I spent some of the longish Easter break thinking about Dark Matter — as you do.

The reason is, I have a theory about all this. But before you duck for cover, let me explain.

Physicists claim that the universe punches above its weight. It behaves as if it were much heavier than it appears to be. To make allowances for this the boffins describe the chunk they can’t see as “Dark Matter”. It’s a bit like calling a transcendant intelligence “God” — but don’t tell them that.

Of course, this begs the question of how they weighed the universe in the first place. Does a weighing machine exist hidden away in the basement of the Physics department at some university? It would have to be bigger than the universe itself, of course, and it couldn’t weigh itself. Presumably the scales would have to be designated Dark Matter.

Anyway, they obviously think they’re on to something here.

Not quite. I remember an ancient text by the Buddha in which he says that only one-quarter of the universe is made known to us, the rest is hidden. Hmm, sound like Dark Matter to me. Sorry lads.

Now — are you still with me? — if we remove the word “Dark” from the equation we’re left with “Matter”. Did the Buddha think of the remaining three-parts as matter? What if it were software of some kind?

Say you were trying to show someone on a blog how to code a particular action — putting up a picture, for example. Every time you post the code the software converts it, usually into a blank space with a symbol or two dangling from it. That’s because you wouldn’t have fully completed the code. If you had, your student at the other end would get a picture instead of an explanation.

Hold that image in your head as we move on.

Quantum physicists say that if you have twin particles — presumably electrons — and you change one of them, the other changes too … wait for it … even if it’s on the other side of the universe!

How do they know that? They’re magicians, of course. Seriously. Their latest theory is called “M Theory”, the “m” standing for Magic and Mystery. I’m not making this up.

Anyway, you see where I’m going with all this.

Let’s assume Dark Matter is software or its mystical equivalent. Every time you wish for something, the “software” tries to convert it into reality. Remember the time you wanted something very badly : “Please land me a big job and a mansion in the country. I promise I’ll be good from now on.”? Fat chance.

Actually, it’s said you often get a rough approximation of what you ask for. That’s because, like the code, you won’t have framed it specifically enough, and you may even have changed your mind halfway through the process. Presumably that explains why camels often appear instead of horses.

Einstein mentioned the fact in his Relativity Theory that human observers affect the processes they’re observing. In other words they often see what they want to see. Take the human genome. These genes can only be seen by an electron microscope, which only shows what it’s been programmed to show. So, if we are set on finding “genes” we’ll find genes — and they will look like some fantasy picture by a splendid artist — a double helix, let’s say.

Physicists always look for complexity, that’s the way they’re made. So we have one dizzying set of particles after another, like the quark, which used to be soft cheese and is now a fundamental building block of the universe. The moon could be made of green cheese after all, if we want it enough.

Once — like Einstein and the Quantum chappies — you start breaking down matter, the whole of science reveals itself to be a sham. I’m not talking about technology which probably works on the “cosmic ordering” principle. Man dreams about flying like a bird, and decades later the Tiger Moth appears, later still the Jumbo jet. Not quite what we had in mind, but close. Teleology lives!

Back full circle and someone now claims to have found Dark Matter, neatly tidied away in some unused corner of the cosmos. It had to be. The mathematical model required it.

Or could it be the universe gave us what we wanted? The only question is, what on earth will we do with it?

Be careful what you wish for — you may get it.

Have you noticed the increase in pingback comment spam recently? Our mod panels are full of the stuff.

Much of it seems to come via a gentleman by the name of Elliott Back, who is listed as having a legitimate web design and software business, and writes a blog about Cornell University.

All very respectable, you might think. Then why write the kind of software that monitors keywords in other people’s posts, presumably through Technorati, then scrapes a section of the post automatically onto an untreated Wordpress install and sends a pingback to the unfortunate author?

Some sites now lift whole articles for reprint, without permission. Inevitably, the posts are surrounded by great wodges of Adsense blocks.

This is what his website has to say :

I’m not some city slicker looking for a fast buck, or a country boy who’s never seen w-e-b-twooo-point-oh. I do what I like, and I do it well. Whether it’s branding, web presence, search engine optimization, blogging, coding, service-oriented architecture, java, php, facebook development, rich internet applications, mobile developement, web services, thick-client guis, debugging, q&a, testing, or documentation, I’m your man.

He’s obviously a man of talent who could be a useful presence around the web, especially for bespoke pieces of software for particular tasks. Why then the dark side, ripping off other folk’s work for personal profit?

Oliver White at Knee High to a Grasshopper has a word for this flighty freelance :

“People like those who use the plugin that Elliott Back distributes are destroying the web, site owner by site owner. Its impact may be low, but it is those small-time publishers that make the internet such a diverse and wonderous place that it is. Tell me, why the f**k do you get to repeat my hard-worked content for your own f***ing gain? And without my permission?”

He now has many imitators, but his name crops up time and again in the pingbacks. These are all caught in the spam trap, but by then the content appears as duplicate material in the search engines.

Of course, quoting a segment of another’s post with link back is standard procedure on the web, but only as part of a freshly written piece which develops the original’s argument. It’s the machine-like mass production aspect of his method that makes it so pernicious.

Has anyone successfully scuppered this software’s ability to scrape their sites?

Update : Elliott Back has emailed me to say, “I wrote a plugin to import RSS items as blog posts because I wanted to aggregate my and some families members’ blogs into a single feed. I released it, spammers picked up on it, and now it’s killed but some people are still where did they get it from?) using it for spam. If you find spam sites, please DCMA them and get rid of them for good.”

There I’ve said it.

No point in beating about the bush. This is a great product.

It may have its imperfections, of course — which one of us hasn’t — but as a piece of monumentally complex software, it surely stands supreme.

I know of all the complaints that portmanteau products like Microsoft Office are much too big, too complex, and contain hundreds of features that most people don’t need and never will use. But that’s the nature of the beast. Just try using Google Documents and Spreadsheets for anything other than simple projects. And you need to be online to use them.

I’ve had Office 2007 for a couple of months now, and while I haven’t yet got round to trying out every program bundled in there, I have to say I’m very impressed. I came to it directly from Office 2000, so missed the intermediate experience of the 2003 version.

At first, the so-called Ribbon feature was a bit baffling, like all supposedly intuitive controls are. But once I found my way around the different groupings of features and learned what all the icons stood for, I began to revel in its clean simplicity and ease of use — I’m usually wary of geeks being “intuitive”, because more often than not, they’re not.

However, Office 2007 is a triumph of design and utility (my favourite word). Nowadays, we expect software to be over-engineered simply to get ahead of the competition. And, yes, it is. Features aren’t everything, naturally, although in today’s world of cheap memory, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t have them, especially in a productivity suite that is expected to meet all criteria in a fully-functioning business environment.

I believe Word 2007 to be the best word processor around now, and Excel 2007 to be irreplaceable. Smaller features stand out too. Like most folk I don’t need the massive clout — and expense — of Adobe’s Photoshop for my image handling. But I do want something better than the cheaper programs out there. One surprise in Office 2007 is the Microsoft Office Picture Handler which comes bundled in with the suite. It really is a doddle to use and has all the functionality I need (in combination with my non-Microsoft DTP program), without the heart-stopping overload of some other applications.

So, well done Microsoft. It’s not often you hear that, is it?