Ahh, sweet, surreal Belgium. Members of the Belgian intelligence service, the Sûreté de l’Etat, have been ordered to hand in their weapons after an inebriated colleague tried to shoot a co-worker. Unarmed agents being sent on dangerous missions? Not a problem in Belgium, it would appear.
Popularity: 11% [?]
Purdue University researchers have solved the riddle of unpopped popcorn. This probably won’t make the world a better place, won’t banish war and pestilence, won’t even make people smile more. But it matters to me, and I’m sure there are other people who just hate the bloody wastage of unpopped kernels. Tonight we may all sleep, secure in the knowledge that Purdue are on the case.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Having a freshly installed papacy appears to have emboldened the Vatican politically. Condemning Spanish Law allowing homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexuals, a “senior Vatican official” called on Spanish Catholics to be “prepared to lose their jobs rather than co-operate with the law”. Insurrection, according to the Cambridge Dictionary, is “an organized attempt by a group of people to defeat their government and take control of their country, usually by violence”. No violence yet, but the Vatican’s instruction to the populace to rise against a perfectly moral secular rule of law certainly qualifies as an attempt to defeat the democratically elected Spanish government.
This lends new credence to speculation that the election of Pope Benedict XVI heralds the end of the Catholic Church’s role in Europe. In the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash wrote:
Atheists should welcome the election of Pope Benedict XVI. For this aged, scholarly, conservative, uncharismatic Bavarian theologian will surely hasten precisely the de-Christianisation of Europe that he aims to reverse. At the end of his papacy, Europe may again be as un-Christian as it was when St Benedict, one of the patron saints of Europe, founded his pioneering monastic order, the Benedictines, 15 centuries ago. Christian Europe: from Benedict to Benedict. RIP.
Harsh words, but not an unqualified prediction of the end. The author continues:
As everyone keeps saying, elderly popes can surprise us all, as John XXIII did by convoking the reforming Second Vatican Council. But I see nothing in the personality, biography, principles or strategy of Benedict XVI to suggest that he can reverse these trends.
What the papacy of Benedict XVI will do to the Catholic Church in Europe remains to be seen. A crossroads has been reached: accept the secular ideals and beliefs of the majority of Europeans, or be relegated to the continents of Africa and South America where supersitious belief still holds sway.
Popularity: 8% [?]
From Yahoo News:
German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the Vatican theologian who was elected Pope Benedict XVI, intervened in the 2004 US election campaign ordering bishops to deny communion to abortion rights supporters including presidential candidate John Kerry.
We’re in for a rough ride, just no rough riders...
Popularity: 7% [?]
From a New York Times article entitled The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay, first published on Friday, March 25, 2005, and now kindly republished by Common Dreams:
That bullying, stoked by politicians in power, has become omnipresent, leading television stations to practice self-censorship and high school teachers to avoid mentioning “the E word,” evolution, in their classrooms, lest they arouse fundamentalist rancor. The president is on record as saying that the jury is still out on evolution, so perhaps it’s no surprise that The Los Angeles Times has uncovered a three-year-old “religious rights” unit in the Justice Department that investigated a biology professor at Texas Tech because he refused to write letters of recommendation for students who do not accept evolution as “the central, unifying principle of biology.” Cornelia Dean of The New York Times broke the story last weekend that some Imax theaters, even those in science centers, are now refusing to show documentaries like “Galápagos” or “Volcanoes of the Deep Sea” because their references to Darwin and the Big Bang theory might antagonize some audiences. Soon such films will disappear along with biology textbooks that don’t give equal time to creationism.
James Cameron, producer of “Volcanoes” (and, more famously, the director of “Titanic”), called this development “obviously symptomatic of our shift away from empiricism in science to faith-based science.” Faith-based science has in turn begat faith-based medicine that impedes stem-cell research, not to mention faith-based abstinence-only health policy that impedes the prevention of unwanted pregnancies and diseases like AIDS.
Popularity: 10% [?]
The United States military machine employes hackers, according to Wired. Big deal. Anyone could have guessed as much without too much Googling or sniffing around. The Internet has become a very important international structure, vital to many industries and probably indispensable to most modern businesses. The Joint Functional Component Command for Network Warfare (just rolls off the toungue, doesn’t it) defends Department of Defense networks, and could in all probability play some kind of role in covert operations. But in a frenzy of spook-induced hyperbole, Wired let’s rip with this:
In simple terms and sans any military jargon, the unit could best be described as the world’s most formidable hacker posse. Ever.
Huh? OK, “hacker posse”, make them sound cool and kinda hip-hop, in case those pesky Russians realise that America’s elite hacker commandos are IRC-using math geeks. But “most formidable”? You could expect them to be well funded, well equipped and well trained. But throw the same funding and equipment into a pot, back it up with the to-be-expected immunity to prosecution, and see a bunch of Brazilian teenagers tear them a new one.
Update: more coverage by Salon.
Popularity: 10% [?]
This collection of unrealised architectural projects in Moscow, spanning the 1930s to the early 1950s, illustrate the ambitious scale of the Soviet project. Monuments, hotels, offices, residential buildings, all evocative of a certain Gotham City charm, but doomed to forever remain as fictional as Gotham itself.
Popularity: 10% [?]
Multiple choice vote-rigging for the British electorate at www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com, the White House can learn something from this site. And as it turns out, I should vote LibDem, if I could vote, which I can’t. And only because there’s no radical libertarian party available.
Popularity: 7% [?]
[Found in the Independent.] Using infra-red scanning techniques, Oxford University scientists are recovering information from around 400,000 papyrus fragments. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri apparently contain writings by luminaries such as Sophocles and Euripides, and could redefine the way we view the classical world. Of special interest would be what these scholars do with the information they unearth. Once the recovered texts have been catalogued and studied, will it be shared with the world? Will the texts be donated to a worthy cause like Project Gutenberg? Even (shudder) handed over to Google Print? If the information is only to be locked up in a library again, we really haven’t made much progress since the library of Alexandria.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Gun-toting robots? Related to robots about to be deployed in Iraq by the US military? Are the machines taking over? May we start the fighting yet?
Popularity: 8% [?]
At the heart of civilisation, or at least civilisation as defined by Western European culture, lies mathematics. And at the heart of mathematics lies the concept of infinity, denoted by the lemniscate.
This study takes as its departure point information available on the Internet, most notably information on the worldwide web and Usenet. How is the infinity symbol viewed and put to use on the Internet? Is it a taboo in this giant conversation spanning all languages, nations and cultures? Merriam-Webster define “taboo” as “forbidden to profane use or contact because of what are held to be dangerous supernatural powers”, or “banned on grounds of morality or taste”. Is the use of the infinity symbol prohibited in some or all cultures? What are its emotive associations?
Continue reading ‘The Lemniscate (Infinity Symbol)’Popularity: 53% [?]
The state of translation on Flemish television is infuriatingly bad, the main culprits being the commercial channels VT4 and KanaalTwee. There really can’t be any excuses—if you want to be a professional broadcaster you have to set yourself certain professional standards. The subtitles provided on the quality Flemish channel Canvas are of a very high standard, and the translations on state channels in the neighbouring Netherlands are excellent.
Many of the translations for subtitles on VT4 and KanaalTwee are clearly done by people who don’t have a proper understanding of English idiom or British/American culture, in all probability translators speaking English as a second or third language. Television shows like The Simpsons appear deceptively easy to translate, but without an exceptional understanding of American pop culture it’s quite impossible.
In an attempt to avert the heart attack I can feel approaching every time I spot a ludicrous translation, I have started writing down the worst and funniest. These are a few of the gems I’ve collected. Continue reading ‘Miss Translations 2005’
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A recent post on a mailing list I subscribe to set out the following scenario:
I have been taking syndicated news items from other sites, and displaying it on my site in the news section, with attribution and a link back to the original source.[...]
Earlier on today I was contacted by a webmaster from a site I was using the RSS feed from, disappointed that I hadn’t asked permission and not keen on the fact I was displaying whole articles from his site (as distributed in the RSS feed) rather than just headlines and a one-sentence teaser (which I consider really frustrating when reading, but that’s a totally different rant…).
I’ve had to face exactly the same situation, twice. I started gathering publicly accessible RSS feeds on a site just over two years ago. At first this was just for me to read, then for a few friends, and eventually a few dozen strangers started checking in every now and then.
When Google launched their ad service, I started displaying the ads on pages containing the syndicated content. One feed owner complained, arguing that, as I was making money from his content, I was no longer allowed to display the information. (The revenue in question turned out to be pennies, as most people who flirted with Google ads on low-traffic sites know by now.) But rather than argue (it wasn’t as if the feed had any real importance to me) I removed it from the list of sites I syndicate.
The second time I had a complaint was about two months ago, when a regular poster in a LiveJournal community noticed my site as referrer in his server logs. The community members had the habit of posting images, with the images hosted on their personal sites. These were good photographs, with insightful discussions in-between, but apparently members of the community didn’t know that LiveJournal produce RSS feeds of discussions, and didn’t realise that this could be turned off (as far as I know).
The complainant went as far as contacting my web host, invoking the DMCA and requesting that my site be shut down. Lucky for me the hosting company has been in the business long enough to know how to handle this: demand the correct procedure be followed, and inform the client (me) that there might be trouble a-brewing. Rather than cause problems for the host or my own clients, I just removed the feed.
RSS feeds and how to use them has become a moot point for me, as I don’t aggregate any more. But I still believe that RSS feeds are to be used as we (syndicators and aggregators) have been using them since their inception: for purposes of public distribution. When an RSS feed is not intended for public distribution, it is simply not distributed publicly. It’s as easy as that. When someone scrapes a site and generates an RSS feed, this does not constitute a publicly accessible feed. When a site owner plonks a whopping great orange XML button on the site, linked to an RSS or RDF document, and perhaps even uses META tags for purposes of auto-discovery, that person has clearly gone to great trouble to publicly syndicate the feed. Intentions be damned.
Invoking copyright law is a specious argument, confusing non-applicable real-world scenarios with digital content. Syndicating an RSS feed is not like copying a book and then redistributing the copies. Syndication should more accurately be compared to publishing a book, having a library legally buy a copy, and then having many people borrow the book from the library. The world of digital content simply means that the original book never leaves the library.
In the world of RSS syndication, syndicators have full control over what they syndicate. If their readers insist on full copies of articles, complete with image tags, they’re free to syndicate like that. But the expectation is that RSS be used for links and headlines, with full content versions only available on a website. Simply because some site owners have lately discovered a Next Big Thing does not mean that core Internet cultural values have to be changed to accommodate Johnnies-come-lately.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Update: Cory Doctorow asks much the same questions in a post on Boing Boing entitled BBC’s RSS: Why do we need a license to aggregate, period?
Popularity: 9% [?]
Today is the 250th anniversary of Dr Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary of the English Language, in the words of Wikipedia “one of the most influential dictionaries in the history of the English language”. The importance of this work in stabilising and unifying the English language cannot be overestimated, and for nearly three centuries Dr Johnson’s dictionary has served as example to countless others. Happy birthday, little book of words.
Popularity: 10% [?]
