Nail-in-the-glans of scientific accuracy and reliable public information (BBC News), have once again lurched forward with their helmet visors fully occluded by their own sweat, and their engines set to maximum stupid.
Julian Siddle makes a brilliant job of de-accuratifiying* the recent discovery of evidence for water vapour in the atmosphere of a newly discovered extra-solar planet. I’ve emboldened the factual parts to highlight the conflicts between them, and the headline under which this heavily diluted science-piss is squatting, namely:
“Water found in hot planet’s orbit”
Let me grid-reference the shit stains on this headline.
1) Water was not found, EVIDENCE for water was found.
2) It was not found in its orbit, the evidence was found in its atmosphere. This headline implies that the planet is leaving a trail of water behind it as it hurtles through space.
Now okay, maybe he’s trying to whip up some interest in the article by realising that dumbing it down also has the added side effect of making it sound much more significant than it actually is, but not only do I feel cheated, but the headline is simply scientifically inaccurate and LAZY.
Fuck you, Julian Siddle. Seriously. Fuck you.
*Those who know me will realise that this is linguistic play, I know it’s not a word before I start getting emails about that.
My dearly not-beloved sludge-filled news drip-tray [the BBC] has recently point out this delightful set of stats published my our Mighty Search Overlords. Orginial article is here for anyone who cares. And for those who don’t, but lack the energy to click that link, I’ve screenied the comparison below, with an explanatory summary.
“What do Sarah Palin, Facebook and Euro 2008 have in common?They are all on the list of the top ten fastest rising queries on Google during 2008.The search engine has published its year-end Zeitgeist, the tool which reveals what internet users are searching for.”
If I paste the two trite summaries, you’ll see what is upsetting me:
One for normal people...
..and for the UK - Quality British Fail in action.
Now…is it just me who thinks that it’s a BIT sad that most of these can be accessed directly by simply adding ‘.com’ on the end? Who the fuck Googles ‘hotmail’? Surley we’ve all had a Hotmail account since we were 7 years old. Googling for Yahoo is like Yahooing for Google. And eBay? For fuck’s sake.
The worst crime there is Googling for YouTube.
I think our Mighty Search Overlords should add these search terms to a blacklist, so that people entering them may have their IP traced and be neutered on the spot.
I wimped out of leaping onto the 2.1 bandwagon. My iPhone shipped with 2.0.2 and I wasn’t experiencing any of the call dropping/3G performance issues so why bother? And besides, I’d jailbroken the bastard anyway and I lost patience waiting for the hackers to catch up.
Then 2.2 pops up with some notable (but all-the-same useless features). Some reported fixes relating to problems that I wasn’t experiencing (again). So why bother?
I was spending my days starting at the WinPwn page waiting for those guys to catch up. There was no activity on their site [yes, I'd forgotten about QuickPWN].
My main concern was losing my beautiful and precious theme (a custom mash-up of icons from one, and a background from another).
A couple of weeks ago, I decided to take the plunge, and well, I’m happy.
Of course, as soon as I’d flashed the new 2.2 from iTunes, things went back to boring default iPhone L&F, but magically, as soon as I’d installed WinterBoard, my custom theme instantly returned! Subsequently reinstalling all of my old apps from Cydia showed that I needn’t have worried, everything retained it’s settings and after the flash, I was happily running on 2.2, with none of my customisations lost. The whole process took less than 30 minutes and was entirely painless.
And my homescreen looks like this:
My Homescreen
Well vaguely anyway. The operator logo now says my name. The icon theme is ‘MacCiti’, and the background is nicked from one of the ‘Abstract Wallpapers *’ packs from Cydia.
Another one of Chet’s annoyingly fascinating spams.
FTA: “It’s worth sitting through the annoying “in a world…” narration to see the structure of an immense colony of ants. The scientists poured 10 tons of concrete down into anabandoned ant colony, waited for it to harden, and then spent weeks excavating the results.”
Original ‘tubage here:
Bloody bonkers.
PS:You may be wondering about their use of strikethrough in the explanation there. Well the article follows on:
“During the construction of the giant structure, it’s estimated that the ants hauled 40 tons of dirt out of the holes, the equivalent of building the Great Wall of China. (via cyn-c)
Update: The ant colony was not abandoned. Nice work, scientists!”
I’m buying one of these in a couple of days. Question is, do I cough up a full €699 for it from Dijkman and have the pleasure of buying it from a shop and having it in my hands, or order it online from Feedback.nl and suffer the pain of a delay of several days. Should be €669 with delivery.
Fuck knows. Anyway. Next post on here should be the unboxing pics. Standby.
Ever wondered what would happen if you decided to wave your hand in the beam produced at CERN?
Well, a little known fact is that the Russians ‘accidentally’ performed this experiment some years ago, and the results are truly quite bizarre. Keep in mind that the beam was travelling VERY slowly compared to CERN’s, so maybe this chap got off rather lightly. Check out the article here. Many thanks to Doug for this.
Well I had a colleague move upstairs to a spanky new office. I lucked out and moved to his previous location. A nice snug corner right next to some enourmous windows offering a direct view over central Amsterdam, and the World Trade Centre – check out this panorama.
However, it appears that this comes at a price. Have a look at this ‘Point-of-view’ image I’ve just taken. This is what I’m looking at right now. The effect lasts from as soon as I arrive in the morning, until about midday, when the bastard star disappears out of view. The effect is only going to get worse in winter due to the low sun.
Due to the bizarre lack of action (and apparent promise of continued inaction) by the UK government regarding Phorm, the EU has apparently decided to wade in with an actual threat of a good, old fashioned bout of violent legal sodomy.
FTA: “The European Commission has sent a message to the British government, and it reads something like this: “If you don’t deal with Phorm, we will.”
Well hats off to Johnny Foreigner in this instance, I say. If BT decided to spaz less wad of paying that lanky wank-pot Kris Marshall to be in their ‘cover-sub-standard-product-up-with-actor-from-shit-family-sitcom’ ads, then perhaps they wouldn’t feel the need to piss into the open grave of what were once, apprently effective data protection laws in order to line his filthy pockets.
Thank you Chet, for pointing out this epic fail from the BBC News site.
Assuming they’re not actually advocating the formation of some kind of Nazi Joy Divsion-style organisation, we believe that they had actually forgotten to insert the word ‘investigation’.
It seems that the Home Office were inundated with applications from convicted rapists offering their services, and have kindly requested that the BBC update their headline.
