This is the lesson I learned watching the new Star Wars movie last night. "You're either with me, or you're my enemy." "Only a Sith thinks in absolutes." George's Sith Lord Master must be Darth Cheney.

I agree with those who've said this last movie was better than the previous two. It finally gives us what we've been expecting all along from these three prequels - it shows how and why Anakin turns to the Dark Side and becomes Darth Vader, it shows where Luke and Leia come from and how they end up where they are at the start of the original Star Wars (part IV), and it shows the origin of the Empire. Mostly what made this one more enjoyable than the previous two was that throughout it you are reminded of events and situations from the original trilogy.

The previous two movies only laid the groundwork for this movie, and probably could have been compressed into 30 minutes of this one.

Of course the dialogue and romantic chemistry is poor, as usual.

As for Anakin's conversion, I get the feeling we're supposed to buy this a logical thing. He's basically got three reasons for going Dark, one being his arrogant, impatient petulance, the second being a personal fear that he hopes to defeat, the third being a desire to do what's best for the galaxy.

The third one is hard to swallow. The logic the bad guy gives to convince Anakin that going against the Jedi is a good thing doesn't really work. I'm trying not to spoil the plot, but basically Anakin is led to believe the Jedi are doing something bad, to convince him to help the bad guy do the exact same bad thing. Maybe his annoyance with the Jedi is what leads him to it, but once it was all over, most of his reasons for going with the bad guy are pretty obviously invalid. I guess the Dark Force actively corrupts someone's mind once they give in, and makes them stupid.

The site ToryScum has some great photos of billboards for the UK Conservative Party that have been, uh, "modified". These billboards are just begging to be hacked. They feature a large handwritten message that emphasizes some fear-mongering aspect of the Conservative platform, for example "It's not racist to limit immigration", with the tagline "Are you thinking what we're thinking?", and plenty of whitespace.

There are some amusing modifications on that site, but what I'd like to see is thought bubbles coming out of the "Are you thinking what we're thinking", with suggestions of what Conservatives might be trying to imply without coming right out and saying it. The Economist has a good article on this "dog whistle politics", and a long piece which (for subscribers only, unfortunately) explores the facts of the immigration issue.

Of course, as a "bloody foreigner" I can't vote - not that I'm complaining, in spite of the substantial chunk of my paycheck that Tony and Gordon swallow every month. The "Who you should vote for" survey suggests the Lib Dems or the Greens match my views most closely (although I really don't give a toss about fox hunting, and the survey doesn't ask any questions about the environment). For those outside the UK, the Liberal Democrats are the official centrist party, but the political pigeonholes are a bit out of whack these days. Thanks to Tony Blair, the most business-friendly party in national politics is the one called "Labour" (which is a classic example of dry British "humour").

I would be sorely tempted to vote Lib Dem if I could, but they haven't got much of a shot, although they do much better than all of the third parties in the US combined. So I would be afraid the Tories would get in, and I learned my lesson about refusing to vote for the lesser of two evils on principle in 2000. In any case, Blair is supposed to step down in favor of Brown sometime in the next term, so in theory a vote for Labour is a vote for Brown, maybe, eventually, if they ever really do pry Tony's fingers off the controls.

As with any American who spends much time abroad, I occasionally get stick about how ignorant Americans are. Seemingly every European has a story of some appalling example of ignorance about geography, politics, or history on the part of an American they've met ("You're from Denmark? Oh, that's the capital of Holland, isn't it!") Never mind that most Europeans have a similar ignorance about geography in the other hemisphere ("You're from Tennessee? That's next to Texas, isn't it!"), in general American awareness of what's going on outside of the country's borders is feeble.

But a while back I witnessed an example of British ignorance that I'm now able to wield in defense in these situations, at least when dealing with English critics. I was watching a game show the other day, and an (English) contestant was asked, "Who is the head of the Church of England?" Her answer: "The Pope".

Now, our non-British readers, can be excused for not getting the seriousness of this error, but for several centuries saying something like that in this country was the kind of thing that got people hung, beheaded, pulled apart by horses, or burnt at the stake, sometimes all at once. And it's not like the whole thing with the English and the Pope is an obscure bit of trivia, it is the fundamental theme of several centuries of Enlish history.

Imagine an American saying that the head of state of the USA was the Queen of England and you get an idea of what's wrong with this.

Anyway, this came to my mind with the recent Royal Wedding. There were a number of people who, in person on the street interviews, objected to the idea of a divorced heir apparent marrying a divorced woman because of tradition and, you know, someday he's going to be King and the head of the Church! (In case you were wondering about the answer to the above game show question.)

This always makes me laugh. I really want to ask these people whether they know why the Church of England was founded in the first place? The answer, for those of any nationality who are ignorant to this bit of English history, is that the King of England wanted to get a divorce so he could marry his mistress. The pope wouldn't let him, so he started his own church and made himself the head of it.

Charles is a traditional guy after all.

Apparently I'm "mild mannered" Abe.

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My Mom has whipped up some cafepress items with the definition of kief, as per my etymology page. These are sure to become a hit with hipsters around the world. Mugs, t-shirts, bags, bbq aprons, and, sure to be a top seller, "Etymology of Kief" throw-pillows. Get your Kief Swag today!!

Check how to start a startup out, it's by Paul Graham, who also wrote about what makes a great hacker. I've also recently read The Art of the Start, a great book for anyone thinking about starting a business, especially a tech one.

Most bloggers have missed the most useful points of the recent eyetrack study. I've seen a number of blog items on the eyetrack study recently published by Poynter. But checking it out this morning, I've found much more interesting things in it than the "people look at the top left of the page first" angle that most people are talking up. Granted, that's the angle mentioned at the top of the story.

Reading the article and looking at kief.com, I realize my new design is an atrocity of unreadability. Some key points:

• Headline sizes affect whether people actually read what's on the page, or skim it. Big page headlines, and article headlines significantly larger than the blurbs, encourage people to scan the page rather than read the details.
• My biggest crime is the groovy lines I put around the headline of each article. Even underlining headlines discourages people from reading the text beneath. Looking at it, the way I have the header and footer blocks of each post indented, although I find the look pleasing, is jarring for reading through the stuff on the page. This is the nastiest effect of my new design, I think.
• The first few words of the blurb are critical; they determine if someone is going to read the whole blurb. Of course it's no news that the lede needs to have a hook, but on the web it looks like the hook needs a sharper barb than in print.
• Shorter paragraphs are better. We're talking one or two sentences each
• Summary paragraphs at the beginning of an article are a winnder
• Interesting words or phrases can draw a reader's attention to areas of the page that wouldn't normally get looked at:

We observed a high number of eye fixations on a headline about clothing maker FCUK, which was placed far down on a page with a long list of headlines and blurbs

People do scroll down a page looking for interesting bits, but need something special that hooks them. One point is that although many people would probably try visual tricks to highlight things they want people to look at, like changing the color, using a big font size, or underlining it, but the other findings of the study suggest that would actually be counter-productive. The key is to make the actual words used compelling enough that people will read them.

Some other things I want to think about:

• Right side navigation actually gets people to spend more time looking at it
• Ads work better on the left side than the left
• Ads in the middle of the text work best (this is for attention, I don't know if they affect click-throughs)
• Separating ads with lines or even whitespace decreases the chance people will look at them. Not sure how you would do this without confusing people about what's advertising and what's editorial, this sounds like a false "win".
• People look at text ads much more than banners

So I need to take a stab at making my design more readable. I probably won't get around to it soon, since my plate is overflowing both at work and home, and we've got a trip to Turkey next week.

When I have more time, I need to check out this tutorial by Jaza on how to modify Drupal to make a nice organization system.

I hate, hate, hate commuting in London. But even so, Underground maps are still cool.

The tube map is a classic icon, although it's well known to have no relationship to the aboveground geography of London. As Bill Bryson said,

An out-of-town visitor using Mr.Beck's map to get from, say, Bank Station to Mansion House would quite understandably board a Central Line train to Liverpool Street, transfer to the Circle Line and continue for another five stops to Mansion House and emerge 200 yards down the street from where he started.

Owen Massey has put together a thorough listing of Tube maps. I like this geographically accurate one, which morphs the existing map to position the stations and trains in the right places, but even coolor is this one which overlays that same geographically accurate map onto a satellite photo.

Also cool is this interactive, 3-D map that morphs between the standard, current tube map, a geographically accurate version, and the original 1933 map.

I was turned on to these by an article in Londonist.

You are the 1926 Stingemore Map! This small and compact map is fairly geographically accurate, but unfortunately there are no places of interest, although the river makes its first appearence. Fishing anyone?

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This is a familiar story:

Even the best working environments can become unhealthy if the corporate culture sickens and dies after repeated attacks from within. If management does not realize what a treasure they have in their corporate culture, they may stand idly by while new executives uproot and destroy it. Some executives may not even recognize the power of the corporate culture, perhaps because they had little part in creating it.

It's not always a clear cut thing. Sometimes new management, with fresher viewpoints, is a good thing. Growing companies go through phases. It's rare for a company of 30 people to have the same feel as it did when it had 10, and even moreso when it becomes 150. Usually the phases have semi-violent transition periods where a series of "old hands" move on, often muttering about how things have gone downhill. Things might really be going bad, or it might just be that the changes that come with growth make the company less appealing to the people who thrived being part of a tightly knit startup.

I've joined several companies shortly after a wave of people had left, and have so far been pretty lucky. In one case the exodus was triggered by an investment which changed the nature of the company's business to a more corporate clientele than it had before. I've since seen a posting on a wiki which described this as the end of the glory days for the company, but those of us in the new guard had a great time and formed strong bonds.

Of course, this isn't to say discontent and hemoraging staff is always a healthy thing; I've avoided joining several companies which smelled of decay or disaster. And one of the companies I've worked for has since gone through exactly what David describes in the post I linked to above; new senior management who came from larger companies and had no idea how to manage a small, dynamic team. Unfortunately they snowed the managers who had been around, at least long enough to lose 90% of the top talent in the team in question.

That's not to say that the company won't recover, and replenish its ranks with an enthusiastic and bright new guard, but this time around it wasn't a case of constructive growth turning out the people who aren't at home in a larger, more professionalized company. The difference is in understanding and nurturing a positive culture.