I love this site. Or rather I find the reason for it’s existance amusing. The tabloid press, particularly during the silly season, has a fondness for making up or exagerating EU legislation. And so, the European Commission’s Press Office in London monitors these stories, and describes on the site what the truth behind them is.
All the classics are here, from straight bananas to standardised condom sizes.
BBC NEWS | Magazine | Bad statistics and binge drinking
I love this article almost as much as I hate the abuse of statistics to grab headlines in the press or to grab soundbites in parliament. And all these reports, most often commisioned by a group with an agenda, never give you all the raw data that you’d need to make your own mind up.
As for the terrors of binge drinking, yes it is ill-advised to drink so much (and/or in bad combinations) that you do bad things to your health, your surroundings (I include people in this category, AKA collateral damage) and your self-respect. But unless you’re doing it all the time, it’s ridiculous. While I accept that my drinking last Saturday can only really be described as an (accidental) binge, enjoying a couple of glasses of wine with a meal is not a binge, even if you do so a couple of times a week, and go out to the pub with your friends once or twice.
And anyway, I’ve given up smoking, so I still need one vice to cling on to. But it’s certainly not going to be massaged statistics.
Yakuza boss resigns, underworld weeps
Okay, it’s mostly research material for Lethe, but it’s also such a surreal story about Japanese organised crime that I had to link to it. Could you imagine a similar story about East London Yardies being reported in the Metro?
First off, I never really covered the bank holiday weekend. It started for me on Friday evening when I went up north with Andy, getting into Arnold just in time to get a couple of drinks in before last orders.
Saturday involved some shopping and, once Tim had arrived, traipsing around a few pubs in central Nottingham, enjoying the ale and killing time until the rest of the reprobates managed to show up in Nottingham. At seven we then all met up in a pub in Sherwood, there was a brief flurry of gifts for Karen from the absent Penny and the present Tim. After that? Well, Bryce has already covered it here, so I won’t go over it again. But let’s just say I felt awful for about 2 days after the event. Not a great thing really, as I was working on Monday.
For some reason I ended up watching two chick flicks this weekend. Personally I think my decision-making ability was diminished to my hangover and that I was taken advantage of. But since I have seen them and since some of you are in the position to be coerced into watching chick flicks, I may as well review them for you.
First up we have Hitch, starring Will Smith and Eva Mendes. Watch this film if you want somewhat amusing, formulaic, heart-warming pulp. It is light-hearted if you can’t be bothered to engage your brain and fancy the odd chuckle at Will Smith’s expense. This film is harmless.
Next we have Closer, starring Natalie Portman, Jude Law, Julia Roberts and Clive Owen. This is in no way formulaic, heart-warming or light-hearted, and although it has the odd funny moment, it’s occasional, ironic and black comedy. This film is the anti-Hitch. It is an intelligent look at modern messed-up relationships, truth, lies, loss and obsession. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still mostly a chick flick. But it’s certainly not a traditional entrant into the category and should not be recommended to anyone who likes a happy film or wants avoid thinking.
And goodbye to the Creative Commons license for Lethe. The experiment didn’t last long, and to be honest it wouldn’t have even got off the ground had I done more research first instead of listening to the techno utopians. (Sidenote: Wikipedia is particularly prone to techno-utopianism, especially when it comes to copyright. It’s understandable as Wikipedia is, as a whole, a techno-utopian project, but it’s not very encyclopaedic when there is no criticism to be found of techno-utopianism or the Creative Commons idea, while there is much criticism of traditional copyright.)
So I did a little more research with the help of
The Register and Google. The key problem with the CC license is that a) it is irrevocable, meaning that it can never be fully copyrighted in the future and also that it can never be fully released into the public domain; and b) that the author loses control of who references the work and under what circumstances. An example from a
Reg article:
Take this example. A Linux advocacy group emails me to ask permission for a reprint of an article, and I’m delighted to grant it. The Daily Express asks for permission, and I tell them where to shove it. Now that’s a freedom I don’t have by adding an unnecessary license to my work. Now let’s say the Linux advocacy group has been taken over by people I don’t like. It asks for another reprint. I can change my mind, of course, but that’s because I haven’t signed over my rights under an irrevocable license. (And very few people tagging their work with Creative Commons licenses seem to realize that they’re irrevocable).
In other words, if I copyright Lethe, not only do I retain control of what people do with it, but it is my decision if I ever release it fully into the public domain or, (and I’m under no illusions that this is likely, just so we’re clear here) I enjoy some kind of commercial success.
I’m still hungover and at work. So you can read this instead. (Click to enlarge)
I hate Andy. This is from his Flickr album and was taken with Andy’s cameraphone in Nottingham when we were there for Karen’s birthday, titling it The Pornomancer.
Tim thinks I look like a romantic poet.
And considering the size of my hangover, I feel fully justified in hating everyone.
technorati tag: pornomancer
I guess it was only a matter of time… I may have thought I was taking a nice sedate office-based job in SAP support, where I go home every night. But no.
Somebody in the delivery team (traditional consulting as I used to do it, rather than support) took a look at my CV, saw international project experience, multiple languages and experiences with project roll-outs for multinationals and has put a request into my boss to have me lent out to do the Swedish/Danish project roll-out for a major chocolate manufacturer.
I’ll have more information next week, but I’m going to ensure that this is for a limited time-period and not a regular occurrence. Sure, I’d get good billable time bonus, but at the expense of my hard-won life.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Cuteness triumphs in Nintendogs
Dear God. Tamagotchi for Nintendo DS users.
…when it comes to walkies, you must bag whatever falls from Fido’s backside, making this quite possibly the first game to have players packaging faeces.
*shudder* That’s just wrong.
technorati tag:
nintendogs
This trend for acronyms to describe a group of people is getting silly. In the 80’s we had the yuppies (young urban professionals), later we got the DINKs (dual income, no kids) and SITCOMs (Single Income, Two Children, Oppressive Mortgage).
Now we have new designators, especially for kids. First we have the
Neets. Apparently these are teenagers who are Not in Education, Employment or Training. Although surely, to avoid confusion with adults in the same situation (simply call unemployed. Sorry, no acronym here), perhaps they should be called Teenagers not in Education, Employment or Training, or TEETs.
And then we have
IPODs, a group that is under 35 (hey, that’s me!) that is Insecure, Pressured, Overtaxed and Debt-ridden (no, that’s not me after all). Damn, that sounds depressing. But apparently I am a member of the Ipod generation, the one that came after
Generation X. But that’s even more confusing, since according to the Wikipedia article, Generation Xers are born in the 1960s and 70s.
So, to put it in context, I’m a Generation X/Ipod Generation IPOD, former yuppie, former literal NEET, but never a TEET and unlikely to be a SITCOM.
Or should that be a GXIGIPODfYflNEETnNEETnSITCOM?
What a bunch of crap.
Update Time!
Yes indeed, we have a new classification: Suburban Asset Lightweights or SALs. These are people who are living middle class lifestyles despite being in the bottom fifth of the population in terms of “asset wealth”. In plain English: People in their mid-thirties who own no home but are in permanent employment.
