Interesting Links for 16-12-2014

[andrewducker]

• Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation.
  (tags: Amazon punctuation epicwtf )
• Identical Twins' Genes Are Not Identical
  (tags: genetics twins )
• Jobcentre sanctions woman for being pregnant
  (tags: welfare work pregnancy UK )
• Graphene: Fast, Strong, Cheap, and Impossible to Use (so far)
  (tags: graphene technology research )
• What

Comments

[bart_calendar]

What is Amazon going to do with James Ellroy - a best selling author who intentionally uses incorrect grammar and spelling in his books?

Hell, the man has entire paragraphs without verbs.

Also I am not ready to believe that the people putting out dinosaur and bigfoot erotica have no grammar mistakes in their books.

[andrewducker]

It does seem massively ridiculous to me.

I can understand them not wanting to include the massive dumps of Wikipedia that turn up in their POD section, but "Your writing has too many hyphens" has completely detached from reality!

[cybik]

Clockwork Orange and Feersum Endjinn come to mind also. And anything by ee cummings..

[naath]

Star Trek> no, not everyone-ever picks that one (#1 on the list). Silly. Trials and Tribbleations is much better ;-p

[steer]

Trials and Tribbleations is pure genius.

[kalimac]

So Amazon is willing to suppress books because readers think they're incompetently written? Boy, this is power! Tempting, tempting ...

The only Star Trek series I really know well is TOS, and while I don't have any objections to any of the good episodes that list put in the top ten, I would rank "Trouble with Tribbles" along with them instead of several points down, and I'd certainly put it much higher than any TNG episodes with Q in them. Indeed, the main reason I watched as little TNG as I did was fear that I'd get yet another episode with Q in it. That concept had its outing in a TOS episode called "The Squire of Gothos" (also ranked fairly high, I see), and that should have been the end of it.

Oh, and I watched "Trials and Tribble-ations", one of the few times I ventured into DS9, and I wished I hadn't watched it. Painful. Why retcon is a temptation that should usually be resisted.

[ipslore]

If you read the comments on the 'Amazon hates hyphens' thing, one possible explanation is that he was using a minus sign for the hyphen instead of an en dash, which could cause problems for text-to-speech readers. So it's not quite as absurd as it sounds.

It's still utter bollocks that they weren't able to properly explain the problem to him, though.

[andrewducker]

That _would_ be reasonable. And if they asked him to change that, that would be just fin.

[ipslore]

Yeah, dropping a line to say "Hey, maybe you should take a look at the html you're using for hyphens, it's causing problems X and Y" is reasonable; cutting him off until he fixes a problem that they failed to adequately explain isn't.

Good News You May Have Missed in 2014

[drdoug]

Thanks for posting that. I love that stuff. The news is full of the worst stuff that's happening; the good stuff happens more slowly and has terrible news value. Even the things Bill Gates picked out here are news-ed up.

I got a bit depressed recently when there was another ONS release of mortality data ... and so far as I can see, not one single large news organisation picked it up. Because the story was the same as last year, and the year before, and the year before: fewer people are dying. Overall, out of everyone, all causes included, significantly fewer deaths last year. This is excellent news! It's about as good news as you could reasonably hope for! But except it's not news at all. It's just good stuff that you can only point to in the most distant and abstract sense. It's impossible to personalise: the people who would've died either didn't get ill, so they just didn't know, or they did get seriously ill, in which case they're still going to rate it as a pretty rum year overall even though they made it.

Re: Good News You May Have Missed in 2014

[andrewducker]

The clear answer is for everyone to get ill at least once per year, and seriously so once per five years, so that they can feel good about not being dead.

(And yes, it is sad that more good news isn't publicly visible!)

Re: Good News You May Have Missed in 2014

[drdoug]

Yes! It's the Revolutionary Communist Party argument for health statistics! We must oppose attempts to improve things and instead make them very, very much worse than they are, so that people want them to be better, which will at some later date, by some convoluted and fanciful mechanism, result in them getting better ...

I think there's something profound about what we like about news that means that this stuff just can't work as news, even with the most noble intentions. I suspect I am quite unusually fond of, say, charts showing long term improvement trends, and even I hardly mention them or pass them on via Twitter or LJ.

Re: Good News You May Have Missed in 2014

[andrewducker]

I think people are generally disinclined to believe that things do, or indeed _can_ get better.

Which is a massive shame, because they do. An awful lot of the time.