The BBC reports that remarkably well preserved fossils of tiny winged dinosaurs may be the missing link to resolve the debate over the origin of birds. But the real question is: will anybody believe the fossils are genuine?

As recently as 1999 gullible paleontologists put up $80,000 for an alleged winged dinosaur fossil from China that was featured on the cover on National Geographic. The only real problem was that the fossil was a fake.

Now the BBC ominously reports that,

We drove between parched brown fields and passed low mud-brick farms. An icy wind blew from Siberia to the north. The farmers buttoned up their coats against the chill as they gathered every last scrap of vegetation in the hope that they could keep their donkeys alive through another winter. Two years of drought have also meant these are impoverished people.

But as we came to the little village of Sihetun, there was a subtle difference. There were a few modern villa-style homes and some of the young men were riding new Japanese motorbikes. Clearly, there was an additional source of income here.

With the additional source of income coming from selling the many fossils being removed from nearby hills. We’ll see if these new “missing link” fossils stand up to scrutiny over the long term (and personally the whole story has a “too good to be true” feel to it).

Cleaning out my e-mail inbox today, I noticed an online acquaintance who is what I like to call an atheist fundamentalist sent me a link to this anti-religious page. The page puts forth several claims that religion is, in fact, a negative influence, but simply demonstrate’s the author’s complete lack of understanding basic principles of logic and of statistics (assuming any of these claims are even based on real studies — and given the lack of documentation, that’s a doubtful proposition).

Reading this page I am reminded of a classic way of pointing out a statistical/logical fallacy — namely that cities that have large numbers of churches also have very high numbers of arrests for crimes such as prostitution. Of course the real variable being measured by this comparison is population. The author of the anti-religious page has also mistaken correlation for causation and committed numerous other errors as well.

The morons at Interplay did this with Starfleet Command and they’ve decided to do it again with Starfleet Command II — the game ships with a bonus disk, but the only way to get the bonus disk is to pre-order through the Interplay site. What, the money I spent at Best Buy just isn’t good enough for them?

Normally I completely detest software piracy — people are always offering to burn game CDs for me or ask me to burn some for them, and I always politely decline. I make an exception for this sort of “not available anywhere else” nonsense.

A couple years ago graphic chip maker 3dfx was so far ahead of its competitors that people often used 3dfx and 3d accelerator cards as synonymous. Its competitors tended to put out propriety chips that didn’t work well (if they worked at all) and had numerous problems. 3dfx was on top of the world and looked, to me at least, untouchable.

This week, of course, 3dfx went out of business with rival chip maker and reining 3d king Nvidia acquiring the only thing of value 3dfx had left — its intellectual property in the form of patents and some physical assets. What happened?

3dfx got greedy. Rather than simply turn out butt kicking graphics chips, 3dfx listened to the suits who were whispering in their ears that they could make even more money if they cut out the middlemen who put their chips on cards with different configurations and went into the business of exclusively producing graphic cards with their chips. So where once you could buy a 3d card with a 3dfx chip from any number of companies, now the only place to buy such cards was from 3dfx. Unfortunately for the company, it sucked at getting graphics cards out almost as much as it excelled at creating state-of-the-art graphics.

Nvidia positioned itself simply as a graphics chip company and won. Why deal with all the headaches of different card configurations and technical support for every iteration — sell the chips to third parties and let them deal with that hassle (and conversely, let competition among card makers give consumers a much wider range of options than Nvidia could possibly support on its own).

In addition, Nvidia embraced Microsoft’s Direct 3D while 3dfx’s Voodoo cards supported its own Glide system exclusively. Early versions of Direct 3D were horrendous (and some argue the API has improved little since then), but hardware companies ignore Microsoft at their own peril

Of course hindsight is always 20/20 and it’s always that easy to tell the difference between a boneheaded move and passing up a golden business opportunity, but everything 3dfx was doing was so far removed from its bread and butter graphic chip business that it would really have been a shock if the company had been able to pull it off.

There’s also a lesson in there about just how quickly a company can go from market leader to dead meat. A lot of people thought 3dfx was making the wrong decisions, but nobody to my knowledge suspected they’d be out of business in only two years, much less from Nvidia which prior to its TNT chip produced cards that were generally considered inferior at best.