Excellent article on SEO and Ethics

http://mattgemmell.com/2011/09/20/seo-for-non-dicks/

My Faith in the God Particle

I was reading recently about the continued search for the Higgs Boson, a.k.a. "The God Particle". There is quite a tremendous amount of religious fervor about the topic, and I believe that Stephen Hawking himself has a large bet where he believes it will not be found. Apparently, according to him, they (the scientists at Cern and the Large Hadron Collider) are running out of places to find the GP and it is running out of places to hide.

This got me to thinking of religious behavior in all walks of life. By "religious behavior", I don't necessarily mean behavior by religious people, but rather, behavior among people with vastly different opinions to which they are too emotionally attached, that appears to be religious in nature. We see this "religious" behavior in all walks of life, from Trade Unions to Prison Gangs, from Comic Book fans (Marvel vs DC) to Programmers (Java vs .NET). It appears to me that religious fervor is an evolutionarily successful behavior and our brains have evolved to be religious. Let's look at the benefits of religious behavior.

• Association with those who have similar opinions to you
• Isolation from those who may harm you because of differences in opinion.
• Strong pecking order in the form of hierarchy (i.e. moderators/popes/imams/comic book store owners)
• Preferences by the females for males that are higher up on the chain.
• The more people who agree with you, the more you believe you are right, despite evidence to the contrary.
  

Now let's look at the cons:

• War
• Isolation for those who cannot find others with their opinion
• Discrimination against those whose opinion is in the minority
• The mechanisms by which units establish pecking order are often unpleasant.
• The more people who disagree with you, the more likely you are to believe you are wrong despite evidence to the contrary.

Let's face it, religion exists because religious behavior is successful and contributes to the success of those who have the genetic predisposition to have similar opinions of its members. Humans are a social animal, and genes that contribute to being able to associate will survive.

To Bee or not to Bee

This morning I was wondering where bees went in the winter time. So I went to google and typed in "Where do bees..." and the first thing that popped up was "Where do bees go in the winter". Apart from quenching my thirst for this little dribble of knowledge, it was somewhat soothing that enough people have wondered this for it to be at the top of the google instant feature.
Anyway, its pretty interesting...check this article out:
http://davesgarden.com/guides/articles/view/1699/

The Good, The Bad and the Neutral

I happed upon a moral quandry the other day that lead me to really think about my constitution (term borrowed from D&D). I believe there are 3 constitutions in the real world. Law, Neutral and Chaos. Not everybody fits into just one of these boxes (some do though). My theory (not necessarily mine) is that people might not (should not?) be considered evil if they fail to act against "evil" deeds and people should not necessarily be considered good if they do no evil. The third box which is neutral, is really there for all the apathetic people of the world. I consider myself on the Law side of Neutral, where as most people I know are on the Neutral side of Law.

The dilemma is one of a friend of mine, lets call him Humphrey, who works for a software company. Recently, he was working remotely and found he could access other computers on his network, more specifically the computers of the CEO, CFO and HR Head. He could access every file on their machine and a tremendous amount of personal data. Now he was VPN'ed in and has an account on their network, but he still thinks that these people are exposing a tremendous amount of personal data. He asked me if he should tell these people to lock up their machines. Now, I told him, what if they asked why he tried to access their machines? And he didn't know. There definitely seemed to be a possibility for him to be fired for exposing this, but there was also a possibility for him to be lionized or treated as a hero. He asked me what he should do, because he felt personally that not revealing this fact was tantamount to negligence.

I described to him the following breakdown and asked him to describe:
The best and worst case if he told.
1. Best Case: He would be thanked, and he could sleep at night
2. Worst Case: He would be fired for attempting to access other peoples machines

The best and worst case if he remained silent
3. Best Case: Nothing happens
4. Worst Case: Personal data is breached, but he does not have any liability in the matter.

Then I asked him to look at all of these possibilities and decide which was more desirable.
He listed them from least desirable to most desirable.
2. 4. 3. 1.

2 was worse than 4 and 1 was better than 3. Since 2 has a higher probability than 4 and 1 is only marginally better than 3, I recommended that he go the "not tell" approach.

This is a very mathematical view of the situation, but the real problem is the question of is 2 really worse than 4? Is self preservation better than the greater good and does this make you Neutral or Law?

On Girls, Boys and Transformers

My son received a transformer toy the other day for his birthday. The toy transforms between a robot and a hovercraft. Both my daughter (3) and son (5) play with the toy, however my daughter prefers it to be in its humanoid form where she calls it her baby robot and puts a blanket on it, and changes its diaper and gives it food, where my son prefers it to be in the hovercraft where his Hulk toy can ride on it, and shoot the lasers and blow stuff up. The difference between boys and girls is hard wired: boys are destructive and girls are nurturing.

Money and Happiness

I realized today that money does buy you happiness, but only if your unhappiness is caused by a lack of money.

On Lego and Turds

Yesterday I was playing LEGOs with my 3 year old daughter. We are trying to convince her that going on the toilet is much better in the long-run than going in a diaper. She started to make a lego changing table to changer her lego baby's diaper. So I decided to make a lego toilet for her lego baby. Once I was done with the TURBO PLOP 2000(tm), she starts to take the tiny one-piece legos and put them in the lego toilet and says..."I'm putting lego turds in the lego toilet"