Remodelling

I have been struck down with a fairly violent bout of food poisoning which has given me the opportunity to redesign the layout a bit and play around with some ideas...

As in the natural world, things which are bright colours (such as pink) are often warnings that they are poisonous and shouldn't be consumed. Why then, didn't I realise this before my first (or second, for that matter) mouthful of Pepto-Bismol???

Astonishing...

Courtesy of Finklestein's Comment Central, another interesting piece from Robbie Millen on what is essentially the widening gap between fundamentalists and the mainstream.

Conservapedia is, frankly, astonishing. I don't think it's unfair to suggest that Wikipedia suffers from certain problems, but to suggest that it is over run by anti-Christian, American hating communists is frankly risible. Conservapedia attacks Wikipedia for clouding facts with liberal propaganda and unsurprisingly, all the US hot potatoes are cited: abortion, homosexuality and evolution theory/the big bang.

By virtue of the sheer number of people who moderate at Wikipedia, articles (on the whole) tend to the factual and avoid any one bias. That's not to say they don't outline various criticisms, etc. but the main article itself is usually factually based.

Not so in Conservapedia... take abortion. Wikipedia's entry is the description of medical procedure (which abortion is) where as Conservapedia's entry is a list of the horrors associated with abortion.

Why squeal about bias, only to replace it with bias of a different flavour*?

At least CreationWiki does what it says in the tin - it is open and honest about it's objectives. Conservapedia seeks to squash inconvenient facts that contradict theological beliefs and present the results as fact. It's not about the religiosity or beliefs, it's the deliberate deception and promotion of ignorance.

Give people the facts and let them make up their own minds. Wikipedia, for all it's faults, is still the better proposition because it shares and expands the store of human knowledge.

*That's flavour with a u. Hilariously they think this is ungodly. The patronising and ignorant mindset could possibly explain the phenomena.

last.fm: personal music preferences

I first heard about last.fm about 2 months ago but had been slow to check it out.

It watches what music you listen to and makes suggestions from:

• music that is similar by genre, etc.
  
• other peoples' prefences whose are similar to your own
  

It has a radio player "thing" that also lets you rate songs and seems to be a free to air playlist.

Combining all this, it then lists what you listened to last, most, etc. Overall quite a lot of cool things going on behind the scenes with this. Check it out: