Well, there seems to be a continuing trend for my blogs now, innocently I click on a Technorati tag search and see what happens. When the results surprise me, I end up blogging about them. I wonder when it will cease to surprise me.

Anyway, the most recent one is the Technorati Philosophy blogs. Now this is busy. When I looked at it just now there were over 370,000 blog posts with the tag and the last 30 days have added around 1500 a day.

Obviously this means a lot to someone…

Strangely, most of the ones Technorati took me to today were much more biased towards “religion” than philosophy per se, but I assume most people have the two concepts closely linked. (It is not a requirement though).

Also a massive proportion of the blog posts seem to be the musings of religious-“spiritual” people in their late teens. Again, this panders to a few stereotypes and is a shame, as Philosophy is really a legitimate, serious subject with ramifications across lots of subject areas. An example of the slightly off the rails religious approach and an example of the late teen approach (Ok, she is 20 but my point remains) are available! It is worth noting that both sites have “Religion and Philosophy” as a single category.

Throwing a contrast, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science presents a very different perspective and is well worth visiting for the free content if nothing else. It is not “easy reading” of the manner of the previous two, but if you are interested in science, it is certainly worth working through.

Now, after the “sane” examples we are left with the rest of the bunch. This is always an entertaining stage of blog surfing. The word Philosophy seems to drag them out of the woodwork – I may try “Religion” when I have more spare time….

This is a priceless one. In a post titled “Saddam Hussein & Feast of Sacrifice (Muslim Holiday)” (this alone should highlight the potential crank content) we get such gems as:

Dont be fooled by Western Propaganda and Middle Eastern “Statesmen” that kiss the United States Ass!! Saddam Hussein is Christ Manifest. In The Bible It Tells You That Christ Will Return As A King of Terror. The Reason Why I Say This Is Because I Am Saddam Hussein!! Saddam Hussein is Zeus!! Saddam Hussein is Me!!

Blimey. Is this meant to be satirical? After a bit more ranting and incoherent babble, the post finishes with this:

Shiites and Sunnis Dont Believe In Allah, Kurds Dont Believe In Allah; Dont Believe In God That Is Why They Got Their Asses Tortured By Saddam Hussein. Why Is It That The Devil Wants To Divide Heaven, Be A False Provider Of Freedom. Human Beings Dont Need A Petty Constitution To Tell Them That They Are Free…..That Is Why God Created The Sun.

Now, I suppose the randomness of this page served a purpose as it encouraged me to read through more of his site and look at the MySpace profile he has – mainly to see if he was actually insane. Sadly reading the profile has not convinced me this is a nut case, so I can only assume the page is there as a joke. The brunt of the profile seems like a normal person (although choice of books is: “Bible, Quran, Tao Te Ching, Confucious, Ayn Rand, Karl Marx, Immanuel Kant, Nietzsche, Plato, Aristotle, William Shakespear,Saving Socrates, Call of the Wild, Political Thrillers & Military Thrillers, Romantic Novels, Steven King, Michael Chrichton, Science Fictions, Biographies” which is certainly unusual for a 25 year old male). He also has a picture of GW Bush (Captioned “The Devil without Make Up) and the words “I WANT TO MAKE THE WORLD FALSELY BELIEVE THAT DEMOCRACY IS GREATER THAN GOD’S PROVIDENCE” attached (as if this is Bush’s motive). A similar picture of Adolph Hitler is labled “I WANT TO MAKE THE WORLD FALSELY BELIEVE THAT NAZISM IS GREATER THAN GOD’S PROVIDENCE” so you can only assume some link between Democracy and Nazism, which is certainly a different philosophical point of view…

Just goes to show, no matter how much Technorati annoys me and how bad its set up is and how much it polarises the blogosphere – there remains the facility for it to provide hours of meaningless, pointless but still interesting distraction. 🙂

As lots of people will be aware, Linux is a fully functional, open source, operating system which runs on a massive variety of hardware platforms (from embedded devices to high end servers), comes with all the source code, comes with a massive variety of application packages (massive is an understatement) and generally costs nothing.

One of the other “wonders” of Linux, is the different variations you can have (often called Distro’s or Distributions). Vendors such as Novell (SuSE), Mandrake, RedHat (etc) all make versions. The sheer scale of the different distros is hard to appreciate but take a look at the DistroWatch website to see what is out there, or for a smaller sample, Wikipedia has a shorter list.

Despite this great variety, there is a common theme in that all the distros are – broadly speaking – the same. You execute commands in the same manner, you have a root account in the same manner etc. Add to this the similarity to Unix and you can see why linux is great and this spread of distros is not something to be scared of.

Now, not all that long ago a new distro appeared which while being good was hardly “better” than the others. In fact, this new distro changed some of the fundamental ways Linux used to do things (no root account for example) and created a “learning curve” for people moving from one distro to another. One thing this distro did do which was good, was to ship hundreds of installation disks for free. This distro was Ubuntu.

Since Ubuntu managed to flood the market, it has grown in popularity at an astonishing rate. This is not exactly something I was initially over the moon about (for examples, look at these search results) but it is good to see Linux get more mass market publicity.

However, as time progresses I now think it may not be such a good thing. Months ago, I gave up on PCW because it was becoming morbidly repetetive and the Unix column mentioned nothing but Ubuntu. If this was kept to generic “Unix ways of doingt things” it might not be a bad thing, but it isn’t. It is almost invariably Ubuntu specific things.

Recently I had the chance to read through back issues and the current issue of PCW – including the Unix column – and this trend has remained. The current one should be ashamed to call itself a “Unix” article. The whole section is now Ubuntu articles. Each month the author waxes lyrical about how great the latest distro is and how to work round the weird way Ubuntu does things.

As far as I can see it, this trend carries over to pretty much all the general PC publications, and worryingly is present (in smaller doses) on the more specialist magazines. As more and more people get locked into the Ubuntu way of doing things, Linux as it used to be will cease to exist and the day where Linux is a single OS in the manner of Windows will be upon us.

This is not a good thing.

Yesterday I was somewhat disapointed at the number of Creationist, or creationist-supporter, blogs which were out there attacking Richard Dawkins.

Today I look at technorati and see the balance is returning. It is not yet complete though, as these were the top three:

Sub Ratione Dei. A theology student who feels that, as a theology student he is more placed to talk about God than Dawkins. This is interesting as the God delusion is not about the Christian deity per se, but about the implications belief in a divine being have on humanity and the biological evidence which contradicts those beliefs. Maybe the author of Sub Ratione Dei feels that as a theology student they are more placed to discuss evolution and creationism than Dawkins. This is a quote from the Sub Ratione Dei web page: (all typos etc are as in the original)

By the grace of God as I was browsing the Politics section pondering whether to by the Griffin book there were what appeared to be a kindly elderly couple hunching over the popular science section discussing which of the three Dawkins books was the one he has just written that was causing all the fuss. Mustering up every ounce of self-restraint I pointed out which was the text in question and it is here they I deem the mysterious hand of divine providence to be at work. “Have you read it, is it good?” asked the moment. Ah ha! thought I, an opportunity to save a soul from the ramblings of a grumpy old man who doesn’t really know the subject he is talking about. Needless to say I with utmost respect for the man’s scientific qualifications considered his writing as perceptive on religion as an MI5 report on the existence of WMD in Iraq. After explaining that as a theology student I know a little bit about religion (and hence a little bit more than Dawkins) I suggested that they may want to try a Polkinghorne book I saw in the same section (not read the book but I took an educated guess it would be good). By the infinite mercies of God they agreed to take this book as well the Dawkins one. Not quite the outcome I was hoping for but at least if they are reading both they may have something reading Dawkins alone would be lacking, balance.

Godfight: now this is an odd blog and there isn’t much I can say about it, other than to link to it: http://freaktochic.typepad.com/ godfight/ 2006/ 12/ welcome_to_the_.html. You really do have to see it to understand what I mean.

The last of the top three – “X: Something to Ponder” – is different all together. It is not really a blog “about” Dawkins but mentions him in passing regarding a strange question the author is pondering. This quote is from http://www.sarwark.org /writings/ 2006/ 12/ something-to-ponder.html:

Question: If a Muslim father makes one a Muslim (a claim falsely made by Debbie Schlussel to smear Barack Obama) and a Jewish mother makes one a Jew, if a Muslim man marries a Jewish woman and they have a kid, is the child both Muslim and Jewish?
If so, can we fix the whole Middle Eastern situation through intermarriage?
Richard Dawkins would argue against the frame of the question. In his latest book, The God Delusion, he posits that children can’t truly hold religious beliefs, so a child is a “child of Jewish parents” rather than a “Jewish child.”
UPDATE: As I thought, being a Muslim requires one to submit to Allah. So much for that idea.

Still, these few days have possibly convinced me looking over technorati does indeed have some value.

You can tell the Christmas period is nearly over, the new crop of PC related magazines are all proclaiming (through front page blurbs) about how great Windows Vista is.

Now, before I rant, I have never used Vista and I am sure it is a great operating system.

For those of you who live under a rock, Vista is the latest version of Windows (ie it could also be called Windows XP2 or Windows 2007 depending on how you want to spin a name) and is supposedly an overhaul of the windows code from the ground up.

I have seen previews and read reviews on Vista and it looks like it will be a positive step for Windows, but XP is good. Why spend in the region of GBP160 to upgrade when in effect, you can already do everything it offers?

Now, if we use the cover of PCW as an example, it claims:

IT’S FASTER, MORE RELIABLE AND MORE SECURE
WHY YOU SHOULD UPGRADE AND WHICH VERSION TO CHOOSE

Now, call me old fashioned but I suspect a less than objective review is going to take place here. Sadly, this is nearly always the case when Microsoft churn out something significant and new. The MS PR machine seems to ensure that the PC press will generate page after page of rave reviews. Now I accept this does not happen all the time, but when was the last time you read a bad pre-launch review of either Windows or Microsoft Office?

Sadly, I can remember the run up to Windows ME being released and this was trumpeted (albeit not like Win 95 or Vista have been) about what a great upgrade it would be for the home user, how stable it would be and how secure it would be.

Then a few months later, reality hit and everyone realised what a dog WinME was….. 98 was “great” but only really took off after the service packs and so on. It is unlikely that Vista will be a really dencent operating system until after SP1 has been applied. None of the others have been.

Taking the three PCW points though, still leaves a big so what?

Vista is “faster” if you have a good processor, 1gb of RAM and a decent graphics card. Well, really. Who would have thought it. In the Winter 2006/2007 issue of PCW less than 50% of the PC systems (inc laptops) advertised would be able to run Vista properly. Shocking.

Vista is more reliable? Really? How do they know this? Have millions of users put it through it’s paces yet? Has it been running servers and workstations for months on end?

More secure? Possibly true as general windows security is abysmal. However it is like saying putting a rope in a door way is more secure than leaving it open. I’d rather have a door myself.

Now, is there any point to this rant? Well sort of. You see there is already an operating system which does ALL the things Vista claims and has been on the user market for long enough that it’s reliability and security are proven.

Linux.

Now, I hate Ubuntu but you can get it for free, it will do everything PCW claims are selling points for Vista and will run fast and secure on things other than the top of the range PCs. If you get Vista / Office 2007 you will need to learn new user interfaces and ways of doing things, so why not save yourself a few hundred pounds and get Linux?

Well, after a fairly innocuous first post on the subject, having read The God Delusion, I spent a little time today reading some technorati links regarding Richard Dawkins. This was an eye opener.

Now, historically, I have found Richard Dawkins annoying, irritating and overbearing. I am not a biologist so his remarkable wealth of knowledge on the subject is – largely – irrelevant.

However, reading some of the counter-argument blogs is amazing. The vast majority are blatant Christian / Creationist blogs which are obviously intimidated about the prospect of some one “preaching” (yes, I use this word with a full sense of the irony attached) atheism. Some are just nonsense, and some disguise themselves as being “open minded” blogs – but when you read any of the history they may as well have ©Discovery Institute at the bottom.

Some of the more recently viewed examples are (blatant Christian blog) – http://telicthoughts.com/ which has a YouTube video of Dawkins apparently making a fool of himself. The video is disturbing in many ways, not because of Dawkins error (everyone makes mistakes and it takes a special kind of retentive person to worry about this one unduly), but because of the comments Melvin Konner makes. He is talking about Dawkins (somewhat over the top) claims that Religious Indoctrination is child abuse and he goes on about how it is wrong to tell people how their children should or shouldn’t be indoctrinated (shocking in itself). He brings out the tired old fear that if people are told they cant indoctrinate their children – “Your Children or Mine will be taken away first.”

What madness is this. It is insane. It is pure fear mongering. At 2 mins 15 seconds the camera pans around the audience and you see the suitably concerned woman (with assumptions she is a mother) sitting in the audience looking worried. In the back of my head I can hear the voice from the Simpson’s “Wont anyone think of the children.” It really is shameful that this is presented as a reasoned argument. If you want to see more, but want to avoid the telicthoughts website, then you can watch the video on YouTube. The site appears to have a bit of Richard Dawkin’s fixation which is interesting on many levels. (As examples: http://telicthoughts.com/?p=1141 or more generally http://telicthoughts.com/?cat=35)

On a (much) more entertaining vein, there is a blog called Pavlov’s Cat, which has a post about Dawkins, which I can only assume is meant to be satire. After a long, drawn out introduction we get to the meat of the post:

Voice is also the thing that always alerts me, in the absence of any other obvious sign, to someone’s mental state. When a voice sounds odd to me — a buzz, a drone, a monotone — then what one beloved ex-boss of mine used to call the ‘maddie antenna’ quivers like that retriever’s tail in the Bugs Bunny cartoon. And as soon as Dawkins began to speak I thought Oh my God, he sounds like a Dalek. I mentally plotted him somewhere along the Asperger’s spectrum. The phrase ‘lack of affect’ came to mind.

His voice has a sort of metallic, sawing, plangent edge, its effect reminiscent of paper cuts and fingernails on blackboards. Yet is not in itself an ugly voice, that isn’t what I mean; its timbre, in fact, is rather unusually pure and clear. It’s the voice of a brilliantly played brass instrument. A trumpet, say. A trumpet of an evangelical, military and/or annunciatory kind, of the kind that summons souls on the Day of Judgement, orders Adam and Eve out of Paradise, or announces sternly to the Virgin Mary that she’s pregnant with the son of God and there’s not a damn thing she can do about it.

And it was deeply ironic, I thought, that a man so loudly, insistently and unreservedly determined to pour scorn on any manner of theist, on spirituality of any kind, should adopt so successfully the Biblical modes of denunciation and command: the mode of evangelists and angels, or vengeful gods of any stamp. The mode of a bossy, overbearing, single-minded bully.

Well, it certainly made me laugh.

There were positive examples available though. The “everything is pointless” website had an interesting article about Dawkins, but they may be biased….

Technorati tags: Richard Dawkins, Dawkins, Atheism, Atheist, Evolution, Science, Creationism

Following the last post (about The God Delusion), I had a look on Technorati to see what others were saying.

This URL is interesting: http://adricv.vox.com/library/post/3-reasons-why-richard-dawkins-is-an-arrogant-prick-despite-having-some-good-ideas.html. Mainly because it is apparent that the author of the blogpost has not read the book.

It is a short blog entry – only having three real points:

• God ‘Delusion’? Is he a psychologist?
• God ‘Delusion’? Who gave him the authority to conclusively say there is no form of deity?
• God ‘Delusion’? I beleive in God in my way – not as a force concerned with terrenal matters, but as something unnamable and higher, a form which could explain the Big Bang – something which Dawkins can’t do

In the book, Dawkins addresses the title in the first few page and explains why the term “delusion” is used and sets the context for it’s use. This largely renders the first point above meaningless.

The second one, is equally irrelevant and meaningless. What authority can be granted to say there is or isn’t a form of deity? Who gave the author of the blog post the authority to challenge Dawkins’ imaginary authority?

The third point hammers home the playground level of the blog post. Dawkins is a Biologist, who expects him to explain the Big Bang. What “explanation” is actually provided by the cop-out “God did it” that does anything but end further learning?

All in all, and this goes for most English language blogs which rail against The God Delusion, most of the critique comes from people who have not read the book and have couched their “complaints” in the terms of a nine year old.

Well, December is always hectic at WhyDontYou, as you can imagine. This tends to mean that our blog posts concentrate into two periods – autumn (fall) and spring. This is not always a bad thing. Sorry for the recent lack in posts, it isn’t because we have run out of ideas – just time!

Oddly (given that Richard Dawkins can be a bit annoying), I have been reading “The God Delusion” and it certainly is something I would recommend to everyone else. The book is interesting, insightful, at times witty and always well written.

In the past I have been concerned that vocal atheists, especially scientists, are running the risk of creating Atheism as a religion. The God Delusion has actually managed to make me re-assess this idea, and see that within reason there is a “need” for vocal, outspoken, well educated, intelligent opponents of “Religion.”

Some of the more pertinent points of the book (and another interesting book – Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris – even has its own “mySpace” space), is how the devout followers of various religions respond to criticism. I frequently read on the Internet and USENET, times where followers of the supposededly peaceful religions threaten non-believers with all manner of physical harm in the name of their peaceful Deity. Strangely, the error in this thinking seems to escape them. In the US, abortionism seems to draw the same sort of response. Killing a collection of cells is “morally wrong” but killing fully grown humans is OK.

I am sure there is some logic there somewhere……

–

As always, the combination of the season, work and education commitments mean there will be very, very few posts here for the next few weeks.

Sorry for the interruption to the service and seasons greetings to everyone.

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)

I know this blog tends to “poke fun” at technorati a lot, but right now it deserves it.

After being told that Technorati was playing up (see http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/28/technorati-tech-support-needed/) I thought I would check it out myself and see what it produced.

Visiting the links about this blog page (obviously where my main interest lies 🙂 ), I thought I would check out what Technorati thought about other blogs which linked here and what it described the site’s profile as.

Trying the standard search which looks at blogs linking to a site (http://www.technorati.com/ search /http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog?cc=xrw7n395cr) was a total non-starter on IE. I tried this link (by clicking the link and by pasting it into the URL bar) several times, almost every time I got an odd windows error message saying “Operation Aborted” and IE returned to the about:blank page it likes so much. One time I got through, I ended up with a page which said “Sorry, no blogs link here.” Strange as at the top of the page it said “14 links from 6 blogs.”

Curiousity got to me and I checked the URL in Firefox. This was even stranger in some respects. I had a few page not founds then all of a sudden a hit! The page appeared but without the “Sorry, no blogs link here” malarky. Firefox claimed that while the site still had “14 links from 6 blogs” there were actually 19 links (Sorted by freshness) and then procedes to show 18.

Amazing.

I tried the “» View my profile” link but after ten attempts (five each IE 7 and FF2.0) which only got operation aborted or blank pages, I gave up. I don’t have that much patience even looking for pure hubris.

Well, if this is the face of Web 2.0, I cant wait for the bubble to burst.

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.