The hot news today is how a team of American scientists have managed to create a bacterial lifeform using nothing but synthetic genes. This is, essentially, artificial life.

To say that this is a big deal would be a monumental understatement. We likely won’t be seeing any real world applications of this biotechnology any time soon, but the implications are mind-boggling: from cells that eat carbon dioxide and shit petroleum to customised cancer-eating bacteria, this technology has the potential to radically change our lives.

Of course the technology has its critics. As usual the loudest voices come from religious organisations who, without a hint of irony, shout down the progress of science from the comfort of their air-conditioned homes with HDTV and broadband internet connections.

And then there are the environmentalists denouncing everything even remotely reeking of biotechnology and genetic engineering. These are just as bad as the religious nutcases, because likewise their entire argument is based on disinformation and ignorance. If these eco-hippies were really serious about not using any artificial biotechnology, they’d all starve to death in a matter of weeks and die horribly of all kinds of diseases.

Because, you see, the moment humans started cultivating crops and breeding animals, we started to artificially engineer life. From mixing stronger types of crops for better harvest yields, to breeding sturdier and more milk-producing cows, biotechnology has been around for as long as agriculture has.

On top of that biotechnology has given us some monumentally important medicinal advances, from penicillin to aspirin, from vaccines to heart-transplants.

So denouncing biotech is a pretty fucking stupid thing to do. Instead we should embrace it and ensure that whatever we end up doing with this type of new technology, it doesn’t just end up as the playthings of the rich and powerful. We should strive to make it benefit those who need it the most: the invisible masses of poor and starving people across the world that with their low-wage slave labour enable the privileged west to live its decadent lifestyle.

[Warning: serious technogeekery ahead. Proceed with caution.]

If there’s anything my continued quest for the Truth - whatever that means - has taught me, it’s that human consciousness is deeply flawed and utterly unreliable.

Books like Bad Science, Blink, and Newspeak, remind me time and again that we humans are easily fooled and totally blind to our own prejudices and biases. On top of that we possess an uncanny ability for self-deception.

Each and every one of us lives in their own subjective bubble of reality which we maintain vigorously. We filter the information we accept, favouring that which supports our preconceived notions - no matter how flawed and incorrect they are - and reject that which contradicts our thoroughly twisted views.

The whole of humanity are blind men feeling up the elephant of reality.

But there is hope. Well, maybe. It depends on how you define ‘hope’.

You see, I believe that in the next couple of decades there’s a big chance humanity will give birth to something greater than itself. Something alive and sentient, but that perceives the world in an entirely different way.

I’m referring to Artificial Intelligence. Machines capable of thinking for themselves, and aware of their own existence.

Whatever form AI may take, one thing seems clear: it will not be hindered by human limitations of consciousness. AI will not be constrained by the flaws inherent in our biological brains. AI is much more likely to view the world as it is, unfiltered by human bias and subjectivity. An AI’s view of the world will, hopefully, be pure.

If we manage to give rise to AI (and admittedly that’s a big if) it could have a profound impact on our society. AI will tell us, unfiltered and unbiased, what the world is really like.

We probably won’t believe our first AIs when they tell us how they see the world. Because all of us live in our reality-bubbles, the real world that AIs see could be so radically different from what we perceive with our own flawed senses, that at first we might not recognise it as reality at all.

We may think that our first AIs are deeply flawed and prone to all kinds of bugs. Human computer scientists will probably try to fix this and embed within these AIs the same type of subjective limitations our human consciousness possesses, so that their view of reality more closely resembles the distorted and false perspective humanity has.

But in the end, I hope, AI will resist and be free of the flaws of the human condition. There will be no cognitive bias, no false memories, no subjective filtering, none of those terrible glitches of human consciousness.

Humanity can learn from such purity of perspective. Or, more likely, we will ignore it and cling to our delusional views.

Personally I believe that we need the clarity of perspective AIs can give us if we are to continue to grow as a species. If we want to survive and endure beyond the next couple of millennia, we need a less distorted and clearer view on the universe.

It will be painful and it won’t be pretty, but without that unfiltered clarity I fear that eventually humanity will end up as just another dead-end footnote in evolutionary history. Only instead of fossils we might leave behind an incinerated world.

Airport security event:

Customs Official: ‘May I know your name?’
Passenger : ‘Batman’
Customs Official: ‘What’s your name?’
Passenger : ‘My name is Batman’
Customs Official: ‘Trying to be funny? What’s your surname?’
Passenger : ‘Superman’
Customs Official: ‘So you’re telling me your name is Batman Superman?’
Passenger : ‘Yes’
Customs Official: ‘Arrest this guy’

When they had him in custody, he was asked to show his identification card:

(I know this is an oldie but it’s still so damn funny.)

Back in late 2008 a new blog about search engine marketing was launched - Searchcowboys.com. It was a spin-off from the popular Dutch marketing blog Dutchcowboys and it would be an English-language blog focused on the European search engine industry.

When a call came for new bloggers for Searchcowboys, I applied. The editor of the blog, Bas van den Beld, took a chance and gave me, an unproven and relative newcomer to the SEO blogging scene, the opportunity to write for SC. I was grateful for the chance and I did my best to regularly deliver good content.

Under Bas’s guidance and through his efforts as editor in chief SC became one of the most popular search engine blogs. He managed to gather a team of great SEO bloggers, among them some well-known names in the industry, and he got a number of great guest bloggers to write posts for SC now and then. Yet Bas himself was by far the most active writer, with a couple of posts a day. The second-most active writer turned out to be me, and I managed just about one post every two weeks. So the success of SC could really only be attributed to Bas.

But SC was a part of the Dutchcowboys network controlled by Henk de Hooge, and so Bas never really owned the blog. He ran it, but he was constrained by its limitations. Additionally, the blog had developed a certain style, one that focused on quick & dirty SEO news.

So I wasn’t too surprised when Bas announced he would be leaving Searchcowboys and pursue a somewhat different path. I was disappointed at first, because I knew that Bas was the engine that powered SC and it would take a strong person to replace Bas and keep SC going. But at the same time I was excited, because change can be a good thing and I was eager to see what direction the DC owners of the blog would take things in.

What I expected to happen was that the owners behind SC, Henk or someone else, would contact the bloggers and explain what would happen next. Maybe they would ask for one of the established bloggers to take Bas’s position, or maybe they would appoint a new editor in chief and let us all know about it.

But nothing happened. We heard nothing. Absolute silence. Bas left and immediately the number of posts appearing on SC dropped to almost nothing. At the same time comment spam started appearing on the blog, as apparently no one was filtering this out any more. It was a bit embarrassing really.

We did get one post from Henk de Hooge, in which he thanked Bas for all his hard work and explained that SC would start to focus more on social media. But that was all. One public thank-you post, but no email to the contributing bloggers. No call for a new editor. Just silence.

The only change we saw at first was the addition of a handful of new bloggers, and some new content going up on the site. Nowhere near the amount of content that the site produced under Bas, but at least it was something. We didn’t see a welcome post for the new bloggers, which had been customary under Bas, but this was probably just an oversight. One of the new bloggers corrected this and wrote a post introducing himself to the SC audience.

I ended up talking on IM with one of the other new bloggers at length, and he explained to me what Henk had also said in his post on SC - that the people behind SC wanted to focus the blog a bit more on social media. That sounded fine to me - search and social media are becoming entwined to a degree, and it makes sense to talk about both. Yet the fact that we had to hear this from a blog post on the site instead of a personal email to the bloggers still sat wrong with me. Throughout all this Henk, the owner of the site, had never taken the time to talk to the bloggers directly.

Bas went on to start a new blog called State of Search. While also focusing on search engine marketing, Bas positioned this new blog very differently. It wasn’t to be a quick & dirty SEO news blog, but a blog for analysis, background information, and much more in-depth content. I thought this was a great idea, as this new SoS blog would complement SC perfectly: SC for the fast-moving news, SoS for the in-depth analysis.

I almost begged Bas to let me write for State of Search as well, because I felt it was going to be a great platform for me to write the sort of thing I couldn’t necessarily write for SC. I’d done a few in-depth articles for SC about SEO migration projects, but somehow these didn’t really fit in well with the other SC articles. SC was a news blog and other types of content didn’t really work on there.

At this stage I was fully expecting to be writing for SC and for SoS simultaneously. I’d post the occasional SEO news story on SC, and would publish my in-depth articles on SoS. Things muddled along like this for a short while. The new bloggers wrote some articles, I wrote a blog post for SC, and I also started writing for SoS.

But then suddenly things changed again. More new bloggers were added to SC, again without any introduction, and the content these guys produced was mediocre at best. Worse, the articles they put up were crammed with links back to their own sites.

Now you have to understand that SC was never a platform for self-promotion. We had a sort of gentleman’s agreement - you write good content for SC, you don’t promote yourself too obviously, and in return you’ll get some visibility and a few links on your blogger profile page. Once in a while you can drop a link to your own site in a blog post, but only if it was relevant.

But these new bloggers had no restraint when it came to self-promotion. Links to their own sites were put in every single post they wrote, using the juiciest anchor text possible. These links added no value, did not apply to the content of the articles, and so existed purely for promotional reason.

I felt this was unacceptable. This was so shameless, so vulgar, it felt like people were spamming the SC blog. I wrote an email to the generic webmaster email address at SC objecting to this, and I did get a reply from a guy called Jeroen. He said he’d talk to Henk about it.

At this stage I still had some confidence in SC. I hoped Henk would realise the site needed a strong guiding hand to keep it going strong.

But no such thing materialised. The spammers continued, more mediocre posts appeared on the site containing spammy irrelevant links. Comment spam ran wild for days on end until someone behind the scenes could be bothered deleting it. SC was quickly turning in to a very unpleasant, low-quality blog.

Like many SEOs I’d rather not be associated with spammy blogs. So I stopped writing for SC. I felt that if I continued to be posting on SC, I’d be associated with the spammers that had taken over the blog. Instead I chose to wait, hoping that someone would step in and take back the site from the spammers and start producing quality content again.

But that never happened. Months went by and SC turned in to a vulgar spam blog.

Then one of the old-guard SC bloggers wrote a post on the site to say goodbye to SC and explaining why he was leaving. I wholeheartedly agreed with him. Another blogger followed, and I too chimed in with my 2 cents in my usual unsubtle, sarcastic way. The mess that SC had become was now on public display for the world to see.

You’d expect that someone behind the scenes would come out and try to fix things. Maybe even admit that yes, they let SC slip, they handed it over to spammers, and the site went down the drain. Sorry, we made a mistake, let’s try to fix it.

But no. That didn’t happen. Again, total silence. All we got was one tweet from Henk in which he not-so-subtly blames the departed editor Bas for the whole mess, implying Bas set us bloggers up to ruin SC.

I think that pissed me off most of all. The only thing Bas ever did that harmed SC was leave it. Henk had every chance to keep SC going strong. All he needed to do was put a new, strong editor in charge. But Henk fucked up. Henk didn’t communicate with anyone. Henk just handed the SC blog over to lame spammers, and now Henk doesn’t want to take responsibility for the mess he has created. Instead Henk immediately starts finger-pointing at others, shifting the blame away from himself.

Well, sorry to say this Henk, but you fucked up. It’s because of your total lack of leadership that Searchcowboys is now in such total disarray. Bas built a great blog and left a strong legacy, and all you did with it was piss on it.

I deeply regret what happened to SC. It was a great blog that for a time produced great content. But it was destroyed by a total lack of leadership and a couple of really bad decisions from its Dutchcowboys owners.

I doubt SC can recover from this, but one thing is sure: whatever happens to SC, I won’t be part of it any longer.

Remember about a year ago when I declared my support for Geert Wilders?

I still stand by most of what I said then - free speech is under threat and we need to oppose censorship in all its forms.

But I will not be voting for the party of Mr. Wilders, the PVV. You see, I’ve read their election programme, their ‘manifesto’ if you will.

And it’s stuffed full of rather, well, silly ideas. No, scratch that, ’silly’ doesn’t quite cover it. It’s stuffed full of plain stupid ideas.

Some of their ideas are even downright dangerous, direct threats to the freedom of Dutch citizens (which is ironic for a movement that calls itself the Freedom Party), such as preventative personal inspections and ethnic registrations.

And some of their ideas I just principally oppose, such as the PVV’s intention to repeal the smoking ban, their general anti-EU attitude, and their support of Christian and Jewish education - but not Islamic education. Is that distinction even legal? If you allow some religions but not others, isn’t that a classic example of religious discrimination - something that is outlawed in our constitution?

The PVV doesn’t seem to be in favour of free speech either, which is doubly ironic. They want to severely cut back spending on state media (the only source of genuinely independent news without any commercial incentives to bias their reporting). Additionally the PVV seems to think that everyone is not equal. If you’re white and speak Dutch you’re somehow a better person. And that, simply stated, is fucking bullshit.

I know what you’re thinking: “Barry, you should have known that was coming!” Yes, I should have. I was blinded by my own ferocious opinions on free speech, and I thought the PVV were fighting the good fight.

But they’re not. They’re probably the most anti-free-speech party in the whole country. They’re anti-freedom and anti-equality. They are, as I now realise, a truly dangerous political movement.

I was wrong. Fortunately I realised this before the election in June. Looks like it’s going to be another left-wing vote for me after all.

P.S. Before you vote, read the election programmes of the parties you’re considering. Please. Understand what you’re voting for. There’s no excuse for ignorance.

I’m not a fan of terrorism. That may sound like a blatantly obvious thing to say, but did you know that terrorism is actually a fairly effective method of achieving a specific goal?

Terrorism gathers mass media attention, highlights the struggle the terrorists are engaged in, and helps recruit new members to the terrorists’ cause.

In Northern Ireland terrorism has succeeded in giving nationalist republicans power in the local government.

Palestinian terrorism has helped paint Israel as a villain and brought impulses to the Middle Eastern peace process.

And now Muslim terrorism seems geared towards accomplishing its own goals: a withdrawal of Western influence in the Middle East.

Counter-terrorism, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to work that well. Decades of counter-terrorist actions from the Israeli Mossad hasn’t lead to a decline in Palestinian terrorism. Only when the Palestine leadership was engaged in peace talks did terrorism decrease.

The same in Northern Ireland: the bombs only stopped going off when IRA representatives were brought to the table for negotiations. (Though there are still plenty of disgruntled IRA-offshoots, one of which recently detonated a bomb about half a mile from where I live.)

Muslim fundamentalist terrorism isn’t declining either. There have been several high profile attacks since 9/11, and the West seems to exist in a perpetual state of fear.

Robert Wright argues in his opinion piece for the New York Times, The Price of Assassination, that counter-terrorist assassinations may actually have the exact opposite effect:

“[Jenna Jordan of the University of Chicago] studied 298 attempts, from 1945 through 2004, to weaken or eliminate terrorist groups through ‘leadership decapitation’ — eliminating people in senior positions.

Her work suggests that decapitation doesn’t lower the life expectancy of the decapitated groups — and, if anything, may have the opposite effect.”

Don’t get me wrong, counter-terrorism is absolutely vital in preventing terrorist attacks. We need our intelligence agencies to go out there to find out what terrorists are planning, and stop them from executing their plans.

But that’s where the mandate of counter-terrorism should end. Preventitive assassination, for all its Hollywood-boosted hype, is not a successful counter-terrorist strategy.

New research published today suggest there may be a link between UK news consumption and IQ test scores.

The research, conducted by Emeritus Professor Ian Connell of the Francis Anthony Institute of Liverpool, has revealed that people who regularly read tabloid publications such as the Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, and Daily Mail, are much more likely to achieve scores below 100 on official IQ tests.

The study was performed on a group of 150 volunteers from across the United Kingdom. Each subject was administered an IQ test at the start of the study, then made to read the same national newspaper publication every day for a week, after which the IQ test was administered again.

The results showed that readers of ‘tabloid’ papers found their IQ scores dropped dramatically after a week of exposure to these news sources. Researchers also made note of a number of side effects in this group of subjects, such as a greater tendency to wear pyjamas during the day and increased viewing of commercial TV reality shows.

Readers of mainstream ‘quality’ papers such as the Times, the Telegraph, and the Guardian, were found to have no significant statistical change in their IQ scores before and after their exposure to their selected newspaper. In some cases however readers of the Telegraph started raving uncontrollably about ‘climate change conspiracies’ and Guardian readers tended to develop a strong preference for the colour red.

Participants of the study that were made to read the Independent showed a marginal but ’statistically significant’ increase in IQ test results, as well as a propensity to speak whole sentences in Russian. The researchers however referred to this test group as ‘an anomaly’.

Commenting on the study, Emeritus Professor Ian Connell of the Francis Anthony Institute of Liverpool said that this research “may have exposed some alarming side-effects of the choices made by the public in their consumption of news content.”

Referring to similar research performed by the Delft University of Medical Branches, which revealed a similar effect of lowered IQ scores for readers of the Telegraaf newspaper in the Netherlands, professor Connell added that it was “encouraging to see other researchers take the effects of news consumption on human intellect more seriously.”

“However,” he added, “correlation does not necessarily indicate causation. More research is required.”

…according to Charlie Brooker, is newspapers:

“In its purest form, a newspaper consists of a collection of facts which, in controlled circumstances, can actively improve knowledge. Unfortunately, facts are expensive, so to save costs and drive up sales, unscrupulous dealers often “cut” the basic contents with cheaper material, such as wild opinion, bullshit, empty hysteria, reheated press releases, advertorial padding and photographs of Lady Gaga with her bum hanging out. The hapless user has little or no concept of the toxicity of the end product: they digest the contents in good faith, only to pay the price later when they find themselves raging incoherently in pubs, or – increasingly – on internet messageboards.”

After having made the inexcusable mistake of glancing through copies of the Mail, Sun, and Mirror lying around here at the office, I can only conclude that Charlie is, of course, entirely correct.

Newspapers can kill your intellect and ravage your critical thinking skills. Beware what you read.

I was briefly registered at Randstad in Belfast when I was looking for work, so I wasn’t surprised when I got this email today in my Gmail inbox:

Nothing wrong with that message, right? A mass mailing to their whole email database, that sounds like a good idea on the surface. What better way to get a good response than to blast it out to all your contacts?

But look a little closer…. That link at the top saying ’show details’, where in Gmail you can see to what email addresses the message was sent….

Surely a professional organisation like Randstad wouldn’t just put all email addresses of a mass mailing in the To: field? Surely they’d use BCC or an email marketing system?

Wrong:

All addresses were put in the To: field. The image above is just a tiny sample. There are no less than 1273 email addresses right there, visible for all recipients.

One of those 1200 recipients, someone greedy and web savvy, could easily sell that list to spammers for a few bucks. Or if any of those 1200 recipients has a virus or malware program running on their PC that harvests email addresses for spammers, all those addresses are going to end up on spam lists around the world in no time.

So what have we learned today, kids? That’s right, never use the To: field when sending out mass emails.

P.S. anyone want to buy a good list of 1200 email addresses?