It starts from 6 million years ago and runs right through to the 19th century. Not in massive detail to be sure and even when it really gets underway (around 12,000 years ago) it skims over vast tracts of human history. Darned impressive nonetheless and absolutely packed with information on just about every corner of the world.

Supposedly during the course I’ll have gotten through about half of the 784 pages. That works out at something like 30 pages a week which sounds fairly manageable though it’s pretty hard going at the moment with so much new terminology. Some of that terminology is starting to sink in though and I now know what palaeolithic and neolithic mean which seems like a good start.

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Whilst I couldn’t claim to remember all the prices of everything there are a number of things that I’ve noticed moving in peculiar directions as the weeks have went by. Lucozade for instance has a seemingly endless series of different offers with six packs starting off at £2.99, going down to £2 in some places then back up to £2.99 and then to “2 for £5″ (ie £2.50 each). Obviously a case of the shop or supplier experimenting with the price to try and find what will make the most money for them but the problem is that it’s showing clearly that the higher prices are bringing in a profit so canny shoppers just wait ’til the price goes down.

Even more confusing is one of the milk drinks that the kids like. This comes in two places in the shop in bottles that are identical apart from a single word being added to the bottles in the fridges which seemingly is enough to add 30% to the price even though the contents of the other bottle are identical.

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Whilst we might laugh at the mess they got themselves into over Copernicus and Galileo over the issue of the Earth no longer being at the centre of the universe and moons appearing through telescopes which weren’t recorded, there are even more of these fundamental problems arising in the present day. Personally I think that the biggest of these is that in many cases death isn’t permanent these days but that’s something that the church seems largely to have quietly accepted. Recently though there’s been the addition of the creation of new life which seems like something that the church would have issues with but seems to also have ignored.

I suspect that their problem is that there are so many instances of what would previously have been classed as miracles which occur pretty much every day nowadays that they don’t get as worked up about such things as they would have done in earlier times.

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I’d thought that the 256MB of my previous computer would see me through a reasonable number of years but even a year after I bought the thing, it was pretty much crawling along as the graphical content of the latest websites just eats memory. Running the likes of Vista on that amount is, of course, a total nonstarter unless you have incredible amounts of patience to wait around for even the most trivial of tasks.

If you do find that your computer is running a touch slow then it’s almost certainly down to it not having enough memory for the tasks that you’re using it for. Since this is one of the cheapest upgrades that you can do, it’s well worth it to add another year or two of life to your computer

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Take the SevaTeem theme that we’re using here at the moment. It looks pretty different from the theme over at Our Inns and yet the only two changes between the two are that this one uses white text instead of black and the background is different.

SevaTeem is the theme that I’m developing over at SevaTeem and which I’ve been rolling out on a few of my sites to see how it runs before I release it on an unsuspecting world

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For the third year in a row, the traffic on the sites that I keep an eye on has tripled year on year. That’s counting both the sites that I very actively promoted around this time last year and those that I just allowed to carry on their merry way. Even when you compare those that I spent a lot on vs those I spent next to nothing on the stats seem to tell the same story.

As an example, I put quite a bit of effort (although not much actual cash) into promoting my main blog yet I find that this one is steets ahead of it with next to no effort expended on promotion. Typically on Reuters this blog gets about 50% more readers than the main one for example.

Then, of course, there’s the google fiasco where they hammered a large number of minor league blogs for carrying sponsored posts yet ignored exactly the same practice for the big league sites who were doing exactly the same thing. As it happens, that passed me by pretty much unscathed aside from one blog written by Wendy who’s less than pleased about that to put it mildly. Still, it has me wondering about all the money I spent to get my sites submitted to various directories. Was it all wasted? To be sure those sites did see a jump in traffic starting shortly after each round of promotion but as we come into 2008 I’m seeing exactly the same jump and this time around I’ve not ran the promotion.

Ironically, one of the sites which I did spend a fair bit to promote and which seems to deserve a better following just didn’t shift at all. A comparable site to it launched in the summer is already streets ahead of it.

I suspect that you need to either spend a little money or put a lot of effort into the initial promotion but, unless you’re in the really big league, I don’t know that it’s worthwhile spending more than, say, $50 now and that only to put a new site on the map.

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Building bridges was a trial and error process until relatively recently. The designs that survived were worked out through eliminating many designs that weren’t up to the job and fell down. This isn’t entirely a recent phenomena either as the bridge at Tacoma illustrates.

Obviously small bridges weren’t really a problem. Throw a log over a river and it’s not going to collapse under you. It’s the larger constructions that are the problem as they involve all kinds of structural stresses that just weren’t well understood until quite recently. Hence, you don’t see anything like the number of Roman bridges as you might expect to see if you thought about it for a while. After all, their roads went pretty much directly from A to B so they would have crossed numerous rivers along the way yet few of those bridges remain.

Ah, but they’d have been worn out and collapsed by now. Yes, some of them would have of course but the Romans built pretty chunky artifacts as those which remain attest to so there should have been a whole lot more of them still around. Obviously, they’d have needed some repairs after 2000 odd years but you still see substantial buildings around for that length of time.

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The reasons for this go way back into the past when there were “national airlines” and bilateral arrangements were negotiated on their behalf by the various governments. For example, at one time you could only fly between America and Britain on British Airways or American Airlines and that remained the case for many years which, of course, led to all of us paying much higher fares than we really needed to.

Within Europe many of these restrictions have been killed off by the European Commission who regard competition as a “good thing” and so it is. The discount airline Ryanair could never have gotten off the ground had the old-time restrictions remained in place. One effect of those restrictions was that, since it’s an Irish airline, it could only have flown between France and Ireland yet in many of the airports that it uses it flies from, say, France to Belgium, Germany, etc.

But what about code-sharing? Well, that exists to get around those old-time restrictions which also ruled out cross-border purchases of airlines. The relatively recent AirFrance/KLM merger could never have happened even 10 years earlier and even now it’s not possible for a foreign airline to buy any American owned airlines (so much for America promoting competition, eh?).

With code-sharing airlines are effectively able to operate as one without requiring to merge as such. Singapore Airlines would probably like to buy Lufthansa for its European routes but can’t do so at the moment so instead there’s code-sharing.

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A programmed learning course was a variant of a correspondence course in that you did it largely by yourself. Where it was different was that you could also do the marking ie no tutor needed to be involved.

Now the big plus point of this was that without the tutor, the courses were much cheaper and could even be sold in bookshops as they simply consisted of a series of workbooks with the answers at the back. How they worked sounds exactly how many DVD based courses work today. You went through a series of questions, then checked the answers; if they were correct, you went on to the next session and if they weren’t the book directed you to a revision of the concepts and went over it again.

Although you can get the descendants of this type of course today, we don’t use the phrase “programmed learning” because it got a very bad press at the time. Most importantly, it was felt that the technique would only work for fairly simple subjects and, to be fair, it does work best when there is a straight yes/no response.

That all changed with the launch of the Open University in the UK which started teaching the worlds first distance learning courses in 1971 after several years of preparations.

Things have obviously changed a lot since then and now similar universities exist in all the major countries of the world and together they teach just about every subject you could imagine. And then some. To be fair, there is tutor feedback in the majority of these courses but at its heart it’s still the programmed learning approach from the 1960s and before but applied to courses at a much higher level.

In fact, so much work goes into perfecting their courses that in many instances it’s actually better to study with them than it is at a conventional university: In 2004 The Sunday Times Universities Guide said “Just four institutions — Cambridge, Loughborough, York and the LSE — have a better teaching record than the OU” which is pretty amazing.

Interestingly, the Open University has been given top ranks in 19 very different subjects: Business and management; chemistry; classics and ancient history; economics; education; general engineering; geography; geology; molecular biosciences; music; organismal biosciences; philosophy; physics and astronomy; politics; psychology; social policy and administration; sociology; subjects allied to medicine; theology and religious studies which, of course, includes some rather heavy-weight topics.

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The panic really started in the mid-1990s as some computer systems needed to refer to dates in the 21st century and people discovered that they couldn’t as the dates were all held with only two digits. The net effect of holding the year as two digits was that, for the most part, the computer treated dates that should have been in the 21st century as though they were instead in the 20th century so 01 was 1901 and not 2001 for instance. Naturally, as 2000 approached more and more computer systems were hit with this problem and, eventually, this reached the attention of “the authorities” who duly hit the panic button.

Interestingly though 2000 is a special year as it is a leap year because it’s divisible by 400. In fact, the first problem with computers hit in 1900 because the guys writing Lotus 123 assumed that 1900 was a leapyear therefore you can have the 29th of February 1900 in Lotus spreadsheets (and indeed many others as for compatibility that mistake needed to be replicated). Since 2000 was a leapyear, things like video recorders were fine with two digit years as were most consumer electronic devices.

However, 2100 will be quite a different matter. On the offchance, that you are still using your somewhat obsolete 20th century video recorder at that point, it’ll let you have a February 29th when it shouldn’t. You might think that 2100 is a very long time from now but actually the first problem crops up in 2038 when Unix has a problem with dates and seeing as Unix is pretty prevalent you can probably look forward to a similar Y2K panic around then.

But why was 2000 something of a non-event? Simple really: thousands of programmers all around the world were working on fixing the problems with all the software in the run-up to it. Things did happen though: if you had your eye on the ATMs you may have noticed that a lot of them were rebooted a few minutes before midnight for example.

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