Google good, but bad

Good news everybody: Google has UK-ised its Local and Maps services. The local search is better than anything I’ve ever used, and the maps interface is far better than Streetmap (realtime scrolling – wahey!).

So, this is where I’m off to tonight, and this is how I’m going to get there (unless I get lazy and take some form of public transport…)

Unfortunately, the mappers have made some slightly odd decisions about what to include on their greater-scale maps. Spot the missing city. Diamond Geezer has more (latter via Gert).

I bet the developers are fucking Tabs.

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Does Suicide Girls have a print edition?

Scottish young women are topping themselves in record numbers. They still haven’t caught up with young men, though. How come the government is so keen on closing the employment gap, but has done so little to end this terrible gender imbalance?

The study holds teen magazines partly responsible for the rise. I don’t recall any teen magazines directly advocating suicide (unlike this lot), but I can see where the researchers are coming from. Last time I read More, I certainly lost the will to live.

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Benedict XVI

We have a new pope. And he’s a fucking mentalist.

Comments like "Cardinal Ratzinger has been criticised for his disapproval of abortion and homosexuality" are silly. Of course he disapproves of them; so do most Catholics (some might say ‘all Catholics’, depending on how liberal their inclusion criteria are).

However, that’s not the issue: the issue is that, unlike previous modern-era popes, Benedict XVI’s key traits are "authoritarianism, hostility to modernity, assertion of papal supremacy and quashing of internal debate and dissent" (Sully). The problem isn’t that he’s not a modernist – it’s that he’s a Counter-Reformationist…

Best-case scenario: Benedict XVI will follow in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor Benedict IX, and sell the position to someone less loony.

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Something has gone very badly wrong

Dsquared draws our attention to this study in the New England Journal of Medicine, which suggests that 13% of US Army soldiers in Iraq believe themselves to have killed a civilian.

Very back-of-the-envelope-ishly, dsquared works out that this involves 60,000 deaths *directly* attributable to coalition troops (before you take into account the rising mortality rate from disease and lack of medical care) – higher than in the Lancet study. While this extrapolation is far too rough to actually make that claim, it certainly provides significant support for the order of magnitude of excess deaths claimed in the Lancet study.

Inevitably, the more ignorant pro-war-ites will critique this study as only they know how ("but they only interviewed 894 soldiers! That means there might only be 116 soldiers who’ve killed any civilians at all!", etc), while the less ignorant ones will quietly ignore it.

This is unfortunate: everyone on whatever side needs to accept that the Iraq war (irrespective of how noble its aims and irrespective of Saddam Hussein’s undeniably great evil) has been a massive fuckup and is something that we should never, ever do anything like again.

Update: Peter C points out that if you support the war for political/strategic reasons and don’t care about what happens to the Iraqis, then you can still believe it was a good idea. Fair play.

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All change please

"Remember when it used to be the left who blamed everything on the evils of the capitalist media?" – Sonic at Harry’s.

It’s amusing that the pro-war mainstream have become deluded fantasists who believe in ideology-driven nonsense and massive conspiracy theories (all the Muslims! All coming to get us! All the media! In league with the Muslims!), while the other side have become the realists who recognise that the power of Our Enemies is generally exaggerated, that governments will fuck up most things they touch, and that any event described as a conspiracy is usually best explained by incompetence.

I’m sure the stereotypes used to go the other way round…

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Hmphf

I was going to write something about the Who Should You Vote For results, and the bizarre bleating from Labour supporters that it must be a Lib Dem plot (on the grounds, presumably, that their heads would explode if they realised that they agreed with the Liberals’ politics more than those of their own Dear Leader).

However, Chris Lightfoot has beaten me to it, while also slating Egg and making a South Park-ish cartoon of himself.

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No economist of mine

I respect the Economist as a newspaper. Not as much as do some underinformed commentators (I’ve seen enough of its coverage of areas on which I’m a genuine expert to know that it can be highly misguided), but quite a lot. Therefore, it surprises me that it employs Megan McCardle as a staff writer in the US, to the extent that I’m predisposed to ignore its US coverage entirely.

One glittering recent example: "Plus, remember how Europe’s cell phone network was, like, eighty zillion times better than ours until it turned out they couldn’t afford to upgrade to 3G? Big, honking government sponsored infrastructure projects, in which the government picks a technology winner, generally look better than the market’s bumbling trial-and-error approach right up until it turns out that the government has made a whomping big mistake and it’s too costly to fix."

As anyone who’s walked down a European high street, viewed the European media or travelled on European transport in the last two years will know, 3G has been widely available here for some time. In the US, meanwhile, handset and market development is still way behind Europe – and although the country’s CDMA providers do now offer a product that’s labeled 3G (CDMA2000 1X), it actually only runs at the speed of GPRS.

It worries me that someone this unaware of what the hell she’s talking about has a job as an opinion former on one of the most influential newspapers. Sack her, employ me.

Oh, speaking of idiocy: global warming denialist bingo; reporting on terrorists means the terrorists have already won; and airline security monkeys can now ban books.

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Misc.misc

Tim Worstall has the latest Britblog roundup. Bruce Schneier has an analysis of the potential for corruption at the Papal election (lower than in Birmingham, for sure). Vice Squad has evidence that drinking makes you want to smoke. Dsquared has a correct assessment of Excel:

"No fuck off. Excel is the spreadsheet program of champions, endorsed by no fewer than five winners of the ‘Financial Analyst of the Year’ [award]".

Damn right. However, his verdict on Powerpoint is still wrong. And less upbeatly, Dave Weeden has inexplicable medical trouble which might cut his blogging output, his drinking input, and therefore his drunk blogging output. This is all sad news.

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Some things need repeating

It’s been said before, but: "Prewar Jews, like today’s East End Muslims, also lived in unforgiving poverty. They too were herded into the cramped streets of East London as the first stop for new immigrants. They too were reviled as outsiders, branded as parasites on the indigenous society. And they too were feared as a potential fifth column, suspected adherents of a violent, supranational ideology. The ‘Jewish menace’ was said to be first anarchism and then Bolshevism. Today’s ‘Muslim peril’ is jihadism."

(Jonathan Freedland, via Lenin)

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In praise of the NHS

An American writer is annoyed that unlike the US healthcare system, the NHS doesn’t waste vast amounts of time and money on services for people who are on their way out anyway. I’m not.

Admittedly, we should make euthanasia a more formalised and directly legal process, rather than something that happens by default – but focusing medical resources on people with a life ahead of them makes obvious sense (although if people really want to pay extra to be pointlessly kept alive, that should be their prerogative).

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