- Our Social World – a conference in Cambridge at the end of this week on weblogs, wikis and social software I’ll be talking at this event along with lots of other UK and US experts, so register now if you haven’t already done so…
- The rumour is that Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely have designed the sleeve for the new Robbie Williams album I believe my brain just leapt out of my ear. That’s it on the floor over there. Looking freaked.
- Wikipedia’s article on falsifiability – a key concept in the philosophy of science particularly advocated by Karl Popper I think for me this is one of the core principles of science that Intelligent Design does not countenance or allow to be incorporated into their work. Which I find frustrating…
- As far as I can tell, this is the weblog of Paul Daniels, famous UK magician and millionaire husband of Debbie McGee I mean it could be a parody, but if so it’s so close to the truth that it’s almost impossible to tell…
- Sisters under the skin – the Economist reports on the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome “The genome of the chimpanzeemankind’s closest living relativehas been sequenced. Comparing it with Man’s should help people understand themselves”
- Baffling Cuteness – an old Paul Ford post in which he finds cute animal cards and ‘interprets’ them “The zombie is a panda. But it will not eat brains because he is too lazy. Get up, lazy panda, and eat brains! You are so lazy! But he is too lazy. All right, no brains today!”
- One side can be wrong – scientists articulate their problems with Intelligent Design (from The Guardian) “Accepting ‘intelligent design’ in science classrooms would have disastrous consequences, warn Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne “
- FeedBurner has redesigned and gone for a much simpler and more open, clean look… Ah, the new simplicity – this is the stuff. Beautiful bit of work and well worth ripping off wholesale. Makes the old design look incredibly dated and ostentatious…
- Blinksale – The easiest way to send invoices online I was sure I’d linked to this a while back – anyway, Blinksale is a beautiful, simple and clear Web 2.0 application designed to fulfil a really interesting little (and profitable) niche…
- It’s been everywhere, but it’s really good: Tiger Secrets “Secret shortcuts. Hidden helpers. Mysterious menus. You could spend months tracking down all the undocumented features tucked away in Mac OS X 10.4, Apple‚Äôs newest operating system”
- “iPod mini to move entirely to flash and color, shuffle and phone details emerge” An interesting, if predictable, move by Apple to replace the smaller hard-drive based iPods with the newer larger Flash memory units…
- Viewpoint: Has Katrina saved US media? Fascinating article which suggests that this particular crisis in the States has pushed the media into a position where it can be critical of government again, and interrogate it as it’s supposed to. Fascinating stuff. Hopefully won’t be an exception from
- “Dinosaurs may have been a fluffy lot” Apparently a new scientific consensus is emerging that many dinosaurs may have been covered with feathers!
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One reply on “Links for 2005-09-06”
Reading the Wikipedia article on falifiability I couldn’t help but think that it seems a bit woolly. Is ‘falsifiability’ itself falsifiable – is it a principle or an ideology? It reminds me of the sort of knots produced by applying relativism (post-modernist anti-‘meta narrative’ politics etc.) to itself – which reveal the sort of insubstantial or impractical nature of the debate, from both sides. Innit?
Also, I can’t help but agree with the physists etc. quoted saying “This just isn’t how science works”. Finally – shouldn’t Intelligent Design should be fought on much less sophisticated (less alientating) grounds? It’s not hard to prove ID to be boll*cks, but the fight does require stamina and patience and repetitions of reasons why there aren’t fossils at certain times blahdeblahdeblah.
BTW, I was at your Govt. e-Comms thing the other day – enjoyed it v. much, so I thought I’d pay a visit here. I might e-chunter on to you at some point soon with regard to propriety and ethics, and what the Civil Service code means we can and can’t, and indeed shouldn’t, do – even in the name of greater engagement with the public. I think there are other, less contentious ways to engage that I will relentlessly blether about too. I’m looking forward to that and I shall presume that you can hardly stand the wait either.