I came across this report on a study by Jonathan Huebner showing that the rate of technological innovation is slowing down, and that by this rate we will be down to the Dark Ages level by 2024 (a curiously precise prediction, but presumably by comparing the technological advances of the millennium 500-1500 with the current trend).

There is no doubt this study is seriously flawed, the data picked can be seen as arbitrary and even misleading, but it is no more flawed than the other hypotheses and studies around. Self-styled futurists tend to be highly myoptic. It is a natural phenomena, you are highly aware of the changes happening to you, but less to to your parents and their parents’ parents. In particular I admit a strong scorn of the singularitons claiming our world will enter a technological apocalypse in the near, but conveniently distant, future. My claim is that revolutionary, paradigm shattering, Oedipal changes are getting rarer as we live a longer productive life. Of course that is far from the whole story, but over time extrapolations always fail.

In a particular area the field may be stable or stagnant for a long time, experience rapid technological growth, and then fade into the background. This can be seen in the ages, we have had the non-starters of the Atomic Age followed by the Space Age, with the more successful Information Age which too will fade. The myoptic bias is to count the changes that are important to us now, and discount the changes that were important to us then, or will be in the future. We will have no greater problems living in our future than our predecessors have living in our present, as long as we can adjust to that change in focus. All that changes fast now will change slowly in the future.

2005 was the year Mobile SVG arrived, and 2006 was the year Mobile SVG got lost. Before 2005 SVG was used in a few niches, “semantic graphics” like map applications with a limited number of users but really nothing to talk about. In 2005 on the other hand the phone world showed interest in SVG, and while other SVG events happened like the first public alpha implementation of SVG in Opera and Firefox, and pre-alpha in Safari, the Canvas spec, and ominously the Merger of Macromedia and Adobe, everything newsworthy was related to phones.

In Michle, between the proper urban architecture and the high-rise suburbs of South City, there is an area obviously created with a ruler&compass and city planning with an explicit lack of imagination. The streets have names like South-West IV, Lateral II, and North VII. But in between all these evidently planned streets on the map I saw this tiny stub of a street called Zapomenutá (Forgotten).

Of course I had to go there. While in walking distance I aborted my first attempt in the summer. The road had no shade and while I was wearing a hat it was too unpleasant to get here under the sun. Now mid-winter it is much easier (though the picture is correspondingly dark, unfortunately, the day is too short).

An advantage of the unsurprising city plan was that I could guess where the pub would be. Admittedly I was off by 15m, but it was still good enough, and this is written from the Holy Hell pub (so named due to the nearby church?) during a fairly decent meal.

I got a well-appreciated birthday gift from myself a few days ago, the Rome series 1 DVDs. The second, and probably last season, will air in a few days. The time slice covered by this TV series will thus (assumedly) be from the fall of Gaul to the preeminence of the first Roman Emperor. A small gripe is why does it always have to be Caesar and Augustus, and not for instance the republic a couple centuries earlier.

While the backdrop story is one often told and retold, the historical characters are not the stars in the series, but the city of Rome itself. This fictional account of the end of the Republic, and history is always fictional, is the best one I’ve seen so far. Given the high cost and usually moderate income from historical soaps, dramas, and documentaries, it is likely to remain so for some time to come. The creators have said that current Calcutta, err Kolkata, has been an inspiration for the recreation of the Rome as was, and the city is as believable as the story is enjoyable.

Something fishy in the state of Czechia

I came across a blog claiming that we’re at war, based on Eskil having a good partisan gloat on a negative review of the Konqueror-based Nokia browser (“A special circle of Hell needs to be created…”). The blog entry is somewhat unfair as it discounts Small-Screen Rendering for reformatting pages and then goes to criticise horizontal scrolling, the very problem SSR was designed to counter (if you don’t reformat the page on too small screens, you will get horizontal scrolling which wrecks havoc with readability), but I liked the site-by-site comparison.

I am fine with our “war”, just like press coverage of the “second browser war” is good for anyone caring about browser rendering on the Web. That is, as long as the story is IE vs Firefox vs Opera vs Safari/Konqueror (vs the other browsers if the journalists are thorough enough). IE vs Firefox stories are less interesting, obviously for leaving out Opera, but in particular because as long as the story is about two boxers in the ring, why should anyone care about open standards?

This image, the phone blogging equivalent of a lens cap snap, was posted with Opera Mini 3, released today.

I decided to go through the regular process, entering my phone number (which I never remember, but fortunately my phone remembers it for me), guessing what the damn captcha said, and submitted. Sure enough I got an SMS giving me an URL to click on (it would be easier to enter the URL directly, but at least I know that the system worked, in the Czech Republic too). After downloading/upgrading and after running the selftest and entering the cryptographic seed, I clicked on the phone blog link (confirming that I wanted to get on the Internet and would allow Opera Mini to abuse the camera, two Java midlet application warnings you can’t get around).

Then I discovered that midlets have no inhibitions against taking pictures with the shutter closed, unlike the regular camera application, so I just had to do it and posting the result was automatic.

This comment I wrote later as writing longer text from Mini isn’t that fun.

I am using a fairly fresh install of Opera right now, with more default settings than I normally would use. One of these was the PDF file handling, like with other browsers (at least for Windows) Opera uses the Adobe Acrobat plugin by default. I do read quite a few PDFs, particularly work-related, and Acrobat is a fine program, but I really don’t like the plugin. In theory integrating PDF files with the browser sounds good, but it takes away my control over my browsing environment, for instance I can’t go back with Z (or a mouse gesture), and the plugin can’t do all what the full Acrobat program can do either.

Fortunately this isn’t hard to fix. What you need to do is to change the PDF settings.

1. Open Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Download (Ctrl+F12,D should do it)
2. Type PDF in the Quick Find field, application/pdf will show.
3. Hit the Edit button
4. Change the option to Open with default application

In some cases you might want to open with another program than the default. Personally I prefer, instead of just opening the PDFs, to store them in a particular directory and then open them. That will mean that junk files will accumulate in that directory as all PDF files will be saved there, but I don’t read much junk PDF anyway, so cleaning up the directory isn’t that much of a challenge.

The same issue of New Scientist had a report from an evangelical rationalist science congregation, under the theme of the atheists strike back.

But my question is: Is this good for science? Richard Dawkins’ foundation, based on much the same idea, is discussed in the forums, the God-gutting comment in my previous post also elicited a reaction.

My magazine of choice, (The) New Scientist, released its first issue 50 years ago, and more recently followed up with a hefty anniversary issue.

Reading news (or watching or browsing them for that matter) is a waste of time if you want to be informed or enlightened. I have argued before that instead of following flickering interpretations of what just happened it is better to use sources like New Scientist get an insight into what is going to happen.

Self-conscious at 50, New Scientist looked backwards for its New Zeitgeist in news articles past, as well as forward in inviting predictions for the following 50 years. While both are good reads, true to form it is the present, in the “Big Questions“, that this issue shines. One present but unasked question is the role of science itself.