Playing Devil’s Advocate here (:-)) I decided to take up the question of whether Buddhism is religion or philosophy, as discussed a few posts ago.

I think any belief system can have a philosophical or religious side. Buddhism gets away with a lot because people who aren’t brought up in its traditions tend to be introduced to the philosophy, which has some wonderful insights into the human condition and the nature of life. In which case, you might think it doesn’t matter if it also involves certain observances.  Have you ever heard of Nicheren Shoshu “Buddhism”? It involves chanting certain mantras, to get rewards in the material world – wealth, promotions, a wife or husband, a new kitchen, etc. It seems to require that believers hand over fair amounts of cash but they can always get this back through their dedication to chanting. Chanting for things you need  is a sign of devoutness. If you need a new washing machine, surely it shows a lack of faith if you don’t take the opportunity to chant  so the universe will magically provide it for you.

By this standard, even extreme fundamentalist Islam or Christianity seem almost innocent. However, having said that, there is little evidence that the self-indulgent celeb-heavy philosophies like Nicheren Shoshu or Kabbala leads people to take part in crusades or jihads, so I suppose we should be grateful for them.

Technorati Tags: Religion, Philosophy, Society, Buddhism

Under the Disability Discrimination Act (1999 & 2004 amendment) I can be prosecuted (alright, I admit it is unlikely) if my web sites can’t be accessed by people with impairments. (For example, a webpage must be OK for software that reads out the content for the blind. It can’t base navigation on colours that colourblind people can’t distinguish.)

I happen to regard the sites that I’ve got some input into as pretty useful. Sadly, I can’t really flatter myself that they are a matter of life or death to anyone.

So how is it that I could be prosecuted if a blind person can’t read the web site, when I can’t find a single item of dispensed or over-the-counter medicine (MEDICINE, that was, not sweets or makeup or fabric softener) where the crucial instructions are written in more than 7 point text?

7 point text might as well be invisible ink as far as I am concerned. I genuinely cannot see the text, unless I shine stage lighting on it and squint. And I don’t even wear glasses.

Does the DDA not apply to anything where it might matter? I can’t think of any circumstances where misreading our websites might injure someone – unless they read them backwards and act on perceived Judas priest-style secret messages. On the other hand, I am sure everyone could think of several ways in which failing to read crucial information on food or medicine could lead to serious injury or death.

Technorati Tags: Disability Discrimination Act, DDA, Disability, Discrimination, Law, legislation, Society

BBC website – an unending source of blogging topics, thank you, BBC – has some discussion of conspiracy theories about Princess Diana’s death, plus an online questionnaire designed to let you assess how inclined you are to believe in conspiracy theories. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/6213226.stm

The questionnaire is designed along the blatantly silly lines you’d expect – after a string of questions on the lines of “Do you believe event x was a conspiracy?” it adds them up and tells you the obvious. Although some aren’t so obvious. I can’t see a connection between feeling politically powerless and being willing to believe everything is the result of a conspiracy. The first seems to indicate a rational assessment and the second like encroaching paranoia.

A big problem with conspiracy theories as a way of understanding the world is that the theories require there to be people with almost godlike powers. These conspirators can foresee every eventuality and turn it to their advantage. Their plans can take years to be put into practice. The big conspiracy theories always rest upon large numbers of people being involved but none of the actors ever give away the secrets.

This seems exactly the reverse of what most people know about the world. Most importantly, people make mistakes. Governments make big costly mistakes. Constantly. People don’t keep secrets. The bigger the secret, the less likely it is to be kept. Once more than one person knows something, the truth starts leaking out. Lies get found out. Plans fall apart because of completely irrelevant accidents – an unexpected traffic jam, an overheard phone conversation, a slip of the tongue. People who plan things together might agree on an objective but start to disagree, as soon as it’s achieved.

When comparatively minor sins – MPs getting paid cash for questions or political parties burgling their opposition’s headquarters – are found out, huge scandals erupt. Could any social group have enough power to stop the leakage of information with such explosive potential as proof that aliens have landed, or the US government manufactured 9/11 or the moon landings were faked.

Once we start believing that there are all-powerful groups who control everything and who aren’t susceptible to normal human failings, we might as well check our brains and lose the tickets.

This is a seasonal update on an old post here http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/04/14/happy-easter/ which was all about Easter being good. Sadly, in the interest of balance, it has to be matched by a post that tells you Christmas is rubbish.

This is obviously not true if you are under 12. The judgement can go either way for the next 6 years or so. After that, it is basically a rubbish holiday, made bearable only by watching under 12 year-olds enjoy it.

(And that enjoyment is marred when you realise that the most innocent children can be successfully turned into grasping consumer monsters, after you’ve spent a few years teaching them that greed is good and will be annually rewarded.)

It’s not even on the date of the winter solstice. It’s a few days afterward, so Christmas is sneakily trying to pretend it’s not really a pagan midwinter festival. Come on. This just shows that priests couldn’t even be bothered to work out the date of the midwinter solstice properly. (Hint to the Christian hierarchy, megalithic circles may be the way to solve this problem. It’s apparently worked before.)

This is a time of year when you have to wake up in the dark and come home from work in the dark. By definition, this is extremely depressing. Imagine what it’s like at the North Pole. There must be about ten minutes of daylight for those poor captive elves who have to make and pack all this consumer trash. Does anyone care about them?

It’s the middle of the winter. I like the idea of a big feast to take your mind of that. Why did we turn this natural response into a festival the run-up to which is so stressful that we need a fortnight to wind down?

Who thought we’d feel better about the cold and damp and darkness if we started spending all our money? Even getting into debt, so we can give away our money – having first transmuted it into novelty slipper sock and “designer” label deodorant form – mainly to people who don’t need it. Or, at least, who wouldn’t need it if they weren’t also becoming indebted in the process of giving away all theiir money. This seems to me to be a definite misunderstanding of the whole rich man and eye of the needle thing.

Any holiday from work is normally welcome. Why do the work holidays you get at Christmas come when you don’t need them? Boxing Day? Why? Even more redundant are the free days between Boxing Day and New Year’s Eve. There is nothing to do in this week except regret how much you’ve spent/eaten/drunk in the week before Christmas – when you would have actually welcomed a holiday so you could shop/drink/cook and eat the odd foods that are required at Christmas. (If these ritual food items are so good, why doesn’t anyone eat them at any other time?). Bah humbug, etc.

There are websites celebrating naff Christmas things. http://www.uglychristmaslights.com/ has photos of decorations that are not in fact particularly ugly (though the site is) but which laugh in the face of all those adverts that tell us not to leave our TVs on standby because of global warming. There are obviously people who would choose to be reincarnated as Blackpool, if they were Buddhists.

There are some Christmas things on http://www.worldofkitsch.com/features/kitschmas2003/index.html, although I thought I had invented the concept of Kitschmas, so I feel a bit cheated by this site’s very existence. I am baffled by “Or, you can discuss kitschmas in the chat room and messageboard. “. Are there really people who want to discuss naff Christmas things with other people? Well, if there are, this is clearly the place for it.

Oh blast, I want to go there now, just to see what they talk about. And sneer, of course, as I am doing here …… There is something intriguingingly circular about going to a web forum just to sneer at people who are meeting just to sneer at naff things. Ha, start sneering at me now and we will have achieved escape velocity, thus opening up a wormhole to an alternative sneer-powered universe. Where you can power a TV on standby by merely thinking of the sort of music they have listed in their Kitschest music quiz. (Beegees, Abba, Village People, and Odyssey, if you are interested. Who are Odyssey? No, on second thoughts, its better not to know.)

http://www.worldofkitsch.com/features/kitschmas2003/treegame.html lets you decorate a virtual tree to excess. (Don’t bother, except in Internet Explorer. It will just sit there if you try it in Firefox)

My PC is often eccentric and Internet Explorer sometimes seems to have its own agenda, but the way Technorati has been behaving in the past few days defies even my capacity for denial.

I have managed to get it to behave normally about one in twenty tries. Almost all of the rest of the time it just dies on any search, giving the sort of useless error messages that might as well say “It’s broken. I have no idea either, sorry.” A few times, it manfully tried to give me search results but couldn’t sustain the effort beyond the first page and belatedly did the dying thing again.

Long after it has come into existence and disappeared, I read in MD that there the first online bodybuilding competition had been held. (Won by a lad in a weird blonde wig.)

Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t the existence of Photoshop mean that anyone could win one of these competitions?

This blog complained in January 2006 about how bad search engines are. This post will raise that one by about a grand. If anything, they seem to be getting worse.

I had offered to try to find someone’s email address online. Assuming the person was too canny to put their real name (to avoid spam) but might give some signs of their presence in forums and so on, I tried various search methods. The first thing that I discovered was that there seem to be no legitimate directories in which you can find people. Where there used to be White pages and People finders, there are basically none worth using. I can see that spam has made people unwilling to leave their email addresses ripe for the plucking but this seems ridiculous.

I did straight searches for the name (quite an unusual one) and found one forum post containing this name in Google. I continued searching using other search engines and what you would assume to be more productive versions of the name, (such as just the first initial and surname) and actually found that even the forum post that I had found the first time wasn’t brought up by any other searches.

So experimentally, I tried searching for other names, including the name of someone who I know was found through the Internet by an old school friend a couple of years ago, when the internet was clearly a much more naive and open place. No results. I then tried searching for a name that had appeared in this blog. I found this blog but only a cached version. I did not find the article to which the blog had linked, although this is still available online.

So, to test Google, I searched for the headline of the article to which I had referred. I enclosed the text in quotes to stop it from bringing up its first choices – a string of web addresses where any of the words appeared anywhere in any order. (The blog article had came up on page 2) No results, this time, except for where the headline was quoted in this blog – cache version only.

Not believing my eyes, given that I had the article open in front of me in Internet Explorer, I assume that the site for which I was searching is just not indexed by Google. It is a local newspaper site for a pretty sizeable UK city. It gets public funding. Can it really have been so inept in its SEO practice that Google can’t see it? Are googlebots so inadequate that they can’t see a site which supplies many GB of text?

The article is nearly a year old. I thought that maybe Google feels impelled to cache anything this old to save its search time. However, this doesn’t explain why most of the presented results went back 7 years and came from very obscure rural journals, when I put a couple of phrases from the headline in quotes.

There are lots of sources online that claim to have some idea about the logic that underlies Google (et al) ‘s search methods. Bullsh. There is no logic to it, as far as I can see, after empirical testing.

Tragically, search engines are not just getting poorer at delivering meaningful results, they are increasingly clones of each other, so that you get the same garbage, in the same order, from half a dozen. There must be a solution?

I don’t want to turn my part of this blog into a Wire fan site but it’s not easy. So, to keep the fanaticism under control, I’m going to list a few watchable to good recent US tV series that we need to have in the UK, and not just on obscure cable channels. (Just bear in mind that nothing is fit to wash the feet of the Wire.) Any contributions/disagreements/ suggestions of alternative programmes are more than welcome.

Heroes: really good. A Guardian Guide piece suggested it was good partly because it doesn’t take comic book superheroes you already know and mess with your own expectations. It creates a whole new set of really interesting heroes, some of whom are evil. The netcam “model” with the evil murderer inside her is great. The chubby Japanese lad, Hiro (geddit) who can mess about with time and space is great. The Mutantfinder general who turns out to be actually trying to save his daughter is slimily chilling (so, good) And so on. It’s the current number 2 on my US TV list.

Numb3rs: I’ve already written about this. The plots are getting sillier and the resolutions lamer and the family values stuff is threatening to choke it even more than usual. But- it still gets interesting Math into the story lines and it’s always watchable.

Smallville: Always watchable. Clark plays the dumb farmboy so well you want to siphon mind-enhancers into his kryponitestream. Lois is pretty good. She has remade the Lois role in a completely unfamiliar way. Lana is more like the traditional Lois, both visually and in her character. Lana’s acting range is still stuck between simpering and looking hurt at “secrets,” but I’ve got used to her and she’s consistent. Chloe is also good, still the nosiest would-be reporter on earth, with hacking skills that would put her in the top 0.0001% of computer users. Jimmy Olsen hasn’t been in it long enough to wipe the memory of the comic book and old TV series Jimmy Olsens so I can’t really take to him. Prep school bully turned millionaire avenger, the Green Hornet is a new twist and is Lois’s current boyfriend. Lana is bizarrely having Lex’s child but it’s really Zod’s. Lex and Mr Luthor are just brilliant.

Stargate and Stargate Atlantis: Am missing them both. Where have they gone?

Eureka: Silly but engaging premise, a town populated by geniuses. Silly but engaging programme.

Invasion: Pretty compulsive but they seem to have dropped it. Lots of fish.

Dead zone: That’s on here. It’s almost always watchable. I suspect they’ve dropped this before ever getting to the resolution.

Law and order.x: Elevator Inspectors’ Unit. I made that up (I didn’t, the Simpsons did.) All varieties are good even when ludicrous.

High spots: Vincent D’Onofrio in Criminal Intent – the most ludicrous but completely engaging overacting you have ever seen on TV. Set off by the extreme matter of factness of his partner, Eames, in the series. So they are a sort of Mulder and Scully (from when the X-Files was still good) but taken to extremes. Plus, Detective Goren is the exact opposite of Mulder in credulity. My favourite partly because it is both silly and shrewd.

Traditional Law and Order– always good, Briscoe was the true star, of course, but it has always had great parts, sometimes engagingly played by really surprising people, Like the early Law and Order detective who was a central characters in a wierd angels/avengers series – a dead pair of fighters against the Morlocks in the war between heaven and hell, in a series called something like Dead and Alive. (I said something like, not that that was its name, because I’ve forgotten it ) The fact that Ice T plays a detective in Special Victims Unit gives it an wierd underlying comedy value. He is certainly no worse in the part than any of the other actors but it’s quite hard to take him seriously as a continuously morally outraged Special Victims cop.

Which brings me back to the Wire, given that Method Man plays Marlo’s chief assassin (and is really good in the part) Bah, I’ve come full circle. I think that’s covered it for even remotely current things.

I am resisting my overwhelming compulsion to discuss the Wire until my hands seize up from RSI.

However, I have recently resurfaced from complete immersion in a few episodes at once and can’t put a stopper on this altogether. The last time that I was swept up into a world populated by so many diverse characters, who are true-to-life and extravagantly over-the-top at the same time, was when I read Charles Dickens as a child.

Especially in Series 4, the Wire’s world of hypocrites, self-serving officials, cheats, villains, child criminals, abandoned urchins and flawed heroes is a modern mirror for Dickens’ depiction of the world of the Victorian underclass.

A Carnegie Mellon University study of anti-phishing toolbars has concluded that they are all pretty pesh.

Reports produced by  SmartWare & 3sharp –  companies that turn out to have been funded by Microsoft and  Mozilla – had claimed that Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 were great at detecting fake urls.  No prizes for guessing which company funded the report that came up with which finding. 

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh – in a study funded by  rather more disinterested organisations including the US National Science Foundation and the US Army Research Office - looked at ten browser toolbars: Microsoft Explorer 7, eBay,Google, Netcraft (Mozilla), Netscape, Cloudmark (Mozilla), Earthlink,  Geotrust’s TrustWatch, Stanford University’s Spoofguard and McAfee’s SiteAdvisor.
The best performers were – Earthlink, Netcraft, Google, Cloudmark, and Explorer 7 – but these found only 85 percent of fraudulent websites.  This is a good score but far from paerect and coul;d give you a false sense of security. None of the others found more than 50  percent. McAfee’s SiteAdvisor ignominiously failed to identify any phishing sites.(Source:  TECHWORLD)

From the Register-

The police and Home Office demanding legal powers to insist that every CCTV camera in Britain (of which there are supposedly over 4 million) be upgraded so it can provide good enough footage to be used as police evidence and be able to host technologies to identify people automatically

Scary.

The Guardian (Friday 17 November) reported that it had cracked the super-secure biometric passport in under 48 hours by using brute force password cracking and an RFID reader costing under £200.

This is, of course, the technology that will be used on the ID card, except that the ID card will have infinitely more personal information that can be be read by anyone with enough cash to buy a reader and a copy of a password cracker. Not that anyone with hostile intent will need to go to that trouble when everyone’s most private information will be available to a quarter of a million health service employees at the touch of a keyboard.

To be honest, the passport reading wasn’t quite as much of a victory over the password encryption technology as the Guardian presented it as. They said there was no capacity to change anything on the embedded chip but the article pointed out that it left the passwords open to cloning, as demonstrated by a German a month ago.

The Guardian article made the excellent point, which can’t be repeated often enough, but which never seems to get through to government – these ID technologies will be a godsend to identity thieves. They will be no major obstacle to terrorists or organised crime – in fact they may represent a revenue stream. They will threaten the liberties of everybody else.

According to Wikipedia, the Wire has been called “the best show on television by TIME, Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian , the Chicago Tribune, Slate, and the Philadelphia Daily News (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire_(TV_series))

No argument there.

You might think I’m over the top in my enthusiasm for the Wire but on I-tunes there are some really fanatical reviews. I’m still not 100% sure how to get to the podcasts but you can go there from HBO’s site http://www.hbo.com/thewire/ The best way seems to be to click on the HBO podcast links on http://www.hbo.com/thewire/downloads/ and so on.

The customer reviews say things like

“Light years ahead of everything on television. If you’re not watching you’re missing out on history”

I was going to blog here about why the Wire is so special, but I’ve been distracted by the wealth of material from HBO and in podcasts. This material ranges from really informative discussion (e.g. David Simon discusses how it is rooted in real-world Baltimore society and that it’s more about class than race, for instance, which seemed pretty obvious to me but I’m not American) to blatantly silly (buy Jermaine’s – supposed – pick of classic hip hop.) It will keep you engrossed for hours if you like the Wire.

However, it appears that not many people do. The viewing figures are supposed to be poor. I suspect it may be too demanding of a lot of the audience. Granted, thinking about social relations doesn’t normally make for very good escapist entertainment. The genius of the Wire is to work as crime show at the same time as (not so ) popular entertainment.

I see that posts tagged 3 hours ago on del.icio.us have been tagged by 48 people. Is there any stretch of the imagination that would have 48 people reading and saving a tag from an ordinary blogger’s page?

That was a rhetorical question.

I am usually silent about the failings of technorati & blogger etc, which is mainly because my knowledge of these things is barely more than minimal.

However, I thought I’d put my own whine in now. I was reading back through the posts on technorati, etc (I can’t keep blaming technorati – it’s pretty fair, compared to g**gle) I saw one blog that had been tagged Stonehenge on del.icio.us and I followed that tag. Not only did this post not appear on the tag page, the ones shown on the page included a post from 2003. Do these pages get updated on an annual basis?