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One of the first uses to which the personal computer was put was bookkeeping. It actually predates using it to write. Very early on there was a program called Lotus123, a spreadsheet with basic formula functions that let users do numeric manipulation.

In a similar business model to Apple, Lotus threw away the chance to ‘own’ the world of spreadsheets by charging a small fortune for their product and going to ridiculous lengths to ‘protect’ their product, including things like, in Australia, if something went wrong with the install, the owner had to return the original boot disk to Lotus in Sydney, who had to send it back to the UK to get a new one.

Meanwhile, back in the office, the user, (usually a business) had no access to their data… for up to six weeks! And you couldn’t copy the boot disk to get around this problem because they put a hole in the actual disk to make it impossible!

So when a new program came along without these stupid restrictions, the world turned to it and Lotus123 quickly became a bit player on the scene. VP-Planner was a Lotus clone, but the big winner was Excel. Originally made for the MAC, Excel was ported over to Win-doze in the early days and it was good enough that it probably saved Win-doze from a slow death. (anyone who experienced Windows v1 or 2 promptly became a death-wisher for the product)

Excel actually came with a built-in switch to allow the user to swap it over to the Lotus123 keystrokes to make Excel more compatible and reduce the retraining needed to swap to the product. I’m not sure now because I am using Office 2007, http://www.themsoffice.com/ but I think the switch was still there in Office 2003.

And of course, things have gotten much more friendly with programs like Quicken and MYOB (Mind Your Own Business)

The computer has opened the world to anyone who can get to the internet. For those who haven’t spent a lot of time online, this may seem an exaggerated statement, but once you begin to explore the digital world, you will find yourself in a world without apparent limits.

Any project you may want to try, any information you need, any facts you want to check, you can find on the World Wide Web. You don’t even need to know how it works, nor the ‘best’ way to do things. Find a Search engine (see the above picture) and type in your query.

The Search engines recognise a range of human ways of expressing things, so it almost doesn’t matter how you specify what you’re interested in. You can type, ‘ship, sink, year’ and search through the results to find when the Titanic sank or you can type in ‘when did the titanic sink?’

Capital letters don’t matter as the search will return similar results with or without them. If you want to search for a particular phrase just enclose it in quotes. “(phrase)”

The worst part of searching the net is the possibility of getting lost. You get a page that has links to elsewhere on it and you click the links. They in turn lead you to more links which takes you further and further away from the original page. Eventually you wind up reading something that seems totally unrelated to the place you began your journey.

Note that this ‘worst’ aspect is, for a lot of people, the best part of web surfing. There is something strangely compelling about following the link-trail into realms of information you weren’t expecting to visit and a lot of new things can be learned along the way.

But if you’re trying for specific information to complete a project, link surfing can strip time from your budget faster than you would believe.

One of the ways we can use to demonstrate how ‘superior’ our society is to those gone before is to point out how much of our time is no longer devoted to daily existence. The creation of leisure time has spawned a vast industry, or rather several vast industries, devoted to finding ways to fill that time for us, to devising attractions to get us to spend our money on things to fill in that time, and to provide us with ‘entertainment.’

Television has been a tool that has almost singlehandedly, changed who we are. In its best form, it is a medium of information delivery, showing us sights and sounds from across the world, expanding horizons beyond anything previously achieved. At its worst it is a mindless, drivel-delivering system for dulling the mind, satiating the senses and inundating us with violence and political machinations.

Whether what it delivers these days can be called entertainment, I am not so sure. The TV is too much of a good thing – it delivers most of the inputs so that our brains go into sleep mode, simply accepting all that comes in with no critical faculties in play.

The computer tool has a different level of involvement. While it can provide a similar style of input to that of the TV, it isn’t used that way as much as was once thought. Instead there are games to play, there are blogs to read, forums to participate in. Using a computer as an entertainment tool mostly involves some participation from the user, which, when you compare it to the couch-potato world of the TV addict, can only be good.

By Mr JM

On TED.com you can find more of the TED speakers. If you have any interest in learning, if you’ve wondered about what is going on in our world, if you just like to think or be entertained by bright minds, take yourself to the TED site and spend some time there.

You know that feeling you get when you’ve spent the night watching TV and you can barely keep your eyes open as you head for bed? That dead in the head sensation which is really caused by the fact your brain has been put to sleep hours before by the mind numbing litany of sex, violence and enforced messages to buy and consume? That almost buried feeling that somehow, without really meaning to, you’ve wasted yet another night in an endless procession of nights without meaning or originality, trapped by the flash and glamour of the idiot box?

Watch TED instead. I can guarantee you will not have those sensations and feelings. You may have trouble leaving the screen, but your brain will not be numbed, your thoughts will not be tied into the straight-jacket ‘CONSUME’ pathways dictated by Corporations interested only in taking all your money and you will know you have seen Life happening in front of you.

As a tiny taster, a mere glimpse of what you may find on TED, here are some questions asked by Jonathan Drori as he talks about ‘Why we don’t understand as much as we think…’

1. A seed weighs almost nothing – where does the tree get all the wood?

2. Can you light a lamp bulb with a battery and one wire & could you draw a diagram of how to do it??

3. Why is it hotter in Summer than in Winter?

4. Can you draw a plan diagram of the Solar System showing the shape of the orbits?

See if you can answer these questions – be honest and write the answers down, and then go listen to Jonathan at YouTube.

By Mr JM
In an Info World gone slightly nutso, it is refreshing to find real data, to find sites which attempt to provide a path to knowledge that can be used to help elevate one’s awareness of either self or the world around us.

Each year, in Monterrey in the States, there is a gathering of people with a wide variety of interests, people who are making their own path through their chosen field of knowledge. Some are names you will know, like Stephen Hawking or Brian Greene, some are known only to those with specific interests like Susan Blackmore, Louise Leakey or Billy Graham and some you will not know at all such as Jonathan Drori or Clifford Stoll

You can find a collection of the TED talks either by searching youtube for TEDtalks or go to the Director’s pages http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?p=r&user=TEDtalksDirector&page=1

The TED Conference (TED for Technology, Entertainment, Design) brings together some of the most remarkable people you will find on the internet. In these mini-lectures (most are about twenty minutes long) you will be entertained, challenged and educated. You will find your buttons getting pushed, your misconceptions buffeted and your opinions being questioned for Truth.

Clifford Stoll has to be seen to be believed. Jonathan Drori asks questions to which you think you have the correct answer, only to find not only that you don’t but that the fact you don’t provides valuable clues as to how we think.

Susan Blackmore takes the concept of Memes a step beyond. Many people have no idea what memes may be but the concept of them goes back decades, and they affect everything we say and do, they provide the basics behind our best and worst behaviours and they explain why, for example, children who have been molested often go on to become molesters, even though one would expect their reality of the experience would ensure they would avoid such a future.

By Mr JM

I was browsing a site I visit occasionally and I ran across a link to youtube that seemed interesting. One of the problems I’ve seen with television has been the way what might have been a superb educational tool has been subverted into an entrapment machine, spewing out specially designed traps to hold the attention, to reduce the amount of thought and to lull us into being contented couch potatoes.

And to be honest, I don’t think the powers-that-be have too much interest in our contentment – as far as they are concerned, keeping us trapped on the couch is good enough.

The constant watching of TV allows us to be programmed and controlled on levels never before seen. Our individuality is reduced, our creativity dies and we become lazy thinkers.

The personal computer helped change this a little – computing required thought, it needed the involvement of the user and, at least in the initial stages, without creativity it was a boring pastime.

But I’ve seen the TV attitudes coming onto the net – to paraphrase, ninety percent of everything is junk, and the internet is getting close to, if not exceeding that level. It provides a medium that, just like TV, eats up time with little practical or creative result.

There’s a lot of junk data on the internet and not a lot of people these days get educated in how to spot the difference between real and useful information and somebody’s propaganda or nonsense presented as fact. And the idea of research is too much like hard work for a lot of folk.

You’ve heard about it from your friends and family. Maybe your children. “Blogs.” “Blogging.” “Bloggers.” Heck, you’ve heard that people are actually out there making money from just talking about themselves and their lives. There are even a few who live off what they make from blogging.

Or maybe you have been faithfully reading blogs for quite a while now but have never taken the leap into writing your own.

But then again, it all sounds a bit complicated with all the different ‘platforms’ and things you can do with them. It can be a bit overwhelming to get a start on it all.

So how do you start? Where do you start?

First off, don’t worry about whether or not you’re too ‘late’ to start blogging. People all over the world are starting new blogs every day and many people have been blogging for years, so you’ll be entering into a massive huge arena with people both new and experienced with the world of blogging.

Second, don’t let other people overwhelm you with all the jargon and lingo surrounding blogging. Starting next week, I’ll be taking you through things step by step, and if you have any questions along the way – no matter how you feel about how they may sound – you can always ask in the comments or using the ‘comment me’ button under the site description on the right.

The most important thing to remember about blogging is that blogging is what you make of it. You reap what you sow, so to say and blogging can be a truly great experience if you’re willing to put the time into it.

We’ll get started next week with what blog platforms are and how you choose the one that’s best for you.

Have a great weekend!

On the other side are aligned a much smaller number of scientists, some dedicated amateurs, very little money (the grants get taken away as soon as it’s clear the research is leading away from AGW) and a lot of measurements that get ‘invalidated’ regularly each time they show anything contrary to the AGW hypothesis.

It’s hard to know who to believe. But on the AGW side there’s some seriously poor science going on. Early on, one Michael Mann, now PhD, presented the ‘Hockey Stick’ graph seen below in Using the Net as evidence that in the 1900’s the temperature began to climb. The problem is, the graph is made up of tree ring data for the period up to 1900, then measurements made in the 20th century for the ‘blade’ of the hockey stick.

Another problem is that Mann was, at that time a PhD student, (hard to claim he was a ‘leading scientist’) and also a Leading Reviewer for the IPCC report, so he got to help make the decision to accept his Hockey Stick graph as a significant piece of evidence.

The tree ring data fails to show two events we know from history actually happened – the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. Look them up – they happened, yet the Hockey Stick graph fails to show them. This invalidates the use of tree rings to show global temperature changes.

And if tree rings are so good as data, how come they didn’t simply use the 20th century tree rings to complete the hockey stick? There would seem to be something wrong with a ‘conclusive’ case that requires manipulation of evidence, don’t you think?

More problems come with how many times the pro-AGW side invalidates previously accepted measurements – not interpretations or theories, but actual measurements and then applies ‘corrections’ to the data so it shows what they are saying is happening. Yet before the IPCC came along, there seemed to be nothing wrong with those measurements.

Back in the 1970’s, there was voiced concern over whether the Earth was heading into a new Ice Age – the average temperatures had been trending down for something like thirty years. Yet now, the pro-AGW scientists have applied a ‘correction’ to show those measurements were actually wrong and that really, things were getting warmer during that three decades and the scientists of those times simply didn’t notice.

Your mission, should you accept it, is to use the information here to go and inform yourself as to what might be really going on. Don’t let a bureaucratic ‘inter-governmental’ body with an agenda decide what you will think – use the internet as it is meant to be used and go take a look for yourself.

In Using the Net and Finding the Truth I used the search for information about Anthropogenetic Global Warming (AGW – Human-caused Global Warming) to talk about Internet use.

Here is an example of how use of the Internet can undo the media-driven ideas that seem set to change our world. Note that I am not claiming that there is no warming happening, nor am I going into the very real possibility that global warming could trigger an ice age like that which occurred back around 1600AD or worse.

It’s an ongoing debate across the internet and has been for the past few years. Al Gore has made himself a Noble Peace Prize (oh, and for two thousand five hundred of the world’s ‘leading scientists’) for a movie called ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (AIT) where they make a case for how human-generated carbon dioxide is the cause for Global Warming.

But there’s another side – less famous, but well presented, ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ is worth a watch. They talk about ‘AIT’ and some of the ‘errors’ made in the movie. Things like the slight misalignment of two graphs, one showing the temperature rises across thousands of years and the other the rise in carbon dioxide.

Also have a read of http://www.nationalpost.com/opinion/columnists/story.html?id=332289

Looking at the AIT version, it seems that CO2 rises bring on warming, but when the graphs (derived from ice cores from Greenland) are matched properly, the situation gets reversed – first the temperature rises, then several hundred years later, the levels of CO2 rise.

In other words, Global Warming causes carbon dioxide levels to rise, not the other way around.

On one side are aligned the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – an organization specifically set up to investigate AGW, apparently at least two thousand five hundred of the world’s ‘leading scientists,’ billions of dollars of research grants and a mountain of papers Evil Knievel would be hard pressed to jump over.

There are some apparent problems with the two thousand five hundred of the world’s ‘leading scientists,’ in that many of them haven’t been in a laboratory since school days; some are ‘Administrative’ personnel.

While getting on to a forum and posting (especially for the first time) can be a lot of fun and exhilarating, there is a sobering note that comes along with joining forums (and with communicating with anyone you don’t know on the internet).

While a certain level of trust is involved when talking to any stranger, talking to people you don’t know on the internet involves even more trust. The person talking to you who says she is a twenty year old woman from Germany could actually be a twelve year old girl from Michigan. While you can do some (more…)

While forums come in many shapes and sizes on a variety of subjects, almost all forums have a few things in common. One big thing is the forum personalities who take part in the forums. You’ll often hear members call other members things like ‘flamer’, ‘troll’, ‘royalty’ or other terms.

Like in life, some personalities are good, and some aren’t so great. You mostly learn the hard way, but by paying attention to the labels given, you can avoid some trouble.

Here are a few of the personalities you might encounter:

*Trolls – ‘Troll’ is probably (more…)

The more members a forum has, the more likely it is that someone is going to have your username. But if you are ‘always’ a certain username but that name is taken on the forum, don’t worry. You can think of another one.

However, there are a few aspects to usernames that are sure to get you ridicule and/or make you sick of them after a certain amount of time. The last thing you want is to choose a name that you’re going to want to change soon after.

Here are a few tips for picking out a username that will last you for a long time and won’t open you up for insults:

*Don’t use your real name. As tempting as (more…)

You have the computer, you have the internet, and now you want to start talking to people. Right? You have heard all about how the internet connects people from across the world, so why not get connecting?

Internet forums are a great way to talk to people, make friends, learn new things and have your say as well. And the beauty of forums is you can find several different forums for any subject – everything from creative writing to travel to music and just having a casual chat. Even more niche subjects like House (the television show) have spaces on the internet.

Where do you get started?

The first step is the easiest (more…)

I guess the most obvious question about being a part of the internet is ‘Why?’ Some people may always be observers but not participants, using their access to read, view and download but never actually putting things out there for others to read, view and download.

Others spend their time playing online games – sometimes for money, which involves participation but rarely contributing to the morass of data that is the web. Yet if everybody felt this way, there would be no internet.

The web can be a safety valve, not just (more…)

In the previous post I used the example of the Hockey Stick graph used successfully by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control) to ramp up awareness of the warming trend caused (they say) by human industry and consumption.

Keep in mind, the above graph is what, until the IPCC got on the case, was an agreed record of global temperature trends. Agreed across Science, backed by historical records as well as things like ice core data.

So what happened? If you enter a search in your favourite search engine of ‘hockey stick graph’ you will find the main author was Dr Michael Mann. He was an IPCC lead reviewer who somehow got to highlight his own work as being most indicative of the AGW. (Anthropogenic Global Warming – the warming caused (more…)