Yes, a whole bunch of links cleared out for you!

Newsy! After 40 years of computing with a mouse, mouse creators unhappy with how computing has developed. In short, they are disappointed that computing has been exploited for commercial uses, rather than being used as a tool to collectively solve world problems. The confusing bit is that they seem to take for granted that (pretty much) everybody has a computer -- which is a result of the commercial direction the industry took -- and bemoan that people aren't using computers the way that they envisioned. They want all the benefits of mass computer ownership (a computer in nearly every home, huge amounts of money invested in creating new applications and advancing the technology) without all the drawbacks. Sometimes it's disappointing to find that visionaries have tunnel vision.

Newsy! An interesting article which looks at the cultural context of web technology. In short, those of us who find that the way the web works makes some kind of logical sense do so because the web was designed by people who are not very different from us. How do we make the internet accessible to those who do not have the same socio-cultural experience?

An interesting license plate

Paint!

Globes! Different takes on the globe, based on various statistics. Very cool.

Create your own Pollock!

Newsy! Science Proves Exotic Cars Turn Women On!

Newsy! The way you walk is associated with your orgasmic potential!

Scientific American's responses to people who spout creationist nonsense.

DIY Glasses.

I seem to have a backlog of links, news stories and such that need blogging. So I go ...

I begin with this Globe and Mail editorial which pokes at research regarding the Internet and socialisation of youngsters.

I am completely shocked. The editorial is biased, attacks the researchers as biased without any proof, and values anecdotal evidence over scientific inquiry. It is of a shockingly low standard for what is usually a very good newspaper.

I had the good fortune to attend a public lecture on "Internet Myths" at the LSE a couple of months ago, at which much of the research mentioned in the article was discussed (in actual scientific terms). What the research is pointing to is this: The Internet can be used as a social tool, and social people use it this way. If you're anti-social, the Internet will not "socialize" you. If you're a social person, the Internet will not turn you into a loner.

Perhaps more to the point: When I was a teenager, we would all go down to the Second Cup, where we would sit and socialize. You probably have a similar point of reference -- a place where kids got together and hung out.

Today, increasingly, these hangouts are MySpace, Facebook and the like. This is neither good nor bad, it just is. There are various benefits (familiarity with technology they will likely be using in the workplace eventually) and drawbacks (carpal tunnel syndrome?), but it's more or less the same. It just looks different.

So when the Globe and Mail considers chatting online to be "semi-literate blather", they are at once deriding the intelligence of teens everywhere who use the Internet as a communication tool, while believing that their own childhood was filled with great intellectual discussion. I somehow doubt it.

Of course, it's nice that the Globe and Mail made such weak arguments. I mean ... "For every Jim Carrey who watched a lot of television as a child and now makes $20-million a movie, there are approximately one million adult couch potatoes." What? A simple exercise will point out the folly of this: "Pick an unretired successful person. Did they watch TV as a kid?" I think the answer will be "yes".

In closing:

Dear Globe and Mail,

I used to have some respect for your newspaper. Please stop destroying it.

Much Love,
Steve.

Have you ever broken the rules in the Terms of Service for a website?

If your answer is yes, you may be a hacker in the eyes of the U.S. government.

Yes -- rather than thinking "cyber-bullying is reprehensible, so let's make it illegal under reasonable circumstances", US authorities instead said "we'd like this person to be punished. Let's try to stretch the definition of an existing law to find a way to punish her." As a result, someone has now been convicted of (essentially) hacking for breaking MySpace's rules.

Anybody else think this is bad?

I really dislike it when a report from a new source is taken (essentially) from a press release. You find all kinds of idiocy.

For instance, this article on BBC is about a "new" technology from Nokia which is designed to give people remote (aka internet) access to stuff around their house. You can turn stuff on and off, etc, etc.

Of course, this is hardly groundbreaking stuff. I can, after all, record stuff on my Sky+ box from anywhere with an internet connection (or 3G for my iPhone). I'm sure that it wouldn't be too hard to hack things up to do something similar with regards to my Roomba.

But still, it's significant that someone is actually creating something for the purpose of turning a normal house into a future house -- soon these will also, I'm sure, be voice-controllable. Eventually, according to Science Fiction, one will turn on its makers creating a House of Death and Doom.

But I digress, slightly. A surefire sign that the reporter is doing too little reporting, and too much depending on the press release:

the system might recognise a cold snap when the home-owner is on holiday and turn on the heating to avoid freezing pipes on their return.

Most homes are alread equipped with such a device. It is called a thermostat. Hardly surprising that it would continue to play a role in any central heating system ...

A few links for all y'all:

An interesting essay on blogging

Proven by science: Conservatives are unable to listen to logical arguments which are counter to their position.

And, finally, in the news: Cheap mobile phones are hurting the big phone makers. Or so claims Ericsson, and the BBC dutifully reports. Ericsson's fall in profits couldn't have anything to do with the fact that their mobiles are crap, could it? Seriously -- the worst mobile phone I have ever had the displeasure of using was my old Sony Ericsson. They look pretty, but they suck -- so they're outperformed by their fellow "high-end" competitors, and beat on price by "low-end" competitors, who have products that work better.

The article also mentions Nokia, which is interesting. I've always found it strange that Nokia makes so many of the cheap entry-level phones that teenagers have -- by all accounts, their high-end phones are fantastic, but first-time phone buyers don't appear to become loyal -- they instead look forward to being able move on to a different product. There's a certain stigma, I think, against the high-end Nokia phones -- why buy one, when you can instead have a Samsung, Blackberry or iPhone?

None of which, I will have you note, appear to be suffering from dropping profits. It's only the companies that make "high end" phones that are not actually high end and/or suffer from an image problem that appear to be vulnerable to cheaper phones ...

Goats freed from prison!

Also: Bruce Lee

Today, I bring you things I found in the world of interlinks!

Do they really believe this? - It is the BBC, and it wasn't posted on April 1st, but I still have difficulty believing that some people still believe the earth is flat. I have more trouble believing it when they appear to be sufficiently intelligent to string a couple of sentences together, and even crack a joke at their own use of the word "global".

More from the BBC: Scientists are working hard towards creating an invisibility cloak. Once that's accomplished, they'll move on to creating one ring to rule them all.

Want to go to MIT? Now you can. MIT provides you with free lecture notes, coursework and videos.

Politician tells doctors that they're unethical.

Trolling goes too far: I've always thought that trolling was a usually not-funny (although somewhat amusing) trait of anonymous message boards and similar. Apparently I was naive. Truly professional trolls hack into the pages of dead teenagers in an effort to horrify those who knew them. They post flashing images to epilepsy web sites. They send death threats. And then they justify it, claiming that their victims are somehow "complicit". Well, some do. Others appear to be sociopaths. An interesting read, anyways.