How Not To Blog ?

Bush asks himself, "Am I Christ?"

The Independent's article screams, "Decoded at last: the 'classical holy grail' that may rewrite the history of the world". I don't know how much the found texts will rewrite our history, but it certainly is interesting.

The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye - decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a "second Renaissance".

...

The papyrus fragments were discovered in historic dumps outside the Graeco-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus ("city of the sharp-nosed fish") in central Egypt at the end of the 19th century. Running to 400,000 fragments, stored in 800 boxes at Oxford's Sackler Library, it is the biggest hoard of classical manuscripts in the world.

This find reminds me of the much smaller gnostic scripture find some years ago.

Is the debate on whether or not requiring a license to be a parent still closed? Why would The Asshole Family need a license or permit for fishing, driving, bicycling, camping, boating, hunting, but be able to have as many damn kids (most likely also to be either assholes or dysfunctional) as they want? If a parent is a child abuser, molester, drug addict, etc., they can bear as many children as their houses can hold, and even stick some in a family member's house. Maybe one day the kid(s) will be taken from their home by DCFS if the parents are deemed to be unfit, and put into some other home where their chances of being directly or indirectly abused is also high. But why allow unfit parents to make more humans in the first place?

Selective breeding? Yes. Is it right? Probably not in that context. But why close the discussion before it even opens?

This is a stupid idea. It's stupid because it would never fly in today's society. I bring this up because it is interesting to think about other programs, harmless and for the better, that also would not fly in today's society. And harmful ones that do fly.

Two examples would be a class on Friendship and a class on Social Skills. They are what you think they are and would be held in school. Not "taught" in the traditional sense, but explored. A school would most assuredly resurrect its dead sexual education class or fine arts program sooner than it would even think about a class on how to work within society. Are not people skills much more important than spending 2 weeks discussing who Magellan was and where he went?

A lot of people in this country seem to wonder why anti-social behavoir is on the uptick. But where do children learn behavior that's beneficial to society? Why would Sally have a grasp of algebraic concepts but no idea why being honest to others is a good idea? (No, she isn't learning it at home, which is the usual answer.)

We live in a society that is already considering selective genetic breeding of humans. Some laboratories are actively pursuing it as a business model. Science gets away with a lot because most people are too stupid to grasp the science behind the processes and thus don't consider it to be a part of their lives until it's staring them in the face. Talk about it non-scientifically and people get all emotional and don't want the discussion to continue. That's why there's no vote (or "pubilc permission") on scientific and technological advances or research. It just happens to society, rather than society being a part of the evolving discussion. The effect is that our technology is more mature than we are.

Kids in the future, rich and poor alike, may be born genetically perfect but still have fucked-up parents. You can't change how a person thinks no matter how many reworks of your genetic algorithm you process. Even then, the above two discussions will probably be closed while we're busy breeding "perfect" humans.

Why do more people talk about the way the Prince of Wales' new wife Camilla looks than the fact he was a slimy, unfaithful husband for so many years who doesn't look so hot himself? Or even the rightfulness of 'the monarchy' keeping so many billions of pounds they've appropriated over the years from the English commons?

Let the Queen live a long time, sure. But kill the monarchy. Let it die with Queen Elizabeth, the sexy old hag.

Who will watch the watchers?

I've always thought the AOL chat rooms were a bad joke. They've always been sex-charged and used primarily for all kinds of online (and sometimes offline) sexual encounters. For as many years as AOL has been in existence they've turned what amounts to a blind eye to this kind of activity. You'd have to be a horny-ass pervert to work as an AOL chat room monitor as your job. If you're not already, the sheer volume of sex in the majority of the rooms will make you into one.

For this reason, I've never considered AOL to be family-friendly. Monitoring is not enough because all rooms, public and private, cannot be monitored. They not only need to release themselves of the liability but to kill the ability for these kinds of activities to occur under the AOL brand.

Interesting article in The Independent about how our Earth system is changing.

One thing I'm tired of hearing of is how this-or-that human activity is causing Earth to change in ways that aren't beneficial to us or our environs.

There are bigger seasons that that which farmer Joe knows the names for.

Mother Earth would change regardless of whether or not we're here.

Humans are naturally egotistical. Even the 'bad' things we manage to attribute to ourselves.

April 1: An executive order authorizing the president to quarantine people who may have "bird flu" is made law

April 12: Samples of "Asian flu", which killed between one and four million people in 1957, are mistakenly sent out all across the world from a US lab

What? No more boogeyman?

Focus on the Feral deficit you piece of shit!

Two shipments of the deadly flu virus that a local company sent all over the world have not been found.

Shipments sent to Mexico and Lebanon remain unaccounted for, the World Health Organization said.

Article continues here.

"Uhhh.. we didn't get any flu virus." They must have sent it via UPS.

Are they prepping us for something or just trying to scare people?

Dear Mr. Banner Advertiser

Wow! After some 14 years of looking at banners, I finally found one I want to click on. Isn't today your lucky day?

Alas, I mouse over the banner ad, hesitating to click because I think it will make me feel dirty when.. what do I see? You're using a Flash banner. That's nice in itself, but it makes me think that if I click the result would be that you hog my bandwidth for a few seconds while you download all of your marketing materials (more Flash animations) to my PC. And perhaps a couple of cookies while you're at it.

How about some simplicity? Provide an option at the bottom of the banner for those who just want the facts, without flash or Flash, without cookies or other BS. I think part of the reason Google Adwords is popular is that people really don't mind ads, as long as they're to the point and simple. Most reasonably intelligent people walk away when they feel they're being marketed to. The same kind of marketing doesn't work with everyone - but one would never know it by the way you advertise. If you can somehow assure me that you won't try to rape my senses or my sensibility, I'll guarantee that I will listen to your message even more closely.

Call it "TruClix" or some other nifty name (you gals are good at that) for those of us who don't click for various reasons. When someone clicks on your TruClix link, show them how different you are from all of the other companies. Heck, you could even take me to your product's Wiki page that you've developed and opened up to the community. Err... but don't touch it or splatter crap all over it. Don't ya know, the most successful marketing is when actual people have control of the marketing message? If your product is good, it's good. Trust the marketplace. (You've made money thus far, right?*)

I didn't end up clicking on your banner (who does?) but instead performed a search for your product and found another site that showed me everything I wanted to see on the first page.

*made you look!

Freesound is a new website for the exchange of Creative Commons-licensed audio material.

Great. All they need now is a decent URL to replace their current freesound.iua.upf.edu. Unless they weren't exactly planning on popularity?

Rojo is a web-based social newsreader. It allows you to tag and comment on feeds for other people to read. You can also see the feeds your friends subscribe to (if your friends are using Rojo).

Add a feed and then you can flag, email, comment, and add tags to items in that feed. You can also see stories recommended

I could imagine that such social newsreaders popping up could greatly augment blogging for a lot of blogs. Just add the HNTB feed to your social newsreader and then you can share links and recommendations, etc., with the HNTB community (if/when such a feature is enabled). With today's blogs, there's a lot less community action extant than could be.

All they need to do now is develop some more servers to help with system lag and they're ready for business. (Supposedly, they're ready for a wider release in a few days.)

I'm currently using RSS Bandit, which I think is a decent newsreader. Upon seeing Rojo I immediately want to switch. All they need now is reliability and all I need now is some friends to share with.

[Also see previous article, The future of the blog and blogging]