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Welcome to the weblog, which gets updated whenever I have time to do it. Also new this week: Everything in its place… [web design article]

Friday 23rd August

UPDATE from the Department of No Suprises There, Then. BT’s claim that it holds the patent on the hyperlink has been thrown out by a New York federal judge. Yahoo carries the story:

Tossing out British Telecom’s infringement suit against Prodigy Communications Corp., U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York said no jury could find that Prodigy infringes the patent by providing hyperlinks, the coded, highlighted text that links one Web page to another.…

If British Telecom had prevailed, it was expected to seek royalty payments from Prodigy and other Internet service providers that could have amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.…

British Telecom’s original patent application, filed in 1977, covers a system to allow users to access text-based information via a telephone network. The company submitted several successor applications before its so-called Sargent patent was issued in 1989. The Sargent patent describes an improved way for multiple users, each located at a remote terminal, to access data stored on a central computer. Communication between the terminals takes place over a telephone network.

McMahon disagreed with British Telecom’s argument that the Internet constitutes a system in which each individual Web server is a central computer in one location.

British Telecom’s patent claims “clearly provide that the central computer is one device, in one location,” McMahon wrote. “Therefore, viewing the Internet as a system (as BT asks me to do), it does not literally infringe the Sargent patent, because it contains no such central computer.

“Because the Internet itself does not infringe the Sargent patent, Prodigy cannot be liable for contributory infringement or active inducement for providing its users with access to the Internet,” McMahon said.

“BT’s argument that Prodigy’s Web servers directly infringe the Sargent patent also fails, because Web pages stored on Prodigy’s Web servers do not contain ‘blocks of information’ or ‘complete addresses’ as claimed in the Sargent patent,” she wrote.

No surprise there — no one outside of BT expected them to succeed — but it’s good to see a sensible decision being so clearly delivered.

Conflicting reports of fighting in Kashmir. Pakistan has claimed that it inflicted heavy casualties on Indian forces which were mounting an unprovoked attack on a Pakistani outpost. India has denied this.

Pakistan said that the attack took place last night on a mountain post near Gultari in the north of Pakistan-administered Kahmir. [sic] …

A Pakistan army statement branded the attack as a “highly escalatory act” and went on to say that the “Pakistan army successfully defended the post, causing heavy casualties to the enemy.”

The Pakistani army also claims that Indian aircraft were sent to bomb the post as Indian soldiers were repelled by Pakistani troops who, claims Pakistan, suffered no casualties.

Nirupama Rao, the Indian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, said: “The Pakistani claims are totally untrue. The story is false and baseless. No such incident has occurred yesterday and there are no Indian casualties.”

Attention Mozilla users: are you fed up with all those banners? Install BannerBlind and get rid of them. It’s not absolutely perfect — it doesn’t seem to work if a page is loaded in the background in another tab; when it is working, it seems to load the banner before getting rid of it, which is odd. Still, these little caveats aside, it is a boon to the Mozilla user, and configurable to deal with banner sizes the default settings don’t cover.

A surgeon was forced to halt an operation because of a foreign nurse’s poor command of English:

David Nunn, a consultant orthopaedic surgeon at Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospitals, in London, told The Telegraph that he was unable to complete the operation last week without certain instruments.

When he asked the nurses, all of whom were foreign, to find them, “I was met with a selection of bemused reactions,.” he said. “They were produced only when the scrub nurse de-scrubbed and went to find them herself.”

That seems a reasonable thing to do — a surgeon can hardly continue when the nurses cannot provide him with the necessary instruments. It would be quite unsafe. What is not reasonable is the response of the hospital administration:

Mr Dunn, 48, said his superiors had accused him of racism and threatened him with being disciplined. “But we should not allow political correctness to prevent these problems from being aired.”

Quite. Most of the time people complain about political correctness they are talking bilge, but this does seem to be a case of insane political correctness. It doesn’t matter what country a nurse is from, it doesn’t matter what colour she is, if her understanding of English is so poor that she cannot do her job then she shouldn’t be working in the NHS.

Brain-wave scanners at airports? They can’t be serious, surely?

Officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration have told Northwest Airlines security specialists that the agency is developing brain-monitoring devices in cooperation with a commercial firm, which it did not identify.

Space technology would be adapted to receive and analyze brain-wave and heartbeat patterns, then feed that data into computerized programs “to detect passengers who potentially might pose a threat,” according to briefing documents obtained by The Washington Times.

NASA wants to use “noninvasive neuro-electric sensors,” imbedded in gates, to collect tiny electric signals that all brains and hearts transmit. Computers would apply statistical algorithms to correlate physiologic patterns with computerized data on travel routines, criminal background and credit information from "hundreds to thousands of data sources," NASA documents say.

Leaving aside the little matter of the assumption that anyone who is stressed or nervous is likely to be a terrorist — yeah, air travel is such a calm way to travel — this idea suggests they don’t have any notion of how small the electrical signals involved are. Recording or monitoring an ECG with electrodes attached to chest and/or limbs can be defeated even with very modern equipment if there is skeletal muscle activity — detecting and filtering out the cardiac signal from the muscle activity while the subject is in motion and the sensors are not directly attached to the body is going to be incredibly difficult if not impossible. The electrical signals from the brain are even weaker and more difficult to pick up. This all sounds like they’ve been watching too much Star Trek.

Giant meteorite impact: 3.4 billion years ago, a meteor twice the size of the one which 65 million years ago caused (or helped cause) the mass extinction which wiped out the dinosaurs, hit Earth:

Deposits of the rock were found in South Africa and Australia, said a report in the Science journal.

The 20-kilometre … wide asteroid is believed to have hit the planet with such force that it would have caused tidal waves kilometres high and torn up the bottom of the ocean.

Researchers from Stanford University in California and Louisiana State University say the cataclysmic event happened about 3.4 billion years ago, before continents were formed and when only bacteria existed.

It is not known exactly where the giant meteorite hit as the scientists have not yet located a crater which would have been left by the impact.

The new Scottish Parliament building has come in for a lot of criticism over its spiralling cost; personally, I have always thought the re-established Scottish Parliament should have an impressive building which we should be happy to pay for. A survey has indicated that it is likely to be a major visitor attraction, the third most popular in Scotland.

An estimated 700,000 visitors a year are expected to be drawn to Holyrood over the first three years once the parliament opens next September.

This would make the building the third most popular attraction, behind only Edinburgh Castle and Glasgow’s Kelvingrove art gallery. It would rank above the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, which has about 660,000 visitors a year, and Edinburgh Zoo with about 470,000 visitors. Edinburgh Castle tops the list with just over one million visitors annually.

I’ll say straight away that I don’t know whether this is for real or a complete piss-take. I did show the page to a friend who commented:

That was quite revolting, it could only be American!

I think she is right on both counts. Here’s the link to LifeGems.

It seems the Scotland-Denmark game was a bit lacklustre (I thought there wasn’t much noise from the crowds leaving Hampden). The Herald diary reports the effect of this on corporate hospitality:

In fact, so bad was the game as a spectacle that up in the hospitality boxes hired by various companies to entertain clients, an executive was seen bidding his guests farewell at the end, and was heard to tell them: “Please forget who invited you here.”

Thursday 22nd August

Leni Riefenstahl is 100 today. She is one of the most talented film directors ever; Pauline Kael described her as “one of the dozen or so creative geniuses who have ever worked in the film medium.” She is also widely reviled, and most people have never seen one of her films. That’s s because, of course, she was Hitler’s film-maker, her greatest cinematic achievements being Olympia (1938), a record of the 1936 Olympics at Berlin, and Triumph des Willens (1934), the film of the 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg.

Given everything we know now, from our post-war perspective, about the Nazis I suppose it is understandable that in the 64 years since Olympia she has been considered such a pariah that she has only produced two films: Tiefland (1954), a film begun in Germany during World War II which according to a review at the IMDb “is an unmistakable statement against the evil of authoritarianism and a call for freedom of the common people from tyranny,” and Impressionen unter Wasser (2002), a film of reportedly stunning underwater photography.

Undoubtedly, her cinematic artistry in Triumph des Willens helped to glorify the Nazi Party, yet I can’t help thinking that it is expecting a lot of a filmmaker in 1934 — when Hitler had only been in power for a year and a half and barely a month after he had assumed absolute power as Führer of Germany — to foresee how the Third Reich would develop. In 1934, no one realised that Hitler was bent on war; no one realised what was in store for the Jews — how could they? The Nazis themselves hadn’t formulated such plans at that time. Kristallnacht was four years away, never mind the horrors of the “Final Solution“. Few people were prescient enough to see how different the Hitler Party (which is what the Nazi Party was) was from any of the other political parties of the day. Riefenstahl has said that she was never interested in politics, and I believe her: her films suggest one whose every concentration was given to her art. Yes, her film of the 1934 Parteitag portrays Hitler as a near-divine being who swoops down from the clouds to join the celebrating mortals; she was not the only person to respond to Hitler in this way. In fact, it is salutory to see Triumph des Willens and feel its effectiveness even now, even knowing the full horror of what would happen in that place, under that regime: the comfortable notion that, had we been living then, we would have known better seems less secure.

Leni Riefenstahl was fooled by Hitler, as were many Germans. Her far from unique response to Hitler is reflected in some of her films — which is only to be expected. Other directors have made films which are undoubtedly propagandistic yet still are recognised as masterpieces of the cinema. Eisenstein, for example, is not held responsible for the brutality and the millions of deaths which occurred in the USSR under Lenin and Stalin. Perhaps Riefenstahl is not quite on his level — but she should be recognised as a director of the first rank, a pioneer of cinematic art, rather than by association with the most notorious political regime of the 20th Century.