FT
31 August 2009
8:25pm Om nom nom, they expanded and were covered in melted Mars bars and stuffed with ice cream and and… I think we are too drunk and too full to say any more tonight. More photos to come, not sure about scientific content of the day but food and drink was had by all. Hooray!
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…
more »
Pete Baran in FT /Proven By Science /Pumpkin Publog • 3 Comments
29 June 2009
There is a remarkably unremarkable piece of news on the BBC website. Apparently according to that old favourite “A MEDICAL EXPERT” the appearance of so many fat people on TV normalises obesity. Or as BBC News Health section put it: Fat Stars ‘Make Obesity Normal’ (their scare quotes). One assumes this is much like the way that thin stars normalises thinness and causes anorexia VIA THE SAME MEDIA. Nevertheless the EXPERT is an EXPERT, which we can prove by a few pull quotes from him:
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? more »
Pete Baran in FT /Proven By Science • 6 Comments
10 June 2009
So if a neologism is coined ever 98 minutes, say certain lexicographers, the English language will hit One Million Words TODAY! It surely behooves us at Freakytrigger to
a) pooh pooh this statistic
b) whilst at the same time coining the millionth word.
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. more »
Pete Baran in FT /Proven By Science • 2 Comments
8 June 2009
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)
CarsmileSteve in Blog 7 /FT /Proven By Science • 3 Comments
13 May 2009
alex harrowell of the yorkshire ranter proposes godwin score as a measure of a thread’s usefulness
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…)
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in FT /Proven By Science • 3 Comments
29 April 2009
Yes yes, swine flu. We are all wearing masks and batmanning the barricades against piggy pox. The news is all a flutter and how will we survive with the panicked prognostications of all major news outlets.
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.
more »
Pete Baran in FT /Proven By Science /The Brown Wedge • 2 Comments
An interesting blog post about the recent discovery that our galaxy “smells of raspberries” (and rum, though whether man rum or lady rum is unspecified).
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.
Tom in FT /Proven By Science • 1 Comment
11 April 2009
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.
more »
Tom in Blog 7 /FT /Proven By Science • 3 Comments
27 March 2009
“Twittering” – as Mark pointed out in the pub last week – is how the Romans described the sounds made by ghosts in the classical underworld: spectral interactions, grey and fleeting. The topic had come up after we claimed on air that a percentage of the micro-messages released into the Twitteric aether issued from the dead. We had in mind a phantom undernet of hauntings: the ouija board as the original microblog. The truth of ghost twitters turns out to be more mundane, but just as intriguing in its way.
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. more »
Tom in FT /Proven By Science • 4 Comments
26 March 2009
As you might or might not know, I have another blog which focuses mostly on market research, social media and speculation about how the two fit together.
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”)
Tom in Blog 7 /FT /Proven By Science • No Comments
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