Lightview for your website

http://www.nickstakenburg.com/projects/lightview/

Seems really cool and uses a few javascripts to get the job done.  Nicely Done!

 

Cox Spamming Google?

Cox has added links for its brand new site osulsu.com all over its subsidiaries’ websites. Not only are links popping up in Ohio and Louisiana, Cox has also added links to the BCS National Championship related site in in Texas, Colorado, and North Carolina. It is spread to big and small alike: Austin, Lufkin, Longview and Nacogdoches. Come on now, Nacogdoches? The oldest city in Texas doesn’t need your link spamming Cox! The links are not links for people to use, only for search engines to see. They are right at the bottom of every page near the normal link fodder at the end of the page.

Call it link spamming, link bombing, or link whoring. It doesn’t matter what the label is, but it is dirty. I really like the term incestuous linking, because Cox is making use of all of its children companies to spawn these links loaded with search terms. In affect, they are trying to spoof Google’s (and other search engines) Page Rank algorithm to believe that lots of sites are linking to them.   It is a way to pretend that they are more important than they are.

Is this illegal? No.  Should search engines take action? You would hope so.  Will they? Probably not, seeing how Cox and all of its children provide so much content on the internet.  There are entire communities that exist on these sites and their newspapers.  Now, if this was some spammer in China trying to sell Viagra, Google would blacklist them.  Since it is a media conglomerate promoting a somewhat dubious but still valid enterprise, it will most likely go unscathed.

This is what happens when local news is owned by a conglomerate. And as a reader and consumer of internet content, you should care. Don’t let umbrella companies insert their unrelated content into supposedly local sites to boost national search results…

Lufkin Daily News

Austin American Statesman

Grand Junction News

 

My firefox setup

So, I get a lot of questions from anyone who ever sees my firefox setup and they want to know what add-ons and themes I am using. I have a lot of web security and web developer plugins as well as general usability. Some of the items here I use barely because I am too lazy to remove them, but others are crucial.

Here are the add-ons that I use:

• Adblock
• AJAX Yahoo Mail
• Better Gmail
• ColorfulTabs
• CustomizeGoogle
• del.icio.us
• Download Statusbar
• Duplicate Tab
• Firebug
• FireFTP
• Gmail Manager
• Google Notebook
• Google Toolbar for Firefox
• GooglePreview
• IE Tab
• Last Tab
• LinkedIn Companion
• LiveHTTP Headers
• LoadTime Analyzer
• NoScript
• PDF Download
• Tab Catalog
• Tabbrowser Preferences
• TamperData
• Web Developer
• YSlow

Theme:

• Azerty II

 

From Paul Nelson’s post on Uncommon Descent

If you find yourself moving books in bookstores, so that people won’t see them, or petitioning to reassign certain books in the LC system, or pulling webpages so that your university won’t be embarrassed, or drafting yet another tedious resolution…

This whole Europe censorship of Intelligent Design is ridiculous… When you are covering up a theory and barring it’s proponents, you have to ask yourself, “Why?” Why do you care so much? If they (ID proponents) are wrong, let the evidence prove that out and why give up academic freedom and liberty? Are we so upset with Intelligent Design that we are willing to sacrifice the principles of Education and the foundation of the University? If so, America and her Universities are in more peril than we knew.

 

Europe gone wild?

You better like our materialism… or else!

 

Ever wish you could record your life?

I do. At least bits and pieces of it…  To record it all would be way too boring, but today I had a moment that struck me with some comedy today.

I am walking around the halls at work and there is a guy that is rambling on his cell phone, a little too loudly I might add.  He seems like he is one of those guys that is saying, “Look at me on my phone.”  I could be wrong, but he was definitely acting a little too excited and he was walking all over the place.  Anyways, he gets in the elevator and keeps on talking.  We start moving.  Still talking.  Still moving and now, no more talking.  He suddenly exclaims to the elevator passengers, “I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS!  <big sigh> It dropped my call.. <more rambling here>”

Anyways, I wish I had a recorder for the whole thing.  He seemed genuinely surprised that cell phones won’t work in elevators…  Trust me, it was funnier in person.

 

Am I taking crazy pills

So, there is a trend in culture to have catchy book titles and then write the whole book focused around misusing and redefining the word in the title.  An amazon reviewer wrote this little item on a book called “Refusing to Cheat”

 The author redefines cheating instead of using English words with meanings we understand already, but for no good reason. As a result, the redefined cheating is not cheating at all, but the author still fashioned the book around this concept to the detriment of clear communication of the message. It is as though the marketing took over the book.

So, maybe I am not taking crazy pills, or at least it frustrates one other person besides me. We have to stop trying to fit our messages into sound bites or seemingly clever phrases.  Although, I must ask, when is it clever to butcher language?  Yes, it is clever to use synonyms or double meanings, but it a bad idea to add new meanings to old words.

I tried to think of a way that evolutionists do this, but my brain  is too fried today so  they get off easy today

 

the softest of scientists

No one wants to be called soft, unless you are in the skin-care products industry, and even then you only want that as a reference to your dermis.  In my previous post I lumped math and physics into the hard science category and I lumped biology and sociology into the soft science category.

Mostly I want to delineate people that work with complex systems daily and apply theoretical knowledge to real world systems versus people that are abstracted a few layers above.  Yes, you blur fields all over the place and my hard science versus soft science is not truly able to lump entire fields of study underneath them.  However I will note that if people that are involved in research or application of data systems (organic or not) often see the frailty of the data, the information is not safe.  These people are application driven and are the audience I address as the hard science category.  This group can see how one monkey wrench in the system will often ruin it.

Selection depends on randomness and time to have anything useful to select for.  In addition we see often that more is needed to make a selection than a simple change like color.  To make species change wholly, you need lots of new information encoded into the DNA.  Moving a squirrel to a bat requires new information, whereas a finch beak is merely variation on a current component.  In fact the code for the variation already existed and enabled the variation to happen for Darwin’s friendly finches.

 

Dembski interview about his research, feeding the Intelligent Design machine

So this interview is cool to see they are busy in ID Land. Really, one of my holdouts for ID/Evo has always been the depth of research. While both sides claim lots of research and the pundits rattle through journal pubs and books and conferences, I have always seen a lack of research in the information area. Both sides mind you.

I actually have a personal theory that if you take Engineers, Physicists, Medical Doctors, Chemists and Mathematicians and put them in one group (applied science) and place biologists, zoologists, and sociologists (soft science) into another group, you will see a statistical difference in their beliefs on evolution and ID. My guess is that you would see a slightly higher of Intelligent Design acceptance and adoption in the applied science arena than you would see in the soft science group. I think this is due to how we see the world and information strung throughout it. It is a hard tenet to believe that randomness and time generated all of this information. Everything in the applied science field teaches how randomness doesn’t produce useful information and in fact is a destructive force.

 

Fox news getting hacked?

Pretty cool post. Check the password and username in the file!