Creationism: God's gift to the ignorant - Hilarious (via rc3.org)

Hahahahahahahahahahaha. Idiots!

Okay, they got their facts wrong, but even the Süddeutsche Zeitung now has the story. Oliver Willis has a breakdown of the screaming on the republican side of the isle. I can’t even believe this is happening, the republicans have completely lost it now. One of them is even citing the pope! I guess us europeans are just pussies when it comes to the Iraq war… but if it’s convinient we may deliver the rhetoric for their downright fucking lies.

How this stayed off my radar for so long, is beyond me, but Dave points to How to never miss an episode with Bittorrent and RSS, a short how-to for the RSS integration for Azureus. This integrates nicely with TorrentSpy, so you never miss an episode of your favorite TV show. I love this stuff!

It's a great read. Even if you just want to get a lesson in reframing and misuse of medical studies in the highly disputed case. Read Lindsay Beyerstein's analysis.

On saturday, I had breakfast with an old friend of mine, a top-notch consultant. It works like this: every few months when we both can find the time, we meet for breakfast and bounce ideas off each other. This usually leaves me feeling quite exhausted.

This time, he told me about Mind Manager. A software he uses religiously to create mind maps of his projects, already during meetings, to catalog tasks and ideas. The software even lets you export to Powerpoint and Word, so it makes it easy to create the minutes and even manage the project by assigning deadlines. Until now, I used JOE for this. I find outlines more intuitive for my uses, but I'm lost as soon as I try to present it to my customers.

So now I'm looking at Mind Manager and I like what I see. MindJet LLC. really transferred the rapid editing capabilities of an Outliner to the graphical representation of a mind map. The only problem seems to be able to quickly add longer text. In an outline that is just another subnode that I subsequently hide while I'm editing the rest of the document, in Mind Manager it seems that I'm not able to do that. I may be wrong, I've been playing with this software for 10 minutes now :-).

However, I already solved one problem: the OPML export. Using a XSL/T stylesheet by Gregor J. Rothfuss, I can convert Mind Manager's native XML format to OPML. So now, I just have to find a macro or something to help with importing OPML, then I'm all set.

Updates follow...

The Chicago Tribune banned this comic because "Today's original Boondocks strip presents inaccurate information as fact". This is after President Bush admitted on tape that he smoked marijuana and it is a matter of public knowledge that he used cocaine. Gotta love them liberal american media! (via Russel Beattie)

Jamie Zawinsky has an interesting bit on a new depression treatment that involves getting electrodes implanted into your brain which are then used to stimulate a brain area that is connected to “moods”.

According to the article the test-subjects were severly depressed persons who underwent a number of other treatments first and were thus declared to have ‘untreatable’ clinical depression, which is a shame, as the surgery helped them, so now, technically, they weren’t untreatable after all.

The referenced article quotes “Dr Helen Maybery” of the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia (who appears to be listed as “HELEN MAYBERG, M.D.” on the faculty’s list of members):

“I see depression as a brain disease not as a chemical imbalance like most psychiatrists. The brain is not a bowl of soup. You cannot just add a chemical and stir. It is a very intricate wiring system. Some circuits were not working for these people. Once we turned on the stimulator, the changes were astounding.”

I really had hoped that they didn’t perform the procedure on all of the test-subjects. My guess would be that for some of these people, being in the program, seeing all the advanced technology, then getting a hole drilled in your skull would have done the trick without getting any of the electrodes implanted. But that’s just me.

The medical professionals in the article, though, are really great as they now call invasive brain surgery an alternative to ECT (formerly known as “Electroshock therapy”, but that sounded too harsh for a procedure jwz rightfully describes as “Still depressed?” ZAP! “Still depressed?” ZAP!). In fact Professor Vince Egan, a clinical psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University, is quoted saying:

for those who have biological features of depression who do not respond to drugs, who have previously been treated using ECT, then something less drastic or violent or understood has got to be a good thing.

Yep, all those poor people! Something even less understood will certainly help them more.

I should have been clearer with this, but I wasn't. Google doesn't do most of the stuff I wrote about, yet!. The key sentence is: "suppose Google uses search results for popular phrases to link to".

Still, the current behaviour is bad enough for employees of Barnes & Noble...

…comes up at least twice. When Microsoft decided to introduce its “smart”-tag technology into beta versions of Internet Explorer 6.0, users all over the world were outraged. Suddenly the application that just was a window to the web started changing the content it received. “Why not give the user some extra features?”, someone inside Microsoft thought, “like, linking keywords in webpages to Microsoft products?”

After a public outcry on how Microsoft was using its browser monopoly to control which content reached its viewers, they backpedaled and eventually canned the idea. Smart-tags still exist in Microsoft Office, but not in Internet Explorer.

Now, years later, Google introduced the same feature to its Google toolbar. In its new incarnation, it automatically creates new links on a website in your browser. Other than Microsoft however, the links look exactly like all the other links on the webpage. Currently, the “blogosphere” is running hot, discussing if this is a good thing or not.

Today, after reading Dave’s newest post on the issue, I decided to comment. I’d say that the most obvious problem hasn’t been discussed yet.

Here’s the point that needs to be made: suppose Google uses search results for popular phrases to link to. So suddenly

• every page that contains “John Kerry” and “Vietnam” has a link to the Swift Boat Veterans for truth
• Howard Dean’s weblog links to the “Dean Scream” on Google Movies
• gopusa.com’s appraisal of Bush’s Social Security plan gets linked to the words “miserable failure”

How do they plan to control this? Imagine, for a moment, that Google itself, or one of the bigger investors chooses to endorse a particular political candidate!

Whatever the perceived “use” of such a feature may be, this is a direct affront to the principles of freedom of expression.

More examples? A New York Times article on Japanese history in the US gets linked to Michelle Malkin’s book “In defense of internment” on Amazon… I have plenty.

There shouldn’t even be a discussion about this!

Google cannot be allowed to change the content of my website and if there’s no way around it, how do I distance myself from links that don’t reflect my views? Imagine a gay-community page linked to Pat Robertson… and the author wouldn’t even know that his users see this.

Now we haven’t even touched on the possibility that German users of the Google Toolbar might get totally different links than US users, so you couldn’t even find out what your users get to see. Not to mention the fact that, in Germany, you can be dragged to court for the content of pages that you link to from your page, if they contain content that’s illegal in Germany (Nazi-material, for example, or software that can be used to circumvent copy-protection mechanisms on Audio-CDs). You can, get this, even be held responsible for links contained in pages that you’ve linked to.

Now, let’s hope someone at Google realizes that this is a bad idea. Just like Microsoft did years ago.