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Really Bad Science: BBC announces laws of physics no longer valid

Martin — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 15:16:03 +0000

I’ve recently enriched my Google Reader subscription list with a bunch of feeds which I tag as “skeptical news”. The blog that introduced me to this was Bad Science by Guardian columnist Ben Goldacre. His last column talks about the recent BBC coverage of another ridiculous free energy device. Go read it, it’s very good.

Here’s my “skepticism” blogroll:

Anti-spam services: Defensio vs Akismet

Martin — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:28:00 +0000

I’ve decided to try out Defensio, to see if it beats Akismet as an anti-spam plugin for WordPress. Akismet is a nice simple “set and forget” solution but the odd false negative does slip through occasionally. The setup process for Defensio is almost identical to Akismet but the management interface looks better and they have a nice statistics page for individual blogs (rather than Akismet’s overall spam graph).

Let’s see how it goes…

Facebook and the birthday paradox

Martin — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 12:50:32 +0000

This is one for math geeks with a Facebook account. I recently heard of an interesting probability problem called the Birthday Paradox. I think it was on the excellent Five Numbers series on BBC Radio 4 (or one of the 2 follow-up series). Anyway, the problem states that if you put 23 (or more) randomly selected people in a room, there is more than a 50% chance that at least 2 people will share the same birthday. The solution is not a paradox in the logical sense, it just contradicts our intuition.

Now for the Facebook link. If you have an account you probably know about the birthdays page where you can see a list of all your friends’ birthdays. I checked it the other day and was surprised to find that 3 pairs of my friends shared the same birthday. That is, before I remembered the birthday paradox and that with my 40 Facebook friends there is a 90% chance that at least 2 of them share the same birthday.

If, unlike me, you are uber popular on Facebook and have more than 100 friends, the probability should be more than 99.99996%!

(OK, I did say that this one was for math geeks…)

Attack of the d2e Zombie Copy

Martin — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:20:06 +0000

The title of this post was inspired by the excellent A List Apart article by Erin Kissane (published on October 24, 2005). As Erin puts it:

“You’ve seen them around the web, these zombie sentences. They’re not hard to recognize: syntax slack and drooling, clauses empty of everything but a terrible hunger for human brains.”

The following quotes are just a few examples from the extraordinary stream of zombie copy that is the d2e™ Logic website. The copy goes to such extremes of meaninglessness that I sometimes wonder whether this site/company was created as a joke. However, they actually used to be a client of my previous employer so this stuff is for real.

It seems that they also were great believers in irony when they decided to call their company d2e, which stands for down to earth.

In no particular order of preference (every single sentence is zombie copy of the highest quality):

“Together we’re breaking down the barriers to global synergies with innovative thought leadership and pragmatic transformation programmes that deliver on the promise of prosperity through partnership” (view)

“Our focus on people and processes not just data, helps us innovate new best practice underpinned with proven research and sound logic that comes with years of global eXperience.” (view)

“As our ecologies continue to grow, we’re seeing the emergence of collaborative ecosystems within globally connected communities whose members eXchange skills and eXperience in synergy” (view)

“Collaborative commercialisation projects that outreach the benefits of our solutions throughout specific markets in partnership with customers, leading experts and sector representatives.” (view)

“We do this by offering thought leadership and practical in-context case studies relevant to client interests, and we deliver this through consultancy arrangements and workshops designed to create synergy and add value for clients and their whole supply, design and value chain.” (view)

xkcd on random numbers

Martin — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 10:04:14 +0000

Another gem from xkcd today:

If you haven’t subscribed to xkcd yet, do it now, damn it!