- Does University Challenge really test intelligence? – No. Knowing a bunch of obscure facts isn’t intelligence. If that’s the measure, then Wikipedia is way smarter than Einstein or Newton or Gauss or Darwin.
- Review: Canon EOS 5D Mark II – If anyone wants to buy 5000 copies of Yummy so that I can afford one of these I’d very much appreciate it.
- Creationists are still denying Darwin. Stephen Moss asks why – “What worries me about many of her fellow creationists is that they begin with the Bible and then start looking for scientific evidence to back up what their faith tells them is true.” That and the fact that they keep coming up with the same arguments.
Category: Links
- Scientists Agree: It’s in His Kiss – “Over 90 percent of human society engages in what, if you get right down to it, seems like a very strange thing to do: putting faces together and trading spit.” Seems like a very appropriate thing to discuss on Valentine’s Day…
- Anti-Bootlegging Measures and the iPhone App Store – There’s a lot of talk about cracked iPhone apps at the moment and the measures that developers are taking. The interesting and surprising thing here is how effective a polite message is, at least in the case of a Mac app.
- 1234567890 Day – Finally, an event worth celebrating…
- Ravenous Clock Runs Backward, Scares Children – Neat.
- Darwinism Must Die So That Evolution May Live – “The point is that making a master teacher into a sacred fetish misses the essence of his teaching. So let us now kill Darwin.”
- Zappos CEO Talks Culture Fit and the Importance of Creating a ‘Wow’ Experience – Interesting article about how Zappos have thrived.
- The League of Moveable Type – Most free or open source fonts I’ve seen have been pretty poor but these guys seem to have the right idea.
- Government plans travel database – “When your travel plans, who you are travelling with, where you are going to and when are being recorded you have to ask yourself just how free is this country?”
- Learning and Working in the Collaborative Age: A New Model for the Workplace – Fascinating ten minute video on what Pixar look for in candidates, summarised as Depth, Breadth, Communication and Collaboration. Given those criteria I’m guessing they’re very selective!
- Pro-God buses for London streets – Anyone feel like complaining about these Christian ads on the ground that they make unsubstantiated claims?
- House Approves Whitelist of People Who Aren’t Terrorists – The solution to the errors and inconvenience of the no-fly list is… drum roll… another database! How could that possibly go wrong?
- Exclusive: ID cards are here – but police can’t read them – After spending shed-loads of money on ID cards, apparently the police and immigration officers can’t read them.
- Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge – “A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.”
- The Palm Pre’s possible Achilles heel: battery life – All the glitz you see in the Pre demo and videos may come at a price.
- Tags: Database schemas – Interesting article on how sites like delicious might handle tagging. Yummy until v2.0 uses the “Scuttle” method. Subsequent versions modify this a little for performance reasons.
- China ‘Strikes Hard’ in Tibet – Not good.
- Creativity and stretching the sweatshirt – “For me, creativity is the stuff you do at the edges. But the edges are different for everyone, and the edges change over time.”
- Red Dwarf voyages back to Earth – I’ve been watching the reruns and, well, the episodes I’ve seen so far just haven’t been as good as I remembered them to be. I’ll probably still watch the new ones of course…
- Banks now refusing to lend pens – Only funny because it’s true. Ish.
- NetNewsWire and iPhone-Sized Data – “Lesson learned: It’s not enough for an iPhone app to sport an iPhone-optimized user interface. It needs iPhone-sized data, too.” I agree with this in principle but I’ve been thinking how I’d apply it to my iPhone application, Yummy, and coming up with a blank. How can you decide in advance which bookmarks you’ll want to see? Most recent? Those with a particular tag? I can’t think of an option other than ‘all.’
- The Inauguration of President Barack Obama – In case you’re not sick of the inauguration already, here are some great images of the day.
- Gordon Brown withdraws plan to keep details of MPs’ expenses secret – “The PM said proposals for reforms of MPs’ expenses would provide ‘more transparency’ than in most other parliaments around the world.” I’m not convinced that this is a standard we should aspire to. Let’s face it, our parliament is more open that North Korea and less tyrannical than Iran’s but really that’s not much of an achievement.
- Withnail tourism – Must head up to the lakes, or at the very least dig out my DVD.
- Bush Street Renamed Obama Street in San Francisco – Welcome to the White House, President Obama!
- Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’ – On the eve of Obama’s inauguration it’s instructive to look back to Bush’s 2001 speech…
- 6 days to stop MPs concealing their expenses – I’m appalled that they’re trying to stop the public finding out how they’re spending our money! How about some accountability?
- Yummy 2.0 Quick Overview – New version of my iPhone delicious.com client. Lots of new features, including a web preview, integration with various Twitter clients, view by tag, improved search, streamlined bookmark editing… the list goes on!
- If you’ve nothing to hide… – Double standards from MPs. Who’d have thought?