Exporting your manifesto
Let’s look at how the three major UK political parties are allowing people to share their manifestos.
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Arguing about climate change? There’s an app for that
The Skeptical Science blogger has created an iPhone app to aid your climate change/global warming debates with your friends and family sticking up for the anthropogenic CO2 emission status quo. Now you can scroll down and access a database of known popular arguments and find your response. I’m always keen to see knowledge outsourcing services in action. Why know what it is, when you know where it is?
I like science apps because it lets me pretend my iPhone is more like a tricorder. I’ve got a few psychology reference apps that have come in mildly handy for course work and the stethoscope thing is a nice party trick, but not really the potential spyware its touted to be. Brain tutor is fun with its 3D-esque fly-around mode, as who doesn’t want to jet through the the ossipital lobe on occasion?
The information on the Skeptical Science App is good. It looks to be a copy of the blog’s own database of Frequently Awful Quotes about the subject, but what’s even more intersting is the sort of emerging crowdsourcing intelligentsia part of the kit. When you encounter one of the arguments, there’s an option to upvote it, which lets the app keep track of the most commonly employed rhetoric.
Currently the information is simply stored on your phone in the “My Reports” panel,” though there’s plans to make that data shared amongst users, which to me seemed like an obvious thing. The blog indicates they’re working on a heat map display of where people are encountering arguments. I’d be more interested in seeing the raw numbers, though. I mean, am I really going to check the heat map before going out and think “well, it looks like Tooting is a hotbed for contention around Naomi Oreskes’ study on consensus! Let us make the requisite preparations.”
It would also be useful if the reports option had a place to include new arguments and memes, as The Lobby is effective at trickling them down to their unwitting advocates. I like the app; it’s an interesting read on the tube ride home, but I don’t know how it would go over in a debate with a person somewhere if you pulled out your gizmo and suddenly started reading at them. Good to have handy I guess for comment wars on the web, though.
DIY robot on your desk mimes Twitter for you
I may have to modify my new years resolutions to include hacking together one of these things for my desk at work.
Aaaaaw.
Using the Guardian’s recently launched Open Platform, this little guy monitors your Twitter feed for “happy” and “sad” posts of those you follow and alerts you to the need to respond to people.
Via The Guardian Open Platform
Writing on a Snowy Field with soft Music in the Background
Ommwriter from Herraiz Soto on Vimeo.
Will a serene background image of a snow covered field and non-obtrusive piano really help me bang out serious prose? I don’t know about all the bells and whistles around Omniwriter Beta V2′s version of an immersive writing environment, but I’m sort of taken with the fading in and out interface and cool round buttons, and as a free download and a Mac only application its passed my minimum requirements to try out.
An iPhone app for your cocaine habit: The iSnort
The iSnort – I can’t believe it’s not cocaine.
Now if there was only an iPhone app that would surreptitiously syphon cash from a Colombian drug cartel into my bank account.
Older versions of WordPress under attack
To quote Lorelle: Update your WordPress blog before you continue reading this post. That’s how critical this issue is.
“Otto42 of OttoDestruct, a key WordPress developer and supporter, reports that there is an “attack” on older versions of WordPress right now. The number of sites hit by this is growing every hour. Protect your WordPress blog now: UPDATE NOW!!!”
I sort of have a habit of looking up subscribers to my blog. Thankfully there are not that many of them, so it’s pretty easy. When there’s a new one, I just google it. Two new ones were “OBSCURED EMAIL ADDRESS” and “OBSCURED EMAIL ADDRESS.” Googling these resulted in a slew of warnings on a hack exploit that exists in WordPress installs older than 2.8.4. which can allow nasty things like permalinks being changed to direct people elsewhere, as ArabCrunch points out.
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The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.
