Commenters don’t care if their comment is deleted.

I blanked it last week, because, frankly, it sounded silly: a 13-year-old girl has just made a music promo that suddenly went viral on the basis of how bad it was. The link to the article isn’t working for me, but Boing Boing’s summary is probably good enough for now: despite the promo being ( Read more... )

Random cynicism, human-powered data mining, or the latest iteration of 419 scams?

I’m on Twitter, and while I’m not a prolific poster, occasionally tweets will attract the attention of some random bot that decides to follow me, maybe thinking that I’ll follow it back. I mostly ignore them - everything I post is public, after all, so it’s not ( Read more... )

A revised House of Lords may be the most surprising outcome of Britain’s new coalition government.

The new Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition deal includes one intriguing detail: a commitment to a partially- or wholly-elected House of Lords. This being a Conservative-led government, and the nature of the House of Lords in the UK ( Read more... )

Part of an occasional series of dog-discovered truths.

There are some truths that are self-evident, and can be discovered by introspective reasoning alone. Descartes’ “Cogito ergo sum” is one such truth; the Enlightenment ideal that all people are created equal, and that they have certain unalienable rights, among which life, liberty and the ( Read more... )

Macs are not twice the cost of PCs. People who say that sort of thing are not comparing like with like.

The Daily Kos likes to talk about “zombie lies” - claims that, no matter how often they’ve been disproved, continue to be spouted by disingenuous or deliberately talentless hacks, and thus kept alive.

I encountered such a claim the other ( Read more... )

If you’re trying, a known but badly-performed song.

“Yesterday” is the most-covered song of all time. Wikipedia says Guinness says there are 3,000 of the damn things. I haven’t listened to them all - nobody could - but I’m willing to say that they’re all shit.

Why? Simple: Yesterday is a fantastic song. Evocative lyrics, rich in chord ( Read more... )

Or pretty much all of them if you ignore politics, weird shit and industry shills.

I’m slightly too young to fully remember this, but after the war there were a number of films made where two things were constant.

1. 
   Plucky Allies defeated the Nazis something rotten.
   
2. 
   Everyone was in it.
   

The closest you’d come to it these days would be Ocean’s 11 ( Read more... )

That includes hurting businesses policy-makers think should be hurt.

UK Health Secretary Andy Burnham proposes to toughen up anti-smoking laws. The pro-smoking business lobby protests:

Christopher Ogden, chief executive of the Tobacco Manufacturers Association, said the plans would “do nothing to meet public health policy objectives, but ( Read more... )

Would you notice it if was gone? And would you care?

The important thing about the new Apple iPad is not that you suddenly have a large, glorified iPod Touch. No, the important thing is that, quietly, Apple is getting rid of user interface cruft that we don’t need any more.

Margaret’s didn’t care; why should you?

My late mother came to ( Read more... )

At least we won’t have to do that any longer.

OK, so the rich Torchwood-fleecers have a device that can repair biological tissue, and they want the Master to fix it so it makes someone immortal. Clearly the way to do this is to have it constantly repair biological tissue, so ageing is constantly reversed, every second of every day. And the ( Read more... )