October 2007 Archives

A Google page rank of 5 isn't impressive, but in the blogging community this seems to be the rank that separates the wheat from the chaff. I obtained a Google PR5 in only about three months after the blog was started, and I believe this success is based on a few deliberate "white hat SEO" choices I had made up front. These choices were, in no particular order:

1. Networking. I've found that especially StumbleUpon, Thoof, Reddit, and Fark have drawn traffic to my blog. There's also Digg, Technorati, and Del.icio.us, of course, and while you may not get traffic from those sites unless you're lucky enough to get dugg, Google will notice the links to your site.
2. Participate on message boards and other people's blogs. (This is also networking, of course.) Make shameless self-promotion with a link to an article that you wrote, or use trackbacks if the other person's blog allows them. Have a link to your blog in your signature and your profile.
   
3. Blog bait in the form of provocative articles. Don't be overly provocative (writing a pro-Nazi article will probably draw traffic, but something tells me your site might be placed in a category that won't improve your page rank), but say something that sounds profound using effective rhetoric. My article, Survival Tips: Lessons in Misanthropy quickly became a "buzz" on StumbleUpon, for example. People will share these articles and link to them.
4. Blog bait in the form of little applications, tips, and tricks. I wrote some plugins for Joomla and some plugins and hacks for Movable Type, and made them free for everyone with the license requirement that they link to my blog. Little "how-to" posts explaining how you did something in PhotoShop or on your Linux machine can also draw traffic.
   
5. Blog bait in the form of humor and satire. Readers love to be entertained.
   
6. Valuable and well-written articles. I wrote something about this in an earlier post. I'm sure you can do with less than philosophical high-brow articles, but they should provide some insight in a nice wrapping, that is, something that other people will actually look for and use. Make sure your articles include words that you anticipate people will search for. If in doubt, see which tags similar high-ranking articles have received on Technorati and other aggregator sites and use them in your posts as appropriate.
   
7. Include graphics in your articles. Google indexes the images, and I suspect they have a positive effect in Google's page ranking algorithms. In any even't, quite a few of the blog hits are caused by Google's image search.
   
8. Submit your site to the search engines. Also configure your blog ping the various blog search engines out there. (You probably knew this already.)
   

Finally, there's actually an unused number 9 in the above list that may partly explain why "Survival Tips" became so popular. It is a blog bait where you compile a list of "top-ten" or "top-fifty" (or top-anything) of whatever you choose. For example, you may visit a variety of quotes pages and copy some quotes you like on a specific topic. Then when you have the desired number of quotes, make a blog post that says "Top 50 Republican Quotes" (or, equivalently, "Top 50 Dumbest Quotes Ever") or something, and your post is probably bound to become popular. I have written a few blog posts with enumerated suggestions, but since none of them were entitled "Top-blank," I don't know how effective these top-n lists are yet.

It seems that Google is currently lowering the page ranks of sites that have paid content. As of this writing, this blog has not yet included any paid posts, and considering my plans to include paid content in the future, I can expect the page rank to drop. However, I imagine that the page ranking algorithms consider the ratio between paid content and non-paid content so I'm not too worried about that.

If you accept the fact that there are no gods, then you will also have to face the fact that it doesn't matter what a person believes in: the only thing that matters is what this person does (or doesn't) as a result of his or her belief. All that matters are the tangible results, that is, the practical implications of the belief. What matters are actions, results, and effects; but the belief itself—well, who needs to care about that, except the believers?

Sure, there are very good reasons to investigate beliefs, which are used to justify atrocities all over the world. But it's the atrocities, not the beliefs, that are the cause of concern. If the beliefs implied no harm or good, would you bother to care?

1. Never acquire an enemy you do not need.
2. Study common knowledge, then reject it.
3. Never teach your soldiers everything you know, because one day you may become your own victim.
4. To deceive an enemy, let him think you fear him.
5. Bad luck enters through the door you left open.
6. At sea, we are all brothers. But those with life jackets may be unwilling to share.
7. He that answers for others pays the bill.
8. It you must lie, be brief.
9. Always pull a snake from its hole with another man's hand.
10. Shallow waters may conceal sharks.
11. I you are forced to bow, bow deeply—and remember the bitter feeling when you take revenge.
12. Do not use both legs when you measure the depth of a river.
13. Do not use cat guts to tie a dog.
14. If you are the anvil, be patient. If you are the hammer, hit.
15. Leave a sleeping dog alone unless you have a lion in your leash.
16. Nothing weights less than a promise.
17. Never underestimate your opponent's skills, cunning, and greed. And don't overestimate them either.
18. After the war, many heroes appear.
19. If you strike at someone in anger, be careful not to hit yourself.
20. Fire can be concealed, but smoke cannot.
21. Some defeats are better than victories; unfortunately, some victories are worse than defeats.
22. In every situation, ask: "what do I gain?" Then ask: "what does he gain?"
23. Better your foes believe you are crazy than they believe you are sane and understanding.
24. He that serves two masters must lie to one of them.
25. After a victory, sharpen your knife.
26. Everyone is kind while you do not ask for help.
27. A crow drowns if it mimics a seagull.
28. No crisis is as bad as one imagines.
29. Necessity breaks all rules.
30. Living according to someone's will is misery for a few, necessary for many, and desirable for most.
31. Today's friend is tomorrow's enemy.
32. If you are never on the street, you will never learn its rules.
33. No man's credit is worth his cash payment.
34. You do not know your soldier until he becomes your lieutenant.
35. Never reveal your weaknesses.
36. Do nothing to change your enemies. Control them instead. Know where they are, what they think, and who they trust.
37. Fear is often concealed with courage.
38. It takes a thousands strike to drive a nail into a wall when it is dark.
39. Hunger turns bread to cakes and beans to steaks.
40. Set priorities. If you are up to your waist in leeches, drain the swamp.
41. Everything is quid quo pro.
42. Never think that man is guided by reason and logic.
43. A thousand friends is not enough, but a single enemy is. There is no harmless enemy.
44. Make your plans as complicated as necessary, but issue simple orders.
45. Be kind to everyone, kind to some, acquainted with few, and a friend to just a handful.
46. It is a fool that cannot hide his wisdom.
47. Your opponent is never as dangerous as you may believe. Neither are you.
48. If you want to be loved, buy a dog.
49. Better an ass that drags than a horse that throws.
50. The future is paid with the present.
51. Many have starved to death in the plentiful land of promises.
52. The fish dies for its open mouth.
53. Never judge others for what you hear about them.
54. Eagles do not chase flies.
55. When the arrow leaves the bow, it does not return.
56. If you do not recognize the mark after half an hour when you are gathered at the table, it is you.
57. Not all that snore are asleep.
58. Planning is the mother of fortune.
59. A runaway nun always speaks ill of her convent.
60. Wolves may lose their teeth but not their nature.
61. If a problem seems unsolvable, look for the woman, or the man.
62. Many come fishing, but few will bring the bait.
63. No solution will satisfy everyone.
64. Many words, many lies.
65. If you must cut, let your victim think you are a surgeon.
66. An enemy is most dangeous when he seems defeated.
67. Problems show what men are made of.

I would like to thank all Christians for loving their neighbor so much that they even extend their love to the abominable homosexuals, wishing to help them.

As a former homosexual I would like to express my gratefulness by telling the world how my membership of my Church and my belief in Christ as my savior has taught me that homosexuality is an abomination and a sin, which Jesus my savior has replaced with a love in Christ.

A liar may want to be exposed if the exposure can lead his victim to believe another, better lie. But usually the liar just wants his victim to believe what he says.

In some cases a lie is evident but in some cases you need some tools to reveal it. Fortunately, the liar often provides a number of cues that I'll teach you here. Just remember that the cues do not necessarily prove a lie, and you may also encounter a seasoned liar that can suppress them.

Body and Body Language

Many people believe that loss of eye contact and shifting of the body indicates that a person lies. However, there is no such connection. Touching one's body by wringing one's hands or scratching one's head does not indicate a lie either. (However, if you're the liar, don't expect your victim to be aware of this, so don't wring your hands.)

The body nonetheless provides a number of cues—not about lies, but about emotions. These signals include eye batting, blushing or paling, dilation of the pupils, fast or irregular breathing, increased swallowing frequency, speaking errors, mumbling, etc. It is difficult for a person to hide these signs, but they reveal a lie only if the person feels bad about lying. And they can easily occur for other reasons.

Ubuntu is out today, but as of this writing the official Ubuntu site has not yet been updated with a download option for version 7.10, the "Gutsy Gibbon" release.

You can get it, however, if you're willing to search a little on the Ubuntu Mirrors. I'm currently downloading the desktop and the server editions of Ubuntu 7.10 from a German mirror while the official Ubuntu site still only makes version 7.04 available for download. Look in the ".pool" directories.

You don't need to download a new CD if you're simply upgrading your installation. Instead, if you want to get it while it's fresh from the oven and not yet on the store shelf, you may have to update your distribution source list to point to a mirror that hosts the most recent version of Ubuntu.

I once promised myself that I would never make a stab at poetry, but sometimes you just have to use the means of communication that makes the most sense to you. If it happens to resemble poetry—then so be it.

Items in My Room

When I met you, my room was empty.
As you spoke and acted,
as you were quiet and asleep,
as you prepared food and entertained me,
as you deprived and forgot me,
as you taught me, and as you learned from me,
you decorated my room.

You put paintings on the wall,
or left a box with unassembled furniture.
Some decoration was expensive, and some was cheap.
A few items were curiosities that had value only to me.
Other items were essentials to anyone.
Sometimes you left garbage I had to clean up.

All of the items were how I knew you.
Some were your nagging habits,
and some were your great example.
They were all that I liked and disliked about you.

Then one day you shattered a beautiful vase,
one of the most precious items in my room
with an important history and a soul.
It was an accident, and you meant no harm.
You replaced it with another item,
but since then when you entered my room,
I would notice that the vase was missing
and that I had been mistaken about you.

Ingestion of holy water from Mecca can turn people Muslim. This is the amazing conclusion after subjecting holy water from Mecca to scientific tests.

A local ethnic store had a specialty for sale: genuine, holy water from Mecca. At a discount price of only $3 for a beautiful plastic amphora filled with the waters from the Holy City, the offer was too good to pass.

As sensible skeptics, we suspected that perhaps the amphora might contain nothing but simple tap water, but the store assured us that no-one would buy tap water for $3 a bottle in those quantities, and therefore the water was indeed the real thing.

We were still not entirely convinced, but the store owner added that Muslims purchased these bottles to keep in their homes as well, and that they would obviously never cheat their fellow peoples.

In addition, the Arab letters clearly described the contents of the container as holy water imported from the holy city in Saudi Arabia. There could be no doubt about its authenticity.

Thus the proud and unexpected owners of such a rarity, we began to wonder what to do with this sacriligious item. We are not Muslims, and therefore had no clue what to do with such holy water. Fortunately we don't belong to any other religion either and therefore needed not worry about going to a wrong Hell in case we misapplied the contents.

Instead, we decided to perform some experiments to see if holy water from the holy city of Mecca would demonstrate an effect different from that of regular tap water.

To begin with, we decided to water one of our plants with the holy water. The plant showed no difference in growth, except that within days the plant started to turn away from the light outside the window. Since the plant thrived, evidently the light did no harm, but it seemed very unusual for a plant to turn away from the light.


On repeating the experiment in different rooms with windows facing in different directions it became clear that the plants did indeed not turn away from the light, but instead all leaned towards the south-east of here: more specifically, in the direction of Mecca.

We had seen the first proof that the holy waters from Mecca had a distinct effect.

This sparked our interest, and we decided to go one step further and test the product on animals. We felt relatively secure that the water would not be harmful after the experiments with the plants.

We devised a test where one rat stayed on its regular diet and another rat changed from tap water to holy water. After one week, we offered the rats a piece of pork chops. Again, the result was striking. The rat that had continued to drink regular tap water immediately began to eat the piece of pork chop that we offered to it ("Before" image, indicating the original behavior). The rat that had received holy water in its water bottle showed no interest in the pork chop at all ("After" image, indicating the new behavior):


Since we know that Muslims do not eat pork, the reaction from the rat that had ingested holy water indicates a clear influence from the holy water from Mecca.

It was now time to extend the experiment to humans. Prominent members of the Danish People's Party have on several occasions compared Muslims with rats, and this might imply that rats would show a particularly positive reaction towards the holy water from Mecca. The question therefore remained: would humans react differently than rats?

We hesitated for a while but finally decided to carry out an experiment on our own children. Many leading politicians and Christian theologists have already explained that Islam turns people into fundamentalists and terrorists, and perhaps the effects of the holy water from Mecca would support their explanations.

We secretly replaced his drinking water with holy water from Mecca, and observed his reaction. After one week, we began to see patterns in his behavior that could indicate a distinctly Muslim effect, as shown in the picture to the right.

His behavior is not conclusive evidence, however, as our son may have been influenced by his parents, who are neither republican nor Christian, and we do not support the so-called war on terror.

Our final experiment is still only at the planning stage where yours truly will attempt to brew beer using the holy water from Mecca. We hypothesize that the beer will become non-alcoholic because Muslims are required to abstain from alcoholic drinks. This will be an ultimate sacrifice from me, but I am prepared to make this offer in the name of science.

If it turns out that the holy water of Mecca can indeed influence people and matter, the conclusion should cause alarm, as it means that terrorists could threaten to contaminate Western water supplies with water imported from Saudi Arabia, or perhaps already be doing it, causing an increase in fundamentalism and state terrorism in the nations whose waters are contaminated.

Candy Tothill ponders the "law of three" applied to authors and speculates whether this makes it easier to love writers. She inspired me (and I will wonder if I should not have dared to use this word once this text is complete) to add a few thoughts on the transfer of the story from the writer to the reader.

As a strict atheist, I would have preferred a less religious approach than that of the "law of three," yet I have no choice but to apply mystical words such as "soul" or "spirit" and similar symbology because inspiration, creativity, emotion, and feeling cannot be described by Aristotelian logic. I could perhaps refer to Antonio Damasio's somatic marker model, but since this model is also ontologically incomplete (as Damasio himself recognizes), this detour would eventually be wasted effort. So please bear with me on the mystical language, and try not to imagine metaphysical entities as I use mystical expressions.

Anyone is an author these days; write an incoherent article that includes a few of your darling phrases and you're an author. Change a few fonts to the worse in a premanufactured template and you're a web designer. Submit some video footage of yourself to YouTube and you're an actor and a producer. There are plenty of options for you to earn your 15 bytes of fame.

Aim higher, and you may become one of those authors that have learned the handicraft of writing, applying strong language skills, mastering composition and powerful statements, who can state some profundities and maybe even have stories to tell, yet somehow leave the reader with a feeling that he or she has just read a user's manual.

Alternatively, become a no-style writer whose specialty is simplicity in every sense of the word. It probably helps if you're a religious person or a conservative, because their views invariably tend toward the simplicity of bifurcations.

But some authors charm their readers. Their readers have experienced the captivating feeling that made it impossible to put the book aside. As a reader, you did not merely read the book. You reacted spontaneously to the story as it entered your heart. You let yourself drift in the story with no safety jacket and found yourself sometimes carried gently along and at other times rushing in a deadly torrent. It felt natural and meaningful, but barring bland explanations about a stimulated imagination or entertainment, you could not explain where the meaning was found.

If you have never known this feeling, don't bother reading on, as it will make no sense to you.

The author feels a "higher sensation" within him, call it spirit or muse, which inspires him to ideas that give structure to his composition. The author feels part of a flow, or feels an insight experience, or a love experience; it may feel as a "mystic" experience where a larger whole is perceived. It is as if separates within the author unify and opposites resolve. Anxiety, inhibition, and restraint are lost, and intellectual self-criticism, fear, and doubts about himself are left behind.

Being more himself, the author is more spontaneous and expressive, and everything is done with greater ease. Although authors excel in verbalization, they live far more in the real world than in the verbalized world of abstractions, beliefs, and concepts. They see the raw, the fresh, and the existing in addition to the abstract, the categorized, and the generic. They combine a childish ability to perceive and express with a sophisticated mind. They sense in themselves both a strong ego versus ego-less behavior, their head versus their heart, self-love versus altruism, selfishness versus unselfishness, concreteness versus abstraction, any many other apparent contradictions and polarities that others would see as dichotomies or mutually exclusive; but these people are natural integrators that synthesize separates and opposites into a larger whole. As within themselves, so without themselves, they put together forms that fight each others and combine dissonances into unity: their works of art.

It is in this experience that the art is born in a slow but intense flash of inspiration, but it also requires hard work and training. The spontaneous leads to the planned, the Dionysian to the Apollonian, the feminine to the masculine, yin to yang, or being to becoming, by any expression. We yield to the darkness of our souls for inspiration, and only then turn it to form by control, criticism, judgment, and hard work. The experience of inspiration or heightened being happens to the person, who in turn creates the art. The latter can be learned, but is heartless. The former is innate, but is headless.

And thus the spirit works through the author to manifest itself as letters on paper. Many an author can testify to feeling as if being the tool of a higher purpose.

Now the process is reversed. The letters on the paper are perceived by the reader's body, which senses the contrasts and forms and combine them to words, then sentences and continuity in the brain. The perception of the text invokes feelings and wakes emotions in the reader which collectively create a gestalt, a feeling that is more than the sum total of the individual words. This higher sensation is the story that is told, and is exactly the higher sensation that the author felt as spirit; it is a sensation that, although manifest in words, cannot be expressed in words.

You are the story while the story unfolds, and you sense the spirit that originally inspired the author. It is mind that contacts mind; it is the spirit that speaks through the author's soul to the reader's soul. You may like what you experience through the author, or you may not, and the author's soul may contain both beauty and horror.

But like rays from the sun will cause only growable things to grow, the creativity emitted from the author will be lost on rocks and other dead material. The reader without a soul will never sense the spirit.