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.

Stonehenge,
originally uploaded by Tulna.

Well, as you can see I am still going through flickr.com – a search with the term “english heritage” is very worthwhile.

This shot of stonehenge (I dont know if the colours have been edited at all) is pretty cool. It creates an interesting green sheen over the stones and the lack of people is pretty impressive.

Stonehenge is a good bench mark as it seems to be the most photographed place in England. (From my unscientific view point! :))

jokulsarlon glacial lagoon,
originally uploaded by krmuir.

Sorry to keep the photo thread going… but this lagoon shot looks amazing. Some excellent work done on some fantastic landscape there.

(I will try to limit my use of superlatives soon…)

Well, readers of Saturday’s newspaper (or the website www.badscience.net) may be forgiven for thinking that Ben Goldacre, scourge of the charlatan, has gone soft. (Read the article online)

Taken brutally out of context, and subjected to skim reading, this article look almost like an approval of homeopathic remedies to treat all manner of ailments. The print version is a worse offender (missing the phrase “Bring on the placebos” – at least in my newspaper), but generally speaking about 60% of the people I have shown the article to so far think it was basically saying that “modern medicine has had its chance, now we need to try the homeopathic stuff.”

Shocking.

I hope I am not alone in being dismayed by this. To me, the article read like a sly dig at homeopathy – basically pointing out the fact it does nothing and has no real evidence to support it working – but on re-reading, and after speaking to others it may have been a bit too sly.

From speaking to people who have already bought into the snake oil sales pitch of homeopathy, this article was too close to support for them to see the reality. The only thing I can hope is that 99.9% of badscience’s audience are not that way inclined. (Although from the feedback on mobile phone towers I am not so sure…)

Sorry about the time lag between posts recently but pretty much everyone here at Why Dont You has had some time off of late or been away on work related courses.

You will all be pleased to know that the world has not improved one iota during our down time – so expect more rants to follow soon. 🙂

Is it 1984? Is it Germany 1936 again? I keep asking this and the answers get more depressing every time.

The front page of the Guardian today (19 May 2006) has an article on a plan to give council staff access to police intelligence to monitor criminals. The council staff include a huge swathe of people, inclluding park keepers, housing officers and community support officers. (Park keepers? Are there any left?)

Apart from people that you expect to have problems with this, such as the organisation Liberty, even the Police Federation are understandably disturbed, according to the Guardian article. Their spokesman pointed out that the data protection issues are huge. The police are trained to observe high standards in keeping their information secure. Leaks are traceable and should be dealt with seriously. Not only will the myriad council employees not have the training to evaluate information, they will not have the same constraints on their divulgence of it.

When this gets put into operation together with the implementation of the Identity Card fiasco, no one will have anything resembling privacy. It will also be impossible to obtain redress against people spreading malicious tales about you because it will be well nigh impossible to know who is responsible.

If a police officer misbehaves – as of course they sometimes do – you can hold them accountable. If a bin collector or school dinner worker misuses information about you, what possible redress can you have? It won’t even be in their job description that they can’t misuse personal information. Is there reason to think that police training and accountability are a complete waste of time and that networks of neighbourhood spies would be much more efficient?

Diidn’t this sort of thing used to be the responsibility of the STASI or the KGB in what were supposed to be the bad old days before freedom came to Eastern Europe?

To anyone, who served in World War II on the Allied side – my deepest and most sincere apologies. We seem to have thrown away the lives of the people who died then just so that we could set up our own proto-fascist state sixty years later, and under a “Labour” government no less.

Again, from reading interesting links on the “Past Thinking” blog site – I came across some links to the megalithic portal. All I can say is “wow.”

The map is amazing, and accurate. I have spent the last 10 minutes marvelling at the photos and sheer volume of information they have available. It has a forum and lots of user-contributed information, which is both good and bad. While I havent had time (yet) to fully explore the site, first impressions are very, very good. All I can say is check it out now!

http://www.megalithic.co.uk/

Thanks to a link on the “past thinking” blog I found out about some very interesting software produced to create 3D models. So far it looks VERY cool – I have not had time to check it out properly but I will do so soon.

One of the most interesting things about this is, is the ability it has to link into Google Earth maps – potentially great fun.

You can find out more about this at http://www.sketchup.com/.

Tynemouth Priory and Castle,
originally uploaded by me.

I promise this is the last photo of the day 🙂

This is a picture of the grave yard to the read of the priory at “Tynemouth Castle.” (An English Heritage site at the mouth of the river Tyne, oddly enough :-))

Most, if not all the graves with readable details on date to the 17th or 18th centuries – some from the early 19th but not many. Despite this, apparently King (later Saint) Oswin of Deira and King Osred II of Northumbria are supposed to be buried here. All I can say is I never found their gravestones.

Apparently the priory / monastry did well until the disolution under Henry VIII. During his reign, the Monks here surrendered the site to the king, and he apparently decided it was more suitable for a costal defence fort – and the castle was built.

It is a strange site – it has lots of early medieval parts (the priory for example), is ringed with a sixteenth century artillery fortress, has WW1 and WW2 gun emplacements and, best of all, a 1960’s tower building (looks like an Air Traffic Control tower) which now appears to be home of the CCTV monitoring site. All very amusing.

Well, as I was feeling somewhat photogenic I thought it would be appropriate to share some of my own flickr photos with the world!

This is one of sunlight coming through the trees at Belsay castle. Well, I liked it 🙂 You can see more on the flickr pages.

It’s really hard to choose a decent sig. Anything anyone with taste might reasonably want has already well gone.All the same, there is little excuse for some of the ones I’ve seen recently.

MSN messenger provides emoticon images for sticking in your Msn messages, not for sticking hearts and smileys in a huge string as your user name. This is barely acceptable from kids. Anyone over the age of 16 had better have a good reason for it and I find it hard to think of one.

There is absolutely no excuse for a smiley face in your sig.

I’m not going to go on to a second point because there will be no stopping me. You know who you are.

I’m not claiming the moral high ground here. I  have rubbish user names for everything I do and I can never even remember them so I set them up and then can’t remember them to get back in to whatever i joined. All I can say is that I have never knowingly used any silly pictures or deliberately soppy names,

Sorry about this, it’s not ground-breakingly brilliant but it’s entertaining. There is something good about having a mathematician and his physicist not-quite girlfriend as the relatively glamourous heros of a cop show. This makes a change from scientists always being portrayed as total geeks.

There is an odd physicist as well – the short guy from Ally McBeal – but there are odd non-scientists – liek the man who used too be the central character in Taxi. The programme doesn’t necessarily assume that having mathematical skills makes you a social outcast, which is nice.

How did I miss this?

“This month, NO2ID and a growing number of other organisations* ask that you renew your passport… Did you know that, from October of this year, as preparation for the ID scheme, ALL first-time passport applicants will have background checks and be interviewed by officials at one of the government’s 69 new ‘enrolment centres’? This will include your children as they reach 16“ (http://www.no2id.net/ 7 May 2006) At the moment, existing passport holders are not included in this but they will be.

Granted this means coming up with £51 now, but the ID style one will cost at least £93, according to no2ID. And will get you stuck in the sytem for life.