Google is pursuing a very powerful strategy. One way of looking at it, odd though it seems, is to consider the original browser wars between Netscape and Microsoft. Netscape had the opportunity to undermine Microsoft, but it did exactly the wrong thing. It took the battle to the PC, delivering browser functionality on the PC that Microsoft could match quite easily. The simple bundling of IE with Windows destroyed Netscape’s challenge in very little time.

Netscape should have chosen to fight on the server.

As it happened, the company that won the browser wars was Yahoo. It provided much of the server functionality that Netscape should have been focused on. Unfortunately, for Yahoo, it never saw Google coming. Google came right out of left field. It established its search engine business in a crowded market when it should have been all but impossible. Its killer capability was to provide a well designed interface. (Damn it, its interface is still streets ahead of the competition.) Then it rose to challenge Yahoo, and AOL, and Microsoft, and it gaily marched past them all.

This week Google announced a chat (instant messaging) capability that also happens to be a VoIP capability. You can only sign up if you are also a Gmail (Google email) user – but now it has opened Gmail up to all comers to make the adoption process easy.

This is what I think is going on: Google is going to deliver unified messaging as a service. Right now it’s not sophisticated, but right now nobody else is doing that, so it doesn’t matter too much. Google’s chat capability is inferior to those of Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo and its VoIP is inferior to Skype. Never mind, it won’t remain so for long. And as for VoIP, I had been wondering who would be able to challenge Skype and now we have the answer: Google.

How Google will evolve its service is not so easy to predict, but it will – it will bring VoIP, chat and email together by virtue of a single directory. If Google gets it right quickly then it will gradually attract both consumers and small businesses. (Why not have Google look after all of your messaging for free?).

Of course, this is not Google’s only initiative – it is competing furiously to maintain its grip on the search market – but this is the initiative that will give Microsoft pause for thought. Maybe Microsoft will buy Skype? (No, I’m just kidding).

I started this by looking for the correct statement of Hofstadter’s Law which, it turns out to be, is: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law. I found the quote on a page of eponymous laws – so I decided to browse for eponymous laws for a few hours to find ones I’d never come across. Not scientific laws of course, I had enough of those at school. I was looking for “laws” like Murphy’s Law (if it can go wrong it will go wrong) which are eponymous. Here’s a selection of what I unearthed:

Relating to Computers:

Wirth’s law—Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Godwin’s Law—As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.

Brooks’ Law—Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

…Salt’s Observation—Adding manpower makes it ten times more expensive, too.

Smerek’s Law—Describing a video game to non-players makes you sound like an idiot.

Ralph’s observation—It is a mistake to allow any mechanical object to realize that you are in a hurry. This is especially true of computers

Philosophical

Hartman’s Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation—Any statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror.

Ko?akowski’s Law (the Law of the Infinite Cornucopia)—For any given doctrine that one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which to support it.

Okrent’s Law (the law of media news)—The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true.

Imbesi’s Law of the Conservation of Filth—In order for something to become clean, something else must become dirty.

Observations

I got all of the following from this site, http://www.topology.org/philo/sayings.html which is littered with similar stuff.

Stefan’s Observation—The fish must swim three times: once in the sea, once in the skillet, and once in the stomach.

Slashdot Observation—(Anon) Wars are God’s way of teaching Americans geography.

eMail Observation—(Anon) Before you judge someone harshly walk a mile in his shoes. Then if he objects, you’ll be a mile away and have his shoes.

Forks and Razors???

Of course it isn’t all laws and observations. Much greater kudos has to attach to someone that has a fork or a razor named after them. I came across Morton’s Fork which is named after John Morton, tax collector for King Henry VII of England. This concerns taxation and states that: A person who lives in luxury and has clearly spent a lot of money must obviously have sufficient income to pay as tax. Alternatively, a person who lives frugally and shows no sign of being wealthy must have substantial savings and can therefore afford to pay it as tax.

That was the only fork I could find and there are not many razors either. Just about everyone knows Occam’s razor but I didn’t know what a razor was, so I looked up its definition. Apparently it’s something you shave yourself with and nothing else. I could only find one other razor. Here it is:

Hanlon’s razor—Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Can it be that there are only two razors? I couldn’t find a third.

Incidentally, Occam’s name wasn’t Occam at all, but Ockham.

This fact allows me to finish with Stigler’s Law of Eponymy which states that: No law, not even Stigler’s Law, is named after its original discoverer.

We’re done here.

Believe it or not, I was searching for the origin of a quotation on the web and instead of typing the search terms into the Google search box, I typed them by accident into the place where I’m supposed to type URLs. To my great surprise I found myself in the middle of a chat forum (a bit Alice In Wonderland don’t you think?) where I encountered the following SMS postings (I confess to not understanding some of the abbreviations in use here.):

kitty843
10.28.2004, 02:24 PM
u know what is rele creepy, somebody i have never met just im’ed me on aim and told me to send a stupid chain thing to 10 people in 5 mins and the love of my life will kiss me on friday… :* i get kissed by her already, so it dosent matter.
lol, I hate that one. I get that chain all the time.
:* :* :* :wub:

This was followed by

kitty843
10.28.2004, 02:30 PM
rele? :* :*
Yeah, I get that chain like once or twice every two weeks. Also, I got this one about a ghost killing you if you don’t send the IM to 20 people in 5 minutes. That one freaked me out. CL knows why :unsure:…. ghhhoooossstttsss….. *shudders* .. they do exist…

Well, they may or may not exist, but the consensus of opinion has it that they are not murderers even if they were murderees in the past. I found several web sites that claim with great certainty that there is no evidence of a ghost ever killing anyone. Given that ghosts have are pretty limited in what they do (appear, make noise, and, at a stretch, move objects about) carrying out a murder may be beyond their powers.

However there are a number of reports out there of people being frightened to death by ghosts. Try Edinburghcapitalguide.com to learn the sad tale of an Edinburgh student, Andrew Muir, suffering such a fate or www.edu.pe.ca/birchwood/folktales/micha2a.htm for a sketchy account of a boy being frightened to death in Alberta, Canada or try jon-aristides.net/anybody.shtml for the tale of the lawyer, John Turdlington, who was reportedly frightened to death in his house in the small English village of Bedhampton.Finding examples of people “frightened to death” on the web is made a little difficult by the fact that the phrase “frightened to death” is used metaphorically most of the time, because fright doesn’t kill. People found dead of heart failure in supposedly haunted houses may have simply had heart failure provoked by cholesterol rather than fright. Of course fright may be the trigger, but heart failure is the cause of death.

While my search for murderous ghosts proved fruitless, I did turn up something odd. According to www.cronaca.com/archives/001460.html, mobile phones are killing off ghosts. A story on this site maintains that a British expert, Tony Cornell, of the Society for Psychical Research, told the Sunday Express newspaper that reports of ghost sightings started to decline when mobile phones were introduced in the late eighties/early nineties.

This is one of the most bizarrely random correlations (presented in all seriousness) that I’ve ever come across. I’m sure other experts might be inclined to assign other causes. Perhaps it was due to the introduction of cable TV or the fall of the Berlin Wall. To be honest, I blame Microsoft and Windows for this sad decline. (The blue screen of death actually exorcises ghosts.)

Poltergeist is German for ‘noisy ghost’. The word is therefore used to describe inexplicable noises that don’t accompany apparitions. In so far as there are any explanations for ghost phenomena (um, the apparition is, um, some kind of recording, um, which is, um, embedded in something and, um, you, um, read it like a tape recorder and, um, that’s why you see the ghost) poltergeists have the most credible explanation because they seem to happen (frequently or possibly always) around adolescent children.

Apart from noises, poltergeists are supposed to move things around, make objects appear and disappear and, in extremis, arrange objects or even furniture in odd ways. The adolescent children theory is really good until you ask yourself the question, “How many kids do you know that can move objects about using nothing more than their minds?”

That would be none, then.

A recent widely known poltergeisting occurred in Enfield for about a year from August 1977. A woman and four children, including a 12 year old girl, went through some kind of hell with noises, objects moving and the full range of poltergeist phenomena. It was regular enough for researchers to get involved, but they failed to get ‘solid evidence’ even though they experienced a great deal of weirdness. For example, a toy brick materialised out of thin air and flew across the room, hitting a photographer on the head. Some things caught fire spontaneously. Metal objects would suddenly twist out of shape. And 12 year old Janet would suddenly speak in a deep gruff voice indicating that, perhaps, she’d watched The Exorcist. She didn’t manage any projectile vomiting though, indicating perhaps that she was hiding beneath her seat at that part of the movie.

There was a similar case in Long Island in the US in 1958 although it only went on for a month or so. The phenomena seemed to center around James Hermann, son of James M. Herrmann. The usual noises and moving objects were observed. This case attracted the attention of the famous parapsychologist Dr Rhine from Duke University. Unfortunately the media became very interested and gave the Herrmanns no peace. Again nothing that counts as incontrovertible evidence of anything was gathered. However, it is pretty hard to imagine what could be gathered that counts as indisputable evidence in such a case. Noise on tape isn’t it, even video of objects in flight isn’t it. What is?

It was at this point in the Safari that I began to run into antigravity, which to be honest is only thinly connected to poltergeist activity (if you Google the two words together you get 9000 hits—most of which are about the fact that poltergeist phenomena often involve objects being levitated, and perhaps the force that make this happen is the same as the force that makes antigravity happen.

Antigravity? That’s for another day.

I then went looking for malevolent poltergeists and found one. This is the case of 11-year old Maria José Ferreira. It began in the home of a respectable Catholic family, with pieces of brick appearing and falling inside the house. For a while the poltergeist seemed to shower Maria with gifts (a brooch, fruit, a flower) but then it got nasty, started smashing objects and finally turned on Maria, indicating I guess that Maria wasn’t the source of this phenomenon.

The poltergeist bit her, slapped her, threw chairs at her, and even seemed to attempt to kill her by suffocation while she was asleep, by forcing cups or glasses over her mouth. The phenomena persisted around Maria for years and she committed suicide four years later. How very sad.

You’ve gotta be kidding me. Pets have ghosts too?

Unfortunately, Google suggests as much with the volume of hits. If you Google “Pets ghosts” you get 1,570,000 of them. That’s a big number even if you allow for the fact that many of these hits refer to pets being able to sense ghosts.

To summarise:

• Cats have got them nailed
• Dogs can sniff them out
• Goldfish are pretty useless

According to one site, which may be accurate but never named its source, there are half as many sightings of ghost animals as there are of ghost people.The anecdotal stories abound. A phantom bull terrier called Essex haunts the passage leading to the bar in the Star Inn at Ingatestone. This ghost dog is, so they say, visible only to other dogs. In Witchita, Kansas, a Mrs Cady was awakened by the barking of her dead dog, discovered a thief in her kitchen and drove him off. In a similar incident, a Mrs Kresgal, of New York, was awakened by the barking of her dead collie dog to discover that the house was on fire.

Does anything strike you as odd about this collection of ghostly pet anecdotes?

The skeptic in me is a little unhappy with the emphasis here—compared to the ghosts of human beings. If one believes the common rationale for ghosts, you get to be a ghost (or get to form a ghost?) if you are horribly murdered—beheaded, ripped to pieces by wild animals, hung drawn and quartered or whatever. Most of us happily pass into oblivion (or the next world) without too much fuss, but tortured souls hang around to scare the living bejesus out of the occasional passer-by.

Pets are different. Horribly murdered pets meander off to pet heaven anyway, but supremely loyal pets—especially those of the rich and famous, hang around to continue to charm us all, or save our lives if necessary. (I couldn’t find a single reference on the web to a headless pet ghost, by the way).

So are all pet ghosts benevolent? Not if you believe Dr. Terje Lund, head of the International Council for Paranormal Activities. The good Dr says that there are six signs that you have a pet ghost:

1. Unexplained puddles on the floor.
2. Objects that have been moved.
3. Unexplained indentations on sofas or chairs.
4. Odd noises.
5. Strange smells.
6. Missing food.

According to the expert Dr. (for he has had a team collect data and study the phenomenon) pet ghosts return to strict households they occupied in order to do the things that were forbidden to them in their lives. How quaint. Personally, I think that someone should Fedex the good Dr. some marbles—to replace the ones he’s clearly lost