This is a map of Earth created using a Mercator projection, but with the magnified poles moved to the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. I created it using the Blue Marble map from Wikipedia. The dashed lines are the conventional latitude and longitude lines. You get a much better feel for the shape of Antarctica than normal Mercator maps give you, instead exaggerating Kamchatka.

Because, the Mercator projection doesn’t need to make Africa small and Greenland big. It can do anything you want it to. So for example, here is my little rebellion against Mercator’s underplaying of Africa’s troubles: a Mercator map in which the continent is infinite in area:

I’ve cropped the image here. In principle a Mercator projection can be continued infinitely in the vertical direction, and in this case the ‘north’ pole is in Africa, so the map would be Africa all the way up. The level of detail would, source image notwithstanding, get bigger and bigger until eventually sub-atomic particles started to appear. Theoretically, you could exploit this to produce a map where Britain opened out as Africa has at the top, and extend the map up to include a road map of England, including  a large-scale street map of Manchester, eventually opening out to provide a floor-plan of one particular building, then room, and eventually the layout of one table. This, however, seems like it would be very difficult so I haven’t bothered.

Here’s another Mercator map, this time with the poles near Australia and Africa again:

And here’s one with poles in Asia and South America, creating a world with one central ocean:

Here’s the maths in case you want to make some maps yourself. Feel free to stop reading here if you wrongly find maths boring. I haven’t worried about sign conventions or being especially rigorous, though. It’s just enough to make some nice pictures. I treated the Earth as a sphere of unit radius centred at the origin.

Converting between (x, y) and (latitude, longitude) is fairly trivial if you read Wikipedia, although I did have to kludge the formula a bit for ‘negative’ (south) latitudes. To reorient the map, I converted the latitudes φ and longitudes λ to three-dimensional Cartesian coordinates using the following formulae:

x = cos φ × cos λ
y = cos φ × sin λ
z = sin φ

I’d planned to rotate these and then convert them back into spherical coordinates, but in the event I found it easier to go directly into rotated spherical coordinates. They’re defined by two points, called North Pole N and Greenwich G, each chosen at random from the surface of the sphere, and described by a set of (x, y, z) coordinates. So the new latitude and longitude are given as follows:

φ′ = ½π − cos⁻¹ P⋅N
 = ½π − cos⁻¹ (x x_N + y y_N + z z_N)
λ′ = tan⁻¹ (P⋅G′ ÷ P⋅G″)

where G′ = N × G ÷ |N × G| and G″ = N × G′. Using the cross product this way generates two points on the new equator separated by 90°. In fact the conversion to new-longitude is more complex than this, because you have to mess around with quadrants, but I used the atan2 function to do that for me so I’ve not bothered working out all the steps.

I don’t know if this is the best way of doing this but welcome to stream-of-conciousness mathematics.

Thank you for your impartial coverage of the general election which focussed on the important parts rather than frivolous nonsense.

This was exemplified by your coverage of the two high-profile Liberal Democrat losses, Dr Evan Harris and Lembit Opik. While large photos of each outgoing MP were on the screen, you rightly ignored Dr Harris’ place on the Science and Technology Subcommittee. You rightly paid no heed to his campaigning against religious interference in abortion law. You wisely didn’t mention his campaigning against NHS spending on unproven and disproven forms of alternative medicine. His work on the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was surely dismissed, as was his outspoken opposition to the sacking of Professor Nutt. I thought you might have been taken in by his campaigning to reform our absurdly draconian libel laws, but no. Not you. With your superhuman wit and journalistic integrity you cut straight through all that tedious bullshit and reported the far more important fact that Mr Opik might have had sex with a minor pop star.

Twice.

Sirs, I salute you.

• http://xtaldave.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/in-which-i-apply-for-a-job-as-a-homeopath/
• http://sciencedigestive.blogspot.com/2010/08/my-application-for-job-as-homeopath.html
• http://www.dcscience.net/?p=3339
• http://www.realityismyreligion.com/alternative-medicine/i-applied-to-be-a-homeopath

Update: there’s no point us both maintaining a list, so here’s Zeno’s.

Statement in Support of Application – please tell us your personal qualities, skills and attributes, experience and any major achievements and show how they match those needed for this job.

Obviously I’ve got this post pretty well sewn up, but in case I am unavailable you might want to apply here.

At exactly 06 mins and 07 seconds after 5 o’clock on Aug 9th 2010, it will be 05:06:07 08/09/10. This won’t happen again until the year 3010.

Well. I’ve just been told

AN INTERESTING FACT ABOUT AUGUST 2010. This August has 5 Sundays, 5 Mondays, 5 Tuesdays, all in one month. It happens once in 823 years.

And while the first claim was mostly unimpressive and only slightly false, this one is just false. Massive, shovel-loads of false. Honestly, this may be the falsest (earnest) statement I’ve read all year.

August contained five Sundays, five Mondays and five Tuesdays in 1999. It will happen again in 2021. Okay, so that’s still quite a while, but I can’t imagine how anyone arrived at the figure of 823 years. August is 31 days long. It necessarily has five of three days of the week in it. Why on Earth would it be these three so rarely? How can people not see how implausible that is? Quite aside from anything else, the calendar loops every 400 years. Nothing could possibly happen every 823 years any more than Wednesday could happen every nine days.

It fascinates me how these stories come around. It’s everywhere. This may be my favourite example, for this paragraph:

In 1187, or 823 years ago, the Gregorian calendar hadn’t existed yet (it was introduced in 1582) so there was no ado about this strange happenstance.

And it’s not just this year. August 2009 (which started on a Saturday) was just as special. It’s beginning to look like 816/823 years just don’t have an August. And look, here’s a version with the ridiculous 05:06:07 08/09/10 ‘fact’ glued onto the bottom. This version (quite aside from trying to credit God with the whole thing)

August 2009 is a unique month which has 5 Sundays and 5 Saturdays.  Experts says to see another month with 5 Sundays and 5 Saturdays, we need to live another 823 years. We are blessed to go through and experience this unique month.  Now we have to wait for generations to see another month with 5 Sundays and 5 Saturdays. Let us thank God for allowing us to see this unique month.

even ignores the Mondays, so this amazing, once-in-823-years freak of nature actually rolls round after only five years. In fact it doesn’t even specify that the month must be August, by which standard it happened again the following January. I especially like the use of the word “experts”, in this case to mean “people who own calendar software”, as if somehow predicting what dates will occur in the future is some kind of complex science that us mere mortals can’t be expected to follow. It’s nice to see that in many of the discussion threads someone eventually does bother to sit in front of Google Calendar and click through checking.

I keep being told people aren’t interested in maths. Clearly they are. This stuff is pure mathematics, and it’s capturing people’s imaginations.

Just a shame it’s total bullshit.

I don’t trust Barack Obama. Call me paranoid, but the last time a black man with an imperialist agenda had that much military power, it was Darth Vader.

It did raise a laugh from some of the audience, but I’m forced to assume they were drunk because the joke makes no sense. It makes no sense because it relies on the audience subscribing to his somewhat contentious views on Obama’s politics, but mostly because Darth Vader is white. He just dresses in black, as has every US president since forever. Basically the uncontroversial similarities he’s found between Obama and Vader are that they’re both in charge of powerful armies and while that’s a fair reason to be wary of them, it’s not funny and I’m not capable of finding something funny if it relies on me selectively ignoring facts.

In The Salmon of Doubt, Douglas Adams makes much the same argument about the joke “if the black box is so indestructible, why don’t they make the whole plane out of the same stuff”, which he described as “the teller and the audience complacently conspiring together to jeer at someone who knew more than they did”.

No, I like my comedy to be smart, and to mock people who, either through dishonesty or ignorance, promote nonsense. So this sounded fairly good to me:

You have a 0.000043% chance of dying during this show. We can’t tell you what you’ll die FROM. It could be heart attack, shark attack, or insertion of a sharp object into an orifice. But we will make sure you at least die laughing.

Stand up mathematician Matt Parker and comedian Timandra Harkness got sick of reading ill-founded stories about how eating this or doing that was going to add six months to your life span, or halve your risk of dying from something or other. So they got a grant from the UK’s biggest biomedical charity, the Wellcome Trust, to do the research and bring you the most definitive comedy show ever about dying.

But then I noticed one detail: Timandra Harkness. I’ve never seen her perform, but it’s a distinctive name and one I knew I recognised, and I just worked out whence: in 2004 she helped publicise ”the formula for the perfect joke” in order to promote her show. The formula was

x = (fl + n^o) ÷ p

where f is “the funniness of the punchline”, l is “the length of the buildup”, p is “the number of puns”, and just in case this seemed a bit too reasonable, n is “the amount someone falls over” and o is “the ouch factor”. Science often throws up unexpected results, and here we learn that because War and Peace has very high values for both l and n, and a very low p value, it is in fact provably hysterical (although my preferred formula x = f doesn’t throw up this anomaly). This is just an advert posing as bullshit posing as maths posing as science.

I wholeheartedly agree that the simplistic “+6 months” reporting of health stories is annoying and I’d love to see a show that poked fun at it in a clever way, but frankly I don’t for a second believe that Timandra Harkness is the person to do it. Partly this is because once you sell your (and science’s) credibility in this way, I think you forfeit your right to “get sick of reading ill-founded stories about [science]“, but mostly it’s because I agree with Nicholas Parsons that

The formula has obviously been thought up by somebody with no sense of humour.

No, I like my comedy to be by people with a sense of humour.

The only difference between something that can go wrong and something that cannot possibly go wrong is that when something that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it is generally impossible to get at or repair.

—Douglas Adams

The above quote is interesting because Douglas Adams was a great evangelist of Apple products, which are the archetypal Thing That Cannot Possibly Go Wrong. They famously “just work”. You open the box, plug the thing in, and away you go, doing things.

So I’m told. I have in my life owned exactly one Apple product, an iPhone 3G, and my experience is that actually you take it out of the box, plug it into your PC, charge it for a few hours, install iTunes, set up an account, sync the phone to the account, and after a bit, away you go, doing things. But yes, thereafter it was a dream to use. Save for a handful of niggles, the UI was incredibly intuitive and user friendly and the screen is gorgeous, and so forth. You don’t get to customise it all that much, but you don’t want to — beyond choosing whether you want to use a 12- or 24-hour clock, customisation is an exercise in blaming the user for poor design anyway. Users want to change things to how they incorrectly believe they’d like them, but if you let them then they will and then they’ll like it less than they do with the set-up designed for them by an expert in how to set things up so people like them. That’s why games with level designers built in aren’t as good as games with loads of good levels built in.

That is, until the iPhone 4 turned up like Hudzen 10 and started pummelling it into obsolescence. iOS4 added spellcheck, app folders and — because I jailbroke it — home screen backgrounds and multitasking. Except… the spellcheck is slow, and the app folders all look virtually identical so it’s no longer clear at a glance where I should jab, and the multitasking only works with apps that specifically update to allow it, which isn’t many or the ones I want it to work with…

And basically, iOS4 doesn’t work. I don’t mean that iOS4 doesn’t live up to what I hoped; I mean it doesn’t work. It actively works less well than iOS3.1.3, and in fact less well than my old £50 handset which couldn’t run Reeder either but at least didn’t charge me £1.79 to find out. You might argue that Reeder’s constant crashes are the fault of developer Silvio Rizzi, but Apple approved it. If they’re going to run the absurdly restrictive app policies they do, they have to accept responsibility for ensuring all the apps work on all the devices they sell them on. (This isn’t related to hacked multitasking support; it even happens when I’ve run nothing else since booting the phone.) Apple have gone to great lengths to ensure the iPhone Cannot Possibly Go Wrong and that means it’s their fault when it inevitably does.

So I suppose I can downgrade to iOS3. I don’t know how to do that, but I’m sure I can find out and do it because I’m a colossal nerd. It’s going to be a pain, though, because Apple are so confident in their new OS that there’s no button in iTunes to downgrade, and indeed the iPhone 3GS and 4 have a digital signing system in place specifically to prevent users from downgrading the OS.

Apple don’t want you downgrading the OS because old versions of iOS have security holes that new ones don’t. These holes allow hackers (by which I mean owners of the phone) to add apps and features Apple haven’t approved. For example, I have a torch app on my iPhone which turns the screen white and sets the backlight to maximum. Apple don’t allow developers to mess with the backlight in this way, so that app can’t be released in the AppStore. Meanwhile the hacked multitasking feature in iOS3 worked with all apps and, if it ran out of memory, crashed background apps rather than the one you were using at the time.

But I think I’m going to have to go through the hassle of downgrading the undowngradable, because a few days ago the telephone app crashed. The fucking telephone! My phone, the most sophisticated mobile phone it was possible to buy just two years ago, suddenly didn’t have enough memory to make a fucking telephone call! Eventually I managed to get it to call through the phonebook app, but apparently the “end call” button is part of the Actually Being A Phone app, so unless I wanted to leave a voicemail of me jabbing at the status bar and yelling “hellbastards” until my credit or battery gave out I had to reboot the phone just to make it hang up. This is not what I expect from a product that Just Works. This is not even what I expect from a product that only just works.

A man more cynical than I might suggest that Apple are attempting to make me upgrade to an iPhone 4 by remotely breaking my 3G. I don’t think that’s the case; I think they’ve just set themselves the clearly impossible task of trying to run the same apps on the same OS on maybe seven different devices with three different screen resolutions, and predictably failed to do it. Not that it makes any difference, because in either case the arrival of a new, more powerful phone was inevitably going to break mine.

Anyway, I’m not going to get an iPhone 4, at least not any time soon. I don’t phone much, so it’s not worth me getting a contract. I buy (or win) myself a nice handset every few years, so as you can imagine one of my criteria is “probably won’t be broken next May by some git in Cupertino who wants to sell me the new model”.

I mean, these are people who use two spaces after a full stop, which warrants a place in the first circle of Hell on its own, but since HTML doesn’t render consecutive whitespace they’ve tricked it by using a space followed by a non-breaking space. So not only are there big ugly gaps after sentences, but the indentation is fucked up. The site itself is divided into “Cover Page”, “About”, “Academy”, “Books”, “Contact”, “Join”, “News”, “Page One” and “Site Map” in that order so apparently they’re more keen on alphabetisation than on logic, structure or counting.

As for their attempts at English, an example will help. Their news page shows a photo of the Stella Artois advert which says “less glass/less CO2 emissions”, and comments

Should it not read…..Less C02 emission, or better still, FEWER C02 EMISSIONS?

Leaving aside the dismal attempt at an ellipsis, and the almost random application of capitalisation, and generously assuming the author had just finished a Paul Auster book and forgotten what quotation marks are, there is no such thing as ‘a CO2 emission’. “Fewer CO2 emissions” isn’t “better” and in fact doesn’t make any sense. Not only that, but they’ve written the number zero instead of the letter ‘O’. If they’re going to insist I learn the subjunctive, I’m going to have to insist they learn basic science or have the decency to look it up. This is the equivalent of grammar sauntering up to me at a party and saying “what was that subject you used to go out with? Susan?” “Science.” “Whatever. Shall we dance?”

That’s a particularly offensive sentence, but grammatically it’s fairly representative. The site is littered with clumsy, run-on ambiguities like

Today, we have a membership of around one thousand, mostly United Kingdom residents, but interest is growing worldwide.

and Deepwater Horizon punctuation-explosions like

Mrs Williams, (a short profile is available here,) is also a QES English Academy Board member.

or

“mother-tongue”

or

We can raise issues in our journal, QUEST or in our blog pages:- listen to the radio, watch television and read the papers and tell them when they have got it wrong:- form pressure groups (branches of the Society), in the regions and make ourselves known to the Education Authorities, libraries, local newspapers and broadcasters.

Colon dash! What the hell is colon dash? And that’s not even a dash — that’s a hyphen!

These are people who have appointed themselves guardians of the English language, and not only do they not understand its intricacies, they don’t understand the basics. I actually half expect them to spell ‘lose’ with two Os somewhere.

Their slogan, pasted in ugly italic print across every page on the site, is “Good English Matters in Education, in Business, in Life and in the Future”. Surely that should be “…and will matter in the Future”? I mean, I don’t care. I think it’s fine how it is. It’s clear what it means and scans better this way. But that’s because for once I’m not the joyless pedant.

At exactly 06 mins and 07 seconds after 5 o’clock on Aug 9th 2010, it will be 05:06:07 08/09/10. This won’t happen again until the year 3010

Pretty impressive, no?

No. This stuff bugs me. Mostly it annoys me for the spectacularly banal observation that “this won’t happen again until the year 3010″. Well, no. What you’ve done there is to truncate the number of centuries from the date, and announce that it won’t reoccur for a century (and in the event you did even that wrong and said it won’t reoccur for a millennium; in fact there’ll be an 05:06:07 08/09/10 in 2110).

That’s true of any date. That’s just the modulo function. There won’t be another 05:06:07 08/09/10 for a hundred years, but then there won’t be another 16:27:05 06/01/10 for a hundred years either and nobody’s impressed by that. Why? Because 16, 27, 5, 6 ,1, 10 doesn’t look like anything much. There’ll be a date and time as remarkable as 16:27:05 06/01/10 later today, say 17:09:42 06/01/10.

But then, 05:06:07 08/09/10 is only a sequence written one particular way. In this case, it’s relying on a rather obtuse American way of writing the date, and even then it only works if you use two-digit years and write the time, including seconds, before the date.

So when will there next be a date and time that’s at least as impressive as 05:06:07 08/09/10? If we allow British dates to be used then we get another 05:06:07 08/09/10 not in 3010, nor even in 2110, but in September. We’ve cut it down from a millennium to a month already.

Moreover, there’s no reason we have to start at 5. We could start at 8, and then wait for 08/09/10 11:12:13, and cut the wait down to slightly over six hours. Indeed, there’s no reason we have to write down the number of seconds, so we could celebrate at 06:07 08/09/10 and get the wait down to an hour and fifty-two seconds.

Exactly 6 minutes and 7 seconds after 5 o’clock on Aug 9th 2010, it will be 05:06:07 08/09/10. This won’t happen again for about an hour.

Hands up if you’re still impressed.

Hi,

I just found the “Meebo Bar” on the website at https://fusefm.co.uk/podcasts and I thought you could give me more information about it. I guess my question is, what the hell is it for?

Possibly I’m outside the target audience. I think I might be a bit too web-savvy to really get the full benefit. Certainly I didn’t find the chat panel useful, because I have an IM client installed to handle that and I wouldn’t normally think to visit a small University radio station’s podcast download page if I want to check if my flatmate will be home for dinner. I suppose that’s just a quirk of how I happen to use the web, and other people might not have an IM client installed, and instead rely on every website they visit to support chat individually. I’m not sure how these people ended up with instant messaging accounts, but I expect they filled in the Windows Messenger sign-up page before their children uninstalled it so they would stop downloading viruses from robots posing as teenaged girls.

I guess the Twitter button is the same. Being a nerd, obviously I have a Twitter account (@Andrew_Taylor – follow me!), so I don’t need a button on every website I visit showing me its latest tweets and would ideally like a button that allowed me to follow them using actual Twitter, but I realise you’re going for a more ‘newbie’ market than that so your solution is probably best. Adding any kind of interaction to the Twitter panel would doubtless only confuse them. They would probably tweet their bank details or something. I imagine people who don’t really know what Twitter is probably click it and think “ah yes, I’ve heard about this on the news, it’s what all the kids are using. And now, so am I! Wow, it looks like a tiny version of the site I was already looking at, but more inane and with little gibberish weblinks all through it. Not really sure what it’s for but I do feel very modern”. I imagine they enjoy that.

The YouTube integration’s the same, isn’t it? You don’t need a button to subscribe to, or even view, their YouTube channel; just show the videos and let them watch a bit of telly in a tiny box at the bottom of a website. Us major web-nerds will be able to find it through the player-integrated menu or a normal link or Google or maybe we can just regexp the whole internet or something.

Presumaby you’ve taken the same attitude with the RSS button. Its purpose, clearly, is to flash up a message saying “Sorry, RSS is not supported in your browser” so that they can feel like they’re engaging with Web 2.0 without having to learn anything. They no longer have to say “I don’t understand” when their colleagues or children mention RSS! Now they can just say “yeah, but my browser doesn’t support it” and when asked what browser they use I imagine they say “Google” or “Dell” or something. Everyone will laugh at them behind their backs, of course, but they know better than to laugh in front of people that ignorant because then they’d have to explain what a browser is and that would be like explaining what a planet is to a crab. The Meebo Bar has granted them an illusion that they understand the modern internet.

Have I got this basically right?

One thing I did like about the Meebo Bar is how you’ve implemented a way to view tweets and RSS updates from a website without having to leave that website. Normally if I want to view all my Twitter updates I have to go to Twitter and read them all there, whereas with Meebo I can simply view every website and blog individually and click the buttons on the Meebo Bar, except for the websites that haven’t got a Meebo Bar which is all of them.

In a similar vein, I use a bookmarklet to share webpages with my friends. Sometimes I use a browser extension or copy-paste the URL, but mostly I use a bookmarklet. Meebo Bar allows me to do it without my bookmarklet, and instead to search each webpage I want to share for an individual button to share that page in whatever services it happens to support. This is clearly far more convenient, and I’m thinking of removing my bookmarklet, but before I do that would it be possible for you to add support for webpages without Meebo Bar (which as I say is all of them) by either having a page on your website listing every page on the internet with a share button for each one, or else some kind of bookmarklet?

Thanks,

Andrew

I hope they appreciate my comments.

Hi there. Thanks for your interest. Some quick answers:

• The idea of placing the bar on a site is so a site visitor can access these features without leaving the site. If there was something on a site you liked, you (and more to the point anyone else, regardless of whether they were using their own computer or had a chat app) could chat to a friend about it without firing up another application.
• The RSS button does not work in Chrome because Chrome does not support RSS. It should work fine in IE or Firefox.
• The Twitter/Facebook Friend/RSS/Youtube button allows the site’s publisher to let site viewers access the site’s Youtube/Facebook Friend/RSS/Twitter feed without leaving the site. The idea is that people who are looking at a site might be interested in seeing more information about the site (for example seeing if the content on the YouTube/Twitter feed is worth subscribing to for them).

We appreciate your interest and your comments!

Chris

Oh, good.

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your prompt reply.

The idea of placing the bar on a site is so a site visitor can access these features without leaving the site. If there was something on a site you liked, you (and more to the point anyone else, regardless of whether they were using their own computer or had a chat app) could chat to a friend about it without firing up another application.

Ah! Sorry, I misinterpreted “leaving a site” as “closing the tab”, but thanks to the magic of multi-tasking operating systems I can write a short novel without in that sense leaving a website. Obviously what you meant is that one can share a webpage without deflecting one’s attention or mouse pointer from the webpage for even a nanosecond. Now that you mention it, it does enrage me so when I find a webpage I want to share and have to move my eyes and mouse pointer to my Google Reader bookmarklet or Shareaholic extension button, which can be anywhere up to six pixels away from the webpage. Aside from the sheer Herculean effort of moving my relatively light mouse the extra millimetre required to achieve this, there’s a constant irrational panic that the webpage may be gone when I allow myself to resume my otherwise unremitting stare. I shouldn’t have to put up with this in the twenty-first century.

With the Meebo Bar I can share any webpage I want without any of this danger, provided that I only ever want to share the FuseFM podcast download page.

The RSS button does not work in Chrome because Chrome does not support RSS. It should work fine in IE or Firefox.

Okay, I think I understand this. I’d assumed Chrome didn’t support RSS because it’s a web browser, and a web browser no more needs to support RSS any than it needs to support iCal or zip files or coffee filters but obviously we expect more than that from modern browsers. Meebo’s servers shouldn’t have to read the RSS file, extract the post data and compile it into browser-readable HTML when it can simply sit back and wait for Google to write this code and bundle it into everyone’s browser, any more than you should have to write an entire website when you could just put <website intent="sell the meebo bar" awesome="true">Unfortunately, your browser does not support the 'website' tag yet.</website> and wait for Google to learn how to parse it.

Some would say it’s not Google’s problem, but obviously if Google expected webservers to parse RSS feeds into HTML previews with convenient subscription buttons for popular feed readers they’d have bought FeedBurner or something. Although FeedBurner’s not a good solution because you can’t use it without glancing momentarily away from the webpage whose RSS feed you’re viewing. Some people might suggest that by the time you’re looking at the RSS feed you no longer have any need for the original webpage to be on your screen, but those people will change their tune when they see the Meebo Browser which I assume is the next step in your business model and which I assume will run within the existing Meebo Bar and allow users to view entirely different webpages without “leaving” the FuseFM podcast download page. And the best part is that it will be easy to build because Chrome already supports webpages.

The Twitter/Facebook Friend/RSS/Youtube button allows the site’s publisher to let site viewers access the site’s Youtube/Facebook Friend/RSS/Twitter feed without leaving the site. The idea is that people who are looking at a site might be interested in seeing more information about the site (for example seeing if the content on the YouTube/Twitter feed is worth subscribing to for them)

This is a good feature, to be fair. On my website, presently devoid of a Meebo Bar, Snap Shots, or any other obnoxious JavaScript pop-up books, my Twitter integration is a bit of a kludge: I have a hyperlink to my Twitter page in the navigation bar. Users interested in my Twitter page are expected to click the link and see my tweets in the annoyingly familiar environment of Twitter.com, and if they want to follow me they will have to go through the confusion and hassle of clicking the large “follow” button underneath my name.

When I have installed the Meebo Bar, on the other hand, they will be able to read these tweets in a smaller font in a pop-up layer at the bottom of my website, and if they want to follow me all they’ll have to do is jot down my username, leave my website, navigate manually to Twitter.com/Andrew_Taylor, and click the large “follow” button underneath my name. And they can do all this without leaving my website except for the part where they have to leave my website!

Andrew

Apparently they have stopped appreciating my comments.

Thousands of people rightly complained, so I thought some balance was in order.

The current series of Doctor Who is a triumph. Steven Moffat is a superb writer and Matt Smith is uniquely suited to his new role. I cannot praise it enough. Last night’s episode was particularly exciting: a two-part, mid-series story featuring the brilliantly creepy Weeping Angels from Moffat’s “Blink”, which won the Hugo Award, the BAFTA Cymru and the British Academy Television Award and was nominated for the Nebula Award, and Professor River Song from the sublime Silence In The Library story, also nominated for a Hugo Award. And I thought it lived up to all of that. This is genuinely world-class television, of exactly the kind the BBC is best at and ought to be making.

By far the best part was a gaudy yellow graphic pasted over the climactic moments to advertise an extended audition show for whatever musical Andrew Lloyd Webber reckons isn’t making enough money on its own merits. I suggest you implement this on the radio too. My enjoyment of Just A Minute would be hugely enhanced if while Nicholas Parsons read out the final scores a continuity announcer yelled over him that things look bad for Brian in The Archers next.

I no longer visit the cinema because I can’t enjoy a film unless there’s something to ruin the immersion. At home I get my gran walking in, seeing me rapt on the sofa leaning in toward the screen, and saying “it’s only a film, love”. The BBC have taken great strides to accommodate that. The magenta logo pasted over every single second of Being Human was genius. Aidan Turner’s portrayal of a man devastated by his betrayal by the one person he thought could save him, for a while, from the murderous hell that his vampyric life has become is hugely enhanced by the bright pink logo whirling away pointlessly in the corner because you’ve shunted the show onto a fringe digital channel to try to make BBC Three seem less of a mindless, chav-focussed waste of a frequency band.

I expect these graphics are very effective too, because usually people interested in science-fiction drama are the same people who are interested in brightly coloured singing competitions. I found myself thinking “oh my, how are they going to get out of this? What’s the Doctor’s plan going to be? Can River Song die in this if she’s already ooh look, it’s Graham Norton. There’s a show about the Wizard of Oz on? How exciting, I must watch that. Why did nobody tell me about this program before? Come on, you tedious Time Lord, hurry up and save the day so I can see which Dorothy will be leaving tonight!” Then I think there was some water or something but mostly I just wanted Graham Norton to come back. It was especially useful because I don’t really care about expertly written sci-fi drama. I can get that at one of the many science-fiction-drama bars in Manchester City Centre, but there isn’t really anywhere I can go to hear fairly average members of the public sing popular songs they haven’t written and then cry.

I was dismayed to read that “thousands” of people have complained about these graphics, perhaps because the graphics don’t also have sound. I think if the graphic also made noise it would be more effective. I was glad that when forced to apologise you didn’t pretend the graphic was an error or promise to stop using them, and that you restricted the apology to the timing of the graphic and routed it through a news report of an anonymous spokesperson.

When you get talent like Moffat to helm your flagship program, it’s important to make sure he knows his place. If you show his work as he intended it to be seen instead of spilling the plot all over the internet the previous week and using the climax to advertise dross then he might start to think you respect him and demand a pay rise or the budget cuts to be reversed or something. Obviously we couldn’t have that.

Keep up the good work.

*send*

Thank you for your e-mail.

The ‘Over the Rainbow’ trail in ‘Doctor Who’ should not have played out on Saturday and we apologise to all ‘Doctor Who’ fans whose enjoyment of the show was disrupted. We recognise the strength of feeling that has been expressed and are taking steps to ensure that this mistake will not happen again.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact us with your concerns.

Regards

BBC Complaints

Well, they might at least play along.

With that in mind, allow me to present my new character, Maurice the Mammal:

The Conservative Manifesto says:

[Our] economic vision… is a vision of a truly modern economy… where Britain leads in science, technology and innovation.

and

We will make sure that… commissioning decisions [are made] according to evidence-based quality standards

But then,

[The] Minority Report on abortion [is] a rollercoaster ride of pseudoscience and dubious data, signed by one Tory MP with the support of one other… If you want a good example of how spectacularly weak the evidence behind this “Minority Report” is, then you need look no further than the bit where they talk about, er, well, me, bafflingly:

We were greatly concerned to read… detailed information… which could only have been passed on to the journalist concerned by a member of the Select Committee. There should be an enquiry about how this information got into the public domain…

All the facts came from the written evidence published openly and in full during the select committee hearing. … I totally downloaded the PDF.

The Conservative Manifesto says:

[Our] economic vision … is founded on a determination that wealth and opportunity must be more fairly distributed.

and

We proposed legislation so that anyone wanting to be a member of either the House of Commons or the House of Lords will need to be treated as a full UK taxpayer.

But then,

[Former Conservative Party Leader] William Hague was said to be aware 10 years ago of a deal struck by senior Tories that eventually resulted in [Conservative Deputy Chairman and billionaire] Lord Ashcroft secretly remaining a [non-tax payer] after obtaining his peerage

The Conservative Manifesto says:

We will review and reform libel laws to protect freedom of speech, reduce costs and discourage libel tourism.

But then,

The BBC has shelved a Panorama documentary about the business affairs of the Tory billionaire Lord Ashcroft, because of a threat of legal action.

The Corporation has received what one insider described as “several very heavy letters” from Lord Ashcroft’s lawyers. There is now little or no prospect of the investigation being broadcast before the general election, if it goes out at all.

And the Conservative Manifesto says:

A Conservative government will ensure every vote will have equal value…

But then,

[They] support the first-past-the-post system for Westminster elections, “because it gives voters the chance to kick out a government they are fed up with”.

In fact, that quote is also from their manifesto. Which says:

Government has been far too profligate for far too long. … The explosion of unaccountable quangos, public sector ‘nonjobs’ and costly bureaucracy is an indictment of Labour’s reckless approach to spending other people’s money. …

A Conservative government will bring in new measures to enable the public to scrutinise the government’s accounts to see whether it is providing value for money. All data will be published in an open and standardised format.

But then,

Senior Conservative MP… Derek Conway, a former government whip and an MP for 23 years, paid his son, Freddie, a third year geography student at Newcastle university, £981 a month for unspecified work. …

The disclosure comes as the Tory private member’s bill to exempt MPs from requests under the Freedom of Information Act makes its way through parliament.

The Conservative Manifesto also says:

Wherever possible, we believe that personal data should be controlled by individual citizens themselves. We will strengthen the powers of the Information Commissioner to penalise any public body found guilty of mismanaging data. We will take further steps to protect people from unwarranted intrusion by the state

But then,

I couldn’t see any of this in the Conservative Party [iPhone] app. And in fact, it’s not [the user's] details being submitted – it’s [a friend's]. Who doesn’t get a say in it at all. …

It’s possible that personal data is being stored or processed by the Conservative Party, without them having any contact with the person whose data is being processed. There is no verification that the data is provided with the consent of the person that data refers to. The app doesn’t give a clear indication of what the data will be used for. Neither the app nor its supporting web sites contain a privacy notice describing how the data may be stored and used.

The Conservative Party, as an entity, is saying all the right things, but the actual people who comprise it are not yet showing any apparent willing to live by these lofty ideals. And these aren’t backbenchers, councillors and researchers. This is a former leader, a former whip, the Deputy Chairman, their manifesto, Select Committee members and their official iPhone application.

I agree that we should lead in science and technology, base NHS policy on evidence, distribute wealth fairly, exclude non-taxpayers from the Lords, reform libel law, ensure everyone has a fair say in elections and increase openness and accountability in public spending. And if I thought for one second that the Conservatives would actually do any of those things, then maybe I would vote for them, but it looks to me like the Conservatives are the people we need these reforms to protect us from.

Asking them to “fix our broken politics” would be like asking a bull to glue together all our broken china.

Thank you for your letter dated 16 March. I agree with you that laws of such sensitivity ought not to be rushed through Parliament. I have taken up these issues with the Secretary of State for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and assure you that I shall remain alert on this issue.

On April 7th, the Digital Economy Bill was voted into law and if Gerald Kaufman MP bothered to turn up, he didn’t vote.

That is not “remaining alert” and on May 6th I will not be voting for Gerald Kaufman.