I was stung 11 times in the next eight years. Each sting required a trip to the emergency room. Trust me when I tell you that “the ER” isn’t as sexy as George Clooney made it out to be. One time I saw a guy with multiple stab wounds in the waiting room, sitting calmly on one of the orange plastic seats, holding his sides. (Many of my friends had never been stung at all. Is there something about the flesh of allergic kids that proves irresistible to bees – and indeed to yellowjackets, wasps, and hornets? Something about the way they smell?)

The full-body swelling is what distinguishes your allergic types from run-of-the-mill stingees. When it happens, it’s serious. So throughout my childhood I went every six weeks, like clockwork, to get “my shots” – four injections, each with a different blend of hymenoptera serum, designed to mitigate any systemic reaction to a bee sting. But the shots hurt, too. Was it worth it? Getting “stung” 30-some times a year by a needle just in case I got stung once by a bee?

Why am I telling you all this? Well, I’d never realized there was a qualitative difference between the sting of a needle and the sting of a bee. Or if I had, I’d never thought to try and describe it. But one man has. He’s attempted not only to quantify every range of sting that it’s possible for a human being to feel, he has begun the almost brain-breakingly admirable work of describing these stings. Ladies and gentlemen, Justin O. Schmidt, and the Schmidt Sting Pain Index (thanks to Wikipedia):

• 1.0 Sweat bee: Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. A tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.
• 1.2 Fire ant: Sharp, sudden, mildly alarming. Like walking across a shag carpet and reaching for the light switch.
• 1.8 Bullhorn acacia ant: A rare, piercing, elevated sort of pain. Someone has fired a staple into your cheek.
• 2.0 Bald-faced hornet: Rich, hearty, slightly crunchy. Similar to getting your hand mashed in a revolving door.
• 2.0 Yellowjacket: Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.
• 2.x Honey bee and European hornet: Like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.
• 3.0 Red harvester ant: Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.
• 3.0 Paper wasp: Caustic and burning. Distinctly bitter aftertaste. Like spilling a beaker of hydrochloric acid on a paper cut.
• 4.0 tarantula hawk: Blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath.
• 4.0+ Bullet ant: Pure, intense, brilliant pain. Like fire-walking over flaming charcoal with a 3-inch rusty nail in your heel.[3]

By the way, did you know that a bee will always die after stinging you? Its body isn’t capable of pulling the stinger out of your flesh – but it doesn’t know that. Thus, it will struggle so mightily to retrieve it that the effort rips its own guts out of its body. There, something to look forward to.

This is what happens when you dip a cheeseburger in hydrochloric acid. I want to try this at home!

In this part we dig a little bit deeper into an artist’s catalogue, with two more metrics based on their list of top tracks (which, remember, are the tracks with most listeners over the last six months, not over the whole of LFM’s history). I’m calling these metrics – rather unimaginatively – head and body. “Head” is the number of listeners to the tenth most popular track expressed as a percentage of the number of listeners to the first. “Body” is the number of listeners to the fiftieth most popular track expressed as a percentage of the number of listeners to the tenth.

Both of these are based on the same principle – ratios of popular and less popular songs in an artist’s catalogue – but they turn out to measure quite different things. Head measures the extent to which an act is a several-hit wonder. A high head means that your top track isn’t that much more popular than your tenth, which usually means you’ve racked up either a bunch of successful singles or have at least one album that people are keen to listen to in toto. A low head means that you have a few, or maybe just one track which people are particularly keen on but that interest doesn’t extend very far – it suggests a big chunk of casual listeners in your audience.

A high body, meanwhile, means that people are keen to dig deeper into your back catalogue (50 songs is 4+ albums worth for most bands) and a low body either means they’re not, or that you haven’t GOT that kind of back catalogue. It’s usually pretty obvious if this is the case, as the body will be microscopic, since by the time Sleigh Bells or Wavves hit track 50 we’re in the realm of misfiled tags and typos. It certainly isn’t the case that artists who have that kind of back catalogue automatically get a fat body score though.

Head scores of over 50% seem to be pretty good, below 30% suggest the presence of at least one catalogue-outshining hit. In the top bracket you find “album acts” old and new – Pink Floyd are up there, for instance, but so are Vampire Weekend with an enormous 77% head, i.e. their tenth-most-popular track gets more than three-quarters the plays of their most popular one. In other words when someone puts on a VWE record they probably stick it out.

Just below the album acts you find a smattering of pre-Beatles icons – Sinatra, Elvis, Duke Ellington – men with broad enough catalogues to withstand even standout songs: Sinatra’s 10th most popular track gets over half the listeners of “My Way”. Modern pop icons – even those like Madonna with a basket of hits – dip under 50% head scores: there’s always a few songs that are much more popular than their others.

Down at the bottom you’ve got the occasional newbie like Ke$ha (14%) or Drake (9%), but you’ve also got a lot of 80s acts remembered for one or two songs – Dexys, Soft Cell, Bananarama.

Here’s where the relationship between head and body gets interesting though – or rather, the lack of it. The thing about these scores is that they don’t really correlate that much – you can quite credibly have a fat head and a thin body or vice versa. The averages are distorted by acts with small discographies but broadly speaking above 35% seems like quite a big body and below 20% is a thin one (if you’ve got a back catalogue that would merit more, that is.)

So this makes them diagnostically a bit richer, i.e. you can draw up a QUADRANT.

(Positionings in this quadrant are relative rather than reflecting absolute numbers, i.e. I hand-drew it, it’s not an actual chart.)

So let’s have a look at this. In the top-right you have acts with a big head and a big body – lots of popular tracks AND a deep back catalogue. Oh look, it’s the Beatles! But also Yo La Tengo, Radiohead, Kraftwerk, NIN: acts who have devoted fans who see their work as a body rather than a catalogue to be picked from.

Some of the interest lies in who doesn’t make it in: in the top left quadrant you get older acts like Elvis, Queen, and the Doors – people with extensive catalogues but who don’t have the big “body” scores which might be expected. This is the “good for one album” quadrant – whether that’s a debut album or a greatest hits isn’t reflected in the raw stats.

Below that is the “good for one song” quadrant at bottom-left – this section includes a lot of the acts I particularly like, perhaps because I believe people who’ve made one great pop song will often have made more and am happy to delve in on that basis. But the Last.FM public don’t agree with me so here are the Human League, Britney (though she does much better than most pop acts), ABBA on the borderline – lots of hits but no body to speak of – and, interestingly, the Beach Boys.

And on the bottom right is the most intriguing bunch of all – the rarest quadrant, made up of bands with one or a few big hit songs and a bunch of devoted followers who really get stuck in. If you’re happy to listen as far as your tenth Kate Bush or Johnny Cash track, you’re likely to stick around for a lot more. Most extraordinary is Lil Wayne: very very few of the many “Lollipop” listeners dig into Weezy’s labyrinthine back catalogue but a lot of those who do really get stuck in.

In part III I’ll link the data set as a download, point out important caveats, note some quirky results and also draw some conclusions from all this.

Anyway it made me think:
a) That halo must be a bit uncomfortable. Would it get stuck in a normal birth, or make way for the head? Would it get stuck like some dutch cap if the nipper was breach?

b) If you knew you were giving birth to the second coming of Jesus, wouldn’t you be a bit worried? Octomum got near blanket press, in this case you’ll be looking at constant media attention. Even if you tried to keep it quiet, the shepherds and kings travelling afar (not to mention the star parked above your manger for a week) would make it hard to keep quiet.

c) Again I am sure the infant Jesus was a wonderfully natured child, he didn’t even mind the annoying kid with the drum or the shitting Catalunian in the corner of the stable. But Joseph and Mary were on the run for a crime they did not commit for quite some time. I daresay solving problems in every town they stumbled into. So unless you fancy living like the A-Team for a few years, again abortion may cross your mind.

d) Laura Bush thinks abortion is OK for unplanned pregnancies, and I reckon being knocked up by the deity is the ultimate in unplanned pregnancies. I mean really, has anyone got it on their to do list?

e) I’ve been shown a large number of ultrasounds by wonderful pregnant friends in my time, and there is a massive leap of faith going on when they trace the body, legs and head. Nine times out of ten it could just be a spicy beanburger that went down too quickly, being jiggled by the rightly upset belly. In this case the halo could easily be an onion ring that slipped down transversely or a particularly invasive and this pointless colon piercing.

f) It actually says to me that even Simon Templar was a foetus once.

So, in conclusion, don’t sweat it guys. And as nuts as you will be about the provenance of this ad, it won’t be anywhere near as odd as this Saudi story: Saudi Clerics*** Advocate Breast Feeding.

*Though not as odd as counter religious advertising. Trying to sell the non-existence of something seems like a great scam for the cash strapped ad agencies.

**Yes, yes, yes: it comes earlier every year, the decorations are in the shops in August and the first Argois advert is in September and if you wanted to watch GRUMPY OLD MEN / WOMEN / PETS then I am sure BBC2 will oblige and repeat ad infinitum. Actually I knew Christmas was coming too early last year when they showed the Grumpy Guide to Christmas in May.

***Am I the only person who when Islamic “Clerics” are referenced to wonder if they mind not using edged weapons and if they get to turn undead very often.

The link between these two things? One of the most interesting parts of the talk was when Dr Alex Bentley of Durham university showed some analysis of the spread of “buzzwords” in academia – how particular language choices move through a population. He was looking at the change in use of words like “nuanced”, “apropos”, or “agency” as well as more obviously loaded terms like “Marxist” and words like “retarded” (which academics tend to use to mean ‘slowed’). So of course I found this quite exciting, as it seems to me not wholly unlikely that the use of words like “ethereal” or “soundscape” might well spread in similar ways.

Bentley showed some of his buzzword analysis and it demonstrated that the take-up rates of popular words like “nuanced” and “robust” often followed a classic s-curve. This is the model of word-of-mouth diffusion that became famous from economic studies of hybrid seed corn in the 30s. Hybrid seed corn had a clear benefit, but it wasn’t obvious until you tried it, so it spread by farmers telling their neighbours about it. There was a slow take-up at first, then a rapid one, and then – as most of the people who were going to be interested had latched onto it – a flattening out.

So you’d suspect that an academic sees a word like “robust” in a paper or two, thinks it’s doing useful work and adopts it. Then her peers do, and their peers do, and so on. That’s what the diffusion curve seems to suggest, anyway.

Bentley also showed some graphs of words that were on the way down – like “apropos” and “retarded”. With the exception of “retarded” all of them had a very uneven popularity curve – sometimes up, sometimes down, with a downward trend but no real shape to that trend otherwise. The issue Bentley pointed out is that uneven curve. My take on this – at least I think it’s mine, once you enter the world of what Bentley calls “undirected copying” it becomes harder to be sure! – is that we have ways of copying words but we don’t have ways of uncopying them. It’s rare to notice that a word isn’t being used unless (like “retarded”) people would have reasons of specifically drawing attention to their un-use of the word.

The third relevant slide was one showing the distribution of the buzzwords – a comparison of the ranking of each word with its popularity. In 2001 this followed a power law distribution – the popularity of the #1 buzzword was far more popular than the #2 one, which was far more popular than the #3, with the differences gradually lessening as you go down the curve. This isn’t particularly surprising – it seems to be how the English language as a whole works, with “THE” in the top spot. What’s a little more interesting though is that the shape of this distribution stayed practically the same in 2005, even though there was a massive turnover of actual words. So the words academics were using changed but the distribution of popular buzzwords stayed exactly the same.

The apparent fixity of distribution shapes has implications for all sorts of things but for now let’s speculate about whether Bentley’s findings would also apply to music critics’ choice of adjectives. Do words like “ethereal”, “jangly”, “breezy”, etc. rise on an s-curve and fall in a more random, disconnected fashion. Does the distribution curve remain the same even though words change? An analysis of rocksbackpages or the recently online Spin archives would be incredibly interesting here.

One other thought: Bentley also talked about different types of copying, particularly “directed” and “undirected” copying. I was a little vague on the difference between these but as I understand it (caveat lector!) the two differ in terms of ‘salience’, i.e. there being a relevant difference between the choices on offer. So directed copying is where you copy something because it is doing a better job for whoever’s using it, and undirected copying is where you copy something because it’s kind of there. Most people would – if they admit to copying at all – suggest they’re doing the former but actually the latter seems to be just as common, if not more common.

The way you tell them apart is by looking at stuff like diffusion and distribution curves, where different things spreading through a population leave different signatures, like the S-curves. But what was interesting to me about the buzzwords is that the diffusion curve of a specific word had a signature that suggested directed copying – people using a word because it was more salient – BUT the distribution curve and its high turnover were signs of undirected copying, where actually the choice of words isn’t salient at all.

Why would that be? I asked a question about this but I’m not sure I phrased it well enough. What I’m guessing is happening is that for certain words, word choice among academics is a basically arbitrary act (as shown by the distribution curve) that FEELS salient (as shown by the diffusion curve) while the word is in fashion. It suggests to me that people who laugh at particular words are RIGHT – those words are indeed arbitrary – but also IRRELEVANT in that within the community who use them they do in fact spread as if they were useful and accurate (and I wonder if that means they have some invisible use in terms of social status or bonding). This would apply even more to “management speak”, that other much mocked source of buzzwords. And it might apply to rock critic buzzwords too – so next time you groan at someone for “visceral” you can take comfort in the fact that science may be on your side and no comfort from the fact that nobody using it will or should care.

(Postscript: Word choice is an interesting thing to do this experiment on because it’s not really subject to the kind of interaction effects you get with, say, choosing a record or a band to like. The popularity of words is more easily analysable now than at any time in the last several millennia but it still takes a bit of effort: the popularity of records or books or bands is a well-recognised object of interest and lots of people provide their measurements of those things.)

Past crawls have taken in the Euston Hexagon, the Mornington Crescent, strange arcane routes across the river and last year a foray into Marylebone. This year we are again pushing further afield, by about half a mile and have settled on the wonderful environs of Pimlico, and its surprisingly large number of estate pubs!

So I give you Das Pimlico Boot (when you see the map it makes sense).

We start at 3pm by Victoria Station: The Kings Arms: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub1525.php
4pm: Jugged Hare: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub1521.php
5pm: White Swan: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub447.php
5:45pm: Morpeth Arms: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub446.php
6.30pm: The Grosvenor: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub3547.php
7:15pm: The Pride Of Pimlico: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub3833.php
Finishing at
8pm: The Cask: http://www.fancyapint.com/pubs/pub3531.php

We will then stay at the Cask til kicking out time, or someone suggests going to another pub to make it eight (I think we eventually made nine in the end last year!) Please come along, and if it is your first time remember this isn’t about drinking (completely) – rather savouring the interesting architecture of London’s pubs. Well, maybe a bit of drinking too.

Facebook event here if you want to invite other people.

So things to note. The John Snow is named after John Snow the health campaigner, not the newsreader, which is amusing in itself as John Snow was a confirmed teetotaller*. The pub is near the pump that Snow brought fresh water into Soho thus sorting out the cholera epidemic. This marks it out in Soho already, for an area with a pretty full history an awful lot of the pubs are highly anonymous. Another key point about the Snow is its compartmentalisation. I started drinking after nearly all the separate bars in pubs had been knocked through so there is something really rather nice about seeing various rooms in action in the Snow. Not that the John Snow is precious about it, the weeny door downstairs notwithstanding its an easy and compact pub to navigate. Indeed its size has sometimes worked against it. A regular FT correspondent was supposed to meet us for the first time in there. It was too full so we decamped down the road, his memories of the John Snow are of disappointment.

It is a pub of first meetings, and often drinks there spiralled into odd areas. One night a bunch of us were sitting downstairs shooting the breeze (I guess early 2005) and slowly realised that the blokes on he table next to us were having some sort of UKIP meeting. Somehow we got embroiled, and suddenly it turned from a night of firendly banter into THE MOST IMPORTANT ANTI-FASCIST BATTLE IN THE BRITISH ISLES SINCE MOSLEY GOT HIS ARSE KICKED IN THE EAST END. Or something like that. They walked away tail between their legs and UKIP are now a spent political force because of us a four pints of the Fatman.

For me though the John Snow is synonymous with one of my favourite images of the 00′s. Pre-crossrail, pre-any kind of refurbishment of the Tottenham Court Road area, Centre Point was looking a bit run down. From the upstairs room in the John Snow there is a perfect view of the upper twenty storeys of this oft derided building, towering over Soho. And in its run down state, one of the letters on top had not lit up. So proclaimed to all in the John Snow was the prophetic legend CENTRE PINT. Which is what the John Snow has always been for me.

*Which the newsreader certainly isn’t. Indeed I have drunk in the same pub as the other John Snow on at least two occasions.

“It takes a more adventurous homegrown spud to volunteer for our sizzling Jamaican Jerk Chicken. Some spuds simply ‘dreaded’ not being picked so they went back to their roots (man!) to prove their worth. But the ones in this bag just chilled out ‘cos they knew they ware far better than the rest of the others.”

Well done Walkers, skirting accusations of racism and cultural stereotyping in three needless sentences to add nothing to a bag of crisps that tastes just like you mixed up the roast chicken powder with the picked onion powder.

The locker had been in use recently I had assumed by the phonecall, accidentally left full at the end of September. Unfortunately the same could not be said of the Quavers. After eating the first one, I noticed something wasn’t right. Checking ont he packet I discovered the truth. The Quavers had an expiry date of the 30/12/08. They were ten months out of date. So what happens to cheesy Quavers after they have expired?

They taste of Humbol Messerschmitt Grey Enamel Paint. Who knew?*

*Note, I know what this paint tastes like from an accidental brush sucking moment as a child when painting an airfix kit.

7.20pm Final science of the day, Cis is seeing how much choux pastry wll expand. Diameter buns from 1cm to 10cm have been piped onto the baking tray. Will they expand or will they POP!!!!

6.10 pmLawks – Meg is making a giant Kit Kat. Melted chocolate can be very messy! Oh and Cis and Moggy have turned up talking about doing something with Choux pastry. I keep saying Choux puns aren’t necessary but…

5.25pm Jalapeño Grigio and Jalapeño Noir are both out. Two sets of each. Rob made his using picked Jalapeño, Tim and Jenn made theirs with scored fresh Jalapeños. Taste test have been done and oddly, the pickled versions have a slightly pickly taste. General view around the room is that Rob’s are a bit ropey. Tim and Jenn’s have more subtlety. Except Ewan clearly likes his wine with a hint of VINEGAR.

Comments:
Pinot Grigio with pickled Jalapeños:
Rob: Pickled white is kind of disgusting
Jenn: Would not drink again but not entirely offensive
Pete: Oddly subtle, have had worse “chilli” based cocktails
Tim: Starts well but leaves a sour aftertaste
Sarah: Has the most burn to it.
Meg: Kinda Yeachh!

Pinot Grigio with fresh Jalapeños:
Tim: Tastes like nettle wine, I rather like it
Sarah: Tastes of vinegar, pickles and manky jars. Tastes like something crawled into it and died.
Meg: Tastes OK. I’d drink that.
Pete: I’d drink it in a Mexican western.
Rob: I prefer the unpickled white.

Pinot Noir with picked Jalapeños:
Sarah: I liked it. Its like a flavour of organic chocolate you would get in Planet Organic
Rob: Vinegar seems to work with red wine better.
Pete: May be that the wine is rubbish. But the chilli doesn’t help.
Ewan: A real edge to it. Best of the batch.

Pinot Noir with fresh Jalapeños:
Pete: Hot but rough.
Alix: Disgusting frankly. Tastes of cooking pepper.
Tim: NASTY.
Ewan: Its got no distinctive merit. A very subtle hint of chilli. I’d drink a whole glass of it but the other one is more interesting.
Meg: Attishooooooo! x10.

5.10 pm Eggs have been eaten. They were terrific. Photos to follow but the scientific opinion rated the eggs in the following order:
Irish Egg: White pudding cooked perfectly and the Guinness added a nice tinge to the egg.
Italian Egg: Oddly aniseed, but very nice. Slightly astringent taste from burned parmesan.
Japanese Egg: A bit of a tinned salmon taste, but on the whole quite refreshing.
Polish Egg: Mixed view on this – the kabanos were good but the lager soaked egg tasted funny.
Russian Egg: NEVER EVER STEEP AN EGG IN VODKA. EVER. The perogi dough was OK, but the eggs were vodka evil!
Bubbly bubbly oil!!! />
4.22pm Time to tell you about the Eggs Of The World experiment, devised by Alix Campbell to take the well-known Scotch Egg and the less-well-known Welsh Egg to a wider world. Here they are uncooked. In particular:

The Irish Egg: boiled egg, steeped in Guinness, wrapped in white pudding then covered in breadcrumbs and deep fried.
The Russian Egg: boiled egg steeped in vodka, wrapped in smooshed up pelmenis, covered in breadcrumbs and deep fried
The Polish Egg: boiled egg, wrapped in minced kabanos, covered in breadcrumbs and deep fried
The Japanese Egg: boiled egg, wrapped in smoked salmon mixed with wasabi and soy sauce, covered in breadcrumbs and deep fried
The Italian Egg: boiled egg, wrapped in minced salami and pepperoni, covered in breadcrumbs and grated parmesan and deep fried.

3:58pm Steve and Meg have arrived and a cassoulet is in the oven. Irish, Japanese and Italian eggs are in progress. Hurrah! Ewan is here and he has more beer.

3:40pm Mars bhajis judged a success!! Bhaji coating like a spicy soft wafer with gooey sweet centre. Yum!

3:38pm Mars bhajis are out! Tasting notes to follow.

Score!

Pete's bhaji batter

3:20pm Alix is here. She will be cooking a whole world of eggs.

2:40pm Tim and Jenn are here, with beer, wine and Jenn’s amazing two in one food science. She has bought what could be called Courgette Cake, or alternatively Zucchini Bread. English will be eating Courgette Cake, non-English (for which Ewan will count) will eat Zucchini Bread. Notes will be taken. Time and Jenn are also keen on Jalapeño Grigio, and Jalapeño Noir, so various methods will be employed to make these great treats.

2.33pm: Rob is here. He will be responsible for the Jalapeño Grigio and eating everything! Bhaji batter made (photo on the way). We have decided to make some onion bhajis as well to prove that it actually works!

2pm: Well we are underway officially (no-one actually here yet). However there was a slight warm up for food science yesterday at the barbecue I was at where I investigated the food properties of a Quorn veggie sausage. In particular if cooking it in any way makes it any more edible. To whit, I ate a cold Quorn sausage straight from the pack. Rather dull, but firm textured, surprisingly dry. Ate one from the BBQ, still dull but firm textured. Burnt flavour from where it was burned. Still alive, hence the uncooked Quorn sausage clearly in no way dangerous to health. Unless your health is based on eating nice food. Which any other day of the year, mine is…

Professor McMahon, a expert on keyhole surgery, said: “The increasing profile of larger celebrities, for example James Corden, Eamonn Holmes, Ruth Jones and Beth Ditto, means that being overweight is now perceived as being ‘normal’ in the eyes of the public.

“We talk about the dangers of skinny media images, but the problem actually swings both ways.”

Hold up. Eammon Holmes? Since when has he been seen as a crusader for corpulence? Cuddly perhaps but I certainly wouldn’t put him in the top twenty fat celebrities. Chosing him above, say, Dawn French or Christopher Biggins seems a little churlish. Almost as if someone knew that Eammon is a little obsessed with his weigh himself. Or someone read this article in the Daily Mail: I Dread Being 50 And Fat. Someone is clarly out to undermine his confidence. Well I say Mr Holmes, ignore the Professors carping on and keep up the good work. And keep being a friend to owls. (OK, he looks a bit fat in this World Of Owls photo, but thats an aspect ration thing.)

a) Actually the poohpoohing has already been done by The Guardian, the Guardianilists managing to elicitate this damninquote:

Professor David Crystal, professor of linguistics at Bangor University, called the idea “the biggest load of rubbish I’ve heard in years”. He said: “It is total nonsense. English reached 1 million words years ago. It’s like someone standing by the side of the road counting cars, and when they get to 1 million pronouncing that to be the millionth car in the world. It’s extraordinary.”

b) Well now that’s cleared up, what should that millionth word in English be. I feel Microsoft are very keen on verb usages of Bing to be it (Binging beats Googling hands down on your inputboard). Google is probably less keen (leekeen) on Chromecrash, what happens when you have down loaded the Mac Beta of Chrome. But I am sure we can come up with more…

Graun journalist spends all day reading nme.com and fails to really read the glastowatch story she links to which shows a screencap from metcheck when it said that SEVERAL MILES of rain would fall per day, temperatures would top 2000°C and the wind would be over 1000mph….

Also Science dude in the original Times story is relatively reserved, basically there’s this weather pattern that happens kind of at the end of June, but really isn’t that predictable and it’s not really a real monsoon, really…

The accuweather.com forecast will DO ME FINE to be honest (it currently says no rain after monday night, overcast but reasonably warm all weekend)

daniel davies of dsquared digest proposes a better buzzer-causer than h!tler-mention

(useful pointer: the thread that alex and dsquared are actually commenting in is not itself especially relevant to this issue…)

However the vectors of the spread of a disease are nothing over the spread of jokes, memes and neologisms. So here are a couple of case studies for you to keep your eye out for.

A) WINE FLU: This would be an example of a joke disease which will burn out very quickly once everyone has heard it, but if Have I Got News For You or The News Quiz get it quick enough will get an OK laugh. The basic formulation is as follows:
“I woke up this morning with nausea and splitting headache. I think it might be Wine Flu”
Do you see? Its a play on words mistaking Swine Flu (actual disease) with Wine Flu, a made up term referring to a hangover.

THREAT LEVEL: High. Its a pretty simple joke after all. Luckily it should burn out by this time next week.

B) BADVOCACY: I came across this term on a website and wondered about the difficulties of the neologism coiner. It comes from Tom’s neck of the woods, looking at web and social media’s ability to spread negative perceptions around. For example #amazonfail is a perfect example of Badvocacy in action. Its clearly a clever mixture of BAD and ADVOCACY, and yet feels clunky.

You can check out The Ladybird Book Of Badvocacy, from Weber Shandwick, who are SHOCK, an advocacy firm. So you can see why they are keen on the term. But it seems a bit too glib to really succeed in the rough and tumble word of web neologisms. Nevertheless if you see it elsewhere, in particular in a headline, let us know.

THREAT LEVEL: Low.

Also let us know if you want us to monitor the pandemic levels of threat of other words – we have tendrils everywhere.

The blog asks: given the irrelevance of that ‘fact’ to astronomy, should it have been reported? The German astronomers are quick to distance themselves from the raspberry herring: but if the angle doesn’t obscure the story (galaxy contains very complex molecules), then where’s the harm? The people who only take away the raspberry factoid probably wouldn’t have encountered – or absorbed much of – a drier, flavour-free story. They’re the informational equivalent of the people who download a track illegally which they would never have bought anyway: any loss they’ve caused is purely rhetorical.

For some reason I keep getting suckered into clicking through tinyURLs to things like this old Mashable piece, in which someone lists their reasons for NOT following people on Twitter and then all the comments crew slap each other on the back for realising that Twitter is like “a business networking event”. Since business networking events are some of the grimmest and most insincere occasions on earth it seems odd to want to recreate that vibe online without even a complimentary vol au vent, but each to their own.

Reading it though I thought some positivity was needed. So here are the reasons why I would follow back a complete stranger on Twitter. Of course I should point out that there’s no reason said stranger would follow me in the first place: beardy blokes working in social media are no scarce resource online! But in the event that a slip of the finger lands @tomewing on your list here’s what I’m looking for.

1. AN AMUSING ICON: Or at least something that isn’t passport photo meets nervous grin. Ideally it’ll be a kind of visual signature that makes you stand out amongst the rows of drab mugshots in my ever-unfurling tweetdeck.

2. STUFF I DIDN’T ALREADY KNOW: Doesn’t have to be about my job. It could be a fact about a 13th century Antipope for all I care. Far better someone who can make me interested in something I didn’t know I could be, than someone retweeting orthodox opinion on stuff I spend half my day thinking about.

3. AN INTEREST IN MORE THAN ONE THING: Parliamentarians used to call it a “hinterland” – the stuff you do when you’re not on the job. Chances are if you can be engaging about the rest of your life you’ll be interesting about the professional stuff too.

4. A MANAGEABLE FOLLOWS LIST: This is purely selfish – if you follow more than, say, 1000 people, what are the chances you’ll give a monkeys what I have to say?

5. YOU’RE HUMAN: Obviously it’s easy to spot Russian Spambot Hotties but there are more subtle pointers to your being a replicant: for instance, one dead giveaway is if you use a cliche like “passionate” in your bio to describe your job. Ah, I know, you think it makes you sound more human, but that’s because – yr a lizard! I can see it in your flickering green eyes.

You don’t have to tick all these boxes – and even if you tick none of them I might follow you anyway. And who cares if I do or don’t – I’m a nobody and Twitter is a cocktail party for passionate entrepreneurial experts who are going places! Yeah! No, sorry, I meant: there’s no right or wrong way to use the service and Twitter is a rainbow flower gathering full of sharing and conversation. Phew – glad we got that sorted out!

According to a New York Times article, many of the celebrities who have made Twitter jump into the mainstream are – gasp! – employing ghost writers to compose their 140-character updates. Some are transparent about this – Britney’s vastly popular account is run by Team Britney – others are at least honest: “It’s just like how a designer would work” says Kanye West.

He has a point – celebrity blogs have been ghost-written for a long time, why should celebrity micro-blogs be any different? But as I pointed out earlier this week, vociferous early adopters have made “authenticity” the cardinal virtue of Twitter. Even entertaining fiction is regarded as suspicious, let alone flat-out fakery. But fakery is deep in the web’s DNA – performative identity can be frowned on but it won’t go away.

Celebrities on Twitter are appealing partly because the 140-character limit is a democratising promise – Kanye, Solange, and Lily get exactly the same tools as you or I do to express themselves. And that raises the expectation that they are expressing themselves. I was originally going to compare ghost-twittering to lip-synching, which as most Freaky Trigger readers will know I don’t mind in the slightest. But there’s a difference: pop can transcend the circumstances of its production in a way microblogging doesn’t. Elvis doesn’t need to have been to jail for “Jailhouse Rock” to be effective. But when Snoop Dogg tweets about eating a sandwich, if it’s a non-existent Snoop eating a non-existent sandwich, the – already miniscule! – point of the exercise diminishes still further.

In other words, authenticity isn’t a guarantor of content, it’s a mask for it: strip away the presumed authorship and you’re forced to judge the content on very different terms. And here’s where ghost-twittering gets intriguing. Because it’s not just mainstream celebrities doing it. The NYT article talks to a “ghost-tweeter” for Guy Kawasaki, a prominent social media expert (the fashionable term is “rock star”) with 80,000 followers. This person tweets in Kawasaki’s name – the example given is while he’s on stage at a conference.

This has caused outrage among some Twitter users. “Shame on these imposters!” says one. In reply, another says, “It’s not like people were following Kawasaki for his brilliant insight”. So why were they? “For the connection”. Kawasaki himself is unapologetic – “This is old news”, he tweets, “Is the quality of my tweets high? That’s the question. Not who did them.”

My sympathy here is with Kawasaki, if only because I bet a lot of the people talking about “betrayal” would indeed have claimed that they followed him for the content, not the networking opportunity. And the content hasn’t changed one bit. Authenticity is often a good filter for content, but when it becomes the primary filter for content – a rule to be applied regardless of circumstance – most types of content suffer.

(But maybe I’m just scarred by having fought these kind of battles for years over pop music. Do social media rock stars automatically lead to social media rockism?)

I’ve been really enjoying writing for it lately, and I think it’s got rather good. I try to do stuff that’s interesting whether or not you’re in the marketing loop. Some posts, I admit, are craven attempts to write in the punchily stupid style favoured by the modern business dude, but some of them I’m pleased with. Here’s a little digest of the best recent Blackbeard stuff:

- Humanists and determinists battle for the soul of research.
- The Twitterphant in the room
- The “Bulworth Effect” and the limits of representativeness.
- What we used to believe vs what we now believe about teh internets (this is part of a series called “Digital Colonists”)

“Practice does not help. Neither, surprisingly, does varying the gaps in the scale: it’s no easier to distinguish five sounds between “very loud” and “very quiet” than between “fairly loud” and “fairly quiet”. Some people have perfect pitch and can transcend these limits when it comes to musical tones, but there seem to be few other exceptions. No wonder so many reviews use a scale of one to five stars.”

If true this would not only explain why so many reviews use a scale of one to five stars, but why – when presented with a wider scale – reviewers tend to cluster in the middle or at one end of it. Sadly the FT is somewhat vague about citing its sources in this piece.

Here is my own experiential contribution to scale research – which bears this out to some extent. On Popular, as you know, I have a 1 to 10 scale, and there’s a fair amount of discrimination within it. But my internal method of alloting marks tends to be:

1. Go on instinct whether a record is good (6-10) or not good (1-5).
2. Discriminate within those ranges.

So I’m still using the five-degrees rule, I’m just chunking records into subcategories before applying it. This is also what I do when ordering end-of-year lists by the way (yes, we’re getting deep into Hornby territory here!): I put everything into 4 or 5 baskets, then sort within each basket until I get granularity.

I suspect this is an iterative process – i.e. the Pitchfork 101 point scale LOOKS ridiculous, but not if the reviewers use a series of decisions to differentiate. Is this good Y/N? Is it a 6/7/8/9/10? Is it a high or low 7? Is it 7.1 7.2 7.3? OK, it’s still ridiculous. I love using it though!

That last claim is one which I am sure attracts many middle-class parents afeard of the potential ice dangers hidden inside every snowball. OR Worse. Because the snoballer does not, as claimed, remove the likelihood of these dangers. Firstly if your Walter The Softee kid only throws harmless powder puff snowballs, he is going to get hurt more by the hardcore snowballs. But the device does not even guarntee that the users balls are pure as the driven. Rather it increases the likelihood of the chance of the fabled “yellow snowballs” and worse “the white chocolate Ferrero Rocher”. If the kid doesn’t have to touch the snow to make and throw, he can throw some pretty nasty stuff inside his snowball.

If only the innovation catalogue still existed…

*For all the whinging about cold, and lack of buses, snow days are ace. For one its the only time an parent (or indeed any adult) can throw something at a child and not be seen as a monster.

** I Bet Captain Scott wished he had one when he had the most southerly snowball fight ever.

Look at the following paragraph regarding the growth of the planet Jupiter taken from the BBC News Science and Environment page (it is bad enough science has to share with environment and is hived off from Technology but…)
“The planet Jupiter must have gained mass fast during its infancy, according to astronomers.”

(I know, to me that’s a sentence but on the Beeb website its a paragraph. In bold.) Anyway that sentence is the justification for the following headline for the article:

BABY JUPITER’S HUGE WEIGHT GAIN

Shall we count the errors in this headline. Not only are they equating a planet with a child, but they make the classic mass/weight error. This would be a childhood which lasted a few million years too. All rolled up into some sort of scare story about how planets are OBESE these days. Such scare stories are the bread and butter of the online news industry and drives hits. Though I clicked on it because I thought it was about the massively fat child of Horton Jupiter of They Came From the Stars (I Saw Them) – FT’s live band of the year in 2000.

(That link does not quite express how impressed Tom was with them in 2000 – sorry.)