Well, sadly this rant has been somewhat beaten to the punch by the ever entertaining and ever educational Archeoastronomy site. That said, I am not going to pass up on the chance to complain about how poor journalists are when it comes to science. Sadly, this time scientists themselves as just as much to blame.

A lot of news sites over the last few days have reported the presentation made to the American Astronomical Society regarding the recent discovery that native Americans may have recorded the AD 1006 Supernova. See http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/daily/local/14926.php and http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13149432/ for examples, or if you don’t mind being depressed read through some of the links at http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=1006+Supernova+Indian+Astronomy. It is a touch depressing, the regularity that the same thing is repeated.

Now, as mentioned on Archeoastronomy, this glosses over some of the more interesting facts from the find – but where “I” disagree with Archeoastronomy is in the interpretation.

Basically, archeologists found some Hohokam cave paintings dating to around AD 1006 which depict what looks like a scorpion with a bright star over it. The AD 1006 astronomical event is assumed to have been bright enough to be visible pretty much everywhere on Earth, and certainly noticable. It took place in the constelation of “SCORPIUS” as this extract from the Tuscon Citizen explains:

To back up their hypothesis, Barentine and Esquerdo (the scientists) created a model of the night sky of May 1, 1006, to show that the relative position of the supernova to the constellation Scorpius matches placement of scorpion and star symbols on the rock.

All well and good you may think. There is precious little evidence that native Americans studied the stars or kept astronomical records, so you can see why people are jumping on this. It seems unlikely that any human civilization didn’t study the stars as part of their agricultural developments, but that is an entirely different story.

The critical thing I took from this is how desparate people are to make links – no matter how tenuous. Why on Earth would the Hohokam have used the same name / symbology for a constellation as the Greeks? Generally speaking each culture has radically different names for the constellations (In Europe we have been to heavily overrun by the Romano-Greeks to retain our own names, but the  Saxons, Celts etc all called them different things – different animals etc)? There is no reason what so ever to think they would use the same concepts and it strikes me that the researchers involved have found a  cave painting and shoe horned their model of what it means.

Shockingly bad astronomy if this is the case. It is a sad statement about education that none of the reporters seem to have noticed this.

Apparently a gamer detoxing centre has opened in Amsterdam. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2006-06-08-video-game-addicts_x.htm?csp=34 The consultants who operate it say gaming may look harmless but it’s “as addictive as gambling or drugs.”

Well, OK, if I was the director of a spurious clinic to treat an invented addiction, those might be my very words. I thought conning money from the gullible was supposed to be the sort of behaviour associated with addiction to gambling or drugs. I realise that there is a serious new social problem here. The desire to treat any behaviour as an addiction is obviously a dangerously habit-forming thing.

And I can offer a solution.

So I am offering the services of my new state of the art detox centre to any of the unfortunates caught up in the web of offering detoxes for anything that used to be considered a choice or a hobby. Only £6k a week, all in, introductory offer.

You are also included, Carol Vorderman. Offering detoxes for everyday life is surely the ultimate goal of every therapeutic grifter*. You can’t charge as much per “patient” but you have the whole population as potential customers.

* Source- the Simpsons. Before you ask, I don’t know what it means either.

Even our own proto page isn’t seeing what we post for at least twenty minutes 🙂 For example, the World Cup “soccer” page isnt there yes (ten minutes later).

Shame on us.

Following the rant about the “COPE act” I felt the need to say my two pence as well.

What an insane idea this is. Sadly it is self defeating to a large extent. If email is now first and second class then eventually it will either break down – as every email provider pays to have their email first class, or when everyone realises that AOL produce no decent mail (ever) and just block their systems – or email will become superceded.

Email is one of the “Killer Applications” of the internet. It was one the first and has well and truly out lived the others. Is there anyone who remembers gopher: urls for instance? As people are now getting obsessive about using Blackberry and the like, charging the end user for email would be insane.

Not to mention the problems for cross border issues. Can a (for example) Russian company sue an American ISP for delayng its email? Will return gestures be implemented? When an email passes over the GLOBAL internet, how can any one organisation try to charge for anything other than the very last bit of the loop?

All in all, another badly thought out law passed by the steadily more insane US government.

Welcome to 1984, sorry its a bit late.

Amazingly, many workplaces (e.g. mine) are actually encouraging their managers to allow people to watch the World Cup in worktime or give time off to watch it – although in exchange for some repayment of the time spent. This is because it somehow now seems to be our patriotic duty to support our national football team. (That’s “soccer” to you in the USA though I would also require you to wash your mouth out after saying it)

I am all for this principle of time off for leisure activities. It could just do with being extended. E.g., we actually had good weather this week for the first time this year. I will happily swap a few hours in the sunshine for a couple of hours in work in January. I will even pretend to be watching the World Cup if i have to…..

I do enjoy watching football when there’s a good goal or a fancy bit of ball juggling. I just never realised it was my patriotic duty before.

Yes, things move at a slow rural redneck pace here in the UK, at least as far as undertsanding US politics. However, I have just found out about “net neutrality” and why it is no longer going to exist.

No less a person than St. Tim Berners-Lee voiced concerns over this, reported  on the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5063072.stm. He said that this would be a dark period for the Internet.

The so-called COPE Act (What is with laws having to have snappy names now?) was passed by 321-101 votes. This will basically make it OK to have two levels of Internet – the good bit for the companies that can pay and the duff bit for the rest of us. The bill was opposed by Google, E-Bay and Amazon (and a “film star” I’ve never heard of.) They unsuccessfully tried to get support for an amendment that would guarantee equal access.

Having only just heard about this and understanding as little as I normally do about US politics, let alone the business imperatives underlying the Internet, it seems ominous. I need to look into it. If anyone can explain it better, please write to us here.

Another invented addiction – to text and email – discovered. According to the Register and even today’s television news (so I am told anyway) people are now claiming to be addicted to text and email.

Come on. Doing something repeatedly, even obsessively, is surely not a disease.  People too dumb to see that spending 10p every couple of minutes to text mnnglss ste are just stpd. 

At least this explains spam - the random strings of words that I used to think existed only to stop me from bothering to even look for real emails aren’t from shady businesses. They are really from poor deluded email addicts and we should try to help them not condemn.

Re- previous blog entry. Good points there but Technorati is still infinitely more democratic in its effects than Google, in that the ordinary person still has a chance of getting listed. Granted it may take a while but at least you’re not starting from a position of 80000000 down if you happen to blog on a popular subject.

I don’t have blogs sorted by authority, just by date. In fact, such are the vagaries of my PC, that I can’t even choose to see Technorati’s lists by authority or by langauge because it just decides that English doesnt exist if I try that.

Following on from a recent (if misguided) attempt to try some SEO type experiments (and validate some of the, ahem, advice given on various websites) it seems my opinions of Technorati are in need of a review.

First of all, in the past we have ranted on about the problems with this new web “paradigm,” where every one is supposed to get into social bookmarking sites and the like, so I will try not to repeat it here. In a nutshell though, as more people become dependant on del.icio.us, technorati, Digg and their like, it will become much harder to get noticed as a “new” website.

For example, if you started a brand new website with all manner of cutting edge information in your blog – no one will ever see you. It will take weeks to get indexed in Google. Technorati are pretty much always a few hours behind your updates (unless you are a very high “ranking” site) and when you do a search the default is to return links to sites with more inbound links (and a higher technorati rank) than others.

This is all well and good, and within reason does actually show what is more important on the web. However, it is (IMHO) drastically assisting the inherent polarisation of the internet. Gone are the days where the net produces even a semblance of a level playing field.

If you want to get noticed by Google you need to either sponsor a lot of links or have such a PR juggernaught that you get mentioned on hundreds of other websites. Are either options realistic for the one-man-bands that web trading often characterises?

If you want to get noticed by Technorati it is even harder. You need lots of other blogs to link back to you. In some cases this will just create even more link farming than there is at present. WordPress for example comes with a default Blog roll of about eight blogs – when you search for them on Technorati they get very, very high rankings!

With about one and a half million blogs on Technorati there has to be some way of ranking them, but isnt the risk of making popular sites more popular and killing the smaller sites something to be avoided? If this was a debate about Tesco/Walmart/Sainsbury etc killing off the small shop then people are in uproar about the need for “grass roots businesses.” Why are we allowing, even encouraging, it on the internet?

Almost daily I get emails from reasonably respectable businesses asking for link exchanges – occasionally offering to sweeten the deal with a cash payment – and this is especially true for websites with a reasonable Google PR. The problem with this (and with all systems) is that it is pure abuse of the system. Website X ends up with a high page rank (or Technorati rank) not because it is good, cheap, accurate or anything – just because it has engineered itself more inbound links.

Add into this mess the problems with Digg and del.icio.us and you can see that trying to start a new, popular, website or service these days is going to be VERY hard.

Now to make matters worse, it seems Technorati is as close to random, when it comes to updating, as possible. For example, each time a new entry is made on this blog it sends a ping to Technorati (and gets a “thank you” saying the database has been updated). However, you have to wait about four hours before the post appears in a search. This is not the case for some other sites – generally ones with high Technorati ranking.

Once more, it is reasonable for them to have some system in place – however, this one makes the “hidden blog” situation even worse. People searching for “Interesting Topic XYZ” will generally be pointed towards already popular sites. The newer / less popular ones remain hidden.

As the other ones become more popular they get more links, faster updates and become even more popular. Starting to see signs of an exponential growth curve here…

Is this right? (In every sense of the word?)