Apathy Sketchpad

I’m not particularly patriotic. It always strikes me as a bit irrational to be proud of things you have no control over, such as where your parents were immediately before you (or, even more irrationally, they) were born. But I am very much of the belief that if you’re going to do something then you should do it right, particularly when doing it wrong isn’t actually any easier. As such, I always notice when the Union Jack is upside down. According to what I learned in cub scouts, flying the flag upside down is an old distress signal that only British people would spot.

(I know there are people already scrolling down to post a comment like “oh, hang around on a lot of ships, do you?” but the fact is that it can be called either Jack or Flag no matter where it is, because, well, it’s not even the official flag of the UK. There isn’t an official flag of the UK. And so there are no particular rules governing what I can call it, as long as people know what I mean.)

Sometimes I even see very poor attempts at Union Jacks that are totally symmetrical so it doesn’t matter if they’re upside down. That’s even worse. That says “I’m patriotic enough to have a flag but not enough to get a correct one or work out which way up it goes”.

Today I walked past the BBC building in Manchester. They have two big flags with the BBC logo on. One of these was upside down. It still said “BBC”, of course, but the Bs were very clearly upside down, and I vaguely wondered if there was trouble.

I’ve noticed that the search strings (i.e., what you type into Google or similar) people use to visit sites I run frequently have nothing at all to do with the site or its contents. For example in the last couple of weeks, I’ve had people arrive via. “people who have multiple religions”, “aa9b493913c7fa93440c96e2b97f4657ac066b0870c5f11fcb2de464244fed91952e8c9b04d2dcd2 1d6aafc23d3d8ead749f907b1a67af09c736d8c68304b1a1518492618b4d0e7aea650ac34593bfcb7 b18c38d3af9f6e4ebe10e20a952444d38a1eadb2ae63c4942745740e547568ead860a2906781e44″ (I’ve added a couple of spaces to that one), “meaning of idolate”, and a few other things I’m sure I’ve never mentioned.

I use Google Analytics for my webstats. It’s fantastically powerful, but it’s aimed more at businesses. It’s designed to help your site be profitable, and I’m given to understand it’s very good at that, but I use it more for seeing what parts of the site are proving popular and how people are finding them. For example, once a day or so someone looks up Dave Hitt on Google and I get a hit from that because my Dave Hitt Is A Twat page is the second Google result, except that for some reason I can’t work out, on Tuesday (the 22nd) I got 17 hits this way, and a further seven the next day. I see these strange exponential curves drop into my traffic periodically, such as the time I got twice as many hits one day because someone on b3ta linked to my Reverse Creationism cartoon, so I’m assuming that Hitt managed to worm his way into some publicity that day. Thanks to me and the great democracy of Google, roughly 25 of the people he reached have now read Dave Hitt Is A Twat and therefore got a more balanced opinion.

I am actually rather pleased with that: Hitt is almost universally used as a source by the anti-smoking-ban lobby (who, in the vein of the two abortion factions calling themselves “pro-choice” and “pro-life” as if anyone could reasonably be “anti-choice” or “anti-life”, I think I should probably refer to as the “pro-poisoning” lobby) and I like that there’s nothing he can do to stop Google showing everyone who looks him up exactly what I think of him.

But all of this is something of a precursor to my Idea. It’s an Idea which I feel sure wouldn’t work, but that doesn’t stop it being an interesting idea worthy of discussion. It’s an idea for a website, with no theme. It would have a forum, probably, and it would be organised kind of like a wiki. First, you register a fairly generic domain name; the kind that could really apply to any website, much like IGN or xkcd or elephant.co.uk have done. Then you put an introduction page up that does nothing but explain what I’m about to explain to you. Then you wait.

You also make sure your site is listed on Google. Just telling Google your site exists is generally enough to do this, but having a couple of links around the web helps too. Eventually, someone will stumble onto your page from Google, and when they do you’ll get a search string from them. Then you put up a page that addresses whatever you think that search string was looking for. So if they arrive having searched for “people who have multiple religions” you put a page up about those people, or, if they don’t exist, which I would have thought was a logical necessity but I realise that logic is not exactly one of religion’s strong suits, you put up a page about why they don’t exist. Then Google will index that page and you’ll get a little more traffic from people searching for things tangenially related to our polydeism page. Those people will also give you search strings and you add pages for those as well. Eventually you will end up with a website with a great many pages, drawing in traffic from Google. You could also drop the page with the lowest traffic, every time you add three pages, so your total content would always increase, and the average traffic per-page should also increase. (A special wiki-style CMS that logs search strings could handle most of this automatically, though obviously human input would be required to write the new content.)

This is evolution on the internet. Every page would pull in more visitors from Google, simply by increasing the amount of indexed text on your website, and the successful pages would spawn more children (as more people land on them and seed pages with search strings) and the less successful pages would die out. I wonder what kind of website you’d end up with.

You might end up with a very general Wikipedia style website. Or you might end up with a very thighly-focussed site dealing in great depth with one topic.

Or, you might never get more than ten hits. You just can’t say, on that crazy Internet. But I’d like to try it, one day.

When I get an obviously automated email, I tend not to bother reading the copperplate pleasantries attached to its head and tail ends, and skip straight to the important looking bit in the middle. I just got this email from Mircosoft:

Dear Valued Microsoft Customer,

We received a request to remove you from our Microsoft promotional email listandMicrosoft Partner promotional email list. Please confirm that this information is accurate by clicking the “Please process this request” link below. If you believe you have received this email message in error, please click the “Please ignore this request” link below.

Please process this request: http://www.microsoft.com/unsubscribe/confirmation.aspx?lots-of-tedious-get-parameters

Please ignore this request: http://www.microsoft.com/unsubscribe/confirmation.aspx?lots-of-other-equally-tedious-get-parameters

At any time in the future, if you wish to change your preference for how Microsoft contacts you, you can click the “Manage Your Profile” link on the Microsoft.com home page.

Please do not reply to this email as it has been automatically generated.

Thank you,
Microsoft Corporation

So what I saw, thanks to a combination of this technique and Microsoft’s rather opaque and frankly bizarre choice of words, was a short communication that read “Please process this request. Please ignore this request.”

“Please ignore this request“? What kind of an instruction is that?

According to the Metro, “the records of 100,000 innocent youngsters are now being kept on a ‘sinister’ DNA database”. Perhaps a molecular biochemist with a passing interest in Latin etymology could tell them why this cannot possibly be true.

Facebook allows anyone who wants to to buy little “flyers”, which it then displays to anyone in the approprate network on a random basis. The Metro informs me that the Labour deputy-leadership contest is being fought in no small part on facebook. The other day, it gave me this one:

There are a number of things wrong with it. Firstly the punctuation and composition of the headline. Secondly, it implies, using no fewer than sixteen (and probably twenty-six) question marks, that there exists any uncertaintly about who will be the next Prime Minister. But mostly, it is blatant false advertising.

If you click the flyer, it takes you to Labour’s “Leadership Contest” homepage, which is adorned with a big ol’ picture of Gordon Brown. This page carries a link to what appears to be a list of candidate. Whether one item can constitute a list is a matter for either philosophers or linguists, depending on a matter of semantics (or, perhaps more practically, whether you are a philosopher or a linguist), but I’m damn sure it can’t constitute a decision. There is, as everyone knows, only one candidate. So how the hell do Labour think they can offer me “the chance to decide the next Prime Minister of Great Britain”?

And if they can’t make a flyer without getting every single aspect of it dead wrong, how can I expect them to run an entire country? My God, it’s like having the contestants on The Apprentice running the country sometimes…

Here’s a headline that’s amusing if you deliberately misinterpret it:

Tories ‘out of touch’ on grammars

I can’t be bothered digging out the old template and doing it on the mouse. I’d much rather draw it and scan it. If it doesn’t fit with the others, screw it, why should it?

Earlier today I went to the pub to meet a friend. I was a few minutes late, but he’d said he’d perhaps be “a bit late”. He turned up fully one hour late, to the wrong pub, and then texted my housemate, whom he hadn’t invited, to explain this. After I’d left. Having assumed I wasn’t going to have finished having dinner yet.

For the record, I’ve set http://links.apathysketchpad.com to redirect to my Google Reader shared items page. This is mostly for my benefit — the regular URL is long and unsightly — but I thought I might as well let you know in case you want to visit that page without coming via this one, or give the link to someone without having to email them, or whatever.

It has long seemed strange to me that during the last elections the Conservatives were trying to get us to vote for them by warning us that if we voted for Blair, we’d surely end up with Brown, but once we had Blair they all started calling for him to resign and let Brown take over. Brown, for his part, doesn’t think that his appointment as Prime Minister is something the British public should bother themselves voting for, but apparently he does think that who wins Celebrity Big Brother is something we should all vote for.

So in what is at best a mildly surprising turn of events, nobody wants to be Prime Minister, which is pretty reasonable considering that Blair’s spent the last year or so being accused of everything you can think of, being pestered to resign, and generally having a less than wonderful time of it. The day Blair announced his departure date every newspaper in the land started printing lists of people who might replace him but in the event only one person stood and therefore he is pretty much a certainty to win.

About half an hour after Blair made his announcement, John Prescott also resigned, which wasn’t reported much because there was never any chance that whoever succeeded Blair would keep him on, and nobody really cared given that an important person had just resigned, and in any case Prescott hadn’t seemed to do anything for as long as anyone can remember anyway, except for play Croquet, earn lots of money, sleep with his secretary, pretend to be a cowboy, and generally lounge about in his free “grace and favour” country house.

Lots of people decided to stand for the post of Deputy Prime Minister. So you see they’re smarter than they look.