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.

“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.

Isn’t 6 years old a little young for someone to be undertaking a graphics editor post at a national rag?

Check out this screenie linked from this retarded article.

(Thanks Doug for tip off).

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.

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!”

Fuck knows. Anyway. Next post on here should be the unboxing pics. Standby.

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.

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.

Think I need shades.

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.

Article here.

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’.

Actual article here.

[Update]

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.

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