tempered voice from Thomas Kostigen pours some tepid water on the propaganda advocating population control. Sir David Attenborough, the well-known naturalist, came out in support of the Optimum Population Trust - a think tank that believes there are just too many people (themselves excluded, no doubt). Kostigen begs to differ and points out some of the inaccuracies in the models used to sustain what is essentially a neo-eugenics movement masquerading as an environmental cause.

"The Optimum Population Trust is a registered charity funded by membership, donations and bequests. It receives no political or government funding and is independent of political or commercial interests." At £15 a year basic membership that doesn't buy a lot of thinking, but a list of members and hence funders is currently unavailable.

The ghost that haunts this topic is that of the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. Although he died in 1834 sadly his treatise "An Essay on the Principle of Population" didn't die with him and is summoned by every innumerate eugenicist ever since. "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man. Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will show the immensity of the first power in comparison with the second." A better acquaintance with numbers would reveal how hollow the whole treatise is. Note that this is not a scientific theory but a hugely simplistic mathematical model based on... contemporary propaganda.

The Rev Malthus was a clergyman with little faith in humanity and a lot of faith in the power of money. He wanted more money given to the Church so that it could preach to the poor about how worthless they really were, except in the eyes of God. His treatise was to give a scientific veneer to a policy promoting Christian sexual morals - family planning being the current euphemism.

Kostigen challenges the model but not its creator. The infantile mathematical model is just not true. The declining birth rates in many industrialised countries shows how social changes affect population numbers, with much of the numerical growth coming from immigrants rather than indigenous births. The Malthusian "axiom" that populations grow geometrically, is just plainly false.

But the Optimum Population Trust likes to look at the other half of the Malthusian fantasy - the food supply. Even that cannot hope to increase arithmetically forever. One stark statistic noted in the article is that if everyone on the planet consumed as much energy as the average American then we would need five planet Earths! I don't know where the author got that figure from but, suspending disbelief and assuming it were true, surely that calls for a spirit of innovation, not a culling of humanity.

The thing that makes me highly sceptical is that there is a lot of important research on energy that is getting very little funding. I have written before on how Shell has pulled the plug on its alternative energy research. The drive towards biofuels rather than electric or hydrogen cars is taking more and more land away from food production. So is the much-feared food shortage actually being manipulated? Is this population control by stealth? We shall see, but if laws to curb the population were already in place then perhaps you wouldn't be here to read this. Malthus needs to be buried again!

Ashton Kutcher Overtakes CNN on Twitter

2009-04-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

A marketing dream for Twitter, for Ashton Kutcher and, almost by accident, for CNN. With prizes now on offer to the millionth follower of either Kutcher or CNN, what was a genuine phenomenon has been turned into a manufactured competition. Thing is, one cannot now unfollow either of them.

This last aspect just illustrates how artificial the race has become. Many commenters at TechCrunch seem to think this is a good idea and that by not allowing users to unfollow these Twitts it avoids a mad frenzy of people quickly following and unfollowing in the desperate hope of being that one millionth follower. But this is completely dumb! All that will happen - and most probably already is - is that people will create multiple user accounts and follow both with each new account. Watch the followers plummet after the competition is over.

Surely Twitter's database is not so fragile that they can't figure out the millionth user from a simple query, even if people follow and unfollow quickly? It smells to me like a way to speed up reaching the million mark before people get bored. Twitter might have a problem counting up to a million as one screenshot shows CNN already having 1,963,482 followers, which one assumes is a million too many but also highlights a counting issue.

Why is Ashton Kutcher so popular? Yeah, I looked up who he is in the vain hope of an interesting celebrity. I guess one moral lesson is to use your psychological problems to make a career in the media rather than in prison.

Which Films Are Better Second Time Around?

2009-04-14T08:52:00.000-07:00

Xan Brooks, a film blogger on The Guardian, has asked this same question a second time around, perhaps trying to achieve some fractal structure, or more likely just forgot. Anyway, it remains an interesting enough topic that it can be recycled ad nauseam.

My first real problem here, however, is why would anybody watch a film a second time if they didn't like it on first viewing? So the chances of this happening are serendipitous at best; perhaps a friend or partner wants to watch it and you don't have the conviction to pick something else, or possibly it's on TV and the remote control has gone AWOL. Whatever the reason, I suspect this scenario is fairly rare. Having said that, its rarity value may well make such events more memorable. Watching a film with someone who is enjoying it may shine a new light on it... or on your friend. So which films come out better after a second viewing?

The above blog has a lot of votes for Starship Troopers, which I can relate to. The film's satirical undercurrent often gets blasted away by action scenes, not unlike Robocop and Total Recall - all of them by Paul Verhoeven. Films are often sold as something that they are not, thereby misdirecting one's expectations. Once the disappointment evaporates then perhaps one can re-view the film without the marketing lenses.

I tend to avoid big budget, over-hyped films with a linear storyline as I just expect them to be puffed up like candy floss and bad for my teeth. Indeed the three Star Wars prequels come into this category. I grew up with the first three so telling us how it all began is just a very long and dull journey into the obvious. I later decided to give up on the thin story and to just enjoy the special effects. The Lord of the Rings trilogy is similar in that the crust has been cut off the plot and then filled with long tedious battle scenes - what happened to the relationship between the two magicians? These films seem to make more sense watching them with children, so assume that was the target audience. In contrast, the Harry Potter films have just enough wit and cleverness to keep the adults awake.

I didn't say this was going to be easy! But which films have you grown to appreciate after hating them on first viewing?

NASA to Launch New Module Name on Comedy Show

2009-04-14T07:42:00.000-07:00

NASA is to officially name its new node for the International Space Station on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, being screened later tonight in the US. Over a million people voted, with the whole marketing effort gaining momentum after being featured on Stephen Colbert's show.

NASA's own preferred name was "Serenity" but this has been relegated to the foothills of second place. NASA astronaut Sunita Williams is appearing on Stephen Colbert's show tonight to announce the new name. Some uncharitable souls have speculated that the new ISS module's toilet might be named after Colbert. "I certainly hope NASA does the right thing," said Colbert. "Just kidding, I hope they name it after me."

A marketing success for NASA and a marketing coup for Comedy Central. That's what it takes to push science into the celebrity market. Perhaps next time they should auction the name and sell advertising space on the module. Will the astronauts Twitter from space?

Goldman Sucks Blog Threatened With Legal Action

2009-04-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

Good to see that bankers Goldman Sachs has its priorities in order. Not satisfied with needing to beg the US government for taxpayer money to stop it from becoming history, it has chosen to use some of those funds to attack a blogger.

Mike Morgan is a registered investment adviser who just a few weeks ago opened the site goldmansachs666.com to push Goldman gripes and a selection of conspiracy theories. In response, Goldman Sucks has employed its rather expensive lawyers to send a cease and desist notice warning Morgan that he faces legal action if the blog is not taken down.

Although the blog has a huge disclaimer at the top, Goldman insists that the use of their name will cause confusion amongst its clients. This shows in what high regard Goldman holds its own clients. There are a few good posts and links on the blog - grab them before they disappear.

UK Teachers Press For Wi-fi Ban in Schools

2009-04-11T20:02:00.000-07:00

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers called for classroom wireless networks to be suspended immediately until research has properly considered the threat to health.

Members said they were concerned by scientific reports linking wi-fi with impaired concentration, loss of short-term memory, chromosome damage and increased incidence of cancer, reports the MailOnline.

The ATL cited research from Sweden, where the government funds shielding agents, and Austria, where a government scientist has called for wi-fi to be removed from schools. As always, once new technology is introduced it becomes difficult to remove, with some 70% of UK secondary schools, and half the primary schools, having already installed wi-fi systems.

However, one disturbing trend I'm finding is the sanctimonious ignorance of the vast majority of commenters. These people claim to know so much about science but instead of thinking through the problem they come up with glib excuses. Most of the arguments could be lifted straight from the corporate denialist handbook. Just search for 'electromagnetic resonance' and even 'electromagnetic hypersensitivity'. Science propaganda works just as effectively as political propaganda.

What the teachers have really asked for is that the government initiates and funds some much-needed proper research. This is merely in line with the European parliament which has serious misgivings about the whole area of electromagnetic pollution and especially pulsed digital signals.

Celebrity Pseudo-Science Exposed... kinda!

2009-04-11T11:27:00.000-07:00

"Behold, the most serious challenge to the Royal Society in that august body's 350-year history - the medical musings of Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow and Stella McCartney. These women are not just singers, or actresses, or fashion designers. They are distinguished professors at the University of Celebrity, and are coating your understanding of science like a totally amazing organic body oil.

On top of this, they are best friends, so we can say their pronouncements are peer-reviewed in the best sense of that term. Can you imagine their gatherings? It must be as if Isaac Newton were taking antioxidant tea with Robert Koch and Marie Curie." Strident stuff from Marina Hyde.

OK, we've got the picture, now where's the organic meat on the bone? Madonna's Kabbalah water... yep, that's flakey! "And then there's Stella, who launched her organic skincare range with the warning that "lots of skin products use the same petrochemicals as the antifreeze in your car!", and is one of those celebrities who thinks they eat "chemical-free" food and use "chemical-free" products. I beg you not to tell her that water and trees are made of chemicals. The shock could finish her off." Here Marina Hyde is on shakier ground. Surely anybody but the purest pedant knows that "chemicals" here stands as a short-hand for synthetic and most likely toxic chemicals. Yes, everything is made up of chemicals, it's just that some of them are not very good for human beings.

So what's Gwyneth Paltrow's crime? Well, her concern is, yet again, those nasty chemicals and the inability for young children and foetuses to metabolise them. "The research is troubling; the incidence of diseases in children such as asthma, cancer and autism have shot up exponentially ..." Hyde yet again shoots down our celeb by stating that "there has been very little change in the rate of childhood cancers detected in recent years". How "recent" is that then Professor Hyde? So the impression given is that we shouldn't worry ourselves about the environment being polluted to the point that it is unfit for human habitation. After all, our scientists are doing a jolly good job looking after us, so these celebs should just get back into character and stop impersonating science writers.

Science Punk also quotes the above story but adds that Kelly Osbourne believes that microwave ovens cause cancer. How we laugh at such superstitious nonsense! Except that the Soviet Union banned the sale of domestic microwave ovens because of their carcinogenic effects. Once the FSU turned capitalist they dropped the ban as sales are more important than health.

What strikes me is that most of these celebs are unable to properly articulate any science that they may have learnt and so it comes out as opinionated ramblings. Most of their concerns have legitimate scientific research to back them up - apart from Madonna, who is just morphing into a new species. That they may not always be mainstream views shows the power of corporate science rather than that those concerns are unfounded.

also posted at A World Beyond Belief.

Where Are My Western Friends?

2009-04-11T08:30:00.000-07:00

Mikheil Saakashvili, the Georgian president, is a man under seige. With Russia nibbling away at its border and seemingly also funding the current wave of domestic protests, Saakashvili is also ruing his faith in America.

At the time of the fighting in South Ossetia I did wonder whether the Georgians were pushed into the conflict. A few things just didn't ring true. Blackwater was conducting exercises there at the time, supposedly helping Georgian forces. Always good to find news reports close to the event, before there is time for the editorial hand to spin a convincing narrative. Russian reports had found Blackwater troops had been killed in the fighting. Also, if you or I had planned such a manoeuvre we would have looked at all the possible Russian responses and our counter-measures. But footage at the time showed a president running for his life - scared and clueless. Maybe, just maybe, he really didn't know what was going on.

Speculations, sure, but look at the situation now. Georgia's attempts to join both the European Union and NATO are in the slow lane. Saakashvili can rightly feel let down by his Western friends. Some accommodating agreement between Russia and the USA has obviously taken place and Georgia must be feeling like a rather minor player in a much bigger game. However, the Newsweek interview given by Saakashvili has a few revealing nuggets, especially about who his Western friends truly are.

"Of course, my best friend was always John McCain. You can say he is Georgian already. We expect McCain to come and visit us in a week or so. I have good relationships with Hillary Clinton, Joseph Biden and especially Richard Holbrooke—he is my teacher. I learned a lot of great things from him."

Richard Holbrooke! The same Richard Holbrooke who is currently United States Special Envoy for Oil - sorry, for Afghanistan and Pakistan. The same Richard Holbrooke who was on the Board of Directors of AIG for seven years until July 2008. The Georgian President should reflect on his choice of friends.

There is also a wise saying from Machiavelli: keep your friends close, and your enemies closer still. He seems to have done neither.

Bigorexia - Blame Charles Atlas

2009-04-11T05:33:00.000-07:00

If you thought obsessing over one's body image was a largely female occupation, then think again. Bigorexia is both a big business and a big problem. Sometimes referred to as reverse anorexia, people suffering from bigorexia obsess over their muscle tone and dream of being Charles Atlas.

The medical term muscular dysmorphia was coined in 1997 to describe this new form of obsessive compulsive disorder. Most researchers seem to blame the media's own obsession with promoting infeasible standards of beauty coupled with an individual's own poor self-image. I think there is also a large element of drug addiction here - an addiction to the endorphins released during strenuous exercise. One study suggests abnormal serotonin levels, so such individuals find it difficult to chill out. Strangely, many sufferers of bigorexia also suffer from depression so that what started out as a way of looking good ends up as an obsession that one will never look good enough.

Building those bulging muscles is not very difficult to achieve - just look around the weights room of any gym. I was into it many years ago as an antidote to a sedentary lifestyle but soon realised that it had the potential to become addictive. I stopped. Those with bigorexia just can't.

The guy below has gone way past the body beautiful and heading towards Hulk territory. Next time you see a muscle-bound hunk think about whether they're really happy or not.

Best Surgery Videos on YouTube (not in the least bit gory... honestly!)

2009-04-09T10:38:00.001-07:00

Who needs medical school any more? You can now watch the world's surgeons do their thing from the comfort of your laptop.

From open-heart surgery to amputations, sex-change operations to autopsies, the operating rooms of the world have gone online. One website, OR-Live, regularly broadcasts live from the O.R. For example, tune in next week to watch a hysterectomy. These broadcasts, and dozens of other videos posted to YouTube, draw hundreds of thousands of viewers. We've got four words for you: advertising-supported health care.

For your voyeuristic pleasure, Wired has compiled what they bill as the "10 Gory Surgical triumphs on YouTube". They also go out of their way to forewarn the viewer that "some of these are grisly, and all of them are graphic." This is after all, surgery we're talking about, not a visit to the physio (which can also be grisly), so why the melodrama? Did any Wired writers faint on the job? It's humans on display - we're allowed to ooze on an operating table stuff we wouldn't be proud of in public.

Having said that I'm sure the one everybody wants to watch is the sex-change operation, so why should I disappoint...

Retail Anarchy

2009-04-09T07:48:00.000-07:00

Now, this is the kind of random stuff I like to find: an anti-trend setter added to the trend-setting noise. Retail Anarchy is a blog about the follies of consumerism and the desperate attempts by companies to turn lame products into lifestyle choices.

Sam Pocker is an author, film-maker, and tours the country as a “Stand-Up Economist”. Alex is from St. Petersburg, Russia, and has lived in America for 10 years. His place on the show comes from his mutual love of a bargain, and his frustration with the typical “I want it all” American consumerism. The other partners in crime can be found at the blog.

One irony is that Retail Anarchy also have a product to sell: their book of the same name. But what the hell, people have to live! The blog seems to have struck stardom as Ari Shapiro interviewed Sam Pocker on NPR.

Great timing, as consumers on limited budgets seek discounts, freebies, special deals - basically anything that drives the price of products down to something reasonable. If you're a pro at this you may even be able to drive the price down to the point where it hurts the company. They think they're buying future loyalty whereas you'll do the same again in the future. A product is a product, you either like it or you don't, you either want it or you don't. In the future you may want something different.

In the spirit of Retail Anarchy don't waste your money on the book, just read the blog and listen to the radio show.

How the Date for Easter is Calculated

2009-04-09T05:52:00.000-07:00

In contrast to Christmas, which always takes place on a fixed day, Easter has always been a movable feast. Christian Easter and the Jewish Passover are intimately linked and their calculation is very similar - the differences are now largely due to the differences in the Gregorian and Hebrew calendars but the fundamental ideas remain the same. Indeed, in most languages other than English the word for Easter is a derivation of Passover - the latinate adjective 'paschal' illustrates this link.

To calculate the date on which Easter falls using the Western Gregorian calendar is relatively straight-forward. Firstly, take the 21st March as the ecclesiastical vernal equinox. Then find when the first full moon occurs after this date; yet again, for calculation purposes this is taken as the 14th day of the lunar month. Then just find the first Sunday after this full moon: that will be Easter Sunday.

If one dispenses with the above protocols and uses up to date astronomical data then Easter will still fall on the same day for the vast majority of years as the Gregorian calendar adjusts itself to keep as closely as possible to the solar cycle.

I will pass over the theological links between Judaism and Christianity, save to say that some form of spring celebration has always been held, even in pagan times. The Anglo-Saxon word for Easter, being derived from a fertility goddess, and also the root of the name of hormone oestrogen, illustrates how Christian Europe adapted a celebration that already existed. After all, bunny rabbits and eggs seem to have little to do with Christianity and a lot to do with fertility.

In 2010, Easter Sunday will fall on April 4 for both Western and Eastern churches. This year, 2009, Easter is on April 12 for Western Christianity and on April 19 for the Orthodox Churches.

Aggregated Assault by Online Newspapers

2009-04-08T06:04:00.000-07:00

It's difficult to compete with free! But this is the challenge facing newspaper owners. William Dean Singleton, a newspaper publisher and chairman of the Associated Press, says online news aggregators are making him "mad as hell and we are not going to take it any more." reports MarketWatch. Such targets include the likes of Google and Digg, who are accused of linking to news stories without paying.

Firstly, news websites have RSS feeds for free. Why don't they just remove them? If Google is such a menace then they could block their spiders in their robots.txt file. But Google claims to send a billion clicks a month to originating news sources from their news aggregator. I guess Singleton and his rags could go get that traffic elsewhere. News aggregators are straw men set up by stuffed men. The real problem is supposedly the whole business model of paying for news.

Before the internet most people would buy a daily newspaper. If you worked or frequented a place that would buy all that day's newspapers then you could read a variety of versions of the same story and then make up your own mind. But for most people this wasn't the case. Over time they would stick to one, or maybe two, papers that they liked - newspapers that had the same world view as the reader. But this is the point: it is an illusion that newspapers sell news - what they sell is a social perspective on the news.

What newspapers sell is a spin on the news to further a particular social and political, even economic, point of view. News aggregators obviously in no way dilute the news; if anything they magnify what is popular. But what aggregators are doing is diluting the spin. A single reader may end up on a dozen different originating news websites, each for a different story. The coherent spin is thereby lost. That's what newspapers want back - their spin-wagon.

Let's see how their "business model" will adapt to this internet landscape whilst reclaiming their influence as propaganda organs. I've said this before, but it puts a new light on why newspapers, in the shape of media companies, are buying into the social networking model. It also shows why the ultimate owners of many media companies have nothing to do with entertainment per se. It is not just the obvious advertising to get you to buy products, but the content itself is advertising to make you buy into their world view.

Kutner Suicide Sparks House Search

2009-04-06T21:38:00.000-07:00

Nothing like a suicide to get tongues wagging and fingers tapping as the American portion of the internet seems to have erupted in a frenzy of speculation about the death a TV character. Lawrence Kutner (played by Kal Penn) committed suicide in tonight's episode of House, the immensely popular medical series starring Hugh Laurie as the sarcastic and brilliant doctor.

Good news for the producing network, Fox, but are plot stunts the best way to give oxygen to a series running out of puff? I like House. I've watched it since it was first aired in the UK. An inspired, and rare, character for mainstream television with all the flaws and successes of an eccentric genius inflicted upon patients who expect a tranquillizing bedside manner. But is it just me, or has the writing been going downhill for a long time? Stealing the format of The Apprentice felt lame and I looked forward to fast-forwarding all those obvious competitive clichés. The Apprentice itself works on a voyeuristic level because they are real people. The same format in a scripted series smells like writers without a clue.

Since then we have been subjected to a confusion of characters. House's old team has not left but breeze in and out like ghosts, meaning that the new team has not had a chance to lay claim to their characters. The question being dangled in front of the audience is whether the previous team would return, but isn't this just too obvious? We know Robert Chase, Allison Cameron and Eric Foreman; give the others a chance. Instead we're inflicted with Foreman hanging around like nemesis. House has a living team and a shadow team - perhaps a psychoanalytic metaphor but I don't think it works.

When you get the chance, have a look again at the first series. The writing was generally strong and the use of hallucinations, dreams and fantasies to manufacture faux suspense was not needed. Bring back some of the original writers like John Mankiewicz, or get the current writers to watch again why the series became a hit.

Super-Thermite Explosive Found in 9/11 WTC Dust Demolishing the Official Report

2009-04-05T14:56:00.000-07:00

The mother of all smoking guns has been unearthed by scientists investigating the dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center collapse.

Published in the Open Chemical Physics Journal, no doubt a scientific journal unused to being headline news, Steven E. Jones and Niels Harrit make a stark and sombre discovery: that within the dust and rubble of the World Trade Center towers lies evidence of "a highly engineered explosive," contrary to all federal studies of the collapses. (Raw Story)

They claim their analysis has uncovered "active thermitic material": a combination of elemental aluminum and iron oxide in form of thermite known as "nanostructured super-thermite."

Thermite, used in steel welding, fireworks shows, hand grenades and demolition, can produce a chemical reaction known for extremely high temperatures focused in a very small area for a short period of time.

The sheer cost of super-thermite has limited its use to the defence industry and "is restricted under the International Traffic in Arms Regulation (ITAR), which controls the export and import of defense-related material and services."

This is going to have every investigator into the 9/11 scam jumping for joy. And great to see that not all scientists have been bought off by the authorities.

Flashmob Rules

2009-04-05T12:34:00.000-07:00

In the wake of the G20 and NATO meetings there has been much froth in the online press about how social media tools are helping demo organizers to mobilize forces quickly. The term "flashmobbing" arose from the use of text messaging to quickly bring together a group of people to some event, such as a secret party. The term is now being used by demonstrators using sites such as Twitter and Facebook to announce rendezvous points just minutes before the expected swarm.

Twitter in particular, as a kind of online text messaging service, has grabbed much of the attention. However, once hooked, the demand for instant updates means that the twitters feel the need to transmit the most minuscule details of the experience, such as the desire for a nice hot cup of tea! Yes, there is serious stuff too, but just take a look at... picked at random, Comandante Flops and Climate Camp. I think it's great that organizers have that level of contact with people who come out and support them but the police are only one step behind. A group of police tweeters is going to be following every message and every move that hits the net. Public support requires public information. Hence, a secret demonstration isn't going to erupt unless the police are asleep on the job.

But just as the police record every incident with myriad cameras, including helicopter footage, so as to analyse mob dynamics, so the demonstrators should analyse police response dynamics. But then again, that's no doubt why it is now an offence to photograph a police officer in the UK. It can still be done covertly. Let the cat-and-mouse games commence in earnest.

Woman Found Dead After 18 Months as Nobody Noticed

2009-04-05T04:30:00.000-07:00

Mary Sue Merchant died of natural causes in a tightly locked house on 25 acres in a small community in Orangeburg, South Carolina, with only a dog for company. Now her small town is reflecting on why no one noticed for 18 months.

Nobody knew the reclusive widow was gone — not even when the house was sold for back taxes while her decomposing body lay inside. Sometime later, the lonely dog died of thirst in the same room. This is indeed astonishing. The woman's phone was cut off, her lack of a tax return was noted, her house was put up for auction and sold but... all of this was done without anybody setting foot inside the property.

Yes, of course, the community is now bemoaning it's own lack of real community spirit. The police were also deeply apologetic, saying that they do make regular visits to about 200 old people known to be living alone but that in this case the woman was just not in their records. This person just fell through society's social cracks. Sad, but what is scary is how much damage can be done to a person without them even knowing it. With all the data being collected by governments against the war on ghosts - aka war on terrorism - this just shows that none of it is for the citizen's benefit.

If you're going to drop out of the government's matrix, make sure to do it properly.

Excited About Higgs Excitations

2009-04-04T03:19:00.000-07:00

When was the last time an obscure bit of particle physics flashed into popular culture? Oh yeah, the Large Hadron Collider, with all the talk of God particles and Armageddon. Hence was surprised to find "Higgs excitation" bubbling up on Google trends. A new discovery, perhaps? Nah... just a geeky comic strip!

But if you're not mathematically challenged then XKCD has some funny cartoons. Rather hit and miss, but then so is a Higgs boson.

Just as a little info-bite, when physicists refer to the Higgs boson as being a massive particle they do not mean that it is huge in size, but rather that it has mass, or rather rest-mass. This is in contrast to, say, a photon of light which has no rest-mass and exists only in motion. In a very loose analogy this is somewhat like a ball being carried away by the wind. The wind only exists in motion - when it stops it disappears. But the ball, which is massive, still exists when it stops moving. Like I said, a loose analogy!

Demi Moore Twitters to Avoid Suicide

2009-04-04T02:51:00.000-07:00

Twitter has been credited with potentially saving somebody's life, after actress Demi Moore used it to intervene in the case of a woman who claimed she was suicidal.

Moore picked up a message from a Californian woman who said she was planning to kill herself and rebroadcast it to more than 350,000 fans. As a result, Twitter users began to contact police to warn them of what was happening. Police later confirmed that the suicidal lady was taken into custody for evaluation.

Moore, who is one of the most high-profile celebrities to use Twitter, said she did not know the woman. In a response on the site, she said that the incident was a "prime example of the power of collective consciousness".

The miracle of Twitter! Is there anything it cannot do?! This does sound like a bit of puff care of Twitter's press office. People have been using forums, email lists and instant messaging services to air their problems for many years. Here, however, we see the power of the distributed network. With 350,000 other people listening in that lonely plea for help became amplified into real world action.

If only someone could figure out how to use this to solve so many other global problems.

Should Downloaded Music Be Free?

2009-04-03T12:26:00.000-07:00

I saw this little article on TechCrunch, and then clicked on a link to a BBC article, and then, well... Google is offering free downloads of licensed music tracks in China. Of all the places in the world, China! This is because the biggest search engine in China, Baidu, also offers links to free downloads and that 99% of all tracks distributed in China are unlicensed. The market value of China's legitimate music sales is a pathetic $76 million. Yes, millions, not billions!

So, are you still feeling guilty for downloading those music tracks from your favourite P2P file sharing platform? The days of paying for recorded music may be numbered. Google will share advertising revenue with those record labels that are partnering this programme, with some 350,000 tracks available. However,"Google said it had no plans to expand its music service beyond China." So, if you live in a part of the world where most music, and video, is copied and redistributed then you get rewarded for this by having the producers give it away for free anyway. If, on the other hand, you live in a country where you are told that it is immoral to copy material then you will just have to keep paying for it. Market capitalism is fantastic, isn't it?!

So, the question remains, not whether it is legal or not to copy and share files but whether you still feel... well... that it's somehow wrong! But even the record labels have given up on this argument, so why feel guilty when everyone has thousands of tracks on their computer? Also, with so much streamed music you can listen to what you want when you want so long as you have a decent broadband connection, and all for free (apart from the connection charge).

Let's look at it another way. Before recording media were available musicians made a living from playing live. That's all they could do. Some actually made money from their copyright on songs printed as sheet music so that other people could play the same tunes. Apart from that, it was either live, or you lived with silence.

Once music could be recorded as easily as printing a book then musicians suddenly became very rich. They just needed to record one song and have millions of copies made and they earnt money on every copy. Now, is one song worth millions of pounds? How many times would an artist have to play that same song live to earn the same million pounds? I'm not denying them the money, I just want to show that what was a live entertainment business had become a recorded entertainment business through technology, and that now the march of technology may well mean that it goes back to being a live entertainment business.

All of which means that we the consumers should also adjust our moral standpoint. Music means live music, with all the human interaction that comes with it. Recorded music is just what it is, an advertisement to get you to a live event. Enjoy the concert and enjoy the free music files.

The Queen Gives Orwell's 1984 to President of Mexico

2009-04-03T02:11:00.000-07:00

During the G20 summit, the Queen met with all the heads of state, but surely the most bizarre gift was the one she gave to Mexican President Felipe Calderon: a first edition of George Orwell's novel 1984.

Calderon is apparently a great fan of Orwell and must have been elated at getting a leather bound copy of the 1949 classic. However, must surely be disturbing to the Mexican people to have a President who so openly admires such a totalitarian dystopia. Also fitting that the Queen of Airstrip One should oblige. The zero tolerance policing during the G20 meeting was also a reminder of how far the UK has come in emulating 1984 - except that Orwell wrote it as a warning!

Google in Talks to Buy Twitter

2009-04-03T00:52:00.000-07:00

The rumour mill has gone into overdrive on this one, with TechCrunch assuring readers that talks are at an advanced stage. Twitter rejected an offer from Facebook just a few months ago that valued the company at half a billion dollars, although this was partially based on what was seen as over-valued Facebook stock. A Google bid is likely to be mainly in cash.

So why would Google want Twitter? Search, of course! The volume of traffic on Twitter makes it the best source for live keyword searches. There are already third party applications that display Twitter keywords in a format similar to Google Trends, such as Twopular. But Google's own Hot Trends is still only available for the USA, so hardly global. By adding Google's search power to Twitter's increasing traffic will produce a more meaningful, and global, analysis of the hottest topics.

But why does everybody have to follow the latest buzz? This is somewhat like ambulance chasing for bloggers. Does nobody have an original idea any more? Well, as always, the money is in corporations. Big companies wishing to push their latest and greatest gift to humanity no longer need to wait for the slow world of search engines. Now they can employ a phalanx of social media sales people to promote their products on a variety of social websites, including Twitter. Product keywords can spread at the speed of tweets and, like instant coffee, they get an immediate media brew at a fraction of the cost of banner advertising.

So it all makes sense, giving credence to the rumours. Another step towards the digital world giving rise to granular thinking.

President Obama gives Queen of England an iPod

2009-04-02T04:38:00.000-07:00

President Barack Obama and wife Michelle yesterday met Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh for the first time. The traditional exchange of gifts between the two heads of state had a modern twist as Obama gave the Queen an iPod. Was this an April Fool's joke? The Queen was said to be "delighted" with her personalized iPod that included footage from her 2007 visit to the USA, as well as numerous Broadway songs.

Obama seems keen to reflect the incoming mood of economic depression, what with digging up the White House lawn for a vegetable garden and the parsimonious gifts. But then again, the Queen did better than British Premier Gordon Brown who was culturally assaulted with a bunch of Hollywooden DVDs.

Miss Universe has fun at Guantanamo Bay

2009-04-02T02:19:00.000-07:00

For Miss Universe, the Venezuelan Dayana Mendoza, this surely must have been one of her more surreal engagements. Accompanied by her friend, Miss USA, the two sponsor girls paid a visit to the most notorious illegal detention centre in the world: Guantanamo Bay.

Now this doesn't sound like the kind of place to show off their swimwear or their love of animals, however, visions of the Playboy scene in Apocalypse Now duly vanished as Mendoza gushes,"We also met the military dogs, and they did a very nice demonstration of their skills."

"We visited the detainees' camps and we saw the jails, where they shower, how the[y] recreate themselves with movies, classes of art, books. It was very interesting." reports The Register.

Yes, she's 22 years old (and not 12) but, frankly, how many good things can a girl say about an interrogation centre. Mendoza also marvelled at the spectacular beach, perhaps forgetting that this is, after all, Cuba. They don't seem to have come face to face with any of the inmates as they were probably too busy "recreating themselves".

The joys of fame - but what was the point?

Well, the Miss Universe Organization is a Limited Partnership between Donald J. Trump and NBC Universal (itself owned by General Electric).

"The titleholders of the Miss Universe Organization personify the combination of beauty and intelligence that defines the 21st Century. In keeping with its global view and position as creator of role models, the Miss Universe Organization has a new corporate structure and enhanced corporate goals." And, of course,"These women are savvy, goal-oriented and aware." OK, this is starting to make sense: you too can look like Miss Mendoza if you would only just read more books.