29May
If we're to believe Vecosys, Feedburner is to disappear into the G****e behemoth. If it does, we'll be contacting the owners of all the RSS feeds we use, and explaining why we won't be reading them again. Which includes Datamining, where we read the truism: There seems to be an inverse relationship between the number of G****e ads on a blog and the quality of the blog.
G****e's latest device to foist adverts where no commercial should tread: the Browser Address Error Redirector.
James Thomas lives a life without G****e. And not only lives to tell the tale, but thoroughly enjoys it:
Without the AdSense and Google Analytics javascripts executing (and downloading) on some pages, the entire internet experience is a lot faster... Ask's mapping service is pretty good. Rootly has been a great alternative to Google News, and in some cases even better.
Readers will wish to note the rather large number of javascript calls on the Centre Networks page. Eight. Is that a record? (No; a record is a round, black thing with a hole in the middle.)
In other geeky news
The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication has published a suite of papers on the social dimensions of search engines. We learn that page placement is more important than article snippets - people will pick one of the first few results, no matter how irrelevant it is. Search engines are developed in a split manner - sometimes by capitalist marketeers, other times by experimental scientists. And there's an insight into the rise and possible fall of a G****e-bomb. Which reminds us: B&Q appliance warehouse is now the number 3 return on Yahoo, behind only the company's own website. And Insubstantial careerist is top on all major search engines; number 2 is the Insubstantial Careerist's site to become the Labour party's top elected official.
A very interesting post from Scott Aaronson on religion's rules of inference. Our hero is talking to a religious fundamentalist, and manages to draw out enough evidence to assert that fundies can follow A→B, and B→C, and C→D, but not then see that D→(not A). He wonders if this generalises.
Which leads us to an article in the current Scientific Canadian, about the traveller's dilemma.
Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it. Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer between 2 and 100 without conferring together. If both write the same number, he will take that to be the true price, and he will pay each of them that amount. But if they write different numbers, he will assume that the lower one is the actual price and that the person writing the higher number is cheating. In that case, he will pay both of them the lower number along with a bonus and a penalty--the person who wrote the lower number will get $2 more as a reward for honesty and the one who wrote the higher number will be fined $2 for their duplicity.
The game theory equilibrium is for both players to converge to the lowest amount possible - in this case, $2. In practice, the result tends to be close to, but strictly less than, the upper limit - here, somewhere in the 90s. Does this not show the limitations behind game theory as a model for human behaviour, that it applies only to psycopaths like prochain ancien British prime minister Mister Tony Blair?
Unconfined by length
When is it right to use CC / BCC on an email? When should you filter someone out? When is a hand-written note welcome and a typewritten note containing the same information not so good? Dan Ryan has been looking into sociological norms of notification. A bit over our head, but if this is your cup of tea...
Jeopardy!
has run into a political hot potato by denying the status of Tibet. The question was to name one of the two land-locked countries in the Himalayas, for which the correct responses are Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan. The claim from Red China to have annexed Tibet, though de facto true, is entirely specious de jure. By taking such a provocotive a stance on this matter, the writers of Jeopardy!
show their political leanings.
Language Log continues its campaign against bad science at the BBC. Let's be careful not to confuse legitimate comment on poor journalism with bias against the organisation, there.
We've not created a Twit account, on the entirely reasonable grounds that we have nothing to say in as little as 140 characters, and we don't sign up for anything run by damned Yankees these days. Those who have may be mildly interested in Tube-tracker to SMS, a quick way of receiving a short message saying that there are delays on the Metropolitan line north of Northwood Hills and south of Northwood, allowing one to divert to Ruislip Manor.
