Tom Morris: 2008-07-10

2008.07.10

Americans watching more television than ever, although the Internet is catching up. Of course, feel free to get even more depressed when you remember that almost half of America doesn't read books. Things are better here in the UK, but not dramatically better. Citizens of my country did give the world Heat magazine, after all. Sorry 'bout that. Speaking of which, who wants to get together and try to find a way to destroy celebrity culture? 2008-07-10T13:04:10Z

Aral Balkan has a superb post about the problems with Google App Engine. I've tried it - and I even have an application stored on it - but having Google host your web applications is a bit silly if they can't scale upwards. I've also been playing with Heroku, which is like Google App Engine but uses Ruby on Rails, and Amazon's Web Services platform. This is what scares me a little about Google App Engine - if I build a Rails app and host it on Heroku, then decide that I don't like Heroku or they don't do what I want, I can take my app and host it on any number of alternatives. The same is true of the LAMP stack, the Java stack, even the .NET stack. This is part of what is most useful about widely-implemented open source platforms. It'd be nice if there were some other people who would do AppEngine hosting besides Google, if only to keep Google on their toes. 2008-07-10T12:24:54Z

Just been listening to Richard Dawkins and John Lennox's latest discussion. It's mind-bendingly amazing the weird things that Lennox believes, and PZ's analysis is spot on. 2008-07-10T11:16:49Z

Jeremy Keith has a write-up from OpenTech 2008 last Saturday. 2008-07-10T11:09:30Z

If you are in any doubt as to the irrelevance and bureaucracy of DataPortability.org, check out their new official bylaws. Can you imagine any hacker worth their salt wanting to spend any time with these bureaucracy-addled pencil pushers? 2008-07-10T10:41:46Z

The Obama dream comes crashing back to reality as the current Democratic contender for President votes for the immunity for telecoms companies who spied on Americans. Guess Obama is just one of those "nothing to hide, nothing to fear" zombies after all. One day the Democrats will nominate a pro-Constitution candidate. Obama is not that candidate, and the FISA immunity bill really is the litmus test. 2008-07-10T10:21:03Z

Links from del.icio.us

Jesuit-Trained Movers and Shakers - Club Conspiracy Forums []

This thread describes how everyone who went to a Catholic or Jesuit college or university is secretly being controlled by the Vatican. (I went to a Jesuit college, and have read this faff and my brain hasn't exploded. I wonder why.)

The official Ron Paul is a satanist thread. - Club Conspiracy Forums []

The previous thread thought that conspiracy idol Ron Paul was a freemason. This thread reckons he's a Satanist, although they get back to talking about him being a freemason by the end of it.

Barack Obama - Club Conspiracy Forums []

Here, the conspiracists discuss whether or not Barack Obama is a member of the Bilderbergers. It's frightening that people this silly can vote.

Ron Paul Giving Masonic Handshakes - Club Conspiracy Forums []

I was cruising the conspiracy sites for inspiration while writing an article about these nuts, and found this. Conspiracy theory icon Ron Paul is himself part of the Masonic conspiracy!!11! OMG!

Who Needs the Humanities? (Steve Fuller, Project Syndicate) []

Not a big fan of Fuller, but he is right here. We need to utterly overhaul the way that academic work is measured in both the humanities and the sciences to make it human rather than industry-led.