The Angry Drunk

This piece of utter retar­da­tion just popped up on my radar; and, after a solid round of bash­ing my head against my key­board, I was com­pelled to com­ment. The short ver­sion is, Chris Anderson at Wired is mak­ing the argu­ment that the avail­abil­ity of enor­mous clouds of data will allow sci­en­tists to eschew the sci­en­tific method and just pull con­clu­sions from cor­re­la­tions within “the cloud.” His main argu­ment for this, Google doesn’t have a proper model of why PageRank works, but it does so, there you go.

Ars Technica pro­vides a bet­ter rebut­tal of the sci­en­tific points that I feel like writ­ing; so I highly sug­gest that you read that. But I do have some com­ments I’d like to make.

To start, why, for the love of Ahura Mazda, must every Web 2.0 dork con­flate Google with the rest of the gods damned uni­verse. First, Google is an adver­tis­ing com­pany, noth­ing more, noth­ing less. The sooner you nerds real­ize that every­thing that comes out of Google Labs is directed at cre­at­ing a pool of eyes to view those ads, the less dis­ap­pointed you’ll be when real­ity comes crash­ing down. Second,

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