If you use Firefox 3 on the Mac, you may be interested in a new plugin which allows inline PDF viewing, just as it works in Safari/WebKit. This is very useful, of course, until we finally get a WebKit-based browser that has a wide array of useful plugins like Firefox does.
A lot of people tell me that I’m some kind of intolerant atheist always harping on about other people’s harmless religious beliefs, and shouldn’t I just let them live in their own intellectual squalor. No can do. Unfortunately, ignorance is a social problem, as this story of a man stomping and punching his child to death because he thought the child was possessed by demons. A witness said the man wasn’t frenzied, but acted very calmly on the belief that he had to get the demons out of the child. The man was killed by police during the act. I repeat: ignorance and stupidity is a social problem which can have tragic consequences.
Stupidity can also lead to wilful misrepresentation of scientific information, as Jeffrey Shallit shows on how people misrepresent statistics regarding prevention of HIV transmission.
In the Ruby/Rails community, Bonjour really is the new hotness. Must try some of these things out soon, and poke at the code to see how people are accessing Bonjour (or Zeroconf for those of you who aren’t enamoured with Apple trademarks) services.
Want to see more stupid? $499 for Cat-5 cable and $550 for a USB cable? The latter is treated with “Quantum Tunnelling”. This is what you get when people with a lot of money, but who are so ignorant that they cannot tell the difference between digital and analogue signals. That said, there may be some validity to these designs. I mean, I know when I use cheap USB cables to transfer songs to my iPod sometimes gremlins manage to sneak in.
Tom Scott has an excellent post on de-bullshitting people on the Semantic Web. I’m of the opinion that ‘semantic’ is an increasingly bad word. Not a day goes by without someone announcing that they are providing some kind of ‘semantic’ service, which has absoultely nothing to do with the Semantic Web. The ‘Linked Data’ phrase is getting a lot more play inside my own head these days.
Woohoo! Airships! It’ll be like Final Fantasy all over again. (Via Simon Willison, who I know really loves airships.)
Plagiarists are not being expelled from British universities.
