Yahoo! News - Peru Finds Pre-Inca Ruins Beneath Lake Titicaca
Peruvian divers have found pre-Inca stairways, ramps and walls beneath the waters of Lake Titicaca, but experts said on Wednesday the discoveries were not the remains of a legendary lost city."The remains were found at a depth of between 6.5 and 26 feet on the eastern side of the lake. ... They are built with interlocking stones," oceanic engineer and expedition member Gustavo Villavicencio told Reuters.
Lake Titicaca, a sweeping expanse of brilliant blue water high in the Andes at an altitude of 12,540 feet, is shared by Peru and Bolivia. The world's highest navigable lake, it attracts flocks of visitors a year to see its floating reed islands, Aymara-speaking Indians and Inca ruins.
They are detonating a 2,600 pound explosion
Yahoo! News - Astronomers Find 21st Uranus Moon
Funny to see when a major company like Yahoo has a regular feature, then "forgets" it exists and leaves it in a shambles. I stumbled across their Web Celeb feature. Last time it was updated Was March 2000 with the last celeb mentioned :Leelee Sobieski. Some of their pages have missing images like Pamela Anderson. I would have thought they would make sure to have a system for their archives if they decided to archive it so that images don't get lost and also to have a little page saying they decided to end this feature...funny.
The NYTimes has an interesting article about Troy today.
Nasa Presentation on Antigravity
Nasa and Boeing are each funding projects to try and replicate "gravity shielding" by Evgeny Podkletnov. I am watching this and will keep you up to date.
From the kill 2 birds with one stone department...The Straits Times reports Side effects slow progress in fighting fat.
AFTER decades of hunting for the perfect diet pill, scientists thought they might have found a family of chemicals that could become a new generation of powerful weight-loss drugs.Mice and rats given the drugs, which act on the brain, dramatically reduced their food intake while seeming to suffer no ill effects. Several drug companies were so encouraged that they had begun testing the compounds, called melanocortin 4 receptor agonists, in people.
But researchers conducting those trials began to report an unexpected side effect: Men given the medicines experienced prolonged, unwanted and sometimes uncomfortable erections.
In a rare show of blindness to the marketing possibilities and income potential, the pharmaceutical company viewed this side effect as a setback. I can already here the internet version of some slogans for this new drug...
Jerusalem Artifact Could Be Earliest Relating to Existence of Jesus
An inscription in stone, found in or near Jerusalem and written in a language and script of 2,000 years ago, bears the words "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus."
This could well be the earliest artifact ever found relating to the existence of Jesus, a French scholar has concluded in an analysis of the inscription being published this week in the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review.
AdvertisementIf the inscription is authentic and indeed refers to Jesus of Nazareth, it would be the earliest known documentation of Jesus outside the Bible. The magazine, which announced the find today, is promoting it as "the first-ever archaeological discovery to corroborate biblical references to Jesus."
Low Carb Diet Studied in the short-term deemed safe.
Pharmaceutical companies have no shame. They are feeding on fear of cancer. I just saw an ad, telling you about their website, a bunch of junk marketing their drug to help you with your cancer and even telling you to check out their ad in Health magazine. huh??? So if I have cancer, learn all about it from an ad where you are trying to sell your drug and make sure to check your ad?????? Are you kidding me? This is really disgusting!
This man deserves to be as well as or more recognized than Edison. It is his alternating current in use today for electricity, not Edison's. Thank you Yale, for putting up this page. I hope they fix the images though.
I'm too old to know what Dragon Ball Z is. But apparently it's very popular. So many of you will be pleased to know that you can buy Dragon Ball Z Halloween costumes here.
They've come up with a safe method of breast augmentation. A device will suck on your breasts until they grow. Apparently, The size of the average breast implant is 200 - 300cc vs. 100cc offered by the device. Which I think is a good thing because some people seem to take augmentation too far.
Good news in the battle against HIV in Africa, High speed condom to fight Aids. They have developed an applicator to speed up the process of putting on a condom.
It is unbelievable what is going on there and how little the world cares or does anything about it. According to the government 1 out of every 4 people is HIV positive. That number is just astounding.
The Village Voice: Features: The IBM Link to Auschwitz by Edwin Black, This is quite a story.
The Washington Post titles the article In Cuban Depths, Atlantis or Anomaly? They clearly know what sells and add in some talk about Atlantis to make the headline credible.
But failing the Atlantis angle, this story could turn out very interesting.
If you've followed the debate about Robert Schoch's dating of the pyramids in Giza, he claims it could be quite a bit older than mainstream Egyptologists do. (I won't even go into the books of his friends, because some of that stuff, well, let's just say it is very good at selling books.) Along those lines, the dating mentioned here will probably be tough for many in the mainstream to swallow.
I like the tone and manner the Cuban geologist, Manuel Iturralde, took. He said "It's strange, it's weird; we've never seen something like this before, and we don't have an explanation for it." I wish more scientists would be prudent and take that approach rather than hanging on to the "best theory" there is to explain it.
Another excerpt from the article:
"He also said that if the symmetrical stones are determined to be the ruins of buildings, it could have taken 50,000 years or more for tectonic shifting to carry them so deep into the ocean. "
I found this funny. (sorry about the ad, skip the first couple paragraphs to get to the story)...
Archaeology reports on "Egypt's new archaeology czar" Zawi Hawass. Whatever they're calling him, he's been on the scene for a long time. He's been on Fox a few times in a hyped-up reality-series type specials trying to look like Indiana Jones and trying to make the science of archaeology look more adventurous rather than scientific.
Egypt has many wonders to unveil and I hope we get to see more soon, but without the Fox "realitization" of it.
"It must seem to those in Bloomsbury that the British Museum is under siege. Greek pressure for the return of the Parthenon sculptures is stepping up in advance of the 2004 Olympic Games, and in a February interview, Greece's Minister of Culture, Evangelos Venizelos, told ARCHAEOLOGY that the request for the marbles' return was not part of a broad campaign, but linked to the integrity of the Parthenon, building and sculptures. Still, the British Museum and its supporters fear that sending the sculptures back to Greece would set a bad precedent."
Museums are wonderful places preserving history. Except when they are fake. (And there is an awful lot more of this going on that you might think. I know someone who works for a big name in the industry. She tells me that there are a lot more fakes than you would think at the most presitigious places. She told me a story of someone who tried to document all the fakes at a major museum. When the people with the power found out, they canned him. He can't get a job anywhere. Troublemaker.)
Anyways, the thing is about these museums, as wonderful as they are, they are full of stolen merchandise. That is a fact. And I think requests like those of the Greeks are more than fair and should be granted. I'd love to see what the Vatican has hiding in its coffers. I know this is a touchy issue and most of the stealing was done long before any of the participants were born, but all of the Parthenon still around belongs in the Parthenon. Not in London.
Here's an interesting story I found on Instapundit:
Specter asks probe of Iraq links to WTC-Okla. attacks
U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter is calling for a probe into allegations of a possible Iraqi connection between the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City six years earlier.
This doesn't happen often, where mainstream astronomy would even acknowledge that there is a debate about what they consider the "basics", but on this page, you can surf around and find some fascinating discussions. For further reading on this image and the controversy you may want to read up on The Arp Peculiar Galaxy Club and this page providing some more evidence supporting Arp. Have fun reading!
THIS they have the funds to study, but basic nutritional studies on the effect on protein, fat and carbs on the body? No. This is just astounding!
I really loved Hogan's Heroes and as a kid was quite sad when Bob Crane was killed. Only learning and understanding the full story years later. Is it true that his official site is run by his family? I can't believe what they are displaying there!
Recently there was some Hogan's Heroes type movie on TV, but I only caught the tail end of it. The names were different, but all the actors from the TV show were in it. If someone knows about this, please add a comment. Thanks!
I liked Danny Partridge when he was in the Partridge Family, but he's probably the best thing on The Other Half, which is a show I just don't understand. What is the good part?
16 year old teen was killed, apparently by taking an unregulated dietary supplement that is deadly and drug-like. If you hear your kids talking about Yellow Jackets, be aware what it may mean. It's getting really "hot" these days among teens.
Jama has released a study called Prevalence and Trends in Obesity Among US Adults, 1999-2000. Surprise, we are getting fatter. The health profession keeps giving us advice and we keep getting fatter. And whether you agree or disagree with the low carb diets, the fact remains that among all these expensive studies, not one decent study, with a decent sample size, has been done to test the diet and in general to do an exhaustive survey of the 3 basic components of food. Protein Fat and Carbohydrates and their effect on BMI. I mean, how tough can it be to figure out that we should do this? How hard could it be? It's not like there are 10,000 components of food types?? Let's get serious.
I always enjoyed Teri Garr's movies. I'm sorry to hear that she has MS
Yahoo! News - Reader Ratings is a new feature. And it did seem to weed out some so-so stories like that sex with a twist lemon as contraceptive story.
TECHNOEROTICA - October 2002 has an interesting take on Low Carb dieting.
Roger Short has resurrected an old method of birth control and through an unseen PR machine made it among the top stories on Yahoo today.
But what I found interesting, amidst all the talk of Yahoo's switch from the old search system to a new one, is that the news story had a link to to HIV websites. And at the top of the list, basically, to use an old newspaper term "Above the fold", all results are "Sponsor Matches" which come from Overture (formerly goto.com). And the top one says this:
"Colloidal Silver Is a Mineral Supplement - Read testimonials by HIV+ people who claim amazing benefits of colloidal silver.
http://utopiasilver.com/CSvsHIV.htm"
If you've been following my blog, you will know what I think of those Colloidal Silver "remedies. It may make your skin turn blue permanently, like that politician who made it to Yahoo's Most Popular page in a most unpleasant way for himself.
Now that Mark has publicized it, this should last a good 5 more minutes before google shuts it down.
There's been a lot of talk about how to make money by blogging. Mikhail of
Blogging Network has an interesting approach. Offer a nice blurb, but you need to be a member for $2.99 a month to read the full entry. His stuff seems interesting and he aims to build a network of writers who will share the subscription fees. Interesting idea, but he seems to be the only one doing it. Well, I wish him good luck!
Ancient, Giant Images Found Carved Into Peru Desert
Too bad there were no pictures.
OK, I upgraded Movable Type to 2.5. Everything went so smoothly I was rather surprised. I can't tell much difference but 2 things...there's some automatic trackback autodiscovery thingie where you don't need to do anything, it will check out the links you have selected and if they allow trackback it will ping that site automatically. The other thing is some other site blo.gs or something like that is pinged...
Sterling's journal reports, maybe...
OK, I got the Google Toolbar. Through it, I found out that my blog has a PageRank of 4. This got me thinking about Google some more and I thought I'd do some analysis. Let's start with the most recent terms people have used to find me.
Biggest assumptions in physics. Well, not much to say there because I'm not in the top 2 pages anymore I guess and I'm not going to look any deeper...
Under Forbidden Glasses, not including the sponsored link, I have the 5th position. Above me are such luminaries as So you'd like to ... Borrow a pair of reading glasses for these super books! A guide by mickey1114, Nearsighted Reader of Great Books of Fiction!. Why? Because "glasses" are in the title and one of the books he lists is titled "Forbidden". There's also some karate site which has the phrase "Glasses are forbidden" in it. Good guess I suppose. I also just beat out Edible undies.
But let's get serious in our analysis of these various search requests. As a human, the first question we need to understand is what is the human using these search terms searching for? In the case of "Forbidden Glasses", Nothing immediately springs to mind. One would tend to think this is a reference to some historical artifact or the like...so for all these terms, let's scan the google results and see if we can A. discover what the searcher was looking for, B. see how well Google did in coming up with the result and C. determine if there was a way that google could have found it despite being a machine...
Alas, for Forbidden Glasses, I could find nothing to explain what the searcher was looking for. Refining the search by putting quotes around it provides one potential response here where it's part of some lyrics, but somehow I doubt that was the intention. So did Google do a good job? Even though probably the proper response we come to as a human was that there were no relevant results rather than the 57,300 that Google came up with, I think it is reasonable for Google to provide every page containing those two terms.
Next up is a Googlified Yahoo search for robin richards tutankhamen. I no longer come up in the first page, but I was pretty early in commenting on the story so I think it was appropriate for my post to be there initially. So what would be the ideal search result for this query? As a human, I'd rather see the original research page rather than someone's account of it. My post referenced where I first saw the story, which was on CNN. From reading that CNN story it's clear that indeed the searcher is looking for more original references which is why "Robin Richards", who was quoted in the story, is part of the search terms. Let's see how google did here.
One would suspect that google, with their pagerank algorithms will more likely give a better result to a popular News site than to the university or organization that released the data in the first place. But first let's find the original reference. It seems that discovery channel has a lot of info on this topic. But there are two other leads, one is that the story mentioned that the face is on exhibit at the London Museum and the other mentions that Robin Richards is from University College of London. Looking at those leads I'd say that as a human if we had to rank the best results for the intent of this search, it would be London Museum's King Tut Page first, with Discovery Channel's second and all the news channels below it. You may argue that a specific page with Robin Richards on it might be more relevant, but when you look at Google's results, they don't fare too well in that department either.
The first position went to MSNBC's king tut story, which had a pagerank of 7. The CNN story has a pagerank of 2 for some reason and doesn't show up in the result set. What's third is Gene Expression, which has a link to that CNN news story.
OK, I have figured it out. Gene expression has a pagerank of 6. Why? Because blogs, with all the cross linking, tend to have high pageranks. So probably, he happened to have been indexed when that story was at the top of his page, just like probably happened to me. So the high pagerank and having a story on the front page of the site is the key. That is why blogs do so well. They have topical stories which tend to be searched on a lot, and the newest stories are at the top of the page. If you had to drill down to Gene Expression's individual post, the pagerank goes down to 5 (still not bad).
So even though the best links are the London Museum and Discovery Channel, those pages have a rank of 5 and 3 respectively.
Coming back to the results, the second one is some saigon site. That looks like an appropriate result but I can't understand a word being said there. Pagerank seems to be messed up because it says 0 of 10, but google's toolbar does that sometimes. More baffling is why this result about Richard Rockwood did so well. It has a pagerank of 1. The rest of the results are rather poor. So the two best links didn't even show up in the results. How could google have done better? I'm not sure.
I was planning to do more searches but I didn't expect this to be so intensive. So let me conclude by speculating a bit. Isn't it interesting that only one news site showed up? Part of it seems to be the inclusion of "Robin Richards" in the search query since not all the news stories bothered mentioning him (an oversight which is a good topic for another discussion). However, this Yahoo news story has a pagerank of 8 out of 10 yet I couldn't get a query to bring up that page. I'm wondering if google has restriction on some news sites?
Here are some pages for further reading:
The Google Weblog
Dive into Mark
High Search Engine Rankings
OK, I figured out how to get the Category Links on the right.
This tip assumes that you are using the default template that comes with Movable Type 2.21.
As per this image, click on the Main Index template.
1. Look for (around line 79):
<div id="links">
DIRECTLY AFTER THAT ADD:
<div class="sidetitle">
Categories
</div>
<div class="side">
<MTCategories>
<a href="<$MTCategoryArchiveLink$>"><$MTCategoryLabel$></a><br>
<MTEntries>
<$MTEntryTitle$><br/>
</MTEntries>
<br /><br />
</MTCategories>
</div>
2. The result should look something like.
this.
While Daypop is an awesome resource, I wish they had a new view. Rather or let's say in addition to the Top 40 which is a list of most discussed links by weblogs for the day, a list of top new links for the day would be even more useful (IMO of course).
News stories like these: Study: Breast Self-Exam Is Unproven, are just maddening. It just shows you how little you can trust any study.
Well, I'm still getting used to Movable Type and there are a bunch of things I don't understand yet or haven't gotten around to looking up. As I discover the answers to my questions, I will post them in a Category called Movable Type tips & tricks. So my first question is, how do I link to my categories?
I like the way Ken Layne put this entry right after this one.
Here's a quickie:
Novel form of vitamin D shown to grow bone.
OK, well the smog in Los Angeles is one big argument against the current way we use energy. However, there are plenty of contradictions and confusing data put out there. We've been told that the ozone hole is getting dangerously big the last few years. But now we're told that it's smaller since 1988 because of the hot weather. OK. Maybe I've been reading it all wrong but weren't the greenhouse gases supposed to cause a bigger hole in the ozone layer as well as global warming. So now a warmer globe will also cause a smaller hole in the ozone layer. Maybe I have my facts wrong but it seems to me there's some faulty reasoning and some admissions of errors, rather than explaining away of anomalies, are in order here.
Hopefully this one will be safer than Lasik.
Here's another one to go along with the Penis story. Swap contacts for glasses and you'll "score" better. This is journalism?
Did they check the brands of glasses? Did they check the type of face the person has? Some people look better in glasses because their eyes sink into their face. I mean, the whole thing is so silly.
Sad that this is what makes the news and Halton Arp can't get his testable theories mentioned in an astronomical journal despite his impeccable credentials.
CNN reports that google search results are sometimes off. Well that's no big shock. And a lot of people feel that Microsoft being in the number one spot is appropriate for a search on "Go to hell", so who says that's an odd search result?
OTOH, I agree that some human intervention wouldn't hurt. They should sort their database for the most frequent queries and adjust those queries by pulling out irrelevant results. Not doing it to be "purist" is kind of silly to me. I go to google to get the best results. If humans intervened, that's fine with me if it makes my life easier.
I mean, even spammers use human intervention. As most people know, yahoo and hotmail and paypal accounts are opened by the thousands by spammers. So to combat this, the engineers devised a system where words are displayed as images with the thinking being that a human would have to figure out what image was displayed. But the spammers came back with paid humans...the spambots do most of the work and then pass off the image to a human to decipher the letters and then finish off the job. If the spammers can do that, Google can do the same for the frequent searches. Even if Anna Kournikouva, Britney Spears and Sex are at the top of the list (sigh).
This looks like a nice idea that needs to work out the kinks. I couldn't get anything to work here. But I like the idea. I always felt that schools lacked creativity. Children are very curious by nature and love to learn.
Until you tell them that they're learning. I saw a kid learn math 3 grades ahead of his grade level when he was playing a video game where he had to solve equations in order to collect space junk. I'm sure if he was given a sheet of paper with "MATH PROBLEMS" and numbers in front of him instead that his "learning" would go much slower. Make learning fun and kids will go much farther.
The economist has an interesting article about what they call the first computer in history. It's truly amazing how much technology was out there in Ancient History. Nick Thorpe wrote a couple of great books about this (look at my links list). One of my favorites is the ancient batteries. Another is looking at seals from the Ancient Near East. Spend some time at the Morgan Library in Midtown NYC or the Met to see some examples. The early writing at the Met is particularly amazing.
This whole Uranium story is unbelievable. Someone sent me a great link where you can get all Uranium related info:
1 Nuclear Place