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, 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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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.

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.

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.

• 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.

It’s different to instant messengers (IM) firstly because it isn’t instant, but mostly because it’s public: your tweets can (by default) be seen by anyone in the world. That means it’s less of a one-on-one conversation and more of a group chat.

It’s different to blogging because of the attitude: it asks ‘what are you doing’ and it won’t let you prattle on about even that for more than 140 characters. That means that most tweets you see are pretty trivial stuff you wouldn’t care if you missed but are, in the moment, of interest. It works best if you follow more people than you could reasonably keep track of, and dip in and out of the stream as if it were an IRC channel, so again it’s more like group chat, but…

It’s different to IRC because of the ‘networking’ side of it: in a chat room (IRC is ‘internet relay chat’ and is a form of online group-chat favoured mostly by awful nerds) you see everything in the ‘room’ you’re in, but on Twitter you see what your friends are saying, even if they’re friends with other people you don’t know. If you have a good client such as Twhirl then you can also see what anyone says on a particular topic and anything anyone says that is directed at or that mentions you.

At any given point there are thousands of discussions taking place, and you should generally see whichever are relevant to you by topic or by friendship. You can chime in at any time, even with people you don’t know. To some extent people find themselves ‘grouped’ by a handful of well-known users that loads of people follow — mostly difficult-to-spell celebrities. The tag ‘#badmovieclub‘ was invented a few days ago because at 9PM yesterday Graham Linehan watched ‘The Happening’ with his Twitter friends, who generated something like 30,000 tweets in 86 minutes. They’re going to do it again in a month, probably with the 2006 version of The Wicker Man. I honestly don’t think Linehan could stop them if he wanted to. Phill Jupitus was working that evening, so he organised a second screening at midnight. I’m sure it could have happened without a celebrity endorsement, but it would have taken longer to spread. So Twitter can create events: for further example, this afternoon a friend of mine (I say friend; I’ve never met the guy and know him better by his Twitter username than his real name) went to an event called ‘#flashdate‘ organised on Twitter and met some people. Twitter can also make normal events more social: loads of people watched Barack Obama’s inauguration with a laptop and got live opinion from around the world as they did so. (The BBC have tried this a couple of times, but it worked a lot better on Twitter.) Even small events — I left Twhirl running while I watched QI this evening and got a couple of comments from relative strangers about that as it was on. And it was the repeat. This afternoon I had a look at the Guardian crossword, and because that’s a relatively common Saturday afternoon activity, it was eventually completed by a collaborative effort between hundreds of Peter Serafinowicz‘ followers. When he ran out of crossword he asked his followers to send more cryptic clues for him to solve. Anything you do that other people are doing, you can do together. Anything you are doing at all, if you’re Stephen Fry. Who knew being stuck in a lift was so interesting?

It’s also a great place to vent. You can shout at Twitter and if enough people follow you then you’ll get some sympathy (or told off) and you’ll never feel like you’re whining because you’re supposed to discuss pointless trivia on Twitter. Some companies even watch the feed to see what aspects of their products annoy people. At least once I had someone let me know that the latest version fixed my problem (bizarrely, they replied with a blog comment). I’m sure I get more done at work since I can tweet from Launchy.

It’s a strange thing, Twitter, but it’s a good thing to have around. Oh, and if you don’t already, you can follow me. I assume anyone reading this far down my blog might want to do that.

There was a time when I didn’t know what was in the charts because I was laughably ignorant of music. But then I started listening to it a bit, and after a while I found I was passably interested in the charts and knew generally what was there. But then I found that I cared less and less: I’d found the kinds of music I was interested in, and it mostly wasn’t anywhere near the charts, whereas the music that was in the charts sounded like the tedious generic pop that it was. I realised I’d lost touch with the charts when the new wave of indie music hit: to this day I can’t remember what the difference is between Razorlight, The Killers and Franz Ferdinand. (I vaguely wonder if, like the B in ‘R&B’ is now short for ‘bass’, ‘indie’ might now be short for ‘indistinguishable’.) But I still find new music that I like. My system works, and it does so without me having to hear whatever drivel has been packaged up and sold to infants and the infantile this week or finding out who won The X Factor at any point (providing they don’t cover a song people have strong feelings towards). My knowledge of music intersected with the mainstream for a while but then came out the other side.

I mention it because that I realised today that I did the same thing with the news: there was a time when I found it boring and ignored it. Then I began to take an interest, and started watching the news on TV, or reading newspapers. After a while I found I knew mostly what was going on. But now I don’t watch the TV news. And I don’t read newspapers. I’ve found my own sources of news. Google Reader (my RSS reader of choice — not very good but nevertheless the best) serves up a variety of blogs, select columns from newspapers, and a handful of bloggers’ and my friends’ picks from del.icio.us, tumblr, Facebook and Google Reader Shared Items, and Twitter lets me know what else is on their minds. I find that this works much, much better than the increasingly irrelevant traditional media.

I started doing this by accident, without noticing. I was getting my news from the Internet and I stopped reading newspapers mostly because there wasn’t one lying around most days. These days I’ll rarely bother to pick it up if there is. Newspapers are huge, and full of stuff that is not interesting to me, or frequently to anybody else: PR stunts dressed as science, tragic but irrelevant tales of people I will never meet which are in no way representative of life in Britain, made up lies masquerading as news, polite reminders that they still haven’t found Madeline McCann (because she’s dead), pages of intractable minutiae about how well rich people I don’t know played games I don’t care about, letters from reactionary right-wing lunatics which Gordon Brown pretends to read in order to placate the dribbling cretins, cartoons that either make no sense at all or make sense but don’t work, and which have such lousy caricatures and opaque references in them that all the people and metaphors have to have the names written on them so we know what’s going on (hint: some politicians have normal-sized ears), conspiracy theories about Diana, horoscopes that would be false even if they were honest, opinion pieces by people I don’t even slightly respect and analyses done by people I have no reason to trust, comics I wouldn’t choose to read, uninteresting gossip about celebrities that I wouldn’t care about even if I thought it were true, news stories I have no reason to believe, propagation of things public figures have said about topics they don’t understand, more wallcharts than I have the wall to accommodate, grainy mobile phone-camera footage and photos of traffic and snow from the public, the uncontested claims of known idiots, and the megalithic monument to sheer, unadulterated pointlessness that is the bridge column. When I do read stories from newspapers, generally online, they come from a variety of sources, mainly the Guardian, the Times, the Independant, and the Telegraph, in roughly that order, and I almost always find them through other people rather than through the newspaper itself.

With my way, I can amass a legion of amateurs (and some professionals) who filter all the news, including some which gets largely ignored by the mass media, and repost the stuff they find interesting. I’m interested in human rights and transparency in government, so I have Amnesty International and mySociety feeding news into my gawping brain. I get interesting stuff from Ben Goldacre’s del.icio.us feed, the National Secular Society’s ‘What The Papers Say’ feed plus blogs like Why Don’t You? and the badsciencebloggers, my more political friends on Facebook and Twitter, and a load of other places. Because they’re mostly unpaid, they’re less likely to copy-paste press releases to fill wordcount, and because there’s a variety of sources, it eliminates all biases except my own (and it cuts down on that by a factor determined by my ineptitude at seeking out sources who share my politics). Large parts of it are still not of interest to me, but the hitrate is far better than TV news, and stories are promoted by interest rather than the whimsy of the media. For example, this story about a twelve year old black girl who is on trial for ‘assault’ after she was beaten up by four police officers who thought she was a prostitute came to my attention via. Graham Linehan (who wrote Father Ted, in case you didn’t know) who saw it on Boing Boing. A quick look at Google News suggests to me that only two newspapers in the world have bothered to report this story. Similarly, the recent furore over MPs’ expenses took place almost entirely outside the mainstream media until after the battle had been won. And Twitter lets me watch celebrities I like having impromptu semi-public discussions of said news: I don’t even need Newsnight any more. Also, I can read clever comics which are neither tired and inane nor thinly veiled adverts for Scott Adams’ side-businesses, and the Guardian even has its crosswords on the website (although as it goes, my brother sets crosswords for his student newspaper so I can even get those through my vast organic Yahoo Pipe if I ask nicely). Keeping my end of the bargain, I share and comment on news stories I find interesting (among many other things) on my Shared Items page, this blog and my Twitter feed, and thus I am part of other people’s vast news-filtering armies (although of course anyone is welcome to leech off the same system if they don’t want to contribute). This is people power working at its best; this is exactly what the Internet is about.

I presume that at some point some of these people must read newspapers. Some of them work for newspapers. If newspapers and TV news went away, I’m less sure where the original, unfiltered news would come from. I presume there are enough people anally reading press releases, Hansard and so forth, and badgering officials with Freedom of Information requests, and enough people inside organisations who are willing to leak things they think the public should know, that the system would still work, especially with WikiLeaks hosting it all on secret servers in places with convenient laws.

Actually, come to think of it, most of the above applies to TV guides as well. This applies to pretty-well every kind of information, including humour, music and interesting trivia. I used to live on my own and feel crushingly bored: I need other people to stop myself going stir-crazy. But now I can fire up the computer and get loads of interesting reading material and discuss it with people I like. I can kill an evening without even trying now. If I go out too much, I get overloaded with stuff when I get back, but a new tiering system I devised solves that. (I have a folder in Google Reader called ‘low priority’. Since you can put a feed in multiple folders, I can mark that as read and instantly delete 75% of my least-likely-to-be-interesting unread items.)

This is the great thing about the internet. It took it a while to find its feet, and I’ve no doubt it will keep getting better, but this is what happens when people can exchange information this easily, and it’s fantastic.

Christian Scientists Split God

A group of Christian research scientists in Massachusetts announced this week that they had managed for the first time to split God, also known as the Higgs particle although mostly to annoy physicists, into his component parts. God is believed to have existed in the conditions immediately prior to the Big Bang.

They made the discovery using a machine called the Holy Smoke Chamber. A fragment of the True Cross was accelerated to 40% the speed of light and collided with a King James Bible. The 25m wide device is cooled by a constant stream of holy water. A team of 5 priests work round the clock blessing the inbound pipelines. Researchers were able to detect two of God’s components in the debris from the explosion.

According to Christian scientific theory, God is composed of three smaller particles called father, son and holy spirit. The trace from the Holy Smoke Chamber clearly shows a trail for the son particle, which curves gracefully through the chamber for five nanoseconds before ascending into heaven, more-or-less in line with the theory. The father particle’s trace, however, did not agree with calculated predictions. The researchers have admitted that the way the father particle moves is ‘mysterious’, but are confident an explanation will be found. The holy spirit particle was not observed. The Christian scientists believe that this particle passed clean through the chamber like a ghost.

Most Christian scientists agree that the father and son particles could tell us a lot about the universe if we can unlock their secrets. The experiments have been criticised by others, however, who claim that earlier work by Revelation et al suggests that recreating the son particle on earth could trigger a process known as ‘armageddon’, which potentially could wipe out life on Earth.

DCSF delight as exam results show which pupils are stupid

Schools minister Ed Balls has expressed his delight at a ‘mixed bag’ of exam results, which he says ‘accurately show which pupils are clever and which are a bit stupid.’ When the results were announced, Gordon Brown described them as ‘disappointing,’ saying that ‘we had hoped more students might achieve the top grades,’ but Balls now claims that the purpose of exams is to gauge the different ability of students in various subjects and that a good distribution of grades, including fails, is needed to accomplish this.

‘This is absolute nonsense,’ said Beverley Hughes in an interview earlier today. ‘The purpose of testing students is to demonstrate how wildly successful our education reforms have been. We had been looking forward to another year of record-breaking exam results, and the exciting possibility of introducing a new top-grade to cope with the number of pupils achieving A* at GCSE, but now the system has been hijacked by teachers who just want to know how their students are doing.’ Insiders say the planned introduction of the new grade, tentatively named ‘AA1*+’ was intended to be a much-publicised event designed to underline the runaway success of both students and the Labour Party. The introduction has been put on hold pending an improvement in exam grades.

Employers have praised the latest results, saying that their similarity to the previous years’ results will make it easier to compare job applicants who sat them in different years, as well as clearly showing which pupils are habitual underachievers and should not be considered for important jobs. It is even thought that preventing stupid people from entering highly paid and responsible jobs could help the economy in the long term, and employers have been looking for a system of doing just that for many years, but Children’s minister Delyth Morgan has said that national exam results should not be used in this way. ‘This isn’t what they were designed to do. They are purely a tool for demonstrating the achievements of our department and the government in general.’ Some employers have gone so far as to suggest that some government ministers have a vested interest in maintaining the status-quo in which unqualified and incompetent people can remain in well paid, high-power jobs simply by engineering a series of spuriously inflated exam results. Ed Balls has strenuously denied these rumours, citing a government spreadsheet which would ‘authoritatively debunk these rumours’ had he not left the CD on a bus.

Analogue Switchoff: Your Questions Answered

Will I need to get a new TV?

No. In most cases you will need to purchase a digital receiver box to plug into your existing set. This will enable you to receive digital broadcasts after analogue is turned off. Most analogue TV will be switched off by 2011, but your area may differ.

Will I need to get a new radio?

Eventually. Analogue radio is being continued longer than analogue TV. No date has yet been set for this but sometime around 2015 seems likely. When this happens you will need to purchase a ‘DAB’ Digital Radio.

Will I need to get a new clock?

Yes. When analogue time is turned off in 2020, old-style analogue clocks will stop working. You will need to upgrade to a digital clock to enable you to continue telling the time. You will probably already own a digital clock as it will be built into your digital radio.

What other analogue products will need replacing?

If for some reason you still own a video cassette recorder, you will need to replace it with a Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) player. You will also be unable to play vinyl records and audio cassettes and will need to replace these with digital media such as MP3s or CDs.

Is there anything else I should know?

In 2025, analogue description will be turned off. Among other changes, you will no longer be able to describe the height of a person by gesturing and saying ‘about this high’. You will need to give a figure. You may continue give this figure in feet and inches as long as you also provide a metric estimate. For reference, six feet is approximately 1.5m, and two inches is roughly 0.05m.

Atheist Buses to be followed by Agnostic Trams, Troubled Billboards

Following the success of the so-called “Atheist Bus” campaign, other irreligious groups have launched similar efforts. The atheist message being plastered across buses throughout Britain reads “There’s probably no god. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.” Next week sees the launch of the “Agnostic Tram”, which bears the message “I don’t know if there’s a god - I’m just a tram.” The group behind the “Troubled Billboard” has not yet managed to agree on a wording, but the current favoured text is “There must be more to life than just this, but there’s so much bad stuff in the world… oh, why is it so complicated? I just try to be nice, what else can you do?”. The organisers had hoped to get a bus advert too, but it rapidly became apparent that there simply wouldn’t be enough space.

Commuters in Huddersfield have recently started seeing adverts in train stations which say “We don’t know if we actually believe in God, but we are spiritual”. In one case, this advert is running right next to one that reads “I don’t know whether or not there’s a God, but there definitely aren’t any Thetans.” Nobody yet knows who paid for the double-page advert in Monday’s Telegraph which simply stated “oh, God, I’m so depressed.”

Surprisingly, a recent MORI poll asking which religious beliefs were most common found that most Britons agreed with the statement “I don’t care enough either way that I feel I have to paint it on a bus”.

Civilian deaths in Gaza. More soon.

UN Troops Help Woman With Own Personal Battle Against Cancer

Long-term cancer patient Amanda Myers, 42, was surprised earlier this month when fifty UN troops arrived in her hospital ward to help with what had previously been her own personal battle against cancer. Also surprised were the soldiers, who had previously been deployed keeping the peace in the Middle East. ‘They didn’t seem to know why they were there,’ said Myers. ‘They’ve been very helpful, though. Supportive and always happy to pop to the shops when I need something.’

President of the UN Security Council Jean-Maurice Ripart told the press that after accusations that the UN did nothing about the oppressive regime of Saddam Hussein, the UN was keen to regain popularity by fighting something that everyone would support. What happened next is unclear, but it is known that the council discussed removing a rogue head of state, but had difficulty coming up with anybody suitably unpopular. After a number of names were dismissed as either only ambiguously dangerous or too obscure, the British delegate suggested cancer, having forgotten that English humour is not always understood by other nations.

A representative of the hospital where Myers is being treated said ’strictly, we’re not supposed to allow visitors to stay in the ward 24/7, but when I explained this to the sergeant, he said “I don’t think so, Sir” and didn’t move. In the end we just let them stay. They haven’t caused any problems, apart from the two trasnsplant patients killed last week by friendly fire.’

So far, the UN say, the tumour in Myers’ lung has ’stubbornly refused to negotiate’, but they remain confident of victory.

Terrorist changes mind after seeing atheist bus advert

Police were called to a bus in London yesterday after a man was seen emptying an unidentified liquid onto the floor of the vehicle. Witnesses say he then dropped the bag and ran out of the bus laughing. Police analysis confirmed that the liquid was an explosive mixture of flour and peroxide which the would-be terrorist had apparently chosen not to detonate.

‘I spotted him as soon as he got on the bus,’ one witness said. ‘He looked troubled and was carrying a large bag. He seemed to get more and more agitated until he ripped open his bag, jumped out of his seat, and got off as quickly as he could at the next set of traffic lights.’

Following a brief investigation, police believe the man was an Islamic fundamentalist, most likely working alone, who was plotting to blow up the bus in protest at supposedly immoral western culture, but when getting onto the bus had read the advert on the side which says ‘there’s probably no God, now stop worrying and enjoy your life.’

The man has not yet been identified, but someone matching his description was seen that evening, sitting in the corner of a strip club with a bottle of tequila and a copy of ‘Unweaving the Rainbow’.

Bush refuses to let Obama move into Blair House early

“I know the feeling” - Gordon Brown

Crop circle found that says ‘there probably is’.

OfCom say Prince Harry video ‘outside remit’

Despite receiving hundreds of complaints, OfCom have refused to rule on the alleged racial slur in a video made by Prince Harry three years ago and released recently by the News of the World, claiming that home videos are not subject to their guidelines.

One complaint, leaked to newspapers, reads ‘I would like to complain in the strongest possible terms about the despicable language used by “Prince” Harry in the recent programme “That Video He Made”. Although I myself am not in Harry’s squad and did not see the events in question, I found the seven seconds of out-of-context commentary which I read about in a reputable newspaper [sic] three years later deeply offensive, and I would like to know what measures will be put in place to prevent it happening again.’ OfCom described the letter as ‘typical’.

Prince Harry, who made the offending remark, has already issued a statement saying that the term was used ‘without malice’ and ‘as a nickname’. However, in an interview with BBC News the soldier’s uncle, who wasn’t there, has never met Harry, and knows only what his nephew chooses to tell him about their relationship, claims otherwise.

The Daily Express has already announced that it intends to escalate the incident to the level of Scandal, and claims to have found a series of similar incidents involving racist remarks or actions by other members of the royal family. A spokesperson for the palace told reporters that he thought it ‘highly unlikely’ that the newspaper had unearthed such events, describing the royals as ‘highly reputable members of the international community’ who ‘would not engage in racism or stereotyping.’

Scientists admit Hadron Collider created Financial Black Hole

New compression algorithm discards information listeners are too uncouth to appreciate

Apple have launched a new compression algorithm developed to further extend the capacity of their iPod music players. The format, called XF2, works by discarding any information that the listener won’t appreciate anyway. For example, the best selling XF2 file at the moment is Alexandra Burke’s cover of Hallelujah, which when compressed contains no Biblical imagery or dark undertones at all.

Audiophiles have been outraged by the announcement and are boycotting the new technology, however the general public have warmed to it immensely. One user told reporters “it’s great; I’ve managed to get the entire back catalogue of Girls Aloud, Hearsay and Britney Spears onto my iPod, and there’s still loads of space left.” A spokesperson for Apple commented on this review saying “what’s really good is that in this case the algorithm produces lossless compression, because there was never really anything to that music to begin with. This allows the system to shrink the songs greatly without losing anything. Many so-called ‘boy band’ songs can actually be reconstituted entirely just from the titles.”

Some users have got more out of it than others. Michael Simon, a builder from Oldham, has found that most songs are very small files that download very fast, but Jason Cockburn, a writer from London, says that the music he downloads seems hardly to have compressed at all, with the exception of Don McClean’s American Pie. “That’s probably because it’s a stupid nonsense song anyway,” he said.

Apple have admitted the new system does still have some bugs: currently the algorithm crashes when trying to compress Bohemian Rhapsody.

The name ‘XF2′ does not stand for anything. In production the project had a much longer, cleverer name which was a reference to Dante, but that name has not been announced because the press release was XF2 encoded and it was felt that journalists wouldn’t get it.

Atheist bus on collision course with Church

Could Apple Juice Be Cure For Hiccups?

According to Professor David Cook of Durham University, the answer may be ‘yes’. The discovery was made yesterday, when Cook had hiccups and noticed they were gone later that afternoon. In an exclusive interview secured by chance in a bar, he said “I don’t know what did it. Possibly they just went away on their own. I know I’d had a glass of apple juice. I suppose that might have helped.”

This ground-breaking clinical research offers hope to millions of sufferers worldwide, and nutritionist Patrick Holford has already launched his own range of apple-juice based pills which you should buy. In a press-release, he said that healthy adults should probably drink fifteen glasses of apple juice every two hours or, failing that, take just one of his ‘Cidex’ brand apple-juice supplements.

Holford explains that the active ingredient in apples is the cell wall, which is much thicker than the membrane in human cells and therefore stronger. This means that the cells can be used to strengthen aspects of the human body such as the immune system, allowing patients to naturally fight off viruses such as the hiccups.

Sufferers of the hiccups are already demanding access to this new cure on the NHS, but NICE have remained adamant, saying that the treatment is unproven and therefore not cost effective. Newly founded support group JUICE has described this as ‘blatant bias and discrimination’ against sufferers of ‘a serious disease which is often under-reported’. They say that experimental treatments such as this should be made available automatically.

If you would like more information on where to get this amazing new medicine, contact Cidex Ltd. immediately, on 0845 123 4789.

Here is what I think happened: Sarah Palin is a victim of circumstance. Her meteoric rise to infamy is the fault of the people of Alaska and the Republican party rather than her own. Palin’s problem is that she has no internal barometer of her own ability to do any given job. When she saw an ad saying ‘mayor needed, job may involve constructing coherent sentences’ she (wrongly) assumed she could do it. When the gubernatorial elections rolled around she assumed she could do that too. Whether she asked to be considered for vice-president or whether someone approached her, I don’t think it ever occured to her that she might actually not be smart enough to run the entire country. And there will always be people like her, as evidenced by the paper Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognising one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments (link is to PDF, title will worry the self-employed). That’s why we have systems of exams and qualifications and job interviews — and indeed elections — in place to prevent the incompetent from being given important jobs they are likely to mess up. It doesn’t always work, but it’s usually effective. Think of all the cretins you’ve ever met. Was any of them a doctor or a teacher or an MP? Probably relatively few of them were.

But because now other people have put the idea into Palin’s head that she might actually be qualified to be President, it’s going to be very difficult to convince her otherwise which is, presumably, why she launched SarahPAC. A PAC is, I’m told, an organisation that collects money and turns it into political capital, and is often a precursor to a Presidential campaign. Exactly what else hers might be for is unclear, but given the timing, the five-page or so website, SarahPAC.com, is generally assumed to indicate that she’s planning a campaign for 2012.

I dont’t think we can make Sarah Palin go away, but I think we can ensure her campaign fails. I don’t think we can stop the far-right lunatic fringes of the Republican party from supporting her, but I think we can stop anyone else making that mistake. I don’t think contempt is appropriate, but I don’t think that pity is going to stop her. I propose that ridicule is the answer. People have to see how completely absurd it is that someone so utterly useless could become President.

That’s why my response to SarahPAC.com was to register PacSARAH.com and put up my own page. I like to think it is no less insane than hers.

PacSARAH.com. Spread the word.

A document from the committee led by Michael Martin, the Commons Speaker, said: “It has been argued that it would be excessively burdensome for Members to have provided receipts for all transactions and that additional costs incurred … would be likely disproportionate.”

Which seems almost reasonable except that a reader quickly wrote in to point out that

As a self-employed person I am instructed by my local tax office to keep, log and report all expenses, down to a sandwich or coffee, for five years. Failure to do so will mean I cannot claim these expenses against legitimate business expenses and hence mitigate my tax bill.

MPs don’t just claim the top 28% back from public funds, remember, they get this stuff for free, entirely from taxes. Now I’m not against that, obviously; they have as much right to an expense account as everyone else. (That means they also have as much obligation to let the people paying for it know what they use it for as everyone else. I’m sure we can all think of at least a couple of examples where MPs have been caught abusing this system and their carreers have been damaged as a result. That’s what this would stop.) If they want the self-employed to log these things in exchange for a small fraction of this money, it seems reasonable to suppose they’d be willing to do it themselves for the full amount. But then, it would seem reasonable that if MPs were willing to ban smoking in all workplaces including bars (which again, I support) that they would include in that ban the bars in the Houses of Parliament. It should be a clue that they’re not fit to govern when they enforce rules and then refuse to live by them. It is especially so given that MPs are the people whom it is most important are subject to scrutiny: we entrust them with great power and it’s only fair that we can watch to see what they do with it.

Here is the actual proposal:

This Order amends the entries for the House of Commons and the House of Lords in Part 1 of Schedule 1 to the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (”the Act”).  In respect of Members of Parliament it removes most expenditure information held by either House of Parliament from the scope of the Act.

It strikes me as either lazy and stupid or just massively dishonest. The whole premise of democracy rests somewhat on transparency and openness: if the people aren’t given all the information, how are they supposed to make a decision? Worse, if they’re drip-fed information by the government, then they’ll only know things that make the government look good, and that will just serve to keep the same government in power forever.

It’s vitally important that such things are opposed, because systems naturally fall into that rut anyway. For example, the recent Political Parties and Elections Bill Committee discussed making it more difficult for large, well-funded parties to pour endless money into local elections relatively free of scrutiny by working around the rules. That such a bill is needed is a clue that the system is naturally rigged in favour of whoever is in power. That we’ve only ever had two parties in power, or even with a reasonable shot at government. And apparently the discussion was largely controlled by the chairs, who were all Labour and Conservative members, who primarily selected trivial amendments tabled by Labour and Conservative members, and apparently the way these committees work is that rather than continuing until you reach an agreement or have discussed every idea, you talk until four o’clock then call it a day. That’s not democracy; that’s cricket! It even ends up being abused in the same way as the rules of cricket. The upshot is that the rules to stop big parties abusing their positions end up being controlled by big parties, and the people with the power to change that are the people it’s protecting. The only way around it is for the public to be aware and determined, until it stops being viable for MPs to behave that way. After all, they win nothing if they protect the system and immediately get voted out of it. But we’re a very long way from that at the moment.

And now, some MPs are planning on voting themselves out of having to publish details of their expenses. They say this is because it is too time-consuming and expensive to do so (although presumably it would be cheaper in the long run not to give them carte-blanche to buy any expensive telly they’d like), and they cite as an example details already logged, collated and scheduled for publication, which apparently cost the taxpayer £500,000. That being the case, why are the new proposals so carefully timed and retrospectively acting so as to block the publication of those details? They’re effectively free: we’ve paid for them already. There’s no means to an end in blocking them: the only plausible end is simply keeping your spending a secret, and at that, keeping it a secret from the people who end up footing the bill. This, at the same time as they’re trying to design an invasive and frankly rather stupid database containing details of emails, phone calls, internet activity and text messages for everyone in the country whether or not there is even the slightest suggestion that they may have done anything wrong, which they are presumably going to leave on a train or something. The hypocricy that they show in fighting for their own rights and privacy while trampling everyone else’s is staggering. And we only really have one means of recourse:

MPs have the power to keep their expenses secret if they win the vote, but they do not have the power to keep their voting secret. Not only the results of this vote will be published, but also a full list of MPs who backed it, opposed it, and didn’t vote (which, let’s not forget, is a cowardly way of looking like you object while actually helping the bill to pass). Pester yours to vote the right way. Then, after the vote (whether it passes or not), see how they voted. And bear that in mind when you decide if you want to sack them at the next opportunity.