http://memex.naughtons.org John Naughton's online diary Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:13:40 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Jenni Russell, writing in the Guardian about what divides Britain’s two main political parties, now that the Cameroonians have staked a claim to the centre ground. The new dividing line between Labour and the Tories is less about a left-right split than about an authoritarian approach on one side and a ... http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2008/08/07/5412 The number of crazies in the Democratic Unionist Party (now the lead party in the government of Northern Ireland) continues to amaze. After the First Minister’s wife’s outbursts against homosexuality, we now have this: A SENIOR DUP Assemblyman has pressed for creationism to be taught alongside evolution in classrooms across ... http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2008/08/07/5411 I knew it: he’s an Irishman, deep down! The Irish Times says so. BARACK OBAMA had a distant Irish cousin who went on to become provost of Trinity College and later bishop of Ossory, new research shows. It has also been revealed that an Irish ancestor opposed political corruption in Dublin. The ... http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2008/08/07/5410 Nice rant by Charles Arthur. Apple’s top-down approach to design is a bust when it comes to its approach to the software for the iPhone. Developers for that are up in arms. People are astonishingly angry at the fact that Apple first won’t let them talk about how to develop for the ... http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2008/08/07/5409 From Pew Research Center As he has since January, this week, Barack Obama enjoyed much more visibility as far as the public was concerned than did John McCain. By a margin of 76% to 11% respondents in Pew’s weekly News Interest Index survey named Obama over McCain as the candidate they ... http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2008/08/06/5408 Tom Lehrer said that satire died the day the Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Well, the attendance of ex-KGB thug Vladimir Putin at the funeral of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn runs it a close second. http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2008/08/06/5407 Using Gmail to write to someone in Oxford today when AdSense flashed up a link to www.oxfordcollege.ac. Thinking that it must have missed the “.uk” off the end, I clicked on the link and got this: It is in fact the website of what appears to be a private establishment ... http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2008/08/06/5406 Nice come-back by Obama. http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2008/08/06/5405 Now here’s an angle I hadn’t thought of. From Maureen Dowd: The odd thing is that Obama bears a distinct resemblance to the most cherished hero in chick-lit history. The senator is a modern incarnation of the clever, haughty, reserved and fastidious Mr. Darcy. Like the leading man of Jane Austen ... http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2008/08/06/5404 … in 1945, the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. It’s estimated that 66,000 people died that day. http://memex.naughtons.org/archives/2008/08/06/5403