Mefeedia, a video search engine, is reporting that "54% of web video is now available for playback in HTML5 (H.264 mostly)". Up from 10% in January.

Meanwhile Adobe has bitten the bullet and is building HTML5 export capability into Flash Pro, their Flash authoring tool. And not a moment too soon.

Nack makes a pertinent point about Adobe's motives:

Flash is great for a lot of things ... It’s not the only game in town, however, and Adobe makes its money selling tools, not giving away players.

Indeed indeed. And what they'll be pissed about is that anyone can build HTML5 authoring tools, which means they're not the only game in town either. With Flash, Adobe is the only game in town and they were well on the way to completely controlling rich content on the web. Control this and Flash Pro would have become a money tree for Adobe, degrading the web in the process.

What does Apple have to gain from an open web and the demise of Flash? The same thing as everybody else, a level playing field.

The truth is our world is awash with badly designed, badly crafted things. Apple is one of the few havens in a sea of people and organisations that don't give a fuck about the details. Attention to detail is why I use Apple products:

In July 2002, Apple filed a patent for a “Breathing Status LED Indicator” …They described it as a “blinking effect of the sleep-mode indicator in accordance with the present invention mimics the rhythm of breathing which is psychologically appealing.”

The other day, I noticed that my friend’s Dell laptop had a similar feature but with a shorter fade-in-fade-out period. Its rate was around 40 blinks per second, or the average respiratory rate for adults during strenuous exercise—not very indicative of something in sleep-mode.

It’s interesting how a lot of companies try to copy Apple but never seem to get it right. This is yet another example of Apple’s obsessive attention to detail.

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study. Dr Busby says that while he cannot identify the type of armaments used by the Marines, the extent of genetic damage suffered by inhabitants suggests the use of uranium in some form. He said: "My guess is that they used a new weapon against buildings to break through walls and kill those inside."

The idea is that you shoot, edit and upload your photos entirely with the iPhone.

With this version they've introduced a weekly meal planner and the ability to easily share recipes (subscribe to my favourite recipes).

They say they have an iPad and iPhone version in the works too.

The Keynote, Pages and Numbers videos are particularly interesting as these are full blown productivity apps. Make no mistake about it, this is a replacement for the soon to be old school of Mac OS, Windows and GNU/Linux. And not a moment too soon.

It's a “balloon race”. The higher a bubble, the greater the evidence for its effectiveness. But the supplements are only effective for the conditions listed inside the bubble. You might also see multiple bubbles for certain supplements. These is because some supplements affect a range of conditions, but the evidence quality varies from condition to condition. For example, there’s strong evidence that Green Tea is good for cholesterol levels. But evidence for its anti-cancer effects is conflicting.

There was a segment covering the topic on CBS's 60 minutes Sunday night, including an interview with K.R. Sridhar, which can watch online here.

Astronomy, from Copernicus on, has transformed our view of the place of the earth in the heavens. Darwin changed forever our view of the status of humanity. Neuroscience is likely to challenge our very understanding of what it is to be a person.

But this is something else, amazing:

For seven years the man lay in a hospital bed, showing no signs of consciousness since sustaining a traumatic brain injury in a car accident. His doctors were convinced he was in a vegetative state. Until now.

To the astonishment of his medical team, the patient has been able to ­communicate with the outside world after scientists worked out, in effect, a way to read his thoughts.

They devised a technique to enable the man, now 29, to answer yes and no to simple questions through the use of a hi-tech scanner, monitoring his brain activity.

To answer yes, he was told to think of playing tennis, a motor activity. To answer no, he was told to think of wandering from room to room in his home, visualising everything he would expect to see there, creating activity in the part of the brain governing spatial awareness.

His doctors were amazed when the patient gave the correct answers to a series of questions about his family.

Iraq's Ministry for Human Rights will file a lawsuit against Britain and the US over their use of depleted uranium bombs in Iraq, an Iraqi minister says.

… bombed the country with nearly 2,000 tons of depleted uranium bombs during the early years of the Iraq war. Atomic radiation has increased the number of babies born with defects in the southern provinces of Iraq.

I've always enjoyed this. Not so much the technical tinkering, but the practice of helping people to get on with what they're using a computer for in the first place. In fact it's always frustrated me that people like myself are needed in the first place. And even more so the dismissive attitude of so many of the technologists and computer geeks who frequent the technical forums that I myself gain much of my knowledge from. For them computers are not the problem, people are just bumbling idiots. Rather than design computers around people they think people should mold themselves to the way a computer works.

True to form many of them are apocalyptic about Apple's new iPad. They see it as a toy, nothing more than an oversized iPod, even an affront to their computing prowess. How can one get serious computing done without a filing system, multiple windows or a mouse they cry! ((The truth is multi-touch input is infinitely more powerful than a mechanical pointing device.)) Fraser Speirs aptly refers to this as Future Shock.

Ultimately the iPad represents a couple of things to me: on the negative side it's potentially the beginning of the end of the free and open internet as we know it. On the positive side it is almost certainly the beginning of the end of the desktop metaphor. And not a day too soon.

Someone has finally got serious about creating a powerful computer that's easy to use.

Paypal has blocked donations to the Arrest Blair campaign, supposedly on the basis that it "encourages illegal activity" (conducting a lawful citizens arrest of a rich and powerful figure apparently being illegal in the eyes of PayPal). It's a blatantly political move - and its not the first time they've done it. Last week, they froze the assets of Wikileaks - a site which encourages and publishes anonymous leaks in the public interest, and is credited with "produc[ing] more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years".

When making a purchase, online shoppers are confronted with a validation check that requires them to supply a password—in addition to the standard security code that is on the card itself—in order to prove that they are the real owner of a credit card. … Some of the credit card companies take advantage of [this system] by wrapping their implementations of the validation system in draconian terms of service that force users to agree to accept full liability for credit card fraud.

As email subscribers will have already noticed I've also overhauled the mailing list system, switching to MailChimp. Note that this will now come as a weekly digest instead of individual emails.

While switching I was reminded of how many friends and family I've surreptitiously subscribed over the years. Not the most polite thing to do. Honestly, unless you really want to receive these emails, please unsubscribe. There are other more modern ways to follow a blog these days anyway.

In the mean time you might like to check out another website overhaul I've been working on recently.