[insert witty title]

Just because multiple people have complained about the creepy-ass gibbon gif having been at the top of the blog for months on end…

…[insert witty title] will return in the very near future.

The Gibbon has just become one of my favourite animals, mainly because they seem to take great delight in being absolute pricks towards other species. Check out a gibbon tormenting a dog:

I think the reason this video is so funny is that the gibbon actually looks like an ugly little human, and when he runs away with his arms flailing everywhere I can’t help but think of a mischievous little child. Second, and much more hardcore, a gibbon takes on two tigers:

Thank you Mr. Gibbon for being an absolute bastard to the other animals and really making me laugh.

Browsing YouTube this morning, I noticed the following comment on a music video:

i am a heron. i ahev a long neck and i pick fish out of the water w/ my beak. if you dont repost this comment on 10 other pages i will fly into your kitchen tonight and make a mess of your pots and pans

That is pretty awesome. I hope posting the comment here counts as ten YouTube videos, because I don’t want my pots and pans to get messed up

comic source: xkcd

Seriously

I just want to know if he’s hardcore enough to try Swamootra Neti

You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending to its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things

–William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Today’s post is inspired by this article, titled “The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos”, which contains details on how one company takes short videos made by corporations and makes them go viral (that is: gets them hundreds of thousands of views on Youtube; gets them on blogs, Myspace, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, Google Video and the rest).

This article was a bit surprising to me as I think I’m probably a bit naive about advertising and assumed that when things ‘went viral’ (oh how I loathe that phrase) it was because people thought they were awesome, told their friends about them, posted them to websites, etc. Just knowing that there is a whole business built around efficiently gathering enough pageviews to get onto Youtube’s most watched videos list spoils everything a bit for me. Here are a sample of the techniques used by companies to get vieos watched:

• Paying bloggers to post links to videos
• Having fake arguments in the comments section of the video to draw people in, but deleting all negative comments
• Spamming your facebook friends with links to the video you are being paid to promote

[insert witty subliminal advertising here]
As I sit here writing this blog post on my brand new ultra-stable Dell™ PC, running Microsoft™ Vista™ with an ice cold Coca-Cola™ in my hand I am beginning to wonder whether I can trust anything I read on the internet as being impartial.
[insert witty subliminal advertising here]
The irony is that, of course, this article was written as a piece of viral marketing to drum up business for the comotion group and this blog post is precisely what the author wants.

It’s not often that I’m completely taken by an advertising campaign, but every single advert for the Sony Bravia is completely beautiful and deserves to be watched over and over again.

I don’t even care what a Bravia. I just want one.

When I’m reading news articles I’m always on the lookout for one phrase. Finding this phrase in a piece of writing is reliable predictor that the text surrounding it is going to be awesome. In short these words just fill me with happiness. Here they are quoted from a recent news article:

Police found no evidence of drug or alcohol use.

Why do I like these words? Well for the police to feel it necessary to explicitly tell us that somebody was sober it means they were doing something really, really fucking stupid and got caught out doing it.

The quote above is from a totally awesome story about a guy who (for some reason) decided to put his lava lamp on the kitchen hob and boil it. The materials inside did what materials generally do when they’re heated, they expanded. The glass bottle did what glass bottles generally do when exposed to massive internal pressures: Exploded like a hand grenade.

The poor bastard died when a shard of lava lamp destroyed his heart.

Another more recent example of this phenomenon is the story about a guy who tried to loosen a nut on his car by shooting it with a shotgun*. Sadly for him shotgun pellets bounced off the solid metal car and straight into his soft, fleshy limbs. And yes:

Nobody else was there and he wasn’t intoxicated,” Wilson said.

Fantastic!

If anybody finds more news articles in which the police need to tell the world that “yes, he was sober when he did that” please send them to me.

*In all seriousness I think you could actually use a shotgun to loosen a nut, by placing a spanner on the nut and then shooting the spanner around.

Just stumbled over this new Sony product, courtesy of The consumerist.

Yes that really does say the SONY Twat. What a fantastic piece of marketing! It’s up there on a par with the overtly racist Intel advert in terms of “what the shitting fuck were the marketing department thinking”. I can’t even begin to imagine the conversation that led to this:

Designer: We have created a stylish new camera case.
Marketer: OK it will be called the Sony Twat
Designer: …

However, I do want one and I don’t even own a Sony camera (Although I am a little concerned at the TWA/T’s brown colour).

As proof that this picture isn’t faked here is a link to Sony’s product page. They quickly changed the product name to LCS-TWA/Brown, but left the Sony TWAT in the title bar.

p.s. Re: the last post: My life appears pretty much devoid of “LOL!!! :-P” and combining pictures from my computer into comics seems to result in a lazy sort of surrealism, and nothing else.

I woke up this morning to a rather wonderful ready made blog post in my inbox, here it is (courtesy of a friend, who will probably wish to remain anonymous):

—–
I came across this as I was browsing the other night,

I hope you find it interesting.
—–

This did indeed sound really interesting but sadly there was no movie attached, when I queried this I received the following response:

—–
http://emol.org/movies/greattrainrobbery/movie256kb.html

I’m not feeling too good.
—–

Fantastic! Thank you, anonymous friend. Your sacrifice in the name of finding interesting stuff on the internet is much appreciated and I hope your office chair made for a comfortable bed.

A century of so from now when I’m watching hyper-realistic 3d holo-immersion-scenarios I will indeed spare a thought for the chumps living in the early 21st century watching shoddily shot ‘movies’ on ‘flat screen tele-visions’

Despite using Wikipedia on a pretty much daily basis I have never quite understood exactly how it is that it isn’t, well, shit. Allowing any anonymous idiot to edit pages just seems like a recipe for the final result to reflect the abilities of the lowest common denominator.

I just read this essay in which the author argues that edits to a Wikipedia page work in an extremely counter-intuitive way, rather like evolution:

an edit of Wikipedia might be considered equivalent to a genetic mutation. A mutation, of course, is non-directed…that is, “random.” It could be bad or good, but most of the time it is bad. If we were simply the average of all mutations that predated us, we would be nothing more than a pile of goo. And yet we are not.

The reason that Wikipedia is as good as it is (and the reason that living organisms are as sophisticated as they are), is not due to the average quality of the edits (or mutations). Instead, it is due to a much harder to observe process: selection. Some edits survive, while others quickly die. While one can look at the history of a Wikipedia article and see each and every edit, it is much harder to tell how many potential editors looked at an article, subconsciously thought “I doubt I could improve this much,” and chose not to try. Each of these can be considered a “selection event”, and the number of such events vastly outnumbers the actual edits. Selection is the heart of what makes Wikipedia — as well as Darwinian evolution — work.

This is really a way I had never looked at it before, and it tallies with my own experiences of editing wikipedia. I make changes only when I spot an egregious factual error, blatant vandalism or obvious grammatical error, and do like to think that I occasionally increase the value of the articles.

It’s worth noting that I have only ever seen one blatantly vandalised Wikipedia page, and after correcting it I checked how long it had been in that state for. The answer was two minutes, so I must have been one of the first people to have seen the changes, and that particular edit was stamped out quickly, like evolution would stamp out the genetic mutation that causes a baby to be born with no head.

A while ago now I talked about some awesome maps of the world, in which the size of each country was stretched until it was proportional to different quantities (e.g. homicide rate, amount of imports of alcohol). here is the original post.

In the intervening month the Worldmapper team have been busy and there are very many new and incredibly interesting maps to look at. for reference here is the undistorted map of the world:

Now it is distorted so that each country has a size proportional to the number of people who demonstrated against the Iraq invasion (15.9 million in total):

Why hello thar Europe.

This map is distorted to show the number of native plant species:

I always assumed that Africa had the most native plant species, turns out that I was wrong.

Here is the number of operational nuclear weapons:

No real surprises there, although I never realized that the UK and France were the only European countries to have nuclear weapons.

Anyway, the maps are great fun and I heartily recommend that everybody goes and takes a look at the world in a slightly different way.

It seems that my only neighbour with unsecured wireless internet has wised up so I’m without internet for the next three weeks (the amount of time it takes Orange to set up an ADSL connection). Since I miss blogging I’ll start writing posts at home and getting them posted from work. I’m also slightly disheartened that in the period I have not been posting on the blog the traffic has increased considerably, suggesting that I have a net negative effect on the blog!

finally I have now been linked from the websites of two of my favourite paper publications:

The Guardian
New Scientist

How awesome is that?

When I was little we had a tropical fish tank, with a little black film thermometer. They look a bit like this:

As the temperature increases a gradually larger array of coloured squares begin to appear on the thermometer (only the bottom three are visible on this one). An occasional childhood game was to try and use friction from my thumb to light all of the squares. I’m sure it’s something I’d also like to try today, but sadly I’m too lazy to go to the pet shop and get one.

Well, it turns out I’m not the only person who likes these things and somebody had the idea of putting the same chemicals into wall tiles. It makes for one badass (if somewhat cheesy) shower:

I’d seriously like to know how much this costs.

A few weeks ago now, the Wikipedia scanner arrived on the scene. The scanner allows people to type in a domain, or IP address, and see which Wikipedia pages certain organizations are editing. The combined power of the internet has now tracked down hundreds of embarrasing edits from companies trying to makes themselves look good. Here are a small subsample of funny ones:

• Microsoft tried to cover up the XBOX 360 failure rate
• Apple edit Microsoft entries, adding more negative comments about its rival
• In the 9/11 Wikipedia article, the NRA added that “Iraq was involved in 9/11” (hahahahaha)
• FBI edits Guantanamo Bay, removing numerous pictures (OMG conspiracccyyyy)
• Scientology removes criticism and negatives article from Scientology page (unsurprising)
• Al Jazeera TV station adds that the foundation of Iraq was just as bad as the Holocaust (???)
• Amnesty International removes negative comments
• MySpace removes paragraph when their website was hacked
• Dog breeding association deletes whole paragraphs about fatal attacks by dogs on humans
• US Republican Party changes the “Post-Saddam” section of the Baath Party article to a different account of the war, changing the language from “US-led occupation” to “US-led liberation”
• Fox News removes all controversial topics against the network from the Fox News page
• Someone at Reuters calls Bush “a mass murderer” (hahahahaha ‘unbiased’)
• Coca Cola removes negative content about its effects
• British Conservative Party removes negative references of its MPs and deletes paragraph of the party’s old policies
• MSN Search is “a major competitor to Google”. That’s what MSN added to their page (wishful thinking)

This is brilliant! Here is Wired magazine’s list of salacious wikipedia edits, and this is where I got my list of alterations from.

Whichever spambot is currently filling up my inbox has a fantastic taste in names, just check out the senders from nine of my recent spam messages:

Besetting H. Pencilling
Enlightening H. Prosiest
Systematically H. Gesture
Reprehended V. Upstanding
Chandler D. Luftwaffe
Sod O. Passenger
Settling R. Grams
Raiders M. Mothballs
Sanitarium H. Mythologist

I’m definitely going to start going by the pseudonym Chandler D. Luftwaffe

late edit: Look who just arrived at the party, why it’s Unevenness K. Distrust and his beautiful wife Committal G. Fanciness

even later edit: And just behind them! The german exchange student Cruikshank H. Frieda, with his teacher Fathomable R. Meir