Just a brief rant, old-codger-style.

1 – Usability gurus never have usable – or bearable – web pages.

2 – Web pages are generally getting uglier and they all look the same.

3 – All those technologies that were supposed to transform the web – like vrml and flash – never became better than the rubbbish they started out as. Well nigh nobody uses them. The few sites that do are almost always horribly annoying.

4 – Why can’t we have holosuite web pages? Seems simple enough.

Lots of tv programmes this week claiming that Star Trek inspired all sorts of fantastic tech advances. Even if this silly claim were true- guess what – we wanted the beam-me-up device and the holosuite. Nobody would have asked for the mobile phone ffs.

This is a really good site. I picked the URL up from other blogs on this page. http://archaeoastronomy.co.uk/

However, as well as confessing to being utterly baffled by the technical stuff on the Bosnian pyramid, I have to take issue a bit with the article on the Brazilian megaliths. This is just because it talks about there needing to be something aligned to the midsummer sun, if it is to be accepted as an astronomical thing, because of the crop cycles etc.

It seems to me that anyone who has been anywhere near the tropics knows that people living there don’t care about annual sun cycles. It’s always more or less twelve hours day and 12 hours night near the equator. There are no annual crop cycles of the sort we are familiar with in temperate zones. In the Amazon, it seems unlikely they’d even have to think about when the rainy season is – it’s a rainforest, isn’t it? 🙂

So – why would there need to be a midwinter/midsummer marker for it to be an observatory?

I don’t know if the irony seemed to have passed a lot of people by. I thought that Ben Goodacre was saying that some of the supposedly scientific research behind new medicines is so spurious that it might as well be homeopathic rubbish that they are selling. At least that is not going to make you sick from the side effects.

I can’t see how anything he said could be taken as saying homeopathic remedies are good.