HorsePerson and the ShoeMan

In true Canadian fashion I heard two Canadian radio talk-show hosts discuss the Canadian Women Hockey team. What was Canadian about it was a) the fact that they discussed hockey (and I was of course listening to a hockey discussion), and b) the fact that they criticized the winning.

So far the Canadian Women Hockey team rocked. They're 3-0, winning their last three games by scoring a total of 36 goals and allowing one in.
Canada-Italy 16-0
Russia-Canada 0-12
Canada-Sweden 8-1

Naturally, my reaction was - what happened? Why did they let in that one goal? Best humoured of course. However, these talk-show hosts' reaction was very different from mine. They asked whether the team should stop trying when the score reaches 7-0.

I, for one, can't believe they even mentioned that.
It would be the equivalent of telling a runner to slow down if he has a big margin. I mean, why strive for the best when one can have an easy win?
Besides, the total scores count in the overall standing and give the team with the higher points some sort of advantage.

I'm not sure why exactly these talk-show hosts talked like that.
I get the distinct feeling it was a combination of two things:
The first was because it is the women's hockey team. I'm not sure they would have talked the same if it were the men who reached such results.
The second is being Canadian. What? Are we feeling bad for winning? Are we feeling sorry for the losing teams? What is wrong with us?

For many years Google could do no wrong. Everything it touched turned into gold and whatever services it offered, in addition to the search, were always better than the competition's services.

More than that, back then Google represented the little guy who made it, the one with the values, one we felt we could trust to maintain a start-up mentality rather than embrace corporate values as it grew.

The first time I was disillusioned with Google was just over two years ago when the Google Trademark Enforcement Team decided to get involved in (ridiculous) trademark disputes.

Then we found out that Google saves all our searches and that it abides to court orders and surrenders our search history. Then there was the whole gmail fiasco - scanning private emails to better direct ads at us - yeah, whatever you say.

The latest sour note was Google's collaboration with the Chinese government.

But what is one to do? Google is still the best darn search engine. A monopoly indeed!

Well, there seems to be some hope. A few new search engines that may become serious competitors:

• New Ones:
  
  • Lexxe - "a third generation Internet search engine with advanced Natural Language Processing technologies." That is, Lexxe tries to answer your questions directly from web pages. From Business Pundit.com - Lexxe Beats Google
  
  
  • Hakia - "hakia is building the Web's first "meaning-based" search engine, one that will bring answers and meaningful results to questions on any topic."


• Meta search engines such as MetaCrawler used to be the "in" thing but faded with time. However, gada.be is offering an rss output for searches allowing users to be updated on their search items. Google doesn't provide that. (Yet?)


• Using the surfers to find better results:
  
  • Wink, for example, is "a different search engine that determines relevance by what people indicate are the best links." Problem is that not many people have indicated yet.

So - is it the end of Google as the best search engine? Unlikely. More likely that the good ones will be acquired by Google and the bad ones will disappear. Just like another monopoly we know...

After nearly six months in which I abandoned this blog in favour of my other blog All Kinds of Writing, I decided to reinstate it.

I have more to say than just about writing, in fact, I'm quite an opinionated little [insert your favourite 4-6 letter word here].

There's all this science and health news I want to cover, all these cultural issues that bug the hell out of me, not to mention corporate wrath, commercials' idiocy and social dissonance.

Of course the template needs work too, but I'll get to that in no time.

For now, I'm just happy to be back here too :)

• 9,000-Year-Old Beer Re-Created From Chinese Recipe
  

  "It wasn't a beer, it wasn't a mead, and it wasn't a wine or a cider. It was somewhere between all of them...



• Circumcision Can Reduce AIDS Risk, Study Says
  Ouch, but...
  

  The results show that circumcised men in the study were 63 percent less likely than uncircumcised men to be infected through sex with HIV-positive women. That's a far better level of protection than the 30 percent reduction risk set as a target for an AIDS vaccine.



• Seems like we just never learn: Mars Life May Be Contaminated by Spacecraft, Experts Warn
  

  The early spacecraft that landed on Mars were thoroughly sterilized. But as money for the space program got tight, the expensive cleansing process was cut back.



• The whole article is only an excerpt, but is still interesting: The Stem Cell Divide. To those who can get their hands on the print issue - recommended.
  

  In such varied political climates, scientists around the globe are racing to see which techniques will produce treatments soonest. Their approaches vary, but on one point, all seem to agree: How humanity handles its control over the mysteries of embryo development will say a lot about who we are and what we're becoming.



• Ultra-Lifelike Robot Debuts in Japan - I've seen it on TV a few weeks ago and it's so cool. Go look at the pics.
  

  Internal sensors allow the android to react "naturally." It can block an attempted slap, for example. But it's the little, "unconscious" movements that give the robot its eerie verisimilitude: the slight flutter of the eyelids, the subtle rising and falling of the chest, the constant, nearly imperceptible shifting so familiar to humans.

This is the funniest movie I've see in a while: it's a short film of the guys doing the voice over of movie trailers.

Five Men And A Limo

Via Yankee Fog

In a study done at Stanford University, the team managed to target cancer cells. With all the breakthroughs that I hear of lately, I think there's room for cautious hope about the disease.
The article, Nanotube-Laser Combo Selectively Targets Cancer Cells, Study Shows, published in Scientific American is very encouraging:

"One of the longstanding problems in medicine is how to cure cancer without harming normal body tissue," notes study co-author Hongjie Dai. Thus, to ensure that the carbon nanotubes were attracted only to diseased cells, the researchers coated them with folate molecules. The team then shined a flashlight-size near-infrared laser on aqueous solutions of both tumor and normal cells. Although harmless to regular cells, the light heated the nanotubes to 70 degrees Celsius within two minutes, killing the cancer cells they had invaded.

During last winter, the water pump that runs the little pond I have in my little backyard with the little fall broke down.
I tried my best to dry out the pond until such time as I had enough money to buy that sophisticated water filter-pump. Alas, my efforts were in vane as rain kept falling even though everybody claims we're in a drought.
And then... I was away for a month.
During that month, I've traveled to the Mediterranean hoping I could bathe and swim, catch a wave or two to shore and all the other fun things one does at sea.
Twice I have visited the sea. Twice I was disappointed.
The first time I went swimming in the Mediterranean, the water was calm. No waves. Like being in a salty pool. This was not what my heart desired, but I managed to enjoy myself nonetheless.
Before my second attempt at a swim, I was forewarned. The sea is dangerous, I was told: high waves, strong pull, sneaky undercurrents, and ...
and jellyfish.
Determined as I was, I went to the beach after all. A very small section was closed off by the lifeguards to the enjoyment of the swimming crowd, nowhere else was permitted. But people were in the water, in that little sectioned off part. So, encouraged by this, I decided to go in as well. It wasn't before long that I started feeling the stinging and the itching in a few places in my body. The experience became unpleasant and I left the water to examine my body. In a few places I had what seemed at first like red burn marks, which turned into welts after a few minutes only to settle into burgundy color the next day with what looked like small scratches in the middle of the burgundy spots. It's the jellyfish secretion I was told, and jellyfish eggs. The water was apparently full of secretions and eggs that stung and itched and burnt all bathers who dared going in the water. So much for swimming in the Mediterranean.
Last week I finally returned home and found to my dismay that my pond wasn't just full of water (apparently it rained), but also full of living things I could not name. The waters shimmered from the life in it, not unlike from water sparkling under the sun, and yet so different.
It took me a few days until I gathered enough courage to deal with the pond, but I finally drained it over the weekend. And today I even came this close to buying a new pump. Yet today something else happened. All of a sudden, today for some strange reason, after nearly a fortnight of not bothering me, all my jellyfish burns started itching. And I have no idea why. Maybe I'm growing little jellyfish under my skin from the jellyfish eggs that nestled under my skin??

I didn't know the war was on, but apparently it was and Beethoven beat Bono. Big time.

Forget Coldplay and James Blunt. Forget even Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, which, in the version performed at Live8 by Sir Paul McCartney and U2, has become the fastest online-selling song ever. Beethoven has routed the lot of them.

Final figures from the BBC show that the complete Beethoven symphonies on its website were downloaded 1.4m times, with individual works downloaded between 89,000 and 220,000 times. The works were each available for a week, in two tranches, in June.

I'm not sure what to make of this, but you can read it here yourselves.

And I can't help myself -- it seems that this battle was won in the tranches, not in the trenches :)

Categories: music