I’ve just been watching this great panel discussion with Richard Dawkins, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Ann Druyan and Victor Stenger. It’s about the value of critical thinking and the challenges that religions cause for science teaching. It takes a few minutes to warm up but is well worth watching. It’s an hour long.
I hadn’t seen Neil DeGrasse Tyson before – what a great speaker!
Found on RichardDawkins.net
Just come across this – very nice demo.
Sad to hear that my cousin, John Ryan, has died aged 88. John was the creator of Captain Pugwash, Mary Mungo & Midge, and other BBC children’s favourites from the 70s.
For a bit of nostalgia for those of a certain age – here’s a clip on one of my previous posts.
And here’s the announcement on the BBC website.
My brother Simon is an artist. Well, he’s a doctor, actually, but the two are not mutually exclusive, and he studied art up to A-level.
A couple of nights ago he and I were playing with the now-famous Brushes app on the iPhone/iTouch. I tried to draw a picture of him, he drew one of me. Suffice it to say that my one of him is not worthy to be reproduced even in this humble journal. His one of me, on the other hand, is really rather good. I am, of course, pictured looking down at my iPhone…
What particularly impresses me about this is that Simon had very limited experience with Brushes beforehand, and hadn’t discovered that you could zoom in and out. So this is done almost entirely at 1:1 scale on an iTouch screen with a blunt finger.
It may not be too flattering, but I really like it. Perhaps it’s appropriate that the first portrait anybody has created of me should have been drawn on an iPod.
Overheard the other day: “How come your phone gets 5 bars here and mine only gets 3? We’re on the same network!” It made me smile: as far as I know, there is no standard for the number of bars displayed vs. signal strength, even across different phones, let alone across different manufacturers. Perhaps there should be.
iPhone users who want to know a bit more can dial *3001#12345#* on the numeric keypad and press Call, which will bring up Field Test Mode. The bars in the top left will be replaced with a signal strength in dBm – a negative number where the less negative it is, the stronger the signal – and there’s a whole menu of other diagnostic information whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate.
Incidentally, there are some discussion threads out there talking about signal strength problems that people have seen after upgrading their iPhone, or after installing the 3.0 software, or if you hold the phone the wrong way… While I’m sure some people do have real problems, I’ve just come from a Nokia E71, which was also an excellent phone, and about which people have exactly the same discussions.
I, for one, am loving my iPhone 3GS…
Cambridge was a seething, bubbling broth of tourists and language students today – more than I can remember in a long time. They were trying to go in all of these directions. At once. I had to push my bike along a few streets because it was pointless trying to ride it.
Normally I know better than to go into town on a sunny Saturday morning, but I had promised myself a new camera lens. Very pleased with it so far…
What colour is a light switch?
I’ve always said that there are lies, damned lies, statistics, and web statistics. Any figures from a web site owner about how many hits their site gets should be taken with a big pinch of salt – they could be a long way out in either direction, though one could argue javascript-and-cookie-based analysis gives us better stats now than we had in the past.
Anyway, having said that, there was an interesting TechCrunch article last week showing dramatic recent changes in web browser usage patterns.
Internet Explorer 7 is dramatically down, with most of its users switching to IE8, which is growing fast. If you treat the different browser versions independently, Firefox 3 is about to become the most-used browser out there.
Combine all the IE versions, however, and it still has much the biggest market share with just over half the market. But the significant fact is that the IE share has fallen from nearly two-thirds of the market just 3 months ago. Presumably, this comes from people making the IE upgrade, finding IE8 isn’t quite to their liking, and opting for Chrome, Firefox or Safari instead.
Anyway, this data is only from one source, albeit a reasonably big one, so should be handled with care until confirmed elsewhere. But, whatever your browser of choice, the most important aspect of the web is that it is open and evolving, and healthy competition in the browser space is an absolutely essential part of that, so this looks like a promising trend.
An interesting article in this week’s Economist reports on experiments showing that people in a competition, for example in an exam hall, do better when surrounded by fewer competitors. In the 2005 SAT exams in the USA:
The two researchers used data on the number of test-takers in each state of the union and the number of test-taking venues in that state to calculate the average number of test-takers per venue in the state in question. They found that test scores fell as the number of people in the examination hall increased. And they discovered that this pattern was also true for the Cognitive Reflection Test, another analytical exam.
Further experiments suggested that even when factors such as the differing amounts of distraction have been removed, if you know or feel you are competing against a smaller group, you will achieve more.
The article is here – it may require an Economist subscription, though.
Well, I’m a bit late with this story, but I thought it worth repeating as a great example of the ingenuity of artists (and their lawyers)…
ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, is suing AT&T over the phone company’s selling of ringtones. Why, you may ask, would they do that, since they are already paid a share of the download fees?
Well, the download fees are too low, they claim, because they’re based on the idea that the download is for private listening. No, they say, not so! When your phone rings it is a public performance! And the fees should be adjusted accordingly…
More on the story here. Meanwhile, here’s how you can turn any music into an iPhone ringtone using iTunes.
In the past, big corporates who gave shoddy customer service had little to fear: the worst that could happen was was loss of repeat business from a customer who was probably more trouble than he was worth anyway.
Not any more. Imagine what the PR department at United Airlines are feeling about the fact that over half a million people have watched this rather nice little customer complaint:
Here’s the story. Thanks to Mark Littlewood for the tweet.
Google have just announced officially that they are developing an operating system, Google Chrome OS, and, this being 2009, the official announcement is made on the official blog.
Details are sketchy at present, but it sounds as if the emphasis will be lightweight, quick-booting… my guess is that it’ll be the minimum you can get away with to launch a browser and get online fast, ready to use all those lovely Google services, and that things like Gears will be built in to enable you to use them faster. This may mark the point where the PC really is an extension of your online apps and storage, rather than the other way around.
It’ll run on ARM and x86. And it’ll be Open Source too.
This has been predicted for some time, so it won’t surprise anyone at Microsoft, but I bet there’ll be some interesting discussions around the coffee machines in Redmond today.
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