SEO seems generally useless.  In some cases a so-called SEO company promises money for what you’d get for free in any case – a listing in the next 6 months.

However, there must be some mysterious reasons why a site that apparently matches your search criteria in every aspect comes in as entry 34,672 out of 40,000 while a load of sites that don’t even mention any words in your search can be in the top ten.

Someone must have the secret, so anyone with a website that they hope will get the occasional visitor is fair game for any promise of a listing. 

At the same time, learning all the wierd tricks to optimise your search engine ranking seems a difficult step with no certainty of success.

Google is fine but much too dominant. There should be a wider variety of styles of search engine sites with a wide variety of ways of ranking.

Google’s search criteria are anything but transparent. That is fair enough if it’s meant to stop people easily manipulating their rankings. It’s also fair enough if MSN and similar sites are always easy to find.

However, the end result is that the big sites get bigger through being the biggest. Smaller sites that may have more relevant content don’t get a chance. Who is going to look at page 379 and choose a site from there?

And sometimes, it’s almost incomprehensible why there are pages of results that bear only a passing relationship to the query string.

A reliance on page descriptions can be even worse than the older user of metatags. The description has to make some sort of sense, so it needs standard English words that contribute nothing (and, the, a, as well as introduces, presents, shows and so on). The small word limit makes it very difficult to explain anything about your content, if you have any variety in it.

For all its importance, biodiversity turns out to be another one of those ideas that humans can’t be trusted with.

As reported by the BBC, today (22 Jan 06) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4635330.stm there is about to be a massive cull of grey squirrels in the name of biodiversity. Grey squirrels are suddenly not just a threat to red squireels and tress but to hedgehogs. And they must be killed.

This seems to completely ignore the clear fact that the biggest threat to biodiversity is us – human beings. We brought the grey squirrels in the first place. There are very many ways to address the loss of red squirrels – including protecting the locations where indigenous creatures thrive; stopping turning their habitats into housing and road developments; or doing less poisoning of the countryside – all of which would be inconvenient for at least some of us. Killing grey squirrels is only inconvenient for them, and they don’t exactly have votes.

The killing approach represents a common “solution” to loss of diversity. Badgers swing from being a protected species to being “cullable” because they are allegedely killing hedgehogs (Guardian 21 Jan) or spreading TB. The survival of badgers is in itself a miracle but they are cute enough to have human supporters. Grey squirrels are also cute so they may have some chance. Uncute unfurry animals and insects and plants that don’t make good soft toys have very little chance.

Surely solutions to encouraging biodiversity – where it involves undoing human damage that has limited species numbers – must be more sophisticated than handing out death sentences.

It’s no surpise to anyone that a diversity of life forms reflects the health of an environment. However, the message is often lost when set against human development goals.

In a New Scientist article on a 2005 Biodiversity Conference in Galway, the writer made the point that human health is adversely affected by loss of biodiversity. Organisms like the bilharzia-carrying snail have become a threat where increasing levels of human activity have led to a decrease in snail populations in Kenya, for example.

There is fuller discussion of the conference report available at http://www.sci-tech.co.uk/biodev.php

The best TV series ever was The Wire. (Series 1 was the best, 2 was OK but got better, 3 was better than 2 but not as good as the first series. ) It’s really funny as well as utterly engaging.
It’s a gansters vs cops series. The cops aren’t necessarily good and the gangsters aren’t necessarily bad though. The “wire” refers to various forms of electronic surveillance.
It’s accessible in the UK on an obscure Sky backup channel and is currently in series 2 here but you need to see series 1 first to get a taste for it..

There is not much to say beyond that, but I will provide some (gushing) reasons to justify my choice:

Standard tv reasons: The dialogue is almost always good and sometimes completely brilliant. Some of the characters are brilliant (eg Omar) Some of the acting is excellent. The soundtracks are good – series 1 has a basically hip hop soundtrack. There is lots of action and suspense. The visual aspect is often stunning. The central character starts off sympathetic (McNulty) but then gets increasingly flawed and irritating. The most sympathetic character is a gangster (di Angelo) who starts to stand up for himself and employ some moral sense but who gets killed because of it in series 2

More intellectual reasons: It looks at serious issues – class and race in US society, the priorities of law enforcement and the pressures on police; alternatives to the murderous state of inner-city neighbourhoods; common factors in the internal politics of gangs and police; the effect of economic change on traditional working class neighbourhoods and their institutions; the way people can be manipulated by community/family/group values, and so on.
It does this without ever pushing the issues down your throat and without ever being less than completely entertaining in the way of a standard cop series.
I think it’s the best tv series I’ve ever seen, although my standards are probably a bit dubious anyway.

To my accelerated time sense, it’s only a few years since everyone was supposed to bin their old motherboard because it wouldn’t support AGP graphics cards. AGP was the future of graphics cards, etc.

Now, if you want to upgrade your graphics card, you have to get PCI-E. So throw away your old AGP-supporting motherboard to get one that supports PCI-E. In which case you probably also have to throw away the CPU and RAM and upgrade them to match the motherboard specs.

I know that PC manufacturers have to stay in business and that planned obsolescence is how it’s done but- bah.

Richard Dawkins pro-rationalist TV programme on Channel 4 is pretty good. He interviewed some real headcases and a relatively inoffensive liberal C of E bishop. If I have a criticism it is that he laid into the bishop’s belief system with more enthusiasm than the evangelical US “pro-life and pro-murder of doctors” nutters. Still, he’s not a bad presenter. Dawkins actually seems much more normal than the standard tv scientist, as he would not cause comment in the street, unlike certain other tv scientists, chosen for their visual oddities to distract the viewer from possibly boring science, maybe.

I see from the BBC site that the government is still hoping for a vistory on this ludicrous issue and intends to overturn the Lords ruling, although the BBC reckons there will be a lot of opposition in the Commons

It is clearly ludicrous to treat “Intelligent design” as a serious theory of anything. It has no predictive nor explanatory power. It cannot be tested or falsified. Its only significance in scientific terms must be its role in the teaching of science. So its dissemination is an issue for social science (the history of ideas, the role of ideas as ideologies, the power relations involved in how it is being treated as a serious alternative to evolutionary science.) Even in religious terms it is impossible to see it as a genuine point of view. (Even the Catholic Church has recently dismissed it.) Continue reading →