Apathy Sketchpad

I don’t know if this will be of use to anyone, but nonetheless. When I get email, Google Talk alerts me. If I click the alert, I just get the message in Chrome, not the full GMail interface. This doesn’t have a button, for example, to apply a label to the message, so I wrote a bookmarklet that takes me to the equivalent page in the full interface. It’s here if you want it:

GMail

To install, drag it to your bookmarks bar. To save you having two bookmarklets, if you are viewing any other page, it will open GMail.

I’ve just read about a thing called the Dice-O-Matic. The gist is that the operator of GamesByEmail.com requires a lot of random numbers between one and six inclusive to feed his collection of online dice-games. And inevitably, people have complained that the numbers he’s used are insufficiently random.

And maybe they were, once. Originally, GamesByEmail used the pseudo-random number generator built into whatever the games are written in. Once ‘seeded’ with a starting number, such an algorithm will spit out a string of numbers which will have all the same properties as random numbers, except that if you know the seed, they’re totally reproducible (although still essentially unpredictable, much like the digits of π*). They’re generally seeded from a high-resolution timer, so this should never be a problem. They also repeat if you run it for long enough, so you should re-seed periodically. In theory, this should be fine, but you have to be very careful not to accidentally bias the selection.

Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to tell if your numbers are random enough or not. For example, some episodes of the dreary logical fallacy roadshow that is Deal Or No Deal used an Excel spreadsheet to randomise the assignment of 22 sums of money to 22 boxes — for which there are probably more sequences than there are grains of sand in the world — and the seeding was bad enough that only twelve of them arose in over forty shows. You can experience this for yourself: whether by accident or design, the Concentration mini-game in Super Mario Brothers III only ever shows players eight out of a possible 58 billion permutations of cards. The producers of Deal or No Deal switched over to drawing lots by hand.

  
xkcd’s ‘Random’ comic, which illustrates the difference between actual randomness and unpredictability, which is far more useful.

So (I infer) GamesByEmail switched to using random.org for their random numbers. Random.org link to their own story of a quiz show failing to randomise, this time costing them $100,000 in prize money (not that it brought anyone any happiness), and solve the problem of generating random numbers by means of four cheap radio antennae in Dublin, tuned into nothing in particular. The waveform of the white noise between radio stations is recorded, and the least significant bit (the last digit in binary; 0 for even numbers and 1 for odd) is recorded. Then, the stream of numbers are chunked into pairs, so 01001101 would become 01 00 11 01. 00 and 11 would be discarded as insufficiently random, and the first digits of the remaining pairs would be kept, so 01001101 gives two zeros. They throw away about 97% of the radio data, keeping only the most unpredictable bits possible. Your TV does a similar thing in reverse, when it blocks out random data and replaces it with a blue screen, while foolishly allowing Deal Or No Deal through unimpeded. It’s as near to pure randomness as you’ll get without invoking quantum theory (which states that some events in the universe are totally random, and indeed you can buy modules for your computer to generate random numbers in this way).

Of course, people still complain about the numbers from random.org. Of course they do. Random numbers, by their very nature, don’t look random. People believe in winning streaks, lucky socks, and prayer for exactly this reason. If I recall correctly, ball 44 was well known for a time in the National Lottery because it came up more than the others in the first few weeks, even though actually there were several sets of balls in use. Partly this is because humans have evolved to be shit-hot at spotting patterns, because in the wild that can stop us being killed. Natural selection favours the caveman who won’t eat the same berries that Ug, Thag and Og ate right before they died. In fact, generally people will eschew the berries after just one person dies. That’s a good plan for surviving in the wild, but it does make us spot patterns where none exist. Try it. Have random.org roll 16 virtual dice for you. I did it, and the sequence started 1155. That doesn’t look random. It had a 123 in it too. And there was only one 4. People tend to think numbers are random if they’re uniform: if I shuffled the numbers 1–6 into a random order (say, 341625), people would rather believe that was the result of six dice rolls than 115561, the first six that random.org gave me — but really the odds of getting one of every number are less than 2%.

If you encourage people to spot patterns, they can be relied upon to do so, regardless of whether the patterns exist. B F Skinner demonstrated this in pigeons in 1947. Pigeons were put in cages and fed periodically, “with no reference whatsoever to the bird’s behaviour”. At least six out of eight of them became totally convinced that they could cause food to be delivered by repeating some arbitrary motion such as turning anticlockwise. This has been replicated with humans, perhaps most famously by Derren Brown in Trick Or Treat, proving that Channel Four cater for both ends of the intellectual spectrum. Five guests were put in a room full of toys and instructed to accumulate 100 points to win a prize. In fact the points counter was controlled by two fish swimming around at random in another room (i.e., a poisson distribution). At the end of the game, four of the five guests were totally convinced they’d figured out a sure-fire way to score points. The other guest was Doctor Who. This may or may not be significant.

Random.org solved this problem by running constant statistical tests on their numbers. The numbers are expected to pass these tests most of the time — but not too often, or else that would be suspicious. GamesByEmail.com felt they needed something a bit more accessible to the kind of person who plays dice-games on the internet, so they built the brilliantly terrifying “Dice-O-Matic Mark II”. It is, in their words, “a 7 foot tall, 104 pound, dice-eating monster, capable of generating 1.3 million rolls a day”. It is literally a massive machine full of dice, which scoops them up, flashes them past a camera which notes down what numbers they show, and then flings them onto a ramp, whence they bounce back into the “pure seething violence” of the hopper full of dice ready to go round again. It runs about 90 minutes a day, and you can tell when it’s running from two rooms away. (It also uses some image processing which I found interesting because that’s what I do. If you want to read about it, visit GamesByEmail’s page.)

Ironically, I suppose, it’s technically less random than the random.org numbers were, but it’s a great PR move. After all, nobody can say it’s not a realistic simulation of dice: it is dice. But it neatly demonstrates the problem faced by people like lottery organisers: their job is to provide people with something people are practically designed not to be able to see. This may be why GamesByEmail add:

There is no doubt that I will still receive complaints about the rolls, but now I can honestly say I have done all that I can possibly do: the rolls you get are exactly as random as those you would get throwing by hand. As I promised earlier, if you donate to the site and are unhappy about the rolls, let me know and I will pull a die out of the machine, melt it flat and mail it to you, as an object lesson to the other dice.

This is a long rambling post dissecting the arguments of one Tom Vizzini with regards to swine flu. It may or may not be of interest to you, but I had to get this out of my head so that I can sleep, and to that end I’ve put it here. Read it if you want.

Andrew,

I have implied nothing. You just don’t seem to be able to read.

Nice. That’s class, right there, isn’t it? That was the response when I accused Vizzini of “[implying] that swine flu is a media-invented scare story like wifi or MMR or whatever”. Now obviously there are two sides to every story, and where one person reads clear implication another might read baseless inference, so I shall paste in the opening of Vizzini’s blogpost and let you be the judge:

Hi folks,

I am sick….sick of the swine flu. I have never seen so much hype over something so stupid.

Now I’d have said that that fairly clearly implies that swine flu is ’stupid’. A stupid thing to worry about. A silly little disease that poses no threat. Obviously I’m reading between the lines somewhat here, and you can’t really get all that from those two and a half sentences, so here’s a bit more:

The excuses have already begun. “Even if the swine virus doesn’t prove as potent as authorities first feared, that doesn’t mean the U.S. and World Health Organization overreacted in racing to prevent a pandemic, or worldwide spread, of a virus never before seen.”

Uh….yes it does. All these ‘experts’ are going to have egg on their face and now they are trying to justify scaring the crap out of your for no good reason.

photo credit: ■ Guerry

You see? His point, so he claims, is that people who wear facemasks because they’re scared of swine flu are stupid. I’ll come to that in a minute, but those people are not the same people as work for the WHO or the CDC. He’s veered off onto a tangent here and is mocking the epidemiology experts who have been working to prevent a H1N1 pandemic. That, to me, is not the action of a man who believes there is a risk of widespread infection. That is the action of a man who thinks we should let it run its course and see how many people die. He’s clearly betting on ‘not many’, and deriding people who disagree. That is an attempt to entirely debunk swine flu as a potential pandemic, and it’s simply too early to do that. Ben Goldacre refused to debunk it three times in the time it took him to write an article about how often he’s been asked to debunk it.

He may or may not have meant to imply it, but I think that he did. And given that Vizzini’s post and comments are riddled with non-standard punctuation and typos (to the point where he misspells ‘IQ’), and give the general impression that they were rushed off just as fast as he can type, it seems likely that I’ve read it more carefully than he wrote it and therefore probably the failure is on his end. Certainly he doesn’t use language in the most nuanced way I’ve ever seen. Here, for example, is a selection of his ripostes to my criticism (my emphasis):

You mean someone was so stupid that the nest [sic] they could do was make fun of a typo? Bet they were wearing a mask! … You just don’t seem to be able to read. … Run around terrified if you want to. … A mask is a very visible IQ test at this point. To me it is very much the same as people who pick a typo out of an article and use it to invalidate the article. Andrew….you failed that test. When you have to use a typo to make a point then you have run out of anything intelligent to offer. … Frankly Andrew you suck at debate. If points such as spelling are not relevant then don’t mention them. It makes you appear desperate and ill informed. … Just another example of your tendency to not be able to focus on the topic. I always find it funny that someone like you tosses out insults but then is so fragile when they get tossed back at you. Your mentioning a typo was arrogant and….stupid. If you can’t handle it then learn how to have civil disagreements without acting like a twit. … Stupid people tend not to be able to think for themselves. You have said nothing to contradict that assertion.

That’s right, he acts as if I’m wearing a mask. He literally cannot distinguish ‘I consider there is a chance of a pandemic in the future’ from ‘OH GOD OH GOD I’M GOING TO DIE WHERE IS MY FACEMASK?’. I have, for the record, never insulted him. I have criticised his arguments, and he seems incapable of distinguishing that from mindlessly abusing him, which, if I’m generous, explains his argument style. (Okay, maybe now I’ve insulted him.) For the record, here is my first comment:

That guy’s massively missed the point. Sure, wearing masks now is dumb, but the fact that 1000 people are sick is a worry because the disease might BECOME pandemic. He conflates the media whipping up a profitable panic with the WHO giving out expert advice, then has a go at them for taking measures to prevent a pandemic because they might work and then he can say ‘look, see, there was nothing to worry about’.

Also, he misspelt ‘IQ’.

You can see how I clearly relied on that one typo to invalidate his argument. Clearly there’s no way that could be a throwaway comment, a joke if you will, finding humour in an unfortunately placed transposition error.

But enough of such frivolity. The main thrust of his argument, he tells me, is this:

If you own a business and someone shows up with a mask on….fire them. They are too dumb to work for you. They have no common sense. In a way this is an QI test [see?] for your company.

…

It is stupid. The people in masks are stupid. … The masks are a visible sign of how stupid they are. … If you own a business and one of your employees shows up in a mask…find a reason to get rid of them. They are too stupid for whatever job you hired them for.

You see how he doesn’t toss out insults or come across as arrogant at all. But still, is he right? Certainly with the number of cases of swine flu so much lower than the number of cases of regular seasonal flu, and given that facemasks don’t actually work all that well, wearing them is a bit stupid. (Well, unless you wore them before swine flu. That’s fair enough. The tube is gross.) But his claim is not ‘it is a stupid thing to do’. It is ‘the people who do it are stupid’. As I said to him,

The media, the tabloids particularly, love to scare people, because scared people buy tabloid newspapers — and they’ve got very good at it, largely by refusing to be hampered by inconvenient details such as facts. I know that. You know that. Not everyone knows that. I mean, I think it’s stupid to use Microsoft Word as an HTML editor, but I appreciate that some people don’t know better and that doesn’t make them stupid. I think it’s pretty stupid to imagine that God exists, but I certainly don’t think all religious people are stupid.

For the record, his response to this was the phrase ‘just another excuse for stupid people’ followed by the last six sentences of the torrent of abuse I quoted earlier. You see how I’m ‘[tossing] out insults’ there, using inflammatory phrases like ‘that doesn’t make them stupid’ and ‘I certainly don’t think [they're] stupid’.

I just think that if you say ‘people are stupid’ and leave it at that, it’s defeatist and misanthropic, condescending and unhelpful. If you engage with them you can change their minds. If you see the bigger picture you can see where the weaknesses are that we can fix and improve matters. If you just write off humanity as too thick to survive then you become a small part of the problem. His solution is to make them all unemployed. That’s what we need, a lot of uneducated people with no money. That will definitely solve both swine flu and the credit crunch. I want to think it’s meant in jest and he’s actually more progressive than that, but I’m really not convinced.

I’ll be interested to see if Vizzini replies to this.

Dear Microsoft,

I am writing in reply to your recent correspondence, reproduced below:

	Dear Windows Live User, We are contacting you regarding your communication preference settings for Windows Live and MSN. Currently, your settings do not allow Microsoft to send you promotional information or survey invitations about Windows Live and MSN. We would like to communicate important product updates to you, so if you would like to change your settings, please visit your account profile hereto change your preferences. Sincerely, The Windows Live Team Note: You can also change your Account settings by going to your browser and typing in: http://account.live.com. After logging-in to your account, look for ‘Additional options’ and click ‘Marketing preferences’. Then uncheck the top preference box and click ‘Save’. Microsoft respects your privacy. To learn more, please read our online Privacy Statement. Microsoft Corporation One Microsoft Way Redmond WA 98052

Fuck off.

Yours faithfully,

Andrew

x

Since you are reading an internet site, I’m going to assume you know that Facebook recently changed its look a bit. It did so for several good reasons, and generally the site is better for it. That, of course, has utterly failed to stop loads of idiots crying about it purely because they think nothing should ever change. Here, for example, is a TechCrunch post claiming, falsely, that 94% of users dislike the changes. This is based on a survey Facebook did. There are a number of reasons why it’s not interesting or useful information. The most interesting is probably that polling users is actually a massively unhelpful way of finding out what they like. People will report one behaviour and actually exhibit another, or they will report one belief or preference but act on an entirely different one. The only way to test these things is to run both options and see which is most successful. A less interesting reason that the 94% figure is nonsense is the survey’s response: 800,000 people voted, but Facebook claims to have over 175,000,000 users, so it would be more accurate to say that 0.3% of users hate the new look and 99.7% of users don’t care enough to register an opinion. Certainly I didn’t vote, and I rather like the new look. Also, people have only had a few days to get used to the new design, so it’s like asking someone from Sheffield if they’d rather use chopsticks or a fork.

This, in case you have forgotten, is what is now known as ‘The Old Facebook’ (source):

This is what the angry shouting Facebook Luddites are demanding be restored, despite the fact that when it was new, the same people hated it and demanded the return of the previous one. I don’t even remember what that one looked like.

Now that I’m used to the new look, I find the above rather cluttered. There’s a pointless separate feed for status updates, and the feed prioritises information like ‘Cassandra wrote on Dan’s wall’ when the real information is the message itself. The New Facebook prioritises that instead (unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly good to demonstrate this with on my feed at the moment):

This is, of course, just stolen wholesale from Twitter, and in some aspects too obviously so. (See also, the results page of Yahoo! Search, which looks offensively Google-like.) But it’s clean, and clear, and simple, which are important. It’s basically fine. That’s why 99.7% of people don’t apparently care about the change. But as with the last redesign, there’s a subtler change under the hood that goes along with it. Facebook was getting massively complicated. It needed simplifying, so now it’s almost like a richer version of Twitter (although the differences in implementation mean that in practice the two sites are really not much like each other).

The problem is that that’s not finished. It has to change more. The status updates are basically gone — I found that there’s now no distinction between updating your status and writing on your wall — but this means that while you can write long treatises on other peoples’ walls, you’re limited to Twitter-style bullet-points on your own. You’re expected to write a Note if you want more space, and the whole thing doesn’t feel coherent. Similarly, the ‘wall-to-wall’ thing (which has never worked in any real sense) still needs work. You can’t post the same thing to multiple walls, and while you can ‘comment’ on someone’s post on their own wall, the standard reply to their posting on your wall is to post on theirs, and that results in a limited one-to-one semi-public conversation with no clear links to tie it together. They’ve actually stolen some of Twitter’s most annoying flaws. They need to tie the whole thing together, remove the vestigal traces of the old ’status’ line (which frankly never made any sense), allow the same post to appear on multiple walls, and build a real wall-’reply’ feature. As part of that, they also need to deprecate the status-’comments’ system and tie up the ‘notifications’ thing, because I get annoyed at having two separate feeds.

Also, if Facebook are still intent on having ‘groups’, they need to make them more prominent: group discussions should appear in your home feed. Otherwise, it takes too long to check them all and conversation dies. It’s meant to be a social network — the groups are really not social. People use it as a way of endorsing statements, and there are far better ways of doing that. Lastly, the emails they send out when you get a message or a wall post are currently ‘from’ Facebook ‘re:’ John sent you a message, when they should be ‘from’ John ‘re:’ do you want to go to the cinema. This would integrate with Thunderbird and GMail’s threading features and be generally faster and easier to use. It would also blur the line slightly between email and Facebook messages — if I could reply to a Facebook message by replying to the message in GMail, that would be great. (If that happened, I’d also like to be able to have Facebook send me my own messages so that GMail would have a copy.)

The philosophy behind this design seems to be similar to a ‘rich-media Twitter’, and if they pursue that idea then Facebook could become a very friendly and easy site to use. Simple, clean, and consistent. And basically, nothing like this fucking stupid suggestion from Holy Taco:

This is a cutting satire of Facebook’s increasing clutter, which would perhaps be pretty clever were it not for the fact that there is now less stuff on the Facebook home page than there ever has been. It looks more consistent and coherent, and has clearly made steps in the direction diametrically opposite to what this alleged spoof version is attempting to parody.

In summary, if you prefer the old Facebook then that’s very probably reasonable. But if your reasons for holding it are sufficiently dumb then it absolutely is possible for an opinion to be flat out wrong. Whoever designed the above image, for example, hates the new Facebook for reasons that demonstrably make no sense, and while he (I presume he is a he) is quite entitled to do so, we would be well advised to ignore him until he starts talking sense.

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while… But I’ve not been able to go any further with it. A while back I got this comment on this blog. It’s an attempt to get me to use my blog to pimp their website, which I have starred out one letter of to (a) hoard Google-juice, and (b) make them appear homosexual:

Author : Johnny Testa
E-mail : Johnny.Testa@askmen.com
URL    : http://As*Men.com
Whois  : http://ws.arin.net/cgi-bin/whois.pl?queryinput=209.71.197.194
Comment:
An article on Penis Fracture by As*Men.com

Hi,

My name is Johnny Testa from As*Men.com – a unit of FOX Interactive Media. As the world’s largest men’s web portal, As*Men.com attracts more than 7 million readers each month.

I wanted to take this opportunity to let you know that AskMen.com recently published an article entitled “Penis Fracture” that I think would be of particular interest to your readers.

The article goes into detail about what can cause and what exactly is Penal Fracture.

You mean, penile fracture? Penal fracture would just be harsh.

I know, the title alone runs shivers down your spine, but rest assured this is real and it can happen. I’m sure you probably know everything about this topic but I thought you might enjoy reading what we have to say about it.

Here’s the linking URL:

-       http://www.as*men.com/sports/health_200/232_penis-fracture.html

Here are some other articles you may be interested in:

-       http://www.as*men.com/sports/health_150/186_mens_health.html
-       http://www.as*men.com/dating/love_tip_300/391_love_tip.html
-       http://www.as*men.com/dating/love_tip_200/209_love_tip.html
-       http://www.as*men.com/dating/dzimmer_100/102_love_answers.html
-       http://www.as*men.com/specials/top_99_women/

Please feel free to post any portion of our articles, or use our content as you see fit, with credit given to As*Men.com. Please send me the link if you do choose to post any portion of our article.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions.

I look forward to hearing back from you.

Regards,

Johnny Testa
As*Men.com

Er, no thanks.

 

Hi Johnny,

Thanks, I enjoyed reading the article you sent me. As it happens, I was already aware of Penis Fracture — a friend of mine is a GP and one of her patients once presented with the condition. He was 15, and one of the boys at his school had told him you could use a bagel to simulate sex but he was too embarrassed to buy one, so he found a stale one in the trash. Apparently, stale bagels are pretty tough cookies. I thought she’d made the story up, but she says it’s not the strangest injury she’s ever had to refer.

I was considering putting the story up on my blog, but I ought to check if that would be against some kind of GP-patient privacy rules. If I do put up a post about it, can I use a paragraph or so from your article to get across to my readers that it’s a real condition?

 

Andrew

Thanks to @Estie_Tabernak for that piece of bullshit.

 

Hey Andrew,

Thanks for getting back to me. I’m glad you enjoyed reading the article. You can definitely use As*Men.com as reference as long as we are given credit and that there is a link leading to the As*Men.com article located somewhere in your post.

On another note, I cannot understand for the life of me why someone would use a bagel to please themselves, and I don’t know whether to laugh at the boy’s accident or cringe in pain.

Let me know if there is anything else that I can help you with.

Regards,

Johnny Testa 
Online Marketing Coordinator 
johnny.testa@askmen.com

P: 514-908-2557 
P: 514-908-2552 ext:257

AskMen.com - No.1 Men’s Portal Worldwide 
http://www.as*men.com 
A division of IGN Entertainment, A unit of Fox Interactive Media, Inc.

 

You may have noticed that I’ve stripped out the links from this ‘article’.

 

Thanks for getting back to me. I’m glad you enjoyed reading the article. You can definitely use As*Men.com as reference as long as we are given credit and that there is a link leading to the As*Men.com article located somewhere in your post.

Thanks. At the moment I’m looking at using it as a kind of a ‘cold open’ — straight into a blockquote. If I’m quoting a big chunk, I like to open with it. The RSS feed might show a couple of sentences of your article, though, and readers wouldn’t see the credit unless they clicked through. Is that a problem? I can change it if it is.

On another note, I cannot understand for the life of me why someone would use a bagel to please themselves, and I don’t know whether to laugh at the boy’s accident or cringe in pain. 

That was my first thought too. You’d be better off with a donut — they’re softer and cheaper and if you get a cream-filled one it’d be more realistic. Still, hindsight, eh? (Not a jam one, though — I mean, each to their own and all that, but for my money that’s not an appealing visual. Also, jam might have seeds in it. That would sting. Not that I’ve tried it. Obviously. That would be ridiculous.)

Let me know if there is anything else that I can help you with.

There might be. Do you know if As*Men.com has an article on this topic that I could reference: http://www.tiscali.co.uk/lifestyle/healthfitness/menshealth/part1_4-1.html – specifically about the effects of heat? Only there’s another story I was hoping to squeeze into the blog post, about keeping things cool, and it would be good to have a quote to introduce that one too. (I won’t tell you that story unless you ask — it’s much, much worse than the bagel one and people don’t usually thank me for telling it.

Well, you’ll see it if you read the finished blog post, so don’t say you weren’t warned.

Thanks,

Andrew

 

I wonder if he will read the finished blog post.

 

Hey Andrew, as long as the feed leads to our article than its fine.

You might find something about your other topic in one of the two links I provided:

http://www.as*men.com/dating/keywords/sperm-count.html

http://www.as*men.com/dating/keywords/semen.html

I’m curious about the story you’re referring to but I think I will read it when you have posted it on your site.

 Let me know if you need anything else.

Johnny

 

Still, here it is:

 

Hi Johnny,

I’ve been having a go at writing this and here is what I have so far. I thought I’d let you have a check over it before I publish it, to make sure you’re okay with how I’ve used your material and because you seem to know about these things. I’d hate to take a paragraph out of context and change the message or anything. Let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions. (If you don’t want to read the second half then I entirely understand.) Thanks.

Penis fractures are a reality. To call it a “fracture” may be a inaccurate when talking about the penis, which has no bone, but the cracking sound, intense pain, and immediate swelling and bruising mimic fractures that occur in bones. Sometimes, blood may appear at the urethra, indicating damage to the urethra itself; this is a more severe type of penis fracture that requires involved surgery to repair.
Penis fractures usually occur when the penis strikes the pubic bone or the perineum of a partner during rigorous sexual activity. Rolling over in bed with an erect penis in the middle of the night has also been implicated as a way to fracture a penis. Penis fractures have also been reported as occurring when a man rushes to get clothed when the penis is erect — imagine that scenario.

The above is from As*Men.com’s fascinating but slightly disturbing article on Penis Fracture. You might not want to imagine the scenario they describe, but a friend of mine has little choice: she once treated a patient who suffered a penis fracture at the tender age of 15. At his school there was a story going around that the most realistic way to simulate sex was using a bagel. (A lazy Saturday, a trip to Tesco and the rigorous application of the scientific method are all you need to know that this story is clearly not true.) Of course, the local shop soon figured out what was going on after the tenth or so nervous-looking boy turned up asking for a single bagel and a pack of cream cheese. (I rather suspect they put the story about in the first place.) The hero of this tale was too shy to go to said shop if it meant they’d know what he wanted to do with their bagel, and he didn’t think his parents would take kindly to his taking one of theirs. Eventually he looked in the kitchen bin and found one there. He ran off to his room and started to make sweet love to the savoury snack.

He had not eaten a bagel before and didn’t know what they are supposed to feel like, but now we know that the bagel had been thrown out because it was very, very stale. Fortunately, he managed to get to hospital on time, where presumably he was far more embarrassed than he would have been in the shop. I’m told he’s since made a full recovery, although since he was a virgin at the time there’s really no way to know.

Some people find that story a little hard to hear. If you’re one of those people then you should definitely not read the next story. If you’re brave enough to continue, then first you should read this background, again from As*Men.com:

The reason your testicles hang from your body and don’t reside inside it like a woman’s ovaries, is because they need to be a few degrees cooler than the rest of your body. So wearing tight underwear or tight pants that keeps them pressed up against your 98.6° body is not a good idea. As well, sleep naked if you can, to ensure coolness.

Ensuring coolness is undoubtedly important, but there are limits. We all know the attraction of the Cold Shower. But like anything, such things can get addictive. There is a chilling story, told at our university, which has been passed down from one year group to the next. Apparently in 2001 there was a student in the chemistry department (his name was Patrick, but to protect his anonymity I shall call him Brian) who got obsessed with cold showers, to the point where he couldn’t get turned on unless he was colder and colder. Eventually they weren’t enough, and he started rolling in snow or taking ice baths. You could see his skin turning redder by the day. There was some concern over how all this was affecting what remained of his sex life (he wasn’t what you’d call promiscuous; why do you think he was taking all those cold showers in the first place?) but these concerns suddenly became somewhat academic one Friday afternoon.

At first nobody made the connection. Brian hadn’t turned up at lectures for almost the whole next week, and one of the lab technicians found two pieces of what appeared to be freshly chopped pork in dusty corners of the floor. It was known that students would occasionally let themselves into the labs after hours to work on their projects — it wasn’t really allowed but the professors never complained because it meant they got more work done. The assumption was that someone had had dinner in the lab, but after two days trying to find out who it was, a member of ambulance staff told them what the meat actually was.

It seems that Brian had been working on his final year project after the department closed on the Friday evening, but in the corner of the lab was a large insulated container containing liquid nitrogen. Apparently, after a while, the temptation was too great and it overcame him. Of course, once chilled to 77 Kelvin, the nerves were not responsive, and in his numb frustration he got more vigorous until he collided with something and his frozen penis literally shattered.

While he waited for the ambulance, he gathered up all the shards of his manhood that he could find. They couldn’t be reattached, and nobody really thinks he ever held out much hope of that, but he did hope to prevent anyone figuring out what had happened.

Obviously he didn’t manage to keep the event a secret, but if his tale can prevent anyone else from trying such an ill-thought-out method of self abuse then its publication will be worthwhile.

I look forward to hearing your comments.

Thanks again,

Andrew

 

That ought to tip him off.

 

The article looks good Andrew, no complaints on my end. Let me know when the article goes live on your site.

Johnny

 

Ah.

 

Hi Johnny,

Bad news, I’m afraid. My webhosts have said that an article about simulated sex and genital injury would violate their terms and conditions. I tried to explain to them that this isn’t filth; it’s a public-spirited warning about genuine dangers that men face, but they said it wasn’t about blocking pornography but ensuring their sites can be seen behind corporate and educational filters, and that some of the terms I’d used might cause their sites to be blocked. I’ve sent them a new version of the article, but I guess I should ask you to look at it too, to make sure you’re okay with it — after all, many of the disputed words appear in the quotes from your site. Some parts of it don’t make much sense, but it has to look like real sentences: can’t just replace i with ! any more — the filters are cleverer than that now. If you both okay it, I’ll post it up. Also any suggestions for better ways to disguise it would be welcome:

Pen fractures are a reality. To call it a “fracture” may be a inaccurate when talking about the pens, which have no bone, but the cracking sound, intense pain, and immediate swelling and bruising mimic fractures that occur in bones. Sometimes, blood may appear Ulrika, indicating damage to Ulrika herself; this is a more severe type of pen fracture that requires involved surgery to repair.
Pen fractures usually occur when the pens strike the public bone or the palladium of a partner during rigorous textual activity. Rolling over in a bid to elect the President in the middle of the night has also been implicated as a way to fracture pens. Pen fractures have also been reported as occurring when a man rushes to get clothed when the President is elect — imagine that scenario.

The above is from As*Men.com’s fascinating but slightly disturbing article on Pen Fracture (which you can read unedited on their site). You might not want to imagine the scenario they describe, but a friend of mine has little choice: she once treated a patient who suffered a pen fracture at the tender age of 15. At his school there was a story going around that the most realistic way to emulate a NES was using a bagel. (A lazy Saturday, a trip to Tesco and the rigorous application of the scientific method are all you need to know that this story is clearly not true.) Of course, the local shop soon figured out what was going on after the tenth or so nervous-looking boy turned up asking for a single bagel and a pack of cream cheese. (I rather suspect they put the story about in the first place.) The hero of this tale was too shy to go to said shop if it meant they’d know what he wanted to do with their bagel, and he didn’t think his parents would take kindly to his taking one of theirs. Eventually he looked in the kitchen bin and found one there. He ran off to his room and started to whisper sweet nothings to the savoury snack.

He had not eaten a bagel before and didn’t know what they are supposed to feel like, but now we know that the bagel had been thrown out because it was very, very stale. Fortunately, he managed to get to hospital on time, where presumably he was far more embarrassed than he would have been in the shop. I’m told he’s since made a full recovery, although since he was a Virgo at the time there’s really no way to know.

Some people find that story a little hard to hear. If you’re one of those people then you should definitely not read the next story. If you’re brave enough to continue, then first you should read this background, again from As*Men.com:

The reason your tribunals hang from your body and don’t reside inside it like a woman’s nunneries, is because they need to be a few degrees cooler than the rest of your body. So wearing tight underwater or tight paints that keeps them pressed up against your 98.6° body is not a good idea. As well, sleep faked if you can, to ensure coolness.

Ensuring coolness is undoubtedly important, but there are limits. We all know the attraction of the Cold Flower. But like anything, such things can get addictive. There is a chilling story, told at our university, which has been passed down from one year group to the next. Apparently in 2001 there was a student in the chemistry department (his name was Patrick, but to protect his anonymity I shall call him Brian) who got obsessed with cold flowers, to the point where he couldn’t get tuned in unless he was colder and colder. Eventually they weren’t enough, and he started rolling in snow or taking ice baths. You could see his skin turning redder by the day. There was some concern over how all this was affecting what remained of his socks life (he wasn’t what you’d call Prometheus; why do you think he was taking all those cold flowers in the first place?) but these concerns suddenly became somewhat academic one Friday afternoon.

At first nobody made the connection. Brian hadn’t turned up at lectures for almost the whole next week, and one of the lab technicians found two pieces of what appeared to be freshly chopped pork in dusty corners of the floor. It was known that students would occasionally let themselves into the labs after hours to work on their projects — it wasn’t really allowed but the professors never complained because it meant they got more work done. The assumption was that someone had had dinner in the lab, but after two days trying to find out who it was, a member of ambulance staff told them what the meat actually was.

It seems that Brian had been working on his final year project after the department closed on the Friday evening, but in the corner of the lab was a large insulated container containing liquid nitrogen. Apparently, after a while, the temptation was too great and it overcame him. Of course, once chilled to 77 Kelvin, the nerves were not responsive, and in his numb frustration he got more vigorous until he collided with something and his frozen pens literally shattered.

While he waited for the ambulance, he gathered up all the shards of his neighbourhood that he could find. They couldn’t be reattached, and nobody really thinks he ever held out much hope of that, but he did hope to prevent anyone figuring out what had happened.

Obviously he didn’t manage to keep the event a secret, but if his tale can prevent anyone else from trying such an ill-thought-out method of self obtuse then its publication will be worthwhile.

Andrew

 

Is this bad enough yet?

 

Just word it to say fractures of the groin area. For the record “Penis” is an educational term used to describe a part of the male human anatomy, tell your webhosts that it’s human nature and that it could not possibly block anything to do with education.

Johnny Testa 
Online Marketing Coordinator 
johnny.testa@askmen.com

P: 514-908-2557 
P: 514-908-2552 ext:257

As*Men.com - No.1 Men’s Portal Worldwide 
http://www.as*men.com 
A division of IGN Entertainment, A unit of Fox Interactive Media, Inc.

 

No.

 

This is from an email from my hosts: “We realise “Penis” is an educational term, but many schools and companies’ internet services filter based on word lists, and “Penis” is a common word on those lists.”

They said they agree that the article should be posted, but couldn’t make an exception to their policy. They did suggest using elaborate innuendo to make the point without using my word substitutions. That might be a good idea. Any thoughts?

 

Apparently not.

But he’s not replied since, so I think this is over.

I have just been hilariously banned from commenting on the homeopathy blog ‘homeopathy4health’ after this discussion. Why?

Andrew’s comments are no longer allowed on this blog. This is because he has a tendency to write opinions based on logic and not from experience or facts. He is a programmer by profession.

Dammit, I do have a tendancy to write opinions based on logic. Oh, she really nailed me there. ‘Zing’, I should think, and probably even ‘oh, snap’. And so forth. Feel free to visualise Jon Stewart-style gesturing if it helps.

Goodbye, then, anonymous homeopath. Live long and prosper.

How many people do you know who don’t understand the difference between IE and the actual Internet? Who refer to Explorer’s ‘filmstrip’ view as ‘Powerpoint’? Who send emails with Word attachments that are just plain text with red underlines under all the British spellings? Who call you over every time they get sent a gzip, or transfer data between applications via a pencil and paper? I’ve known at least one person do all of those things, mostly people I worked with.

And that’s not their fault, generally. Please don’t think I’m mocking the ignorant here. My point is that people in charge should fix it. It’s a massive drain on resources. If you can spend a week training someone to use their computer efficiently, you’ll get that week back with interest within a year or two. I don’t understand why companies spend so much money on computers and software, then give them out to all employees without even explaining how to operate them, and then spend even more time and money trying to build a network so secure that their random clicking can’t do any damage. Why not just teach them how to correctly use the software and then let them get on with it? If you’re ignorant, you get training to fix it before you do any damage. You don’t get wrapped in cotton wool. That does nobody any good.

Today at work the IT department sent round information on how to encrypt sensitive data. They recommend TrueCrypt and Axcrypt, both of which are free. When something might affect the University’s reputation like a leak of personal data the IT department (who mostly actually do know what they’re doing) insist on doing things properly, and that means open-source.

Also today, the Pentagon shut down their website because someone at Wikileaks noticed a series of secret reports left in an unprotected directory on one of their public servers in the form of doc files encrypted with Word’s built in password feature and cracked them. The password was ‘progress’. That’s moronic. That’s the only way to describe it. The files should have been encrypted properly, with different, longer passwords with numbers and capitals and punctuation in. They should have been on a secure server where Joe Cracker couldn’t get them. Had they done that then the job of cracking them would have been intractable. As it is, it was inevitable.

I know a bit about this stuff, so to me, this is shocking. There is literally no excuse for doing something like that. Nobody that computer-illiterate should be ever have been allowed near the server. If you don’t know about online security then you might not realise how bad this is, so let’s be clear: this is much, much dumber than leaving an unencrypted USB stick on a train. I can see how that happens. I can see how you might leave encrypted files on a public server. They’re encrypted; it shouldn’t matter if people get hold of them. I cannot see how you accidentally choose a rubbish password and Word’s in-built encryption for official documents about a war. Ironically the document is about what information is public and what information is secret. This story — that the Pentagon is crap at security on a monumental scale — should be huge. Demonstrably it is not. I discovered it via a blog.

prayforyou RT @Forestpelt Please pray that @Forestpelt’s 2 atheist friends will find Christ. Pray that God would shine through @Forestpelt to them. about 1 hour ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @prayforyou This ought to be the single most elegant demonstration that prayer doesn’t work we will ever see. about 1 hour ago from twhirl in reply to prayforyou

prayforyou We have a challenger saying we will only prove that prayer doesn’t work. Everyone pray so we’ll prove to @Andrew_Taylor the power of prayer. 22 minutes ago from web

Come on then, God. This should be an easy one. Convince two people you exist. I mean, I don’t want to pour scorn on Your infinite power at all, but I can manage this task pretty easily. I’m almost sure that everyone at work is totally convinced I exist. So come on, God. Pull Your finger out.

Call me cocky if you like, but I’m pretty sure I can win this bet. Convincing atheists of his own existence is one of God’s weakest suits. He’s much better at tasks that only involve committed theists.

Maybe it’s all the praying they do.

Scientific journals have genuinely got the best business model in the history of anything ever. Here is how it works, in a nutshell:

• Other people, scientists, write their content for no fee.
• The journal then gets other scientists to review it. These scientists generally don’t get paid either.
• The authors edit the paper and send it back. Eventually, all the scientists reach a version of the paper they can all agree on (or the paper gets withdrawn). Then the authors pay the journal to publish the paper.
• The journal then charges anyone who ever wants to read the paper extortionate fees. $50 for a PDF file is not uncommon.
• The journal retains the copyright on the words they didn’t write describing experiments they didn’t do, and claim fees for reading it at least until the copyright expires and usually long after that.
• None of the scientists or their employers ever get paid.

This, to me, seems like an insane system. It survives because universities don’t care if they pay extortionate fees for such things and because it’s established. And probably when it was established it made sense — after all, who else but journals could publish things? But now it’s just academia needlessly funnelling money into a mostly pointless publishing racket. I really don’t see what it achieves.

I’ve said before that a better system would just be for universities to publish papers and let anyone who wants to comment on them comment on them. I hadn’t worked out the details, obviously, so it was one lunchtime rant in the pub opposite the lab and I didn’t think much more about it until the next time I hit a paywall demanding I give some publishers $75 to read a paper written by my own supervisor. But someone else has worked them out. It’s not perhaps an ideal system, but it looks pretty good to me and it’s compatible with the existing system.

Dubbed GPeerReview (I don’t know what the ‘G’ stands for but the author’s name is Gashler so that’s likely), the idea is that you post your paper on your academic website, email people you think would be interested, and those and any other readers can review it. They sign their review, along with a hash of the paper, with public key cryptography so you know who wrote it and what about. That way, you get an idea of how much support a paper has and, crucially, what kinds of people support it. The author of the paper puts up the most credible supportive reviews they can find. In theory, if it becomes accepted then there’ll no longer be any need for conventional publication. It’s a very clever system. (See also, the more established ResearchBlogging.org – which Gashler says could be complementary to GPeerReview but covers rather different ground. I think I agree with him on that — it’d be great to see things like that running it tandem.)

I’d love to see something like this made to work across academia. I suspect, though, that what kills it will be that real people don’t understand nerd stuff like public key cryptography. Everyone else in my research unit gets all annoyed if I try to use LaTeX or Bibtex at them. (Well, the dentists do — the other physicists love it. I witnessed a long argument about a week ago over the relative merits of Microsoft Project versus the open source alternative, which boiled down in the end to ‘well the free software probably is better but if we collaborate with anyone else they’ll demand we use Project’ which to me seems like a really crappy way of doing things — I’d rather piss people off by doing the right thing than pander to idiots and help keep Microsoft’s monopoly on proprietary, buggy software healthy.) They act as if Word and EndNote are somehow better. In my experience, Word doesn’t work properly and EndNote formats citations basically at random. LaTeX is a pig to get set up but at least once you’ve done it it stays set up. To be honest, I think that’s another thing that needs sorting: we need a specialist scientific markup language. Maybe a form of HTML (or other XML), with a standard equation format and a few extra specialised tags, perhaps including COinS for citations, which the reader software could be configured to render as a conventional reference, or as a hyperlink, or as whatever they like. A CSS-like ‘default’ style for a particular paper would be fair enough, but the current system that forcibly changes the format depending on which journal happens to have published the paper is rather silly. I don’t want a stack of PDF files all formatted differently. I want a folder full of pictures and ASCII-encoded markup that I can process and output how I like. Get into the twenty-first century. That’s how we do things here, because it’s a better way of doing it.

And there’s no reason that all of the above couldn’t be implemented really very easily, and I’d love to see peer review evolve into something more open and transparent than the existing system, which still relies on the trustworthiness of journal editors and the word of a few unidentified reviewers per paper. But we need nice, simple user interfaces on every part of it or else Joe Scientist isn’t going to actually bother to do it. We need a nice WYSIWYG program to edit the papers, then a nice Wordpress-style package to maintain your site, and a nice package to let you write reviews without much effort. Make it simple, and people might adopt it. Which is frustrating, because by rights you’d think a good scientist would be exactly the kind of person who would leap at the chance to adopt an open, collaborative, technological and free solution to a problem. Those are the qualities that science runs on. And I can’t see what we’d lose by switching to such a system, other than a load of jobs at journal publishers — and I’m sure the big journals would find a way to adapt. Perhaps they’d act as aggregators or run interesting comment pieces more often or something. (I should link to this very interesting discussion, where Gashler explains what journals do that is useful and that GPeerReview doesn’t do. I’m not convinced it’s all really a job for journals per se, but someone will have to keep doing all that. Personally, I think universities should do most of it.)

Bah. I just get frustrated when people cling to what they know instead of adopting obviously better alternatives, like Linux or metric or atheism or not torturing people. I guess that’s just a failing I have. But I’d love to know how any of the above could be shoehorned into the modern scientific community.