Archive for March, 2006
The seven signs of pseudo-science
There’s a superb piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, where Robert L Park offers the “Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science”. He goes into detail on each one, but here’s a summary of the list:
1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.
[Via Digg]
Redesign time again
I get sick of site designs very quickly, hence the new gurning face at the top of this blog. Sorry if it’s put any of you off your lunch.
As I’ve mentioned in the sidebar, the picture was taken by Glasgow photographer Iain McLean. He’s very good, and a nice bloke to boot. So if you need a snapper in Central Scotland…
This probably isn’t funny if you aren’t immature and Scottish
…but I am both!
Software can save you from drudgery
A while back, I blogged about the problems of information overload:
What I’d like to do is bring those programs together, to share a folder structure or tag system between mail, RSS and Web. That means when I’m doing Mag X’s news section, I can access all the material I need by clicking on the appropriate folder, irrespective of its source.
I think I might have found a solution: Yojimbo. It can’t handle my Entourage emails (or if it can, I haven’t worked out how to do it yet) but I can drag and drop things from firefox and netnewswire, store serial numbers, scribble notes, archive web pages and encrypt data, and while I haven’t had the chance to play with it for too long my initial impression is that it kicks more arse than a giant metal millipede at an arse-kicking contest.
Extra kudos to Bare Bones Software for having a category called “Pirates” in the official screenshot.
The software’s free to try and then $39 for a single user, multiple machine licence, and if it’s even half as good as it seems to be then it’s twice as good as the notorious do-gooder Mrs Good of Good Street, Goodtown, Goodland.
Update
Although it doesn’t seem as if I can drag Entourage emails directly into Yojimbo, I can drag and drop the text of emails. Which is almost as good.
Don’t copy that floppy!
I can’t remember if I’ve posted this link here already, but in case I haven’t: Don’t Copy That Floppy! [Google Video]. It’s a superb anti-piracy advert that makes full use of the two key weapons in the fight against software piracy: bad rapping and worse haircuts.
[Via UKResistance]
PC World: no more commission-based selling
PC World is axing its commission-based scheme in order to improve customer service, says the Register. If true - the announcement’s a bit confusing, because on the one hand the staff won’t have commissions but their shops still do, so there’s bound to be some pressure still - it’s a smart move, because one of the two most annoying things about electrical retailing is the feeling that the person you’re speaking to is thinking of a target rather than what’s right for you.
Mind you, as The Reg notes it’s unclear whether the new regime spells the end of the other most annoying thing about electrical retailing:
The PC World statement failed to mention whether sales staff would be discouraged from persuading customers into buying their warranties, the profitable insurance policies that are the cause of many sour faces among consumer campaigners.
[Vested interest alert: I've written for PC World's customer magazine.]
New camera, new puppy madness
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As Squander Two pointed out the other week, getting a puppy is a great excuse to buy new techno-toys such as digital cameras. And after about ten seconds of playing with it, I’m loving the Kodak EasyShare P850 - not least because its image stabiliser compensates for the shakes in my RSI-added hands.
It’s amazing how far cameras have come. In early 1999 I reviewed some digicams for PC Format:
A megapixel camera can produce images made of more than 1 million pixels, with some newer models taking shots at a resolution of 1984 x 1488 - almost 3 megapixels.
Almost 3 megapixels!
One of the cameras I reviewed was a Kodak Digital Science DC260. For £600, you got this:
the DC260 takes up to 16 pictures at 1152 x 864 resolution. If you’re willing to go for lower quality, you can store up to 90 pictures.
Those 90 pictures were on a CF card, not the camera’s internal memory. 16 hi-res pics on a storage card was pretty damn impressive back then.
Sony does something good
Hard to believe, I know. But according to Engadget, the PlayStation 3 will be region-free.
Yeah, you heard us, any game anywhere in the world will play on any PlayStation 3 console purchased in any nation.
[Sony floated this idea back in November, but they've now confirmed it]
“For 90 percent of the people in the world, the need to buy Microsoft Word just vanished”
So says Michael Robertson, creator of MP3.com and the man behind desktop linux system Linspire. His latest wheeze? A slew of AJAX applications, the first of which is an online Word-type program called ajaxWrite. According to Mr. R:
ajaxWrite is a powerful word processor that can read and write Microsoft Word formatted documents. Anytime you need a word processor, need to open a .doc file or edit a .doc file, simply point your Firefox browser at ajaxWrite.com and in seconds a full-featured program will be loaded.
I’d quibble with “seconds” (at least today) and it misbehaves in my beta of Firefox, but it’s certainly interesting…
Ticketbastard (or: how to make customers hate you even more)
Ticketmaster, known around the world as Ticketbastard, isn’t exactly the world’s most popular company - but unfortunately in many cases, it’s impossible to avoid them. So when I booked tickets to see Eels, I had to buy from TM and pay the ridiculous £4.50 handling charge for two tickets, plus £1.60 for postage.
Imagine my delight when the tickets turned up by standard post this morning, in an envelope stuffed with junk mail.