New Scientist recently published a special issue, The Folly of Growth, ostensibly an expose of flawed economic theory.

As you can deduce from this blog and writings elsewhere, New Scientist is my favourite magazine, and I have read practically every issue the last twenty years. While generally of quality there have been some duds among the articles and issues. This issue is among the worst.

New Scientist has changed through generations of editors, but retaining many of the strengths and weaknesses. It has never done economy well, and most of the time it has been weak in information technology, doing better these days.

Whatever your viewpoints this issue was bad economics, anyone reading it would not learn anything about economy from it, and whatever they learned would be more likely to be wrong than right. Through a Global warming thread in the forums I was pointed to a rebuttal from The Register (of all places), as the errors were basic and numerous that saves me some time.

What dismayed me more with this issue was bad science. I would love to see a scientific outlook on the “dismal science”, where you can find much folly indeed. New Scientist here wasted a good opportunity. I know how hard it is to make a special issue work well, you depend greatly on the contributors and the editors to turn the disparate articles into a coherent whole, and reject the articles that can’t be improved. I don’t know who declined to participate, but of the contributions several articles should never have been published in New Scientist.

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For anyone in Prague with an interest in Internet standards, it pays to look up the PROWAS site for the next event.

Which happens to be today. The topic is HTML5 is happening, the speaker is Martin Hassman, and the talk will be held in Czech, with discussion in any language you like. The place is the Chinese restaurant Dobrý Den nearby the Flora metro station, the time is 18:00.

Some nights ago, at a pub in Žižkov that used to be called U smrku (The Pine), I was chatting with a friend while not listening seriously to the songs being played. I asked her what would be the ten most decadent songs in history, without really coming up with suggestions of my own.

I tentatively put up “Crazy frog” (Axel F) in position #8, but I am really not good with lists, particularly not with music lists. Maybe you can come up with some suggestions?

So the Irish vote was “Lisbon nil points”. An interesting state for this virtual superstate I’m living in. The Lisbon treaty isn’t necessary for the EU to continue, which may be seen as a good thing as Lisbon is dead.

The only way it can be revived is if the Irish somehow decide to change their collective minds. How likely do you think that is? Discussion at the forum.

While constitutionally the EU treaties isn’t getting anywhere fast, the European countries and people are growing more integrated. Maybe it is time for the EU to swap the bike for a more stable vehicle,

I am interested in the concept of employee ownership, and early on while working for Opera I set a goal of a 1/1000 ownership. I never quite reached that goal, the rest of the world has more money than I do and I have not been willing to borrow money to invest in shares, but still I am more economically exposed to the fortunes of Opera Software than anything else I own. So when Opera posted excellent results, the market reaction made me more paper money in a day than I can expect to make in real money in this year. ;cheers: I’d say.

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Opera has published some stats on phone use with Opera Mini the first quarter this year (based on the URL this seems to be a front page rather than a quarter report 2008/I, so if you read this post later the content may no longer match). To what extent this can be generalised to phone browsing in general is less clear.

The first graph, cumulative users per month, isn’t very interesting unless you’re into marketing or wonder how well Opera Mini fares, even then it is less useful than the two other graphs for page views and data consumed that tells something about how much it is used as opposed to how often it is installed, and the use grows considerably faster than the number of installs. The consumption table is particularly freaky, what happened in December that almost doubled the traffic (and increased the number of pageview by almost a half)? In November Mini 4.0 was released. That the data consumption increased faster than the number of pages viewed would either mean that people were viewing more advanced (or bloated) pages than they did before, that the data compression is less efficient than 3.0, or both.

The bigger story is that five times as much traffic is handled this March than a year ago, and though the columns are too small to measure precisely that in turn was five times as much as March 2006. So will the current 1 terabyte of data every day turn into 5 terabytes by 2009? By the guesstimate that Opera Mini uses a quarter of Norway’s bandwidth, they should be using five quarters of the bandwidth by then…

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This post is a reaction to xErath's comment to an earlier rambling.

Originally posted by xErath:

There's enough info online about the deficiencies of ooxml. I don't need to quote them here.

Just to have it over with, we agree. I may be a Microsoft groupie at heart, but I don't have time for OOXML. People who want to discuss OOXML should feel free to do so, elsewhere. More interesting is this part:

HTML5 is a big patch over HTML4, made to be backwards compatible with the complete mess that is the web.

ODF on the other hand is a clean approach to define an abstract model of document formats. Then ODF has many features that html5 will never have nor will make any sense. I doubt html5 will ever include native spreadsheets support, slide transitions, page footers and headers… you name it. ODF will not support local databases nor globalStorage.

First, I have come to realise that the phrase "it is a complete mess" is a shorthand for "it works very well, and I don't think it should". In fact the Web is a remarkably sane place. We have millions of monkeys making Web code every day, and it works. The Web is more like an ecosystem than an engine, you don't stop and "repair" it, it is survival of the fittest. If you look at Web code written today and ten years ago the old code was worse and still achieved less. The Web has evolved and it keeps evolving. … (more…)

At least until tonight when we, if in Prague, will find out. Opera’s Håkon Wium Lie (nice interview), will count down to its doom.

That should more properly be “having left Opera”, as I am no longer an Opera employee, but that doesn’t work as well as a title. There is nothing dramatic about the decision, and I think Opera is an excellent employer, but I had been at Opera for seven and a half years and that was long enough.

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