The original story was pretty weird. The idea that the country was effectively run by a short-tempered, foul-mouthed Scot is, while not implausible, at least a bit derivative. It was pretty uninteresting when it was just allegations in a book, but then Christine Pratt of the National Bullying Helpline told ITN that they’d had several calls from Downing Street staff and rather than everyone saying “that’s shocking, thankyou for raising this important point,” which is presumably what she was expecting, everyone said “hang on, isn’t that a massive breach of confidentiality?” and then every single one of the charity’s patrons resigned. That two of those patrons were members of the Conservative party (one Ann Widdecombe, one a London councillor) and the website carries an endorsement from David Cameron doesn’t make the whole thing look any better. Pratt responded to this by promising to dig through thousands more confidential emails so she’d have “proof” (as if that was the problem). Now there are concerns that the whole charity was never anything more than a front for an anti-bullying consultancy firm. They’ve spent almost nothing and are behind filing their paperwork.

That alone would be plenty of stupid for one story, but then an Asian news channel helpfully animated the whole story in GTA-style. That, I would say, is the second layer of absurdity in the story.

The last story they animated is an enraged Gordon Brown hurling a tangerine into a laminator. This never happened. It was in fact a story invented by Robert Popper, author of The Timewaster Letters, which he phoned in to the ever-credulous LBC radio station, and was somehow uncritically reported by both The Sun and The Telegraph.

I can only presume that The Sun, in their zeal to make Brown look just as bad as possible, will literally publish any old fucking nonsense sent into them. If someone told them that Gordon Brown heated his house by burning stolen babies I’m confident it would be front page news the next day. The Telegraph just print whatever everyone else print because why check something if the competition can do it for you? Essentially the press in this country is nothing more than an institutionalised grapevine.

Of course, this rather took the heat off the National Bullying Helpline, so it was good to see them back in the news today, when one of the other ex-patrons accused Pratt of bullying her.

TV presenter Sarah Cawood…, a former patron of the National Bullying Helpline, says Christine Pratt left her in tears after accusing her of failing the charity. ”She was really pushy and I felt bullied.”

If the worst Labour’s critics have to throw at them is obviously made-up stories and allegations from corrupt charities then (a) maybe we might be spared a Conservative government after all, and (b) they haven’t been paying close enough attention.

I await with baited breath next week’s developments in this story. For my money, I predict that David Cameron will ask Gordon Brown about the tangerine story in PMQ, Christine Pratt will peel off a rubber mask and turn out to be David Cameron (or, more probably given his complexion, vice versa) and someone at The Sun will read this blog and run with the stolen-babies story. I’m available for quotes.

There’s also a page of submitted prayers, so we can find out what Anglicans feel is worthy of God’s time but not theirs. (To be fair, God has more.) There’s also a rather worrying amount of personally identifiable information in these prayers, for example at least one full name alongside a description of the person’s problems, which seems pretty inappropriate to me.

I pray for Andrew – that he may find meaning and purpose in his life, and peace which passes all understanding.

The first thing that struck me as odd was that people pray in text-speak.

i love you jesus
keep me surrounded you
fill me wz ur holy spirit
let me know about you -ur ways -ur service
i need u
i love you jesus

It just seems rude to me. There’s even some all in capitals, as if that will help God hear it.

we pray for simon our vicar on his move. please set us the righr peauson to be our right vicar.

I do get annoyed when I mean to type “R” but instead type “AU”.

World peace is a common theme:

O God almighty I pray for all the countries with wars to settle.

Dear god,

please stop the wars from all around the world and let there be peace. please keep my family and my pets safe.

Dear God

Thank you for life and other people so i can make friends.And thank you for famlies if we didn’t have them i don’t know what will happen and please end war

Amen

Please stop all wars

dear god
please put a end to war
please make us give up somthing for lent
thankyou for making me

I think the biggest prayer was this one, although it is at least helpfully divided up into four sub-tasks for God’s convenience:

Our Lord in Heaven.
Please:
1- Give Peace for all the world.
2- Give health for all sick people.
3- Give work for all jobless people.
4- Let us love you, because you loved us first.

This is how democracy works in the Information Age. I don’t know if God is going to get away with not ending all wars now.

I thought this one especially sweet:

Dear God

Thank you for food. Thank you for animals. Thank you for birds that sing beautifully. I really appreciate all you have given us .

Amen

It reads like they just bumped into God in the office or whatever and it occurred to them they never really said thankyou properly. “Look, God, mate, I know I don’t tell you often but I thought you should know, we all really appreciate the way you created the universe like that. I mean, we use it all the time. Seriously, good work on that one.”

dear lord
sorry for leaving litter on your beautiful earth.

But then I read that someone’s released the Bible on Xbox Live Arcade. It occurs to me that the events of the Old Testament would make for a violent, sex-crazed, prostitute-laden videogame that nobody could criticise. You could play as the Angel of Death, and storm down Egyptian streets slaying babies, or you could, well, drive around killing prostitutes. If the indiscriminate killing in Grand Theft Auto is too offensive, why not make a game based on Deuteronomy 2:33-34, where you run around a city killing everybody? A lot of people would be upset at this game, but I don’t see how they could complain because most of them are big fans of the book.

The New Testament game would be less fun, but easier because you’d get two lives.

Also the real-time-strategy element would probably be a bit unbalanced if all you have to do is march around the city a few times playing horns and the whole place falls down. What Biblical stories would make good criticism-proof videogames?

You may notice that December 2009 is not included on this graph. So far this month, I’ve had 9 e-mails, excluding ones related to orders. That’s equivalent to almost exactly 20 for the month as a whole, but I thought it likely they’d subside around Christmas, so it seemed fairest not to include it. Even without this datum, there’s a pretty clear trend: Amazon have stopped emailing me none-to-two times a month and taken to emailing me nine-to-twelve times a month. In the last week, Amazon have sent me six promotional e-mails. Their average for December is one every 36 hours or so. This graph reminds me of the terrifying one from An Inconvenient Truth. If it carries on at this rate then before too long it’ll catch up with the now glacially slow increase in my GMail storage quota.

Amazon have been spectacularly unhelpful in this regard. I e-mailed them about it and they said:

Dear Customer

Thank you for writing to Amazon.co.uk with your enquiry.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience caused in this regard.

I understand from your email that you are receiving more promotional emails everyday.

Please understand that these are automated and system generated emails. Unfortunately we do not provision to limit the number of emails which are sent to a specific customer.

We do have an option to unsubscribe from the mailing list.

If you would us to remove your email from the mailing list, please confirm using the link below:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/email

As an Amazon.co.uk customer or subscriber, you can receive e-mail updates about important functionality changes to the website, new Amazon.co.uk services, and special offers we believe would be beneficial to you.

Thank you for shopping at Amazon.co.uk.

Did we answer your question?

Well, no, it didn’t (and your link didn’t work).

I want my old, useful e-mail alerts back. I don’t want to run and hide from broken things; I want to work with their operators to improve them. I don’t want to start my own online shop. I’d be terrible at that. I just want one that works how I want it to so that I can buy things from it, and I’m happy to give a little of my time to help existing ones do that. I think if everyone did that we’d have a lovely little world where everything worked. But it needs the companies to co-operate with us, so I get cross if, when I give a company useful information for free, I’m fobbed off with a response like the one above. Worse still, there’s no real ‘reply’ option, merely a ‘tell us how we could have improved our response’ option, which is a needlessly roundabout and confusing question which I wouldn’t know how to begin answering.

So I’m replying here:

Dear Amazon,

No, you did not answer my question. (And technically I didn’t ask one.)

Allow me to reiterate: recently your e-mail alert system has taken to sending me a promotional e-mail every 36 hours or so. That volume of e-mail is neither useful nor solicited. You are abusing the contact details I provided you with to run a spamming campaign.

It sounds from your e-mail like your automated newsletter system has, for reasons best known to itself, elected to send me absurd amounts of increasingly useless e-mails. Let us be clear: this is a fault in your system and one which is costing you money. Fix it. Install a provision to limit the number of emails which are sent to a specific customer. I am happy to help you do this. A good start would be to stop sending people ‘deals of the week in electronics’ because they buy one memory stick a decade from you. Stop hectoring me to take out a trial of Amazon Prime. I don’t want Amazon Prime, because contrary to what your newsletter-droid apparently believes, I don’t use Amazon nearly enough to make it worthwhile. Don’t try to sell me shoes. I am never going to buy shoes from you; I have enough trouble finding ones that fit in real shops where I can try them on. Off the top of my head, perhaps you could weight each offer by how good it is and its relevance to my purchase history, and give me a slider for what ‘value’ threshold I’m willing to accept, or else give me a slider for how many e-mails I’m prepared to read every month and you can adjust the value threshold for me based on that. Maybe you could offer a weekly or monthly ‘digest’ email with anything this system filters out (obviously excluding offers which have by then expired).

It is in our mutual interest for me to when you have a relevant offer on. The system you use to alert me to this is massively broken. I thought you might be interested in this information but apparently you are not.

Suit yourselves,

Andrew

On the right hand side, it’s long since had little faces, with names, and the phrase ‘you have one mutual friend’. Which is fine when it’s that guy from uni who I never got round to adding but less useful when it’s a passing acquaintance of someone I randomly met at a pub after Facebook friending briefly became the new swapping numbers. And that’s passably useful, I guess, although there do seem to be only about six people going round and round in that slot like they’re terrifyingly stalking me and they have no idea.

Underneath that is the new feature. This is a someone on my friends list I’ve presumably not contacted in a while (or, I haven’t messaged on Facebook because I genuinely know them). It has their name and face, then says ‘catch up with him’ and ‘write on his wall’. The only use I can possibly think for this is that it will keep reminding me of which of my lesser-seen friends’ names connects to which human face. That’s a useful service, like flashcards for babies learning to speak, and naturally it’s only trying to help (and by ‘help’ obviously I mean, ‘ensure I do as much of my communication as possible via Facebook and not only read their ads but force my friends to read their ads’). I just feel like any day now Facebook is going to pop up a picture of an ex with a link saying ‘what happened to that nice girl you were seeing?’.

Well, thanks, Facebook. You’re helping a lot.

From the b3ta newsletter, it’s OK Cupid’s analysis of what words and phrases are more successful than others at eliciting a response to a first-contact message. Essentially, it’s a formula for the perfect on-line chat-up line, and it basically reads ’spell right, don’t be a creep, and mention specific interests’. It’s just a blog post, so it’s still not really Proper, Peer-Reviewed Science, but there are enough mentions of N and f and statistical significance — all used quite correctly — as well as a note about anonymisation, that my instinct says they probably did it right. And the results are a nice mix of the obvious (read the other person’s profile), the counter-intuitive (confidence is bad) and the interesting (mentioning a religion is good but mentioning atheism is better).

In any case, it does what the original ‘perfect formulae’ story tried to do (or at least what its creator claims he tried to do and I see no reason to disbelieve him), which is to combine clever PR with an actual attempt to show how science can be relevant. And it worked, because here it is in the Telegraph, alongside a photo of attractive young people kissing each other, for purely illustrative reasons, naturally. Wouldn’t it be nice if companies realised they could get the PR without the sneers of intellectuals if they just did these things right?

Also I’m inclined to like it because it seems to say that self-effacing male atheist physicists are sexy. And I think we can all agree that that’s basically indisputable.

But, I thought, I routinely record TV shows then skip the ads when they’re on. Isn’t that the same? But no, I don’t think it is. My watching a show that was on while I was out doesn’t cost the broadcaster anything, and I’m doing it passively — I’m recording the shows out of necessity and then not feeling the need to voluntarily spend twenty minutes watching adverts. That’s not the same as going out of one’s way to avoid or ‘block’ them. When I watch TV at the time it’s broadcast I generally sit through the ads.

So, I thought, is this basically the same as copying CDs? I’m sure we can all agree that that’s both immoral and illegal and that anyone who thinks otherwise is simply better at rationalising their crimes than the rest of us, but still most people do it and clearly it’s not that big a deal or, necessarily, bad for the industry. But then I thought, no, people who copy CDs routinely also buy more CDs than the average person, whereas someone who uses AdBlock to filter out the mammoth reams of advertising on newspaper websites also uses it to strip out the relatively tiny ads on Google or Facebook, and these websites only survive because most people have either less technical know-how or more ethics than that.

The internet is built on advertising. It’s the best revenue stream it currently has, and while it’s not ideal, people are doing all sorts of really clever things to make it more relevant, less intrusive and more useful both to advertisers and consumers. Except, that is, for the users who choose to exclude themselves from this economy and simply scrounge off the wealth of tools and culture it has produced, while sucking resources out of it like some awful electronic leech, or a burglar. Not only that, but by filtering out easily-identified adverts, they encourage website operators to use more obtrusive, less clearly marked adverts the software doesn’t pick up. AdBlock is very bad for the internet.

If you use Adblock to filter out adverts from websites whose content and bandwidth you consume, I’d like to know what your justification is. Because my current theory is that you haven’t given it a second’s thought. Also I’d like you to turn it off for a week and see if online advertising really bothers you that much. If it does, I suggest you either change your web habits to visit better designed sites or just mellow the fuck out. If not, consider leaving it off and welcome back to the fold of contributing members of internet society.

This week, a South African call-center business, frustrated by persistently slow Internet speeds, decided to use a carrier pigeon named Winston to transfer 4 gigabytes of data between two of its offices, just 50 miles apart.

At the same time, a computer geek pushed a button on his computer to send data the old-fashioned way, through the Internet.

Winston the pigeon won. It wasn’t even close.

It’s a cute stunt to highlight an apparently a bit rubbish internet connection. It’s just epically unimpressive because, as an actual experiment, it doesn’t make the slightest jot of sense. The two aren’t remotely comparable. If the pen drive had been smaller, broadband would have won. Had the distance been longer, broadband would have won.

Internet speeds are measured in data/time, with distance being less important. Pigeons travel distance/time, largely irrespective of how much data you tape onto them. If I was to copy 500GB from my laptop, through the Internet, to my desktop across the other side of the room, I’m confident it’d take hours even on a good day, but I could easily hurl my 500GB external hard disk the same distance and it’d get there in seconds.

I don’t mind this sort of thing being done, but it’s been over-reported to a ludicrous degree, and ABC’s line “just 50 miles apart” suggests to me that they think the short distance somehow makes this more impressive. Of course it doesn’t. Everyone who’s ever worked in an office must know that: you don’t email large files to your friend across the room. That’s what pen-drives are for.

And let’s not start on their throwaway and derisory use of the term ‘computer geek’.

Anyhow, that was fine. That phone worked well. I’m bitching specifically about the 7100. It’s a great handset, don’t get me wrong. It feels satisfyingly sturdy, it’s got a decent camera and a good screen, it has a good four-way switch instead of a flimsy joystick, and although the button in the middle of that is too easy to press accidentally, it is, physically, one of the best phones I’ve ever used.

No, my problem with the 7100 is the software it runs. I’ve had it a few weeks now, in fact almost exactly three weeks, and I’ve already noticed the OS is crap. Here are my reasonings:

• When I open the phone, it takes two seconds to activate. That’s not a long time, but two fucking seconds? It’s a phone? What’s it doing?
• Google Maps doesn’t work. That’s the main reason I wanted a big screen. Not wanting to be unreasonable, I considered writing a hack on my webspace to feed the raster maps you get when you do a regular Google search to my phone. But…
• Even basic online content doesn’t work. I consider Twitter to be the basic, simple thing that any phone should be able to do. It’s simpler, even, than just being a phone. But if I try to use slandr.net, the phone locks up, sometimes whining about memory, and won’t do anything again until I take out the battery and hard-reset it that way.
• Today, an option was missing from the menu. I had no way of knowing what that was or if it was important.
• Today, the phone refused to lock the keys because it had a text it hadn’t managed to send yet (because it had no signal). Not sure what sense that made, but I guess the handset was never tested in a pub.
• Looking up contacts take a long time. Scrolling takes a long time, and it generally just takes a long time to do anything.
• The main menu is a 3×4 grid of icons. There is a 3×4 grid of buttons on the phone. The two do not correspond. Who thought that was a good idea?

I just can’t see how this can happen. Today I was in Tesco looking at the bread, and I thought, no, the bread I want is elsewhere, so I went to get that, but got distracted by one of the two hundred and ten other products in between. So I forgot to buy any. I realise this is partly my fault, but Tesco lost money on this (and so would I have if I didn’t have plans for lunch tomorrow anyway). I remember thinking that, by now, Tesco must have run enough shops for long enough that they’d be pretty good at it.

And I feel the same way about Nokia. By now, they should have written an OS for a telephone that could basically go from closed to making a phone call in maybe five seconds. It can’t. It massively can’t. It’s just not satisfactory on any level. I don’t see how Nokia, of all people, are still so shit at writing phone software.

And Sony Ericsson can do all that, but their handsets (while sturdy enough to be run over twice and keep right on truckin’) are shit. They fall to bits and fill with dust and the joysticks don’t work. But the software is great. You can run Google Maps, even if the screen’s not up to really doing it justice. The menus are fast and intuitive…

Is there a phone manufacturer that can do both? And that can do both with a real, actual keypad that isn’t a touch-screen with numbers drawn on? And if not, what the hell are these morons doing?

(Incidentally, I saw an advert today for LG phones, which advertised them on the basis of their interface. That’s amazing to me. It’s not why people buy phones — they buy them for the look and the features — but you spend days staring at and using the interface, so that’s exactly why they should buy a phone. It’s like an advert written by Aaron Sorkin!)

The crux of the matter, I think, is that Facebook wants me to see it as an entity in its own right, whereas I want it to be a tool. It’s arguably a meaningless distinction, but it can make a big difference to attitude. The email alerts are a big part of this. Because here is what happens when someone sends me a Facebook message:

1. Facebook emails me to tell me I’ve got a Facebook message from my friend.
2. I visit Facebook to read the message.

From: Clare Hunter <message1083610240352@facebook.com>

To: Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew+facebook@gmail.com>

Subject: Stuff to do

How about going to see a film tonight?

View message in Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1083610240352&mid=ee5fa4G3a92783G34fb8cdG0

Alter alert settings: http://www.facebook.com/account

From: Facebook <notification+5euiut_h_@facebookmail.com>

To: Andrew Taylor <taylor.andrew@gmail.com>

Subject: Clare Hunter replied to a thread on Facebook…

Clare sent a message in reply to a thread.

Re: Stuff To Do

“How about going to see a film tonight?”

To reply to this message, follow the link below:
http://www.facebook.com/n/?inbox/readmessage.php&t=1083610240352&mid=ee5fa4G3a92783G34fb8cdG0

___
This message was intended for taylor.andrew@gmail.com

Want to control which emails you receive from Facebook? Go to:
http://www.facebook.com/editaccount.php?notifications&md=bXNnO2zME0Zy5MjcMDMbODg0O3Q9MTA209NjM1zYxMDMjt0bz02MTQxNzM0Nw==&mid=ee5fa4G3a92783G34fb8cdG0

Facebook’s offices are located at 1601 S. California Ave., Palo Alto, CA 94304

Firstly, almost the whole of that email (including the entire first paragraph) is non-message related, which is to say, wasted space. But worse than that, I’ve got an email from Facebook instead of a message from my friend. My email software (in this case, GMail’s web interface) knows how to file messages. They’re from someone, to someone, and on a subject. So, if I want to search for messages from Clare about stuff to do, I can do that. Except I won’t find it, because this email is from “Facebook” and is about “Clare has sent you a message on Facebook”. It appears in my inbox as a generic Facebook message and I have to read it to see which it is. It threads with other messages Clare has sent me instead of other messages in the same conversation, and the whole thing just isn’t satisfactory. This sort of thing was fine in 2001. Now, it’s not good enough. The web has matured and Facebook hasn’t done well at keeping up.

Now I realise that the email above does include my friend’s message in its entirety, so you’d be forgiven for thinking that I’ve no reason to actually visit Facebook unless I want to reply. But if someone replies to a message before I’ve read it in Facebook, I don’t get another email. Facebook reasons, in the manner of those quaintly archaic ‘forums’ that just about still exist, that once I’ve got one message I’m committed to visiting Facebook to read it. So there’s no need to keep me posted. Here, again, Facebook is acting as if it is a website I actively want to interact with. It isn’t. I want it to be transparent to the point of being invisible.

It’s no longer good enough to import. It’s no longer good enough to be an application. Facebook has to become a server that I can use however I like. That is how it will survive. Twitter’s massive growth has been mostly put down to its excellent API that allows people to use it however they like. Facebook can import my Google Reader items and blog posts, but its outgoing RSS support is patchy at best. It can import my tweets, but it can’t tweet my statuses. It can email me when I have a friend’s birthday coming, but it can’t export them to iCal format (although someone made an app that does). Facebook has two RSS feeds and an impenetrable and limited pseudo-API that’s mostly used to annoy users with shitty quizzes. Recently I’ve been discussing with a professional network administrator who can’t figure out how to synchronise a Facebook page and an external website, because it doesn’t occur to Facebook that anyone would want to.

Facebook has ideas well above its station and needs taking down a few notches. Then it can focus on actually doing what users want it to do instead of what it would like to do.

Andrew_Taylor I did consider changing my Twitter username to @ndrewtaylor but it looks stupid in all other contexts. 23 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor lol @andrew_taylor is a nonce 21 minutes ago from web

It’s worth mentioning this account was set up purely for making-this-tweet purposes.

Andrew_Taylor @ndrewtaylor Yeah? Well YOU LOOK STUPID IN ALL OTHER CONTEXTS! Oh, snap! 19 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @Andrew_Taylor least im not a noncing nonce you fucking nonce 19 minutes ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @ndrewtaylor I’m not at all convinced ‘nonce’ can be used as a verb. 17 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @Andrew_Taylor yeah it can. andrew taylor went noncing 1 day and nonced up a kid. you manchester nonce 16 minutes ago from web

Okay, now bear with me here, because when Friz joins in replies start coming in out of order and things get a tad confusing (more so):

frizfrizzle @Andrew_Taylor I think @ndrewtaylor is going to be my #FollowFriday this week. 15 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @frizfrizzle fuck you fatty with shades 14 minutes ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @ndrewtaylor No, I still think that’s ungrammatical. (Also, false.) 13 minutes ago from web

frizfrizzle @ndrewtaylor You’re an odd individual. 13 minutes ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @frizfrizzle Let’s see if he lasts that long before being thrown off Twitter. 13 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @Andrew_Taylor id have thought you were a grammar nazi. or a nonci (nonce+nazi) lol 12 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @frizfrizzle sorry mate cant hear you over all the pies your fucking 11 minutes ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @ndrewtaylor Gold. Utter gold. Any more pantomime villains you want to call me? You haven’t called me a terrorist yet. 10 minutes ago from web

frizfrizzle How odd. @ndrewtaylor is accusing my friend of being a paedophile, and accusing me of having sex with pies. 10 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @Andrew_Taylor why is your profile a drawing are you so butt ugly 9 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @frizfrizzle by friend you mean lover gay boooooooooi 9 minutes ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @frizfrizzle Explicitly, or did he mistype and call you a piedophile? 9 minutes ago from web

I appreciate that this is not the best advert for Twitter.

frizfrizzle @Andrew_Taylor Well, he seems to be a fan portmanteaus. Did you SEE the “nonci” quip? Had me on the FLOOR! 17 minutes ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @frizfrizzle It was a total nonce-sequitur! HAHA! 16 minutes ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @frizfrizzle I wouldn’t mind if he’d at least follow me and add to my perceived popularity. 15 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @Andrew_Taylor sall just words mate. 15 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @frizfrizzle yeah you thought american Pie was a documentary fatty 15 minutes ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @ndrewtaylor Some of it isn’t even that. 15 minutes ago from web

frizfrizzle @Andrew_Taylor I think he’s just F5-ing the @ reply page. 14 minutes ago from web

garethpwatkins @Andrew_Taylor What’s the deal with@ndrewtaylor? 14 minutes ago from Tweetie

ndrewtaylor @garethpwatkins ha more of his bum buddies coming to white knight him. leave him to nonce, mate 13 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @Andrew_Taylor words words words words words words words words words words yeah i can type words 13 minutes ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @garethpwatkins How should I know? 12 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @frizfrizzle @Andrew_Taylor @garethpwatkinsso what are you three like the three nonceketeers 14 minutes ago from web

Andrew_Taylor @ndrewtaylor So I see. Maybe one day you’ll master sentences. 14 minutes ago from web

garethpwatkins @Andrew_Taylor I assumed he was your nemesis/evil twin. 6 minutes ago from Tweetie

ndrewtaylor @Andrew_Taylor yeah i bet you love being the master and you want me to be your slave gay boi 3 minutes ago from web

frizfrizzle @garethpwatkins I personally hope it’s actually@Andrew_Taylor. Like a sort of Fight Club ending. 3 minutes ago from web

frizfrizzle @Andrew_Taylor @garethpwatkins Oh christ, it has some sort of profile pic. 2 minutes ago from web

ndrewtaylor @frizfrizzle you on about me mate thats my girllfriend your on about 1 minute ago from web

garethpwatkins @frizfrizzle @Andrew_Taylor Can’t see it on Tweetie. I’ll just assume it’s a Swastika. 1 minute ago from Tweetie

frizfrizzle I find @ndrewtaylor’s tweets more fun to read in a Welsh accent. less than a minute ago from web

garethpwatkins @Andrew_Taylor @frizfrizzle Oh God it’s following me. Me and my big mouth. less than 10 seconds ago from Tweetie

And this may be continuing…

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.

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 (since dice and coins never have an exactly even chance of landing on any given side — coins in particular are usually biased — but you can correct for this by taking pairs of tosses, just as random.org do with their binary data). It’s a great PR move, though. 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.

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: â–  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.

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

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Fuck off.

Yours faithfully,

Andrew

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