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Brief Notes
Once more, a little round-up of stuff that really needs to be commented on:
1. Apparently, 40% of all Twitter traffic is babble. As Stephen Fry has eloquently stated, that’s the point; Twitter isn’t supposed to be great debate or interesting chat, or even adverts for companies – it’s supposed to be a way to tell the world what’s happening in your life at this moment. Of course, that’s also the reason lots of people think it’s a complete and utter waste of time.
What bothers me about the report is that someone has gone to the trouble to analyse Twitter’s traffic in the first place. What, exactly, was the point of that?
2. It was the Eastbourne Airbourne show last weekend. Surprisingly (well, for the Council anyway – not for anyone with any common sense) now that it’s free again, the event was packed.
What I saw of it was pretty good, but the overall impression seemed to be of an event that doesn’t know where it’s going, isn’t as big as it used to be and isn’t amazingly well run. There seemed to be lots of commercial opportunities going begging, for instance.
Given that the show loses upwards of £70,000 each year – and over £360,000 last year when they tried to charge for it – someone really needs to take it by the scruff of the neck and kick it back into shape.
Either that or get rid of it for good. After all, the only connection Eastbourne has with planes is that it was bombed in the war…..
3. The man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing has been released from prison today, on compassionate grounds – he apparently has cancer. I imagine that a number of the victim’s families may feel that, actually, he should die in prison and you can shove your compassion up your arse.
4. Given all the furore over recent times about MPs expenses, you’d think that they would have learned their lesson and would keep their heads down about pay, etc, for a little while. But you’d be wrong.
Senior Tory Sir Patrick Cormack has said that, in return for scrapping MP allowances (second home sponging, spending sprees at John Lewis, that sort of thing), MPs pay should be doubled. Given that your bog standard MP earns nearly £65,000 I must admit to being utterly lost for words. How can he think that it is even remotely acceptable to reward fraud and corruption in that way?
5. Apparently, researchers in Canada have concluded that an attack by zombies would wipe out civilisation really, really quickly. It doesn’t seem to have put them off that zombies don’t actually exist.
They’ve tried to defend their work by saying that it “could help scientists model the spread of unfamiliar diseases through human populations”. The problem with that is that they based all of their assumptions on movies and books and, I hate to tell you this guys, that stuff is all made up. So, any conclusions reached based on made-up ‘facts’ are also made-up and therefore not worth the paper they’re written on.
And the professor who adds a ‘?’ to his name so he won’t get mistaken for the lead singer from The Cure? He’s a complete dick.
6. Finally, as a bit of a geek it always warms my heart when real geeks start to sound off about how the pretend universe depicted in popular science fiction movies wouldn’t really work. The latest one is an attack on the Star Wars universe. It may or may not be intended to be a joke – it’s often hard to tell with geeks – but, if they are serious, could I just point that (as with zombies) it doesn’t really exist, it’s just made-up to entertain people. You really should go outside more!
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Wolfs Helpers
