Every year or two, newly declassified documents reveal that a couple of decades earlier, the US secret services were involved in murduring innocent people for political motives.

Yet somehow, Americans never think "state backed terrorism" refers to them.

Update : goes for us too, of course. :-(

Grim stuff.

Sex trade's reliance on forced labour

Heh? Meatball has a WikiJobs page.

Ouch! If Bill Seitz thinks FreeMind is ugly, he'll still hate even the newer, prettier SdiDesk. :-(

So, I'm taking the advice of Jon Udell that now is the time for developers to get with new media forms. Here's my first screencast about SdiDesk

This is a good medium to show off the program, as the user's interaction is an important part of what I'm investigating and that doesn't come across too well in static screen-shots.

The screencast just scratches the surface of what you can do with SdiDesk (nothing about diagramming yet), but it should give a flavour. More screencasts revealing more functionality to follow ...

Oh, and it's quite fun to do the Wineresque rambling bit :-) I haven't jumped on the Podcasting bandwagon, though I think it may be time to dust off the moribund BeatBlog and hitch it to the phenomenon ;-)

Bill Seitz joins the conversation on Purple Numbers and wiki names.

z2005-05-10- Purple Number Label Abstractness (WebSeitz/wikilog)

In other words, what I missed in my glimpse of the future in the port of Qingdao is China's triangular push into every area of business life.

BBC NEWS | Business | The view from Qingdao

Chris Dent has posted a Purple response to Adina Levin's questions on Purple Numbers.

It's a good response, and I think the point about granularity and addressability is spot on.

Every time we manage to pulverise writing down to a finer granularity, to smaller pieces, even more loosely joined, exciting things seem to result.

I'd say the blog entry and wiki page represent two fine grained elements (relative to books and newspaper articles). Purple-somethings should, by analogy, be similarly interesting.

But I still disagree with the other intuition in his thought :

"The purple numbers are meant to be entirely meaningless identifiers (not labels or names) and therefore not present any information about the content they identify (no sense of time of creation or of sequence). This makes them portable and stable in the extreme."

Which seems to suggest that the "meaninglessness" is a good thing. That's the natural "computer science" way of thinking, of course, : let's give things unique, arbitrary labels, and bind the semantics later.

But it seems this is the thing which always limits the growth of systems. (In my slogan "Abstraction Doesn't Scale")

The problem is, that it's pretty expensive to make in-links to chunks of data with arbitrary names. I have to go look at the page and look up the number. Or I need a good UI to help me - one I have yet to see.

Contrast this with what's shockingly radical about wiki : when I want to make a link to another topic I just guess the ID for that topic. I know the page about purple numbers will be called PurpleNumbers. I don't have to look. And I don't need the software to do any work to help me find out. The knowledge is extant in my understanding of my language plus a couple of wiki-rules. The semantics of the label are bound by everyday practice.

As well as making link-authoring dirt-cheap, it also has other surprising effects. It allows page-making and link-making to be decoupled in time in both directions. Not only can I make the link without knowing if the page is there, I can make the link to a page which doesn't exist. And if someone creates it later, the link will work.

In any system where nodes have arbitrary labels, the chances I can guess the arbitrary nodeID before the node exists, and that a later author of a node will conveniently use my label, is pretty remote.

The people who are starting to understand this are the Folksonomy people. Tagging is another strategy where semantics are fixed by everyday language use.

So now I'm wondering. The individual tagging of paragraphs is a good thing. The "numbers" are the bad thing. What if the paragraphs could themselves have names (as with Wikipedia's sub-headings) based on standard, easily guessable, conventions. Or could even have several tags, which could be guessed?

Dent is hostile to this notion, complaining of labels posing (miserably) as identifiers.. But I'd say "labels posing as identifiers" is as good a definition of one of the greatest wiki virtues as one can imagine. Not to mention the core of folksonomy.

For anyone who remembers the last days of Thatcher, there seem to be a lot of similarities here.

• Thatcher looked impregnable and popular, except to others within her own party.


• There was a very loyal core of support, which kind of obscured how unpopular she'd become. Probably she didn't realize herself.
  
• She got unpopular, outside the party, because of something she forced the British people for ideological reasons, against their will : the poll tax.
  
• She got unpopular, inside the party because of a) a dictatorial style of premiership, and b) because a large part of the MPs in her party profoundly disagreed with her on another issue. (European integration)
  
• She left a legacy of infighting that wrecked the Tory party. Partly because she didn't promote talent so much as ideological faithful.
  

Well now. Is Iraq Blair's poll tax or his Europe? Ie. is it the thing which finishes his external popularity or his internal? I'm betting on "internal". When he does something that really pisses off the electorate, that'll be the end of him.

How the hell can Labour avoid the subsquent melt-down?

Possibly Gordon Brown is the answer here. As someone who can play both the "continuity with Blair success" card, and the "I'm really different and NOT Blair, and anyway we've always hated each other" card. He has a better chance than John Major. (Seen as ideological continuation, and then traitor)

Unless of course, whatever gets Blair chucked is Brown's fault.

John Simpson's take is interesting. Costly victory for chastened Blair

Human Rights Watch RSS Feeds

Whisper it quietly. Let's not tempt providence this time. But there's a new SdiDesk out. And it's better than last time ...

The five-month investigation found that the shooting had been "pretty much consistent with the established rules of engagement", a spokesman said.

BBC

Meanwhile, back in the UK ...

George Galloway wins parliamentary seat for anti war party.

Oh ... and I didn't vote. Sorry.

I feel pretty guilty about this. I tried to get to the consulate to register, earlier this week. When I finally spoke to someone there, I found I needed to have registered back before the beginning of March (when I was in Buenos Aires).

Yep, I'm stupid. :-(

This is an interesting move

Good summary of the case against GM crops.

(Though I'd like to see that Cuba figure substantiated.)

How the right celebrate May Day.

Catallarchy ? May Day 2005: A Day Of Remembrance

This is a tough read for those of us who are socialists, who are influenced by Marx, or who identify with left-wing movements throughout recent history. However much exageration and gleeful spinning there is over at Catallarchy, the basic story is true : the 20th century has been a blood-bath in the name of left-wing causes.

And we need an answer to this ...

Happy Birthday Dave Winer :-)

Jon Udell on Clueless Users

SdiDesk version 0.2.0 is getting very close now. (Promise :-)

I've started a journal, over on the SdiDesk wiki, to report what's going on.

Yesterday. Remembering one of the oldest tricks in the book, just simplified my life dramatically, and started taking SdiDesk on the road to The Architecture of Participation

RichardP drops science on Eugene Eric Kim.

Am I a racist? Apparently so :

Your data suggest a slight automatic preference for African American relative to European American

Implicit Association Test

Hmmm... not entirely convinced. For example, the order thingie. (See FAQ Q.1)

Having started by associating African-American with "good", I then had to unlearn this behaviour for the second phase, when I was getting a bit more tired and bored. Any connection there?

The FAQ claims order has a negligible effect they're compensating for but I'd like to see a link to some kind of evidence that they've callibrated the test with neutral stimuli to detect order based effects.

Also, look! I hang around with a very PC crowd. I'd be really embarrassed to get this test "wrong". I was probably more careful not to conflate black / bad than other combinations.

Still, it's interesting.

More on Brazil's embrace of Free Software

Just to point out the obvious re: Microsoft et al's complaints that government shouldn't be choosing what software goes on the machines. The government will necessarily be deciding what software gets pre-installed on the machines. No one is seriously suggesting they can offer every possible option. (AmigaOS, for example?)

And there's nothing to stop Microsoft coming up with a cheap CD of software which users can install over the free software they get on their machine, once they get it home.

But this isn't what MS want. They want to turn the Brazilian government into their retail channel by making the government do the pre-installation. That's got nothing to do with a free market for software, and everything to do with the corporation trying to co-opt government to bias the market.

Condi in Brazil

What's going on here? Last week, the Equadorians threw out their president, Lucio Gutierrez. He's accused of various things, including now, murder - in that he ordered his guards to fire on protestors. (Not mentioned here, I note.)

The Equadorians want him to stand trial there. Instead he took refuge in the Brazilian embassy and has been granted asylum in Brazil. Apparently he's now here in Brasilia, hiding in the military zone. In Equador the people are furious, and out protesting against Lula on the streets. Meanwhile there's an official request for his extradition.

So how come? A corrupt president is kicked out of power by his own government, with popular support. Yet Brazil gives him the Ronnie Biggs treatment rather than just hand him back?

One theory : the Brazilian national oil company, Petrobras has interests in Equador although it's hard to see how this move is currying favour with the new government. My politically aware friends inform me it's, naturally, tied up with the Gutierrez's support for the US's Plan Columbia.

Notice how the story is being spun as Condi arrives. That in a time of "concern" about democracy in Latin America, Brazil is a beacon of stability.

No. Remember that the times when democracy was really in trouble in Latin America : when Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay all had dictatorships - they were all pro-US, and US-supported, right-wing military groups.

This, in contrast, is time when a number of Latin American countries are voting for left-wing, non-US sympathetic leaders (Venezuela's Chavez is the most extreme example, but Argentina's Kirchner has also distanced himself. And Uruguay just voted their first left-wing president ever.) As the BBC points out, that doesn't translate (much) into much real action. The region is highly dependent on good economic relations with the US.

Nevertheless, Lula, the first ever president from the "Worker's Party" is making like Tony Blair and looking more and more like the moderate the US can do business with.

You know. If I believed everything I read on the interweb I'd be a lot less comfortable than I am.

Rigorous Intuition: Presidente Quixote

The new Hamsterdance?

Tim OReilly on Stewart Brand on cities

The effect of 1,000 people leaving a county of 1,000 people is much greater than that of the same 1,000 people showing up in a city of one million. Density of occupation in cities has many environmental advantages yet to be examined.

I'm a bit suspicious of this. Are we comparing like-with-like? We're talking millions coming from absolute poverty in the countryside to live in the cities and *increase* their material wealth; and yet those millions are meant to be consuming fewer resources?

The people coming in to live in the favelas aren't the sort of people who were driving around the country in SUVs and requiring a lot of industrially produced stuff to be shipped out to them. In the country they aren't driving anything (more likely to take the bus or use a horse). Their village probably doesn't have electricity, sewage or water. And the little food they get, is produced very locally.

It's quite understandable why they want to leave that for the relatively better conditions in the favela, but very hard to see how their net consumption of energy and products derived from oil can be going *down* in this situation.

Obviously, higher-density living is much better for people who are already reasonably rich. Extended suburbs are a disaster for energy consumption.

Of course, in the city, the birth-rate goes down. But that's only important if the overall rate (country + city) is going down. If the country is simply producing more people to compensate for the outflux then the city isn't having any sort of regulatory effect.

Still, it would be interesting to see the "useful analysis of the "ecological footprint"".

BBC NEWS | Ancient necropolis found in Egypt

Who should I vote for?

Your expected outcome:

Liberal Democrat

Your actual outcome:

Labour -9
Conservative -68
	Liberal Democrat 92
UK Independence Party -22
	Green 72

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For

Monsanto just signed a deal to co-produce text books for Brazilian schools on agriculture and the environment.

Copied the (portuguese) message to
Tribe

X.J. Scott doesn't like Robert Patterson's Going Home. And he liked my attempt to explain it even less.

Some points worth thinking about.

A sceptical rant against business blogs. Don't know why I care really. I think the guy's clueless myself. But does it matter?

Nevertheless I started writing a comment on BubbleGeneration and then remembered my new policy of putting more writing here, rather than scattered around other people's comments sections.

- the only companies doing it are early adopters?

erm ...

- blogs want companies to speak with a "corporate voice"?

not last time I heard

- Businesses already communicate well in various ways?

go ask the customers

- Once people see the alternative, they realize they actually do prefer copy that’s readable, coherent and to the point – puh-lease, to the point!

blogs less readable than corporate happyspeak? The point he's missing is that however crude blog writing is (and it isn't on the blogs I read), it's normally informative, contentful, (even if the content is merely "here's how I feel") rather than a smokescreen designed to produce an impression without saying anything.

- E-mail and the general Web are still the killer apps for online communications in business today – and, last I checked, no experts were predicting their demise.

Not so long ago email and general web weren't considered killer apps either. And blogs don't mean that these older media disappear, though they may change their role

- Personally, I think what’s happening in the newly invigorated field of “word-of-mouth marketing” (in which blogging may play a minor role, though that’s still in question) is a much more interesting overall focus for marketers today.

Pretty much talking at cross-purposes here, aren't we? Most bloggers would put the "newly invigorated word-of-mouth" under the heading "blogging" and will admit that really they're talking about a wider phenomenon that includes blogging along with things like wikis, social software and online discussion fora.

If the author is totally determined to separate blogs from all that and consider them as a single genre of technology, opposed to this more general "word-of-mouth" culture, well ... he's still wrong, but there's perhaps a different argument to be had.

Update : Another comment

Michael thinks we leftists think the oil crisis is all about stupid business-men. If only it were that simple.

Tribe Discussion: Alternative Money and Economics - tribe.net

My reply : It's not a question of whether capitalists are stupid or not. Even great supporters of capitalism don't claim businessmen have more (or less) wisdom than anyone else. The pro-capitalism claim is that capitalists have an institution : the market, which allows greater diversity of experiment, and which discovers and promulgates the successful experiments more efficiently than other institutions do.

The argument doesn't hinge on the people. It hinges on the capacity of the market to solve the problem of oil passing its "peak production".

A good book to read here is Clayton Christensen's "The Innovator's Dilemma"

What Christiansen wants to do is analyse why so many, apparently good, market leading companies, fail. And what he discovers is that they do so, by too slavishly following the signals given to them by the market.

What happens with the doomed companies of "the innovators dilemma" is that they have an existing customer base which they pay too much attention to. This customer base is using a particular format of product (Christensen's examples range from disk-drives to steel to earth-moving machinery) They want (and reward) improvements in the price / performance of this particular format and the company gives it to them. But it remains blind to another coming "disruptive" technology. Not because it's too stupid to understand the technology, but because the signals it gets from its customers are steering it in a different direction.

By the time the customer discovers the "disruptive" technology, another supplier has become dominant in it, and the customer switches to the new supplier rather than wait around for the previous market leader to catch up.

Markets are essentially thermostats : too cold, switch on the heating, too hot, switch it off. Demand outstrips supply, raise the price. Supply outstrips demand, lower it. That's the information available.

In an ideal world, there are nothing but smooth gradients. And simply following the prices up and down will keep you on the right course. What Christiansen demonstrates very clearly is that the world isn't composed of smooth gradients but discontinuities and catastrophe points and dead ends.

In theory market leaders who've spent years supplying customers with one technology will start to perceive a gentle shift towards a demand for another, start to shift their product output accordingly, tracking the demands of the customers.

In practice, the transformation is sudden, shocking, and market leaders rarely survive. As Christensen keeps emphasizing, not because they were stupid but because the market switch is too fast for the the feedback mechanisms to cope. Because the market-leader has constructed and is constrained by the system of other dependent suppliers and the existing customers pushing in the other direction.

This is why he calls such technologies "disruptive". They cause disruption.

Let's go back to the claims about the end of oil. No one is saying oil is going to run out tomorrow. What most people are saying is that oil is getting near its peak of production. That's not a prediction which is based on oil prices increasing, that's a prediction based on trends in oil discoveries. They're slowing down.
Although we're discovering more oil "everyday", the rate at which we are discovering oil is certainly decreasing, while the rate of consumption is going up.

As I said, this isn't a debate about whether the people are smart enough, it's whether the market as institution is able to react fast enough to avoid crises. From Christensen, we know that that's not always the case. Market signals are not always sufficiently timely nor companies sufficiently fast on their feet, to meet dramatic changes. Especially when there's a lot of inertia built in to the system, with each player in holding the others back from making change until the catastrophe.

What we have to remember about oil is that we are so dependent in so many different ways. Food production is highly energy intensive. Plastics are made from oil and almost everything in modern society is partly made from plastic. All kinds of things aren't made in the "west" at all because cheap fuel has enabled cheap transport which takes advantage of cheap labour in Asia.

All these dependencies are a) highly oil dependent, and b) difficult to switch. We have nothing equivalent to replace oil with - you don't make plastic with uranium; oil or gas made from coal requires extremely poisonous processes.

The market should be encouraging relevant research to improve these or find other sources of energy. But our scientists don't have any theories of real alternatives. And the market isn't doing what's needed. Right now, oil is still so cheap that, like the 8 inch disk-drive makers who didn't research 5 1/4 inch discs because no one wanted them, no one does real, sufficient research into alternatives because the car drivers and the farmers and the plastic industry and outsourcers don't want something else which is currently more expensive. Until, one day, they suddenly will, and maybe the industry won't have time to adjust.

Ok, let's not let this become totally negative. Markets are pretty good at acting on negative feedback. Alternative energy sources exist, alternative, less energy intensive methods of production and consumption exist, and if the catastrophe doesn't happen too quickly, the markets should be able to find and encourage them and steer us towards something survivable. But there are a lot of imponderable "ifs" there. As Christensen says, only 4 of the 100 biggest companies in 1900 were big in 2000. 96% screwed up, either due to incompetence or because the market *didn't* lead them in the right direction.

So I suggest the market could do with a bit of help. How does alt.money come in?

Well, alt.money is almost always "local". The big advantage from the oil perspective is users of local currencies can't buy stuff from the other side of the world and don't consume that fuel for transport. That has a downside, of course, sometimes there are real benefits of international trade. We want things and services from places which we can't produce locally. But there is also a lot of international trade which is simply arbitraging the relative prices of national currencies. With more local money, there'd be less of that.

The more people voluntary switch to alt.money, the more they encourage local production, by local labour and from local materials. This consumes less fuel.

Doing things locally, also tends away from doing things in mass, making small scale alternative energy more viable. Perhaps the local farmer selling in my village can produce vegetables without recourse to so much fertilizer or needing fleets of trucks to get his stuff to market.

Local money is not sufficient in itself, but it can play a role in constructing a local economy with a bias towards local, lower energy production.

Obviously, a gamble on the status quo might pay off. As the price of oil increases, someone (probably in China) will unveil a new super energy efficient car that works on everything from gasoline to cow-dung, oil companies will invent new techniques for extracting oil from hitherto unreachable depths, the big boxes will reverse their habit and start to source locally to keep prices down etc.

But remember the dilemma. Sometimes the market leader simply goes bust.

bhangra mix

Robert Paterson's Weblog: Going Home - Our Reformation

Bah! Humbug! I didn't go to Café Brasill, though I told my students to. :-(

Simon Phipps's Blog: Brazil - the Global Java Leader?

God Hates Shrimp!

China changing

Factories covet young, female workers like Ms. Sheng because they are considered better at assembly line work and more docile than young men. In the past, these workers were largely cut off from the outside world, but now they use text messages or e-mail to check with friends at other factories about wages and treatment.

The New York Times : Help Wanted: China Finds Itself With a Labor Shortage

UBERCOOLISCHE : very funny if you read the article which inspired it.

Steve's off to do something new. I'll be watching his blog to find out what.

BBC NEWS : Brazil death squad 'guns down 30'

Of course I got back from Buenos Aires with a few CDs that I'm feeling right now.

The best thing I found : "Echalle Semilla" by Axel Krygier.

Hard to classify. A very mixed, lovely, personal sounding album.

Starts with a couple of beautiful, melodic loungey pieces with organ and whistling. (See if you can find "Silbad el calipso" online)

Then moves into slightly jazzier / funkier territory. Some jazz elements. Some breakbeats. Some salsa and tango. Then suddenly he's just playing with the sampler, triggering loops of speech and children laughing etc. After that, there's songs that sound they were recorded in the back of the taxi and other stuff.

Reminds me a bit of Pascal Comelade, not the sound, but the mood.

Highly recommended.

Also of note :

Electronic Tango. Yep, I know, I know. But it looks like it's not just French carpetbaggers. There are real locals doing this stuff. Went to a night of it as part of the B.A. tango festival, which was pretty enjoyable.

Particularly pleasant : "Tanghetto". On first aquaintance it's fairly ordinary, but it grows. I'm finding myself listening to it continuously while I'm working. Also good : "Narcotango" and "Evolution Tango". Has it's moments : "San Telmo Lounge".

"Landing" by Tremor is a very nice electronica album with low-key hints of folkloric instruments and melodies. Mainly ambient tinkling, rhythms and interesting sounds. Not quite sure what to compare it with. It's surprisingly good example of this kind of thing.

Am I right in thinking robot wisdom is back?

Eufrasio rocks out!

I admire and respect Joel Spolsky. So it's kind of a downer that he's basically saying that I'm screwed when it comes to making software.

Notice changes to my blogroll. I'm doing my bit for the TEN NEW VOICES campaign. It's tokenistic, but WTF. Anything that introduces more diversity of perspective and opinion is good.

Of course, there are only four so far. And nobody cares except the Googlebot.

Oh, and BTW : back from Buenos Aires. As the old catch-phrase has it : "pics soon, I promise"

A promise on which I realize I never fail to fail to deliver. But this time I have a new strategy. I'm going to learn how to use Flickr and maybe, just maybe, it will come true for once ;-)

Oh, and this is hilarious. :-)

Essential reading : When Democracy Failed--2005 | BaltimoreChronicle.com

Still alive ... doesn´t time fly when you´re enjoying yourself and don´t have an internet connection?

What´s up? A new version of SdiDesk on the way. And a couple of other software ideas. I've been writing some stuff which should find its way onto ThoughtStorms.

Apart from that I´ve been tracking down people to talk to about the what´s been going on here politically and economically. Met up with Heloisa Primavera to chat about about collective intelligence and autopoeisis and hopefully (if I can pin her down again) alt.money; watched her C.I. group meet to discuss how solve development problems; rampaged through the streets at 4 am with the delinquent poets of "Cursed Geneva"; admired my wife´s cousin´s husband´s gun collection and learned about ballistics; went to the islands, and the casino, and to the tango festival and the free outdoor cinema ... and ate, in fantastic cafes and restaurants. ARGENTINA MAKES YOU FAT!!!! You have been warned.

Finally made it to Buenos Aires. After 5 days in Choi where Gisel renewed her passport we then got the local bus into Montevideo and it wasn't even checked!

So only a day in Montevideo which is a shame. It's beautiful but somewhat faded by Uruguay's economic decline. Uruguay is basically a small but once fairly affluent farming country which exports mainly aggricultural products, beef and leather to Europe and Argentina. It's obviously been hit by the Argentinian crisis and general decline of this sector. And there's now high unemployment. But it has a small population of around 3.4 million, and very high literacy rate (96%) so the fallout is less noticable.

It feels so much safer than Brazil. No 10 foot fences in front of everyone's house. We walked around the centre of Montevideo at 3 am in the morning (along with many other tourists and locals) without feeling the slightest bit threatened. You see less homelessness than London. People are very friendly. In Brazil, even in the small beach town we stayed at a few days ago, everyone was hiding behind locked gates.

A similar beach in Uruguay (Ponto del diablo) was very open. Mainly traditional thatched fisherman's cottages, rentable Swiss-style challet's and camp sites incongrously along the fairly windswept coast. The beaches are sandy but the water's about the same temperature as the UK, so Brazilians wouldn't come here, but lots of Argentinian tourists.

Pics soon.

Update : a map of Uruguay, no Chui but look at where Brazil meets Uruguay meets the sea.

OK, I´m still alive. Currently in Chui on the Brazil - Uruguay border (at the coast at the right of the map), which is a kind of tax-free shopping paradise. We should be in Montevideo but discovered Gisel´s passport had expired when we reached the border and were dumped off the bus. Looks like we´ll be here until Wednesday to sort that, and will then head to Argentina as fast as possible.

Notes on Social Forum and border-towns coming soon ... :-)

OK! I'm off to the World Social Forum today. And then Argentina for the duration of February.

Have fun ... and I'll be posting here and on ThoughtStorms as and when I can.

ciao

phil

Thank Poland!

Hadn't noticed, but Seb's Open Research seems to be back

Ross Mayfield : The word wiki isn't defined in the release, perhaps because it doesn't need to be anymore.

Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Similar to a Wiki

I'm kind of awe-struck by this course ...

Syllabus, HUM 202 -- Toward a Literacy of Cooperation

Remember, today is a "buy nothing day" in the US.

Not One Damn Dime!

(even if it's a hoax, something might come of it if it's taken seriously. Society is weird like that. And remember, we're an empire now, we make our own reality. Fuck them! Let's make some reality back. Don't spend it today.)

2005 : Free software continues to eat into the mainstream software industry.

Software: Expect The Giants To Stay Sluggish

My God! The experts got the news around 8:00 am on Sunday morning local time. An hour later, the first massive wave struck. But the experts started to discuss the economic impacts when they discussed if a tsunami warning should be issued.

Swedish paper reports tsunami warning halted out of concern for tourist industry

Seymour M. Hersh : The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A.

The New Yorker

Discordian exercise of the day. Grab the nearest book ...

Huygens sends first Titan images

How Cassini got to Saturn.

This is either very sad, or an opportunity for Python-based companies to beat the pants off everyone else.

Here is the key quote from the Newsweek article :

Scroll down and read it in the comments ... :-(

A natural, low-tech solution to tsunamis: mangroves | csmonitor.com

Surreal spam of the day :

Someone came and posted this URL on ThoughtStorms : "http://fucking-spamers.uni.cc"

Go to it and it's a site selling the domain name. Got that? Companies selling spam-hata domain names by spamming. Duh!

David Temkin has the best tagline I've seen on a weblog : every day, computers are making people easier to use

:-)


davidtemkin.com

JohnRobb in the article below says no significant Global Guerrilla activity has appeared in Afghanistan. But that will change if the US tries to suppress opium production in the country. As this is the only viable crop for large parts of the population.

Now the US is considering that.

JohnRobb : I wish I wasn't right on this, but I was right about a guerrilla war in Iraq, infrastructure disruption in Russia, growing instability in Saudi Arabia, high oil prices (due to global guerrilla activity), and the lack of meaningful guerrilla opposition in Afghanistan (at least until they begin to crack down on opium production this year).

John Robb's Weblog

43 things is Yet Another Social thingie. This time you categorize yourself and find friends not according to what you say you *are* interested in, but by what you want to do.

Wonder what difference this makes. The first thing I did when I got my account (you have to queue up for a few days to get in) was sign up for "I want to become a better programmer" and "I want to be more efficient when working". How will these categories differ from joing a "programming tribe" or a "Getting Things Done" tribe? We'll see.

interstar on 43 Things

Surreal spam of the day :

From: 'Moratoria B. Herring' <misogynist@logicsouth.com>

Subject: dictates

albumin

Happy new year everyone!

Hope 2005 is going to be good (ie. interesting, productive, happy, peaceful, inspiring, exciting, prosperous etc.) for you all.

:-)

I've added a bit more to ThoughtStorms: ConspiracyTheories

The Lemur God : DesktopWikis are exactly as they sound, a Wiki on your private PC, versus on a server open to the internet public. I downloaded a few. Many are free, some are rather expensive. I found one that is very good, very free, but also very new. I've used it to enter some info, but am a little worried about how much time I should invest in this program, as it is uber-beta and my prove to be very unstable... especially after mucho info is entered. This program is SdiDesk and has proven to be decent so far.

thelemurgod: WikiPim... DisBlog

SdiDesk hat auch eine hohe Funktionsvielfalt und auch die Möglichkeit der Textformattierung kommt an die “klassischen” Wikis heran. Die Unterseiten und Revisionen werden im Programmunterordner gespeichert. Auch vom “Look & Feeling” erinnert dieses Programm sehr an die bekannten Wikisysteme.

Hmm. Which according to Google is roughly

SdiDesk has also high function variety and also the possibility of the Textformattierung approaches to the "classical" Wikis. The lower surfaces and revisions are stored in the program under file. Also of the "Look & Feeling" this program reminds much of the well-known Wikisysteme.

Peruns Blog - Webwork und Internet ? Desktop-Wikis

ThoughtStorms: ArchitectureAtWar

ThoughtStorms: LateBinding

ThoughtStorms: DavidNoble

The Huygens spacecraft is about to begin the final leg of its journey to Saturn's enigmatic moon Titan.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Moon campaign on starting blocks

Good George Monbiot article. The US government is engaged in a global war with itself. It is like a robin attacking its reflection in a window.

America's war with itself

ThoughtStorms: GraphingCalculator ->

ThoughtStorms: MayorMockus ->

ThoughtStorms: InitialBuildersVsMaintainers

Suppose you wanted to start an eco-friendly / alt.energy smallholding. Where would you find out more?

ThoughtStorms is back

ThoughtStorms temporarily down. Will post here when it's back up.

How the right sees the world.

FrontPage magazine.com :: Symposium: The Terror War: How We Can Win by Jamie Glazov

Shiver.

Charles H. Ferguson : Until now, competition in the search industry has been limited to the Web and has been conducted algorithm by algorithm, feature by feature, and site by site. This competition has resulted in a Google and Yahoo duopoly. If nothing were to change, the growth of Microsoft’s search business would only create a broader oligopoly, similar, perhaps, to those in other media markets. But the search industry will soon serve more than just a Web-based consumer market. It will also include an industrial market for enterprise software products and services, a mass market for personal productivity and communications software, and software and services for a sea of new consumer devices. Search tools will comb through not only Microsoft Office and PDF documents, but also e-mail, instant messages, music, and images; with the spread of voice recognition, Internet telephony, and broadband, it will also be possible to index and search telephone conversations, voice mail, and video files.


Welcome to Technology Review

At the moment, I'm musing about the differences between ThoughtStorms and a real community like MeatBall

ThoughtStorms: ThoughtStormsVsMeatBall

When I posted this ThoughtStorms had 2374 pages.

How many does it have now?

Sunir Shah is working on a fascinating paper on the history of academia and what effect new media (especially wiki) might have.

Meatball Wiki: OpenAcademics

For those who missed it : ThoughtStorms: PhilIsStupid

(Warning : disturbing photo)

Don't these images look exactly like something out of a video game?




from BBC

David Blunket : Ex-Arse

Remember "wiki is the new frontier"

Forbes.com: Extreme Blogging

Tim Bray : This whole Open/Free software thing, it’s not just one hemisphere or economic sphere or ethnic sphere, it’s, well, everybody everywhere.

First Free Software in Swahili : Jambo OpenOffice.org

Why I love Python.

dirtSimple.org: Python Is Not Java

We have no word for "goodbye" in our language

CNN.com - Bush Arrested in Canada for War Crimes ;-)