PZ doesn't like Simon Conway Morris' "inherency" stuff in Life's Solution. Don't blame him. I haven't read Conway Morris, but his theory seems utterly improbable and more driven by his religious beliefs than by the evidence. When I have a little bit more time, I'll read Conway Morris. 
You know that semantic markup and 'Semantic Web' are related only tangentially? Both are good things, but the connection is less obvious than the names would suggest. Semantic markup lets you do neat tricks like telling people to press Alt + F4 and get it styled nicely, but it doesn't get the data out. For that you need RDF, microformats, APIs combined with a certain specificity that just sticking these chunks of markup around stuff doesn't. Why is this? It may be something to do with the fact that - however semantic we want to think - it's browser manufacturers (the presentation layer) who are sitting on the W3C working groups deciding on this stuff.
Terry Sanderson: "As a means of undermining the threat that secularism (and atheism) pose to religious power, church propagandists find that labelling their critics as "extremists" is proving very effective. Nowadays if you have the temerity to even question religion you immediately become a "fundamentalist atheist"... Professor Dawkins is now routinely accused of being a mirror image of a religious extremist. This gentle biologist, whose only crime is to pose questions and challenge unreason, is suddenly on a par with Osama bin Laden. According to the new religious thinking, the "religion" of atheism is as evil and threatening as that of the Taliban."
One has to wonder why people like Jeffrey John don't think these things through before they train for the priesthood. Still, how many defenders of the faith are there out there who are secretly in the closet about their atheism?
Austin Mitchell: saviour of the Internet 
I was listening to Molly Holzschlag talk about 'Crimes Against Web Standards' last night. Today, I found a website that contains the following CSS:
a:link {
color:#666666;
font-weight:bold;
text-decoration:blink;
}
Yes, that is our old friend the blink tag, revised for the era of CSS. Only, this time, it's applied to every single link on the web page.
Take a look. It's delicious. (Via Dave Cross)
"Only Michael Meacher talks to me. Obsessively."
I can see why. 
Still, the Rt Hon. Mr. Mitchell seems to think he is the saviour of the blogosphere:
It [blogging] is inherently anti-government and conservative because prejudice is easier to get over than serious explanation. Just like Talk Radio... So the strongest practitioners [of blogging] are Republicans like Drudge or rank Tories like Ian Dale and Guido Fawkes, leaving this as the only voice of sense, semi-socialism, freedom, truth and justice.
Except that blogging is naturally oppositional - in the States, there are lots of big progressive blogs (Daily Kos etc.), and the right wing blogs are often opposed to the current administration (Andrew Sullivan, Hit and Run). Mitchell's analysis of the political blogosphere really is a bit rubbish. Political bloggers are best when they take the theory of the government and hold it up against reality, and examine the 'meta-narrative' of the whole thing.
Still, I'm waffling now. I need to go and look at those hypnotically blinking links again.
