You Say Potarto

In the UK everyone knows that conservatives are the party for the rich and Labour is the one for the poor. No one is really sure what the liberals do - not even the liberals.

American conservatives are a different thing: they call themselves Republicans. Not being American, I'm not sure where they are come from, but peering into the goldfish bowl, Republicans are intellectually devoid buy dint of religion.

The most recent (2008) election brought this into sharper focus than ever before.

John McCain did not consider himself sufficiently right-wing to appeal to traditional conservative voters, so he brought in Alaskan Governor, Sarah Palin.

Despite being demonstrably ignorant in the extreme, the undeniably attractive and charismatic Palin actually gave the republican party a serious chance of re-election in spite of the almighty mess almost eight years of the Bush administration had left the country in.

This is terrifying.

I reserve judgement about President Obama - it's too early to tell. A little over a decade ago, Tony Blair looked like the saving grace for troubled Britain - and now we're in deeper shit than ever. Like many of my peers I hope against hope that Obama won't be a shadowy reflection of Blair. So far things look promising - but he's not even in the oval office yet.

And the Republicans have not given up.

Unlike the UK, America is a very religious country. We don't tend to notice on a day-to-day basis because it shares a similar religious basis as the UK's historical mono-theistic Christianity. America was founded by people fleeing religious persecution in England and it's a history that the young country clings to even to this day.

Yet in spite of being technologically advanced, a massive cross-section of the American public not only believes in the Christian god, they also think it created the world exactly as described in the bible. An idea favoured in Blighty until a century or so ago when Charles Darwin published his theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.

Religious people didn't like Darwin's theory because it is directly opposed to theistic creation and while some have adapted their ideas to incorporate evolution (theistic evolution) where a god(s) guides the changes species, the vast majority find it too hard to accept.

The bible is their book of life - they read from and study it ad-nauseum yet fail miserably to detect the myriad patent errors.

America is a country in crisis: country in great pain. A pain that is a by-product of wilful ignorance.

It's OK to believe in some form of supernatural entity to replace the things that we don't understand, but to deny the things that we have learned and replace them with the supernatural is stupid and dangerous.

I don't believe in god - I believe there are things we cannot prove and may never be able to.

To deny facts is more dangerous than Islamic fundamentalism.

Right, now I have some potatoes to harvest.

Holy Shit, Sheila - Not AGAIN!

Holy crap, you can't keep a gullible idiot good girl down, now can ya?

She's been at it again, until this time (flaming hell!) MSN is going to close down because some bunch of bastards have been stealing all the good names:

Hi, this is Tara and John, the directors of MSN,

Sorry for the interruption but MSN is closing down. This is because too many inconsiderate people are taking up all the names (e.g. Making up lots of different accounts for just one person, etc.), we only have 587 names left. If you would like to close your account, DO NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE ON. If you would like to keep your account, then SEND THIS MESSAGE TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST.

This is no joke, we will be shutting down the servers.
Send it on, thanks.

P.S. WHOEVER DOES NOT SEND THIS MESSAGE, YOUR ACCOUNT WILL BE CLOSED AND IT WILL COST YOU 10.00 A MONTH TO USE. SEND THIS TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST. NOW YOU KNOW WHAT TO DO. PLEASE DO NOT FORWARD THIS or REPLY. COPY THE WHOLE EMAIL. GO BACK TO YOUR INBOX AND CLICK ON NEW. AND PASTE THANKYOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION.

This is no joke if you dont believe us then go to this site: http://news.BBC.co.UK/1/hi/business/1189119.stm and see for yourself. Anyways once you've sent this message to at least 18 contacts, your MSN icon will become blue. Please copy and paste, dont forward because people wont read them.

Wow! I'm mean, like WOW! I'm convinced.

Yeah. Convinced that no one would be dumb enough to believe such outrageous, well whatever the name for this stuff is. Bulls*t comes to mind.

For Pete's sake, does anyone read these days? "This is Tara and John the directors of MSN?"

Tara and bloody John! I ask you. They couldn't have thought of better names than that? Who honestly thinks that the "directors" of the Microsoft Network would introduce themselves in such a manner?

But these people are so dumb they'll send stuff on if it opened with names like, Seymour Butts and Mike Hunt, they really would. If you sent this message on to someone, do us all a favour and unplug your computer now. Thanks.

For Everyone's Sake: Check Your Facts!

Seth Godin is a marketing specialist, and he's written a slew of books. I recently challenged his idea of RadaR - because no matter what he might like to think, it doesn't work.

In his recent blog post Gravity is just a Theory (and I'll admit he disagreed vehemently with my analysis) Seth bodly spouts that Newton (as in Sir Isaac Newton) only named gravity.

Seth's a marketeer - or something like that - but something seems that seems to have convinced him that it's OK to run fast and loose with science facts.

Seth and I come from different backgrounds. As a former technology journalist and erstwhile computer programmer I deal in hard facts - in a business where facts count. Marketing is, I assume, rather more "fuzzy" in this regard.

Seth declares that Newton only named gravity (he didn't, the word was already in use before he was born). He further asserts (wrongly) that we don't know how fast it travels (essentially, at light speed - the electromagnetic and gravitational forces are closely related). In a couple of short sentences, Godin slags off Newton to the undoubted cheers of his assembled throngs.

Newton was a very smart guy. He was also a creationist (that shouldn't be a surprise) and a complete arse (not for being a creationist, that was par in his day).

He deserves to be slagged of for being an arse, but we can't deny he was more or less cock-on where gravity is concerned.

Sir Isaac didn't name gravity, he described it - with incredible accuracy - so accurately that guys who probably need girlfriends, used the same equations to predict the motion of the toolbag that an astronaut dropped in earth orbit. It took something like 300+ years before Albert Einstein proposed a (demonstrably) more accurate set of equations.

None of this is relevant to marketing, but it matters nontheless.

It matters when people of influence (will somebody please tell Prince Charles Windsor to shut up?) get a bee in their bonnet about stuff they think they know something about. Seth's errors could have a butterfly effect - it matters because people listen to him and take every word as gospel.

It must be part of the human condition but it never ceases to amaze me how people confuse the size of their audience (or wage packet) with the size of their intellect.

Rich scientists are almost unheard of yet they are the most learned among us.

Pop stars, footballers, journalists, unelected heads of state (to name four examples) are liable to drop some amazing clangers and for the most part it doesn't matter a fig; until they start talking science: and then it does. Not because I care for science any more than I care for the cost of my weekly shopping. but because science is something that affects all of us. Good science helps us - bad science can destroy us and junk science is the most dangerous of all.

I'm very fond of the Winnie Churchill quote (which may be only an attribution) that, "A lie can get round the world faster than the truth has time to get his pants on" but there's a lot to be said for that shrewd observation.

So if you're going to open your mouth and a lot of people are going to believe you, for heaven's sake, check with someone who actually knows first.

Seth Godin Offers Hubris In Innovation's Place

Writing in his blog, Godin remarks:

"In 2000, I invented a gadget called RadaR. Fred Wilson (Ed.'s note: of UnionSquareVentures.com we assume) told me that I was ahead of my time, and he was right."

Wow Seth, and no one else had had the same idea!

Well, actually, plenty of people did so you didn't actually invent anything, you had a cool idea. People who go on about their ideas that never came to fruition aren't inventors, they're dreamers. Even people who actually make things are still only dreamers if those things don't get picked up and manufactured. Like I dream of world peace and freedom from religion.

James Dyson (of the bagless vacuum) is an inventor, but he's one of a very rare breed indeed.

Seth is trying to sell his books and since I've not ready any of them, I can't comment on them but I expect they are fairly influential.

Seth has done some notable stuff to be sure, but RadaR isn't among that, a look at the blog here: RadaR blog entry and see if you can spot the hubris. Seth claims iPhones could be leveraged into delivering the traffic information it actually falls down before we even get that far.

The whole idea is fatally flawed. Oddly enough Fred Wilson didn't see that or if he did, Seth isn't saying.

The problem with inventing things (and I've invented a few over the years) is that you're usually so close to them that you become blind to its faults. I'm working on something now that has suffered from exactly the same problem and its developers are bleating the usual excuses like we have a patent (that's meaningless, patents are a great diversion though) and it's always worked so far (also meaningless).

On to RadaR.

Seth claims the problem with traffic reports (on the radio) is that they never tell you anything about where you NEED to go, only where not to. Hardly a shrewd observation but correct nonetheless.

Seth's idea is to put a GPS system into a car and have it report the state of a road by monitoring the car's position in real time and reporting its speed and direction back to a central mapping system.

Sounds great but there's an instant problem which is right under Seth's nose: what if I'm in the bloody car that's slowing down due to traffic? FAIL! A lot of good RadaR did me there.

OK, now everyone else who's similarly equipped gets this message so they get re-routed. But how does RadaR know which route aren't clogged?

It doesn't. Unless another poor RadaR user is already in the jam cursing the blasted thing for leading it up the garden path.

And that's assuming your subscribers (this is a pay service, of course, it has to be) actually turn their phones on and activate the app when in the car. Worse, what if a bunch of little sh*ts get hold of a couple of iPhones and then meander down an otherwise quiet road: kids do this sort of thing out of badness.

RadaR is wrong again and worse still if a couple of RadaR users come whisking by on the same road, since GPS isn't accurate enough to locate which LANE you're in, just that you're on it, the system would have to figure out who's fibbing.

Seth's original idea would have avoided naughty boys, but it still would not work and any town planner could tell him that.

Roads aren't designed to handle the rush hour.

Roads aren't designed to take roadworks at busy periods.

Gridlock is a natural feature of our modern world.

All is not lost (well, it is for RadaR) because if you live in the UK at least, there's already a much better system: TMC (Traffic Message Channel) and the better modern SatNavs have it.

Because TMC relies on camera monitoring to spot tailbacks, it can't be fooled by someone playing silly buggers with the server. It doesn't rely on a phone that's just as likely to drift out of 3g as it is to stay inside it and it doesn't cost much.

Sorry, Seth. Must try harder.

UPDATE: Seth and I exchanged a pleasant couple of emails which I can't reveal here to protect the guilty.

However, my original assertion is valid, the iPhone is not a platform for such a device and RadaR as Seth described in his blog doesn't work.

In fact, the simple fact is none of these gadgets can guarantee you'll miss rush hour traffic - or bypass either. I think I'll invent a teleporter instead, just like Seth did.

Rouge's Gallery Opens

Please, don't forward emails (to me or anyone else) without checking the facts - because anyone who does it getting their name on my rouge's gallery .

xxx GREETINGS SHEILA FROM DURHAM xxx

New viruses (for PCs) come out every day; most days see them appear in the 10s, in fact.

Symantec aren't gearing up for anything any more than usual; neither are McAfee or anyone else in the field and nothing is going to burn your hard drive, set fire to your dog or abduct your hamster.

Snopes.com does list this hoax - yes, it's a hoax. The fact that Snopes is mentioned in the email is a cunning (but ultimately exposed) tactic to lull you into forwarding the email which someone on the list of recipents already did.

How long would it take you guys to check the news? Do you think BBC (UK) would have missed such a cataclysmic event? What about just a cursory check with Symantec.com or AVG.com or Avast.com or McAfee.com or Pandasoftware.com etc.

These sites will tell you the facts, but as Sir Winston Churchill wryly observed, "A lie can get round the world faster than the truth can get its pants on."

You're far more likely to get hit by Antivir 2009 or one of its derivatives than you are by "Postcard" which is older than my ZX81 and about as dangerous: and in fact, you're actually spreading the new form of Postcard virus by actually forwarding the email.

Antivir pretends your system is infected by producing a dummy movie on a web popup and then when you panic and click the link to get cleaned (even though you probaly don't have anything mentioned) you get infected with Antivir.

Welcome to a world of pain. Antivir pretends to be your friend (even locking into the security centre, like real anti-virus program does) while actually asking you for money to clean the threats (which don't even exist). And that's assuming that it hasn't already crippled your systems and let a whole raft of other crap in.

Viruses these days don't want to "burn" your drive or rape your budgie; they don't want to delete your stolen porno collection - they want to hide like a parasite unseen and undetected - because the criminal gangs behind them have much better things to do!

THIS is what they are designed to do:

Sell porn & drugs from Viagra to Vicodin & SPAM the crap out of people using your computer and Internet to do, steal your bank details, steal your logins to and eventually steal your identity, your life and your money.

Think Before You Click!