All techno songs sound the same to me. So I’m surprised this Yahoo Answers query produced results.
People do ask some dumb questions on that site.
Category: Culture
Remind me why I played Farmville?
I used to play Farmville. Then I let my crops die and neglected my animals. Because the game is a black hole of time wasting boringness. This ad just about sums it all up.
On guard
A former Guantanamo Bay guard, Brandon Neely, joined Facebook and on a whim searched for some of the released detainees, leading to a remarkable exchange between them that is now the subject of a BBC doco. Pretty cool.
Mr Neely was 22 when he worked at the camp and left after six months to serve in Iraq. But after quitting the military his doubts about Guantanamo began to crystallise. This led to a spontaneous decision last year to reach out to his former prisoners.
“I was pretty new to Facebook and decided to type in their names to see if their profiles popped up and I came across Shafiq’s Facebook page. I decided to send him a little e-mail,” says Mr Neely.
Just a spoon full of pain
This movie contains some language and the contents may be disturbing. But I watched the whole thing. And it made me laugh.
Virtual billboards
Streetview is cool right? For the luddites (who are unlikely to be reading a blog) it’s Google map’s feature where you can actually experience moving along certain streets because they sent a car that looks like this out into the wild to take photographs.
These photographs have been built into maps. Making it much easier to stalk people or check out the neighbourhood you are thinking about living in.
Google is great at turning things like this into money. So Make is reporting that Google has patented technology that will allow them to turn billboards in their street view photographs into spaces for adwords. If these adwords are location based this will be a fantastic tool for geographically specific advertising.
In praise of hot wives
Dear person who writes their online profiles mindful that your wife reads it,
We get it. You love your wife. You think she’s hot. That’s why you got married.
The rest of us may be inclined to disagree. We may believe that our own wife is hotter.
The fact that you need to reassure yourself that your wife is hot is great. But it comes across as, umm, a bit overstated.
Regards,
Nathan.
You might be wondering why I’m posting this. Well, I was trawling the archives of the Stuff Christian Culture Likes and came across this post. It’s one of my favourites.
Here’s Stephy’s take:
Fortunately, Christian hotness standards are not quite the same as conventional (secular) hotness standards. Value is supposed to be placed on the person rather than on appearance. Even so, hotness is still a valuable commodity even in Christian culture. The public declaration of a spouse’s hotness is a lovely gesture, but can become disquieting when expressed so frequently and fervently. It can begin to sound as if they are trying to convince themselves of something. Could thou protest too much?
My absolute favourite part though, and the part that makes this utterly postworthy, is if you do a bit of a phrase search on Twitter (I can’t guarantee that the results you get will be the same and/or safe for work/your holiness) you get a bunch of people talking about their hot wives. And a startling percentage are Christians. From my quick profile check of the people at this link I would say that close to 80% of the people using the phrase on Twitter either define themselves as Christians in their little description or tweet regularly about the Bible.
How odd.
For the record, I think my wife is hot – but seriously – I don’t need to tell you that.
A silver wining
Climate change had to have a benefit somewhere… and I’ve found it.
“The consequences of warming are already detectable in wine quality, as shown by Duchêne and Schneider (2005), with a gradual increase in the potential alcohol levels at harvest for Riesling in Alsace of nearly 2% volume in the last 30 years. On a worldwide scale, for 25 of the 30 analysed regions, increasing trends of vintage ratings (average rise of 13.3 points on a 100-point scale for every 1°C warmer during the growing season), with lower vintage-to-vintage variation, has been established (Jones, 2005).”
Here’s the study (pdf).
Via BoingBoing
Man pens mathematical theory of singleness, gets girlfriend
You can get a PhD writing about just about anything these days. But applying an obscure mathematical theory about the probability of the existence of alien life to the question of your own singleness would appear to be about the limit. Surely.
But that’s what Peter Backus did. He took the Drake Equation – a mathematical analysis of the chance that alien life exists – to decide that there were only about 26 girls who would make appropriate partners for him in all of the United Kingdom.
The Drake Equation (penned in 1961 by Dr. Frank Drake) says N = R* x Fp x Ne x Fi x Fc x L. I’m not sure what that means, but it found that there could be 10,000 civilizations in our galaxy.
The Backus iteration of the Drake equation had the following findings:
His equation looked at the total number of women in the country, then narrowed it down using relevant factors including the number of women in London; the number of “age-appropriate” women (those aged between 24-34); women with a college degree; and those who Backus would find physically attractive.
In the paper Backus summarized that on a given night out in London there is a 0.0000034 percent chance of meeting a woman that meets his criteria and who is also interested in him. That makes his odds of finding a girlfriend only about 100 times better than finding an alien.
You can read his thesis here (pdf).
In a random turn of events he now has a girlfriend who meets all his criteria.
Overthinking box office figures
I’ve recently discovered “Overthinking It” a brilliant blog specialising in over analysis of pop culture.
They don’t like Avatar much over there (and I must confess I still haven’t seen it).
But they make a good point about how unfair it is to measure movies by box office spend:
In 1997, I paid $7 to see Titanic.
In 2009, I paid $15 to see Avatar.
Even adjusted for inflation, this is insane.
I tend to like densely populated places, so these were both fairly high prices for movie tickets at the time, and location isn’t a major contributor toward the change in ticket price. Yes, I saw Avatar in 3D, but the 3D is there specifically to raise the price of the ticket, not because of the higher costs. It’s price inflation disguised as a “value-add.” For the sake of box office numbers, that doesn’t really matter, now does it?
Furthermore, according to the World Bank:
In 1997, combined global gross domestic product was $30.1 trillion in nominal terms.
In 2008 (the latest year of available data), it was $60.6 trillion.
So, between Titanic and Avatar, the price of my ticket more than doubled, and the size of the global economy also more than doubled. Talk about a fair fight.
But, to offer a little more insight, from the same source:
In 1997, the gross domestic product of China in dollar terms was $953 billion.
In 2008, it was $4.33 trillion.
That’s an increase of 354%.
A taxing issue
Feel free to dismiss this post as an anti-U2 rant simply designed to sling mud at the choir boy reputation that the band enjoys in Christian culture.
But I think this is pretty funny…
Bono, like many other wealthy celebrities, tries to avoid paying tax by using an off shore tax haven. But what about all those tax dollars that are directed towards foreign aid you say?
“Tax avoidance and tax evasion costs the impoverished world at least 160 million US dollars every year. This is money urgently required to bring people out of poverty.
“U2 is just one part of the problem. This is a much wider and systemic problem in our global financial system. Every company and individual has the responsibility to pay the right amount of tax.”
Now this probably pales in comparison to the contribution Bono has made, and I don’t want to rob him of the credit he is due.
But Bono, with shades of Metallica’s anti-napster campaign is crusading for the poor musicians suggesting that governments should monitor the internet in order to prevent file sharing. While pointing the finger firmly at the evil Internet Service Providers.
A decade’s worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators — in this case, the young, fledgling songwriters who can’t live off ticket and T-shirt sales like the least sympathetic among us — and the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business.
Making headlines today… redux
I haven’t quite been able to shake my SMH addiction.
Today’s featured story bar has an eery little look at degenerate 60s rockers with their much younger (and prettier) partners… Surely they did this on purpose.
Storage Story
I have more storage capacity on my keyring than the first five or six computers we owned combined.
Here’s a nice storage infographic from geekologie.
YouTube Tuesday: Puntastic
The Governator has been playing with words for many years – so it should come as no surprise that he issues such classy vetoes.
Here is a selection of puns from his bad guy in whichever Batman movie it was that Mr Freeze appeared in – they all look the same to me…
The tags on this post indicate I actually do know which Batman movie it was in…
The Facebook booby trap
Am I the only person (not just male surely) who is sick of the Facebook phenomena of females posting the colour of their underwear as their Facebook status.
Yes, for the slow people, that is why you have been seeing colours as statuses.
I hate breast cancer. Everybody does. Nobody is unaware of it. And seriously. Posting a colour to raise awareness does nothing for the cause.
Has anybody been compelled to make a donation to breast cancer research as a result of the colour “blue” or “chartreuse” (whatever that is).
I know many of you reading this have taken part in the exercise. And I understand your motivation. But either you’re responding to a friend telling you what is going on – or the originally circulated spam that read:
Some fun is going on….just write the colour of your bra in your status..just the colour, nothing else, and send this on to ONLY girls no men… it will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status…thanks ladies!
Fun? Posting colours and keeping secrets is fun? No. It’s childish.
Here’s a more scathing analysis from Jezebel…
But what good has it really done for breast cancer awareness? Does anyone on Facebook really not know about breast cancer to the point where someone posting “purple lace!” and eight dudes responding, “Ooh, hot, lol” is really doing to anything to really help the cause in any possible way? If anything, the constant sexualization of and cutesy-poo approach to breast cancer pushes people to take it less seriously. As Tracy Clark-Flory of Broadsheet notes: “This bra color movement seems a similarly desperate attempt to get guys to simply give a crap about breast cancer by making it sexy and flirtatious, which I find not only embarrassing to women but insulting to men.”
And, you know, spreading awareness of an issue that statistically is much more predominant in women by keeping the men out of it… that’s a good idea.
Bollocks.
You don’t see guys running boxers or briefs social networking campaigns to raise awareness for prostate cancer. No. We grow moustaches and collect money.
It seems equally stupid. But there’s a difference. Movember raised awareness and almost $20 million (in Australia – and about the same world wide) for the cause.
A public awareness campaign with no call to action is just stupid. Having a strong call to action is the key to any marketing or public relations campaign. A call to action says: “if you care about this, do this”. Marketing that says “care about this” serves no purpose but to get people to care about an issue they probably already care about. A public awareness campaign where the call to action is “keep this a secret from the guys” is even dumber.
This “Bra Colour” Facebook campaign is stupid, juvenile, and almost completely pointless. Unless all the outcry about how pointless it is leads to some people actually donating.
And I’m proud to be a part of that.
If you really want to make a difference regarding Breast Cancer then do this:
Help the National Breast Cancer Foundation to fund research into the prevention, treatment and cure of breast cancer. (If you would like to set up an ongoing donation, please call 02 9299 4090.)
Click here to donate online