darling girl at pr comes up with some intriguing questions about the sexual act and circumstances surrounding it. - no, at first, no, yep, nope - imho#

from nova is the very strange MUTEBLOG - a blog with no words, just tiny tiny pictures.#

nova also writes about what he calls "Adaptive Navigation" - the idea is to have the structure of the site evolve as more content is add and more users navigate it - ''I'm talking about changing the graph structure of the site dynamically to best-reflect the paths that a given user is most likely to be interested in, given their previous surfing/reading behavior. I think what I'm hitting upon is that the concept of a fixed site structure is something that we could completely discard in favor of a more advanced notion of "total separation of content and structure." '' - pretty interesting idea, although i wonder if it really is "The Next Step in User Interface" because isn't the most important aspect of interfaces consistency - although ''Good UI designers use consistency intelligently, and, though it may not show off their creativity as well, in the long run it makes users happier.'' - maybe the hit of not being able to navigate the site the same any more is made up for with the increased utility of the "new" way - look at Wikis!#

nova on a roll - ''Can you understand the character of a culture by the number of different words they have for particular things? For example, Eskimos have dozens of words for snow. Americans have dozens of words for capital. Tibetans have dozens of words for mind.'' - what a great thought!#

accordion guy continues and links sousveillance - watching the watchers. - ''It has often been said that the true causes of terrorism are oppression, bad foreign policy, and secrecy, rather than privacy. (In fact some have even gone so far as to say that they've felt more frightened of the soldiers of their own armed forces than of the so-called ``terrorists''.) ''#

via instapundit is polipundit on how Arnold is a "Soccer Mom" - ''No one seems to have a phrase to describe Arnold's politics. Is he a "conservative," a "moderate," a "liberal" or a "pragmatic libertarian?" None of the above. Arnold Schwarzenegger is... a Soccer Mom! Your prototypical Soccer Mom isn't a hate-the-greedy-corporations Democrat. Heck, her husband is probably a middle manager at Procter & Gamble. She's a "fiscal conservative," in the sense that she doesn't want more taxes and regulation. She doesn't like affirmative action either, since it goes against her sense of fairness and threatens her childrens' future.''#

ev remembers word and that ''it's good for writing stuff'' - sometimes you get into a kick of not using WYSIWYG editors because with HTML you can't trust them, and with WORD you can't put them into the end format (html/blog/pdf/etc)#

brian carnell writes about a Good Example of How Dave Winer Edits and Reputation -#

One of the things that Dave is really setting himself up for is for someone to simply making something up and start claiming that Winer actually said it but then deleted it.

Suppose, for example, I decided to make up a particuarly over-the-top statement and falsely attribute it to Winer. So I post it to my weblog and say that Winer posted this earlier and then almost a quickly deleted it.

How's Dave going to convince people that he didn't? He's not going to be able to say he wouldn't make that kind of inflammatory statement, because we have plenty of evidence that he does. He also can't credibly claim that he wouldn't post and then delete an inflammatory statement because there's plenty of evidence he does it regularly.

spelling mistakes cost lives - a misleading name but interesting site#

nova wonders, "What is the Genetic Benefit of Sexual Versus Asexual Reproduction?" - ''If it turns out there is an important selective advantage to species that reproduce sexually, then cloning, a form of asexual reproduction, may have a negative effect on a species in the long-term.'' - he links reproduction of some insects who have vastly different strategies than humans, asking, ''I wonder whether the mating systems of ants are optimal compared to humans? Ants will probably outlive the human race.''#

amelie is one my favourite movies too - i would watch it anytime, anywhere. - watching foreign films makes me feel smart, heh heh.#

i think it's neat when people are really interested in fonts and think so much about choosing the best one - i love beauty in all his forms.#

dan hon, is incredibly interesting in octopuses, so he is ''Pre-emptively bowing to cephalopoid overlords'' - some neat links from him...#

on their brains#

They also have very differently organised nervous systems. They have large brains but in order to react very rapidly and control the movement of many rubbery legs (as well as controlling their body colour), a lot of information processing happens in ganglia distributed around the body. What mental powers do they have?

Recently there has been a new ripple of interest in their psychology after researchers at Naples found evidence that one octopus was capable of learning by watching what another octopus did. "Observational learning" was thought to be evidence of intelligence and restricted to the "higher" mammals and birds.

The experiment has not yet been repeated, but there is a sense in which it may miss the point. Until the 1970s, researchers tried to classify the intellectual abilities of different animals and rank them within a universal intelligence scale with humans at the top. That view crumbled as it became obvious that the abilities of different animals were tuned to the circumstances in which they live.

Rats learn some things slowly and others very rapidly. Just one experience with a novel food that makes them ill will put them off that food for life, even if they only become sick many hours after eating it. It's a useful memory feat for an animal that survives by scavenging. Honey bees remember the location of a flower that is producing nectar after a single visit and with just a few trips will learn at what time of day the nectar flow is at its peak.

tom coates on the bloody weather - ''The English talk about nothing but the weather. We do this to avoid talking about ritual goat sodomy, which would otherwise be the first thing on our minds, I think. This is my honest belief. It would decimate my world-view if it was demonstrated to be untrue.'' - ''bear in mind that English homes are - at best - designed to keep the rain off and the heat in. They are not designed to be cool and refreshing idylls amid the melting pavements.''#

gene expression highlights an article on Natural Born Killers and how they are great assets to the military - ''A natural killer is a person who has a predisposition to kill—he enjoys combat and feels little or no remorse about killing the enemy. These men have existed throughout the history of warfare, and their feats have often been hailed as heroic. They constitute less than 4 percent of the force, yet some studies show that they do almost half of the killing.''#