I assume that you know all this because you are reading a blog, and at that a blog which frequently mentions science and political issues. You are exactly the kind of person I would expect to know exactly this kind of thing. Let’s take a step back and see what you’d know if you got your news from newspapers and TV.

The Guardian, whose paper carried the in-no-way-offending comment in the first place, have published precisely one follow-up that I have found:

Singh said he would like to fight it, because he is unhappy about the interpretation put on his words. “But there is a bigger issue about the state of our libel laws and how easy it is to be a science journalist or any journalist,” he said.

They elected not to mention what that wider issue is or that the interpretation put on Singh’s words was totally unreasonable, although they did mention that they bankrolled his legal defence (as they did for Ben Goldacre when Matthias Rath sued him) – frankly if newspapers do stop being able to make money then the Guardian should consider applying for charitable status. They do more good than many groups that have it.

The Times has published, as far as I can find, exactly one sentence on the subject, which was totally uncritical of the case and which they used to make Singh sound like a bad person and to put words in his mouth:

On Thursday the [Edinburgh Skeptics] society is addressed by Dr Simon Singh, the author who is being sued by the British Chiropractic Association for his dismissals of the efficacy of chiropractise.

The Telegraph have not mentioned it, nor have the Independent. BBC.co.uk has nothing on it, as does channel4.com. Bizarrely, Sky News can’t sort search results by date so I have no idea whether they’ve deigned to mention it. (The above searches were performed with the sites’ own search functions, so they’ve only themselves to blame if I’ve missed anything.)

That’s a bit crap, considering this is a story about newspapers. The Telegraph, having exhausted all the abuses of the Parliamentary expenses (which a Guardian journalist did all the legwork for), have set about listing everything else MPs have claimed for and trying to insinuate a scandal around each one where generally none exists, and yet don’t apparently have room for even one article about a genuine scandal that is representative of a massive and unwarranted threat of litigation that hangs over them every time they publish any kind of comment piece.

I’ve said before that I get my news from blogs, Twitter, friends and the Internet. I said at the time that newspapers were still a vital primary source, but they’re just not. We know about this from Nature, NewScientist, nerds on Twitter, blogs and so forth, not from newspapers — despite it being about them. The same was true of the planned law to exempt MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act — despite their willingness to cash in on the fruits of that victory.

We don’t need the newspapers any more. Clearly we can do this on our own.

I feel good that I can contribute so much to this situation, with the unwitting help of everyone on Twitter. I forget exactly who, but since it’s pig/disease puns, it seems reasonable to blame @bengoldacre, @krypto, @ArianeSherine and whichever lunatic that started #NameThatFlu hashtag.

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.

This is all well and good except that none of them has done anything remotely wrong. They’re 18 and they’re acting like any other 18 year olds. They, or at least some of them, are drinking and fighting and having sex and then posting about it on social networking sites. That all sounds pretty reasonable to me, and it’s actually good to see that the shooting hasn’t totally wrecked their abilities to live normal lives. But the Express seems to think that that’s somehow Not On. No, these people are Dunblane Survivors, and that means they have to spend their every waking second Honouring The Memory Of Their Fallen Classmates. If they do anything else, like have fun or something, they’re Shaming Their Fallen Classmates.

DUNBLANE survivors have “shamed” the memory of their dead peers with foul-mouthed boasts about sex, brawls and drink-fuelled antics as they reach adulthood. A number of the youngsters, now 18, have posted shocking blogs and photographs of themselves on the Internet, 13 years after being sheltered from public view in the aftermath of the atrocity. … In the days and months that followed the survivors, then aged just five and six, were the subject of overwhelming worldwide sympathy. But now the Sunday Express can reveal how, on their web-based social networking sites, some of them have boasted about alcoholic binges and fights.

Well, no. Obviously nobody at the Express really expects anything else. That would be ridiculous. They just wanted a scandal that nobody else had, and the easiest way to make sure your scandal is exclusive is to engineer it. Nobody else could happen upon a scoop that didn’t exist. If that’s not possible, something that superficially resembles a scandal (such as a sandal) will do. So presumably the journalist, if that’s what you want to call her, Paula Murray, waited until some people who survived a horrific shooting turned 18, looked them up on Facebook, and printed quotes. And pictures. She must have known in advance that some of the survivors were going to be loutish — that’s true of any group of teenagers — so she had this massive ready-made ’scandal’ she could unleash as soon as the last of the surviving children turned 18.

Then you just need a quote from someone who lost a grand-daughter…

“It is insulting. They were damn lucky to come out of it and they should be making the most of it. Maybe that’s what they think they are doing, but it is in bad taste. We go to the cemetery every Sunday and we nearly always meet some people who are visitors, and they come and have a wee look. I think that is lovely and I always say to them that it is nice they remember. So the behaviour of these children is a real contrast to all those caring people. It’s shameful.”

…she would consider confronting the survivors involved. She added: “Can it really be genuinely these same young people? I think it is totally out of order to put something like that on the Internet. It is a bit nasty really.”

…because nothing adds credibility to your story like the emotional reactions of people whose loved ones have been killed. I object pretty strongly to everything she’s said there, but I’m not going to blame her for it. Sixteen pupils died. They presumably had thirty-two parents and sixty-four grandparents. It must be pretty easy to find one of those 96 people that you can whip up into an emotionally charged state and then get a nasty quote out of. That’s why their opinions shouldn’t be in newspapers. It’s also why Murray got a quote from MSP Elizabeth Smith and pasted it into the article as if it was relevant. In an email posted as a comment on the Enemies of Reason blog, Smith says

My comments were not made in the context of Dunblane. The journalist did not ask me anything about Dunblane nor did I comment on it or on any individual involved. It would be quite wrong for me to do so. I have made comments recently to several newspapers about the issues related to young people using internet sites and the inappropriate use of that material. … What the Sunday Express chooses to print as the context is a matter for the relevant editor.

The other comments on that post are also well worth reading (as is the post itself).

The Express have since deleted the story from their website, which could be taken to mean that since receiving all those complaints they’ve realised how contemptible the article was, except… what really angers me about this whole thing is how pre-meditated it all is. Bad journalism as a result of ignorance or incompetence is one thing. Laziness is a bit worse but still basically forgivable, but this could only happen if people set out to do bad journalism. This isn’t something Murray happened on and misinterpreted; this is something she has engineered. She went sniffing around the personal lives of innocent people looking for something she could frame as a scandal. It makes me wonder how long she sat on it waiting for that magical birthday that transformed the last of these people from Innocent Child Victims to Celebrities.

It is perhaps the single worst piece of journalism I’ve ever read.

Should we act on a blame?
Or should we chase the moments away?
Should we live? Should we give?
Remember forever the guns and the feathers in time.

Because the line between wrong and right,
Is the width of a thread from a spider’s web.
The piano keys are black and white,
But they sound like a million colours in your mind.

Specifically, they evoke the feeling of not knowing what the hell Katie Melua is banging on about. It all sounds like nice, sentimental metaphor until you actually listen to the words and realise that it’s just bullshit carefully sculpted into the shape of emotion, like it was written by a very talented poet who didn’t have anything he particularly wanted to say. And it’s every single one of her songs. And it’s frustrating, because I basically quite like her music, but every time I hear it… look, here, from the same abum:

If this was a quiz on a TV show
And the prize was a guy who would love me so
Whatever they ask, the answer I know:
Hey, my reply, boy,
Is gimme a shy boy.

Is it wrong that it bothers me that that is not how quiz shows work? You can’t win the prize simply by asking for it every time someone asks you a question (with the exception of Deal or No Deal). To be honest, though, the bigger problem with Shy Boy is that it’s a whole song about how she likes shy boys but, being shy, they never ask her out. What year is this? Make the first move! That’s okay now. But don’t select someone on the basis of their shyness and then whine that they’re shy. That’s not reasonable. Well, unless… I’m kind of assuming that Katie Melua is not herself incredibly shy. I realise this is a generalisation purely on the basis that her job is singing to large groups of people.

My favourite ever Katie Melua lyric is at the end of Nine Million Bicycles:

There are nine million bicycles in Beijing.
That’s a fact.
It’s a thing we can’t deny,
Like the fact that I will love you till I die.
And there are nine million bicycles in Beijing.
And you know that I will love you till I die.

I love the random piece of trivia dropped into the middle of what ought to be a fairly emotional sentence. I can’t dislike the song, purely because at some point someone must have turned on the radio and heard that song for the first time but only caught the last four or five lines, and they’d just have got love and bicycles with no context. I think that could blow someone’s brain.

Also, I feel like Nine Million Bicycles would be a great song to do at a karaoke night, but with entirely spurious verses that you make up to fit the structure. You just need a ten- or eleven-syllable piece of trivia. It’s easy.

The tomato is technically a fruit. 
That’s a fact.
It’s a truth we can’t deny 
Like the fact that I will love you till I die. 

We’re fourteen billion light years from the edge, 
In real life.
I know the metre’s not as nice,
But don’t change facts to suit your rhythmic device.

I have seventy-seven Facebook friends
Including family,
and it makes me feel quite small 
That you’re the one I love the most of all

Alright, one of those was just pedantry. But that just shows how little thought was put into the original lyrics.

Bonus Katie Melua Jokes That Don’t Work Because She Is The Punchline And Not The Setup:

1. Destiny’s Child’s Survivor is a song about how Beyonce showed her ex that she could be successful without him by forging a glittering career as a bicycle saleswoman in Beijing.
2. I wish people would stop criticising the British Olympic team for mostly getting medals in cycling events at the 2008 games. Do you have any idea how many bicycles there are in Beijing?

Clues

1. Something odd — dessert begins before a drink. (4)
2. Charged particles — Si? (4)
3. Hitchhiker confused after 4 suggested (6)
4. Heard jolly greeting (2)
5. Heard a relative bet (4)
6. Swindled by headless chad (3)
7. Loathe jumbled articles (4)
8. One bit, say, where a drill might be kept (2,1,4)
9. Cotton’s starting deteriorating on the spindle (4)
10. Endless money for me! (3)
11. After end of bombs, Mandy’s innards found in bunker (4)
12. Warm, with expanded belly. Good times. (4)
13. Walking trees in advent setting (4)
14. Part of the mind has nothing in it (5)
15. Infidel to heartlessly attempt robbery (7)
16. Fuss after a party (3)
17. Polish singer in function (5)
18. Constant singer (1)
19. Mixed side on a plate (7)

It’s not very objective or rigorous, obviously, but I can’t help but like it anyway. How could you not when it leads to such brilliant headlines as “Children say happiness is important”? This from the Metro, which runs a snide little column called “No S**t, Sherlock” (their asterisks), where they poke fun at scientific studies that produce results that they consider obvious. Hm.

Mostly though, it’s an excuse to have a few gentle laughs at the naïvité of children. I can’t find the full breakdown for this year’s survey, but from the summaries in newspapers and the results from 2005-2007, it’s safe to say an equally valid headline would be “Children stupid, survey finds”.

The best bit is question 3: “if you were king or queen of the world, what rules would you make?”. It turns out that children in Luton are far-right-wing lunatics. And they say that you get more conservative with age. My favourite one was the seventh most popular answer in 2005, which was “everlasting pets”. I’d like to think that once people grow up they stop thinking that the government can just ban cancer or something, but clearly they don’t.

Deborah Campbell, 25, of nearby Hunterdon County, N.J., said she phoned in her order last week to the Greenwich ShopRite. When she told the bakery department she wanted her son’s name spelled out, she was told to talk to a supervisor, who denied the request.

Maybe that’s because you named him ‘Adolf Hitler’.

Heath Campbell said he named his son after Adolf Hitler because he liked the name and because “no one else in the world would have that name.”

Except Hitler.

Campbell said he was raised not to avoid people of other races but not to mix with them socially or romantically. But he said he would try to raise his children differently. ”Say he grows up and hangs out with black people. That’s fine, I don’t really care,” he said. “That’s his choice.”

…Although it’s unlikely, because you named him ‘Adolf Hitler’.

The transparently false attribution is irony… The attribution is literally false but no reasonable reader could be misled by it.

…

a reasonable reader would expect so serious an allegation to be made without humour, and explicitly

I think this is why the Daily Express still exists: nobody can touch. No reasonable reader could be misled by it because they wouldn’t be reading it in the first place.

Click image for hi-res version, if for whatever reason you want one.

And yes, it says ‘Christmas’. I may be a secularist but I am not a killjoy.

Because of the complexity and cost of building a telescope of this unprecedented size, ESO has elected to focus on the less ambitious 42 meter diameter European Extremely Large Telescope instead.

This was on the entry for the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope.

Three things occur to me about this naming system.

1. The South African Large Telescope is 10m across. The Large Hadron Collider is 5 miles across. What size will the Overwhelmingly Large Hadron Collider be?
2. At some point, scientists will run out of easily ranked adverbs. This could halt all scientific process.
3. At that point I hope that someone like Brian Cox, recently quoted as saying “anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a twat”, is on hand to introduce profanity. Science could be saved by names like “The Seriously Fucking Huge Telescope”.

Here is some information that is not included anywhere in my diary:

• A map of the city where I live
• Timetables for bus or train services

Here is some of the information that did make the cut:

• Road and rail maps of London, where I never go.
• A relief map of South America.
• A chart to show which wines are best.
• The number of ounces in a hectogram, whatever the crap a hectogram is.
• The dialling code for Trinidad and Tobago.
• The UN’s web address.
• The phone number of the Association of British Insurers

I simply cannot think what that’s for. There are loads of phone numbers in there. The ones for airports and suchlike I can imagine being useful, but all of the others are not. In what situation would I be able to call Sports Wales but not Directory Enquiries? Is it for if I’m at a payphone and only have 50p? This stuff is what Google is for. Why do these idiots think it’s useful to me to have the Patent Office’s phone number about my person at all times? Do they think I’ll be in a shop, think “hey, that product violates patent number US D522914!” and immediately call them up so they can send their emergency response unit in? Didn’t they notice as they were compiling all that information how incredibly easy a job it was, and why didn’t it occur to them that if they could track it down with such ease, so could anyone else?

Maybe if there is an asteroid hurtling towards me and I don’t have time for Directory Enquiries, I can look up the Liberal Democrat Party’s phone number in my diary and alert Lembit Opik.

It’s ridiculous.