If The Truth Fits

I often feel that I’m focusing on the negative’s a bit much on this blog, so I’m really happy (good breeds good, it’s self-perpetuating!) that I’ve found enough stories in the news today that genuinely make me think that some pretty awesome things have been happening on Earth recently.

U.S. teen lives for 118 days without heart. When I saw that headline I was hoping for some Mike the Headless Chicken style action, but the reality was actually far more impressive (yes, more impressive than a headless chicken that didn’t die). A 14 year-old girl from South Carolina who suffered from “dilated cardiomyopathy, a condition in which the patient’s heart becomes weakened and enlarged and does not pump blood efficiently,” spent 118 days having her blood pumped by an artificial device until a transplant became available. The girl did find the whole situation distressing, I imagine I would too if I were living without a heart, but I think its pretty incredible that modern medicine can keep people alive when they can’t pump their own blood, and apparently adults have been kept alive for up to a year with the same process. Incredible.

Scientists, having almost completed sequencing the DNA of a wooly mammoth, are getting all cocky and saying that they can create a living mammoth for less than $10 million dollars. Considering how little you can do with $10 million dollars nowadays, I’d say that resurrecting a long extinct animal is actually a pretty good deal. Apparently this is still firmly in the realms of science theory rather than science practise, which drops this a notch on the awesome-o-meter, but the very possibility that ‘we’ could bring back a beast that last lived around 60,000 years ago is pretty cool.

Next up on the “hey, cool things are happening” list, Shaq, aka The Big Aristotle, is now on Twitter (a micro-blogging network where people post short messages), which makes me feel like less of a nerd for also being a member and tweeting about things that happen during my day. I was under the impression that the jury was still out over whether @The_Real_Shaq was actually the real Shaquille O’Neal, so I did a bit of hunting aqround, and it turns out that its true, Shaq is actually tweeting along with the rest of us. The account was set up after someone created a fake account pretending to be the legendary center (for fun, there was no malice intended), and he wanted to set the record straight. What I really like about this story is that the messages are actually coming directly from the big man himself, most celebrities on Twitter don’t actually write the messages themselves, their assistants and PR reps will do it for them (Britney Spears & Barack Obama are good examples), which I don’t particularly have a problem with, but I think its really cool to see a sports star who is a role model to a lot of kids connecting so directly with his fans.

Guns N’ Roses have finally, finally, released ‘Chinese Democracy’ the bands first release in approximately 75 years. I say released, you can’t actually buy it until Monday, but that album has more leaks than a Welsh village (note: joke may not translate internationally, basically, that’s a lot of leaks), you could just be surfing CNN and somehow end up downloading one of their songs. I know that this item doesn’t really fit in with the spirit of the other stories I’ve mentioned, but I am just so glad that the Chinese Democracy ordeal is coming to an end, not because I’m a particularly big fan of the band, I’m just utterly sick of that album being a punchline, maybe now we can all move on. Oh, and from what I’ve read, the most expensive album of all time kinda sucks.

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I wouldn’t really describe myself as being an Apple fanboy, and I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m an iPhone fanboy, I know it has a fair few failings, but I’m afraid that you’re going to have to let me gush for just a minute about the shiny slab of magic in my pocket.

This morning I downloaded the updated version of the Google Mobile app (here’s an iTunes link if you want to check it out yourself) to my phone because I’d heard quite a lot of buzz about it. That buzz related to being able to conduct searches using voice recognition. I’ve never found voice recognition software to be particularly accurate, and if you ever see me in public Googling with my voice rather than tapping away at the keyboard you have my permission to strangle me until I can no longer conduct voice searches which will almost certainly be based around pop culture facts just so that I can settle bets amongst my friends.

On a quick side note, having an iPhone has almost become a threat. If I’m sat in the pub with my friends and someone says something slightly dubious, like, for example “when scared, a squid will balloon to twice its size and turn red,” all I have to do is mutter “I have an iPhone” and all of a sudden their confidence and bravado will be shattered, because people now believe Google results more than their own memories. Hopefully, as smartphones become more prevalent in society, there will be less BS spoken in bars around the world, though being the guy that just sits there fact checking what people are saying all-night between sips on your beer is hardly a good way to be the life and soul of the party. Also, I try and keep my iPhone in my pocket as much as possible when I’ve had a drink or two, because as we’ve discussed before, drinking and e-mails do not mix.

I don’t believe that the ability to search the internet is someone that will catch on too quickly (maybe one day when everyone is comfortable with using those stupid bluetooth microphones), but I think its pretty amazing that ‘we’ seem to have reached a point in technological evolution where we can do things that were in science fiction not so long ago. Imagine if you told someone in the 80s that in about twenty years time that they would be able to pull a phone out of their pocket (that wouldn’t be the same size and weight as a brick) speak into it, without speaking to someone else, and the answer to your query would then be displayed on a screen, how do you think they’d react? Oh, and then you told them that the phone could also hold and play hundreds of hours of music and video. Hell, when I was a kid, I was impressed that ‘they’ could get Tetris to fit onto a wristwatch!

Oh, and in case you missed it, a spider has gone missing on the International Space Station, and that is a genuine story, not the set up to a low budget scifi movie.

Whenever I see a piece of spam pop up on in my e-mail client, its a slight annoyance, but I just accept that its ‘one of those things’ and that we can’t stop it being sent to my inbox, but hopefully a filter will be able to stop me from having to read it. I guess that there are people that are more pro-active than me, because instead of just trying to stop themselves from reading the spam, they’re trying to stop those billions and billions of junk e-mails even being sent to your inbox.

According to this article from the Associated Press, a company called McColo Corp. was shutdown last week after it turned out that they were the half of almost half of the world’s spam e-mails. Spam accounts for 90% of all e-mail sent around the world, so if these guys were responsible for half of all spam, that means that there is about 45% fewer e-mails being sent around the world right now. I know that sounds really impressive, but the article goes on to say that you can never really kill the spam monster, within a few days or weeks there will be just as many e-mails circulating around the world telling you about some great v1agra offers that you should really be interested in.

I don’t think I’ve actually opened or read a spam e-mail for at least a couple of years. I use Gmail and it seems to catch just about everything and put it into the spam folder, which I’ll give a quick browse to check that it hasn’t been overzealous and picked up something I actually want to read, then I might have a swift chuckle at the titles of the spam mails, and click delete all. I’d always presumed that everyone else did the same, but apparently not. 1 in 12,500,000 spam e-mails actually result in someone signing up to that porn site, buying those cheap medications from Canada, or, of course, trying to pick up some little blue pills on the cheap in the hope of stirring things up in the bedroom. Those figures come from the results of a study by computer scientists at University of California, Berkeley and UC San Diego, who decided that the only way that they could get accurate data about spam was to actually spam people, and in a 26 day period they sent 350 messages, yielding them just 28 sales, a record that even poor ol’ Gil Gunderson from the Simpsons wouldn’t be proud of, but apparently that’s enough of a hit-rate for big-time spammers to rake in a couple of million dollars a year, and whilst they can bring in that kind of cash I’m sure that they won’t be stopping any time soon.

Oh, and if you thought that you had it bad when it came to annoying spam clogging up your inbox, think about poor Colin Wells, who has around 44,000 spam messages going through his server every day. He used to spend up to two hours a day tapping away at the delete key, but seems to have got things under control now with some effective filters, so if there’s one lesson that you can learn from this article, its that whilst spammers never quit, neither do the good guys, and you can almost always take back control of your inbox.

Microsoft matches reward for missing Canadian teen - A 15 year old Canadian boy named Brandon Crisp went missing on October 13th after his parents stopped him from playing on his Xbox 360, someone (it isn’t made clear who) put up a reward of $25,000 (Canadian) for infromation that will hopefully lead to finding Brandon, and Microsoft have offered to match the reward.

I don’t know why so many people hate Microsoft, people are always saying that they’re evil, and yet, I can’t really think of anything evil that they’ve done in the world of computing. Okay, I’ve never used Windows Vista, but how bad can that really be? Some people seem to think that Bill Gates is the devil incarnate, saying that all he wanted was to get money out of them and didn’t care about his products. They seem to forget where Bill comes from, the guy is a geek, I’m sure he would love it if he could push a product out of the door that was 100% perfect, but business and practicality gets in the way. And the money thing? Now that Bill has ’stepped back’ from working at Microsoft and stopped palling around with Jerry Seinfeld he’s dedicating a lot more of his time to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, y’know, the foundation he’s using to try and bring about an end to… pretty much all the problems in the world by the looks of it. He’s spending quite a large proportion of his astounding wealth on the Foundation, so I guess that even if you thought he was a money grabber, at least he’s doing some good with it.

Getting back to the story after that extended sidebar, obviously this is a pretty sad story, whenever a kid goes missing you worry, at that age you think you can take on the world but there’s a lot of danger out there and I hope that Brandon gets home safe soon, but at the same time… what kind of kid runs away because his parents stop him from playing on his Xbox? I know that when you’re 15 your mind isn’t all that focused, but I can’t quite follow the logic between these steps: I like playing on my Xbox, Mom and Dad won’t let me play on my Xbox… I’d better run away. Where does this kid expect to go from there with this, but hey, like I said, at that age you aren’t exactly thinking straight, and I’m sure that Brandon thinks he has good reasons.

The Reuters article that I found out about this story worried me somewhat, here’s a quote to help illustrate my point:

It is possible that police will ask or have already asked Microsoft to divulge the list of players with whom Brandon Crisp has played recently.

As online gaming has exploded in popularity since the start of the decade, academics and parents have raised concerns over the possibility of addiction.

Last year, the American Medical Association said more research was necessary on the potential of addiction to video games. It urged parents to closely monitor their children’s use of games and the Internet.

Web sites such as www.wowdetox.com, a sounding board for those addicted to or trying to quit the popular “World of Warcraft” online game, have sprung up as well.

So, the first part of that, about the police asking Microsoft for information, is quite clearly pure speculation, but it is being reported as a fact. The second part is again based upon speculation rather than fact. Parents concerns are not good evidence, and the suggestion of the American Medical Association doesn’t really mean anything either, they say it needs more study, and that parents should monitor their childrens gaming and internet usage, monitor it for what? When was there a suggestion in the story about Brandon Crisp that he was addicted to playing video games? The guy is 15 years old, I’d be willing to be that in a medical sense a pretty high percentage of kids could be classified as being ‘addicted’ to video games, just because a website about people wanting to play less World of Warcraft has been opened doesn’t mean that Brandon was addicted to playing Call of Duty 4.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why Reuters should have gotten a staff member that plays on their Xbox to write that story.

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Photo credit: Hermida

A quick apology and explanation about the lack of posts of late. At this very moment I’m typing from a house in the South of France (right next to the sea!) where I’ve been working for the past week, and will be for the next couple of weeks. The work day here from from about 8:30 to 19:00 and its usually pretty physical stuff, so by the end of the day my brain isn’t ‘all there’ if you know what I mean. Also, I haven’t got as much time as usual to be checking out the news to see what’s happening in the world (I have literally no idea how the stock markets are doing), so that’s why you haven’t been getting your daily dose of my opinions recently.

One story that I have seen in a few places is a rather unusual one that concerns property rights. I know, property rights, you know this post is going to be a barrel of fun. Oh, it also concerns murder, ahhh, you’re hooked now aren’t you. Okay, its not actual murder, its virtual murder, but despite the murder being virtual it is having some very real ramifications.

In Japan (of course), a 43 year-old woman who was ‘divorced’ by her online husband in a MMORPG (Massive Multiplayer Role Playing Game) called Maple Story may face time in jail after logging onto her former “husband’s” account and killing his character. Yes, apparently in Japan doing something like that could result in you going to jail, or getting a rather hefty fine at the very least. I’m sure that if it happened in the UK it either wouldn’t make the news, or would be a laffer on page 9, but the police would probably have better things to do. Not so in Japan, where digital life has very much integrated with ‘real’ life and these matters are taken pretty seriously. In cases like this it isn’t actually the ‘murder’ itself which is the crime, its the woman illegally accessing the man’s account, but that wouldn’t be as interesting of a story now, would it?

Personally, I’m undecided as to whether I can really think about this act as a crime. If I opened an account to play Maple Story, and then someone hacked into it and killed virtual Andy I’d probably be quite annoyed, but I wouldn’t think it was a crime. However, if I had played it for months and months, going around completing quests and making friends, I’d probably be pissed off if one of those people I’d met hacked my account and took their revenge, maybe not to the point of calling the police, but still pretty pissed off. If someone hacked into my e-mail, that would be a crime, if they hacked into my Facebook profile, it would be inconvenietn but probably not a crime, if they hacked into one of my websites, I’d be scared to death of losing many years work, and it probably would be a crime, but I don’t think anything could be done about it so I wouldn’t get the authorities involved.

As you can probably tell from this article, this news story has confused me greatly. I spend a lot of my time working on the internet writing articles, blog postings, and designing websites every so often, so I know exactly what the guy was going through when his character was killed (I’ve lost work in crashes before), and yet I can’t quite bring myself to think that someone should go to jail (or even receive a fine) for a virtual murder.

[That baby put a smile on your face, right?]
Okay, I’m bored of being depressed, just because stocks are slumping at rates not seen since the Great Depression doesn’t mean it should get me down, so this weeks Friday news roundup is going to be upbeat. Obviously, I need to scour the entire damned world to find stories that alleviate the doom-factor that has been pervading the news, my thoughts, my conversations, and what I read on the internet, so you’ve got to trust me when I say that this article took a lot more research than the average article I write.

1. A man that had a double arm transplant is ‘doing well’! A German man called Karl Merk who lost both his arms in a combine harvester accident (I bet that was nasty) spoke this week of his joy after becoming the world’s first ever recipient of a double arm transplant. The operation, which lasted 15-hours and was carried out by “40 surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses and other support staff,” was actually carried out in late July, but I guess that when you’re given two new arms (well, technically they were used) it takes a while to get used to them and declare the operation a success. These arms are actual real arms, not the robotic ones that we’ve seen in the past, I can’t decide which I find more impressive, being able to build arms out of metal, wires and servos that can be controlled by a persons mind, or taking the arms off one persons body (presumably deceased), reattaching them to another person and then those arms actually working again, in a fairly limited way at the moment, but still. You know what, one doesn’t need to be better than the other, they’re both pretty awesome.

2. There’s going to be a suicide net on the side of the Golden Gate bridge! Yep, my upbeat news roundup is about to deal with suicide. A plan has been approved to build a suicide net along the sides of the famous bridge in San Fransisco, although it is subject to further review and study before the steel net is installed. Obviously I’m happy that the chances of people dying by flinging themselves off the bridge are going to be diminished, but is a net really the answer? Apparently it will cost $40-$50 million, for that price you could employ people to patrol the bridge 24/7 for many years, trying to help people mentally rather than physically. Also, what’s to stop them jumping off the edge of the net?

3. Damn, that wasn’t particularly upbeat, how about this? I turned 24 yesterday! Sure, it’s not that exciting for you, but it was pretty fun for me!

4. Apparently Sarah Palin is going do by on Saturday Night Live! Whilst I would love it if Tina Fey absolutely ripped her apart for just about everything the Mayor of the meth capital of Alaska believes in, I’m sure this will just turn out to be yet another crappy cameo on SNL.

5. There are sites dedicated to good news! This is the perfect antitode to all the bad stuff that’s going on in the world at the moment. They are often trying to find the silver lining in almost everything though, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were to start reporting that the current financial crisis means that its a great time to get into the repossession business.

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I’ve read about this story a few times on my travels around the web today, and I’ve found that every single one of those stories felt the need to point out that this is NOT an April Fool’s style prank or faux-feature, possibly because Google are so well known for the hoaxes that they spring upon a very skeptical public every April 1st, some of which were pretty obvious (does anyone else remember Google PigeonRank?), and some of which were so crazy that they had an air of plausibility about them (Virgle? It made so much sense!). I’ve always thought that one of these years, Google would pull the old switcheroo and launch a real product on April Fools Day and not get involved in the web’s April 1st shenanigans, since I’m sure it would confuse the hell out of people, which would probably be the funniest thing they’ve done for Fool’s Day for a few years.

Sorry, I’m afraid I went off on a bit of a tangent there, Google announced a new product today which seems to have caught a lot of attention. It is called ‘Mail Goggles‘ and can be enabled in the Settings>Labs tab when you’re using Gmail. The idea behind it is that there are quite a lot of people who after a night out on the sauce might come home and decide that they’d better check their e-mails before they go to bed, just to see if anything really important has come up, but in the process they might decide to tell a few people what they really think of them in a few e-mails that they’ll probablycertainly regret sending in the morning. These people need protecting from themselves in their inebriated state, and that’s where Mail Goggles comes in. Once enabled, it will activate itself at certain times of night and over the whole weekend (Googlers must party hard at weekends!), and before you are allowed to send an e-mail it will ask you to complete a number of fairly simple maths problems (though you can alter the difficulty level) within a time limit. If you complete the problems, your e-mail will be sent, if not, Google will tell you to have a glass of water and go to bed (no, really).

Whilst I’m sure that if I were really determined to send an e-mail telling them that “they should go to hell” then I would make sure that e-mail got there, I might start by simply disabling ‘Mail Goggles’ (duh!), but I do think its a fun little feature, and it might actually be pretty effective. For one thing, I remember coming home (staggering home, some might say) from a night out, and for some reason I decided it would be a good idea to try and play sudoku on my phone (yep, you can even play sudoku on an iPhone, it can do anything!), after staring at the screen for a minute I’m pretty sure I fell asleep, so maybe Google are onto something with this whole numbers angle. Also, I think that if I were to fail at completing the maths problems once then it might set off a few alarm bells in my head that it might be a good idea to re-read that e-mail, maybe they shouldn’t go to hell, just New Jersey?

As Ars Technica comments, it would be really great if someone made something for cellphones on Friday and Saturday nights!

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Fridays seem like a good day to do a roundup of stories from the news, its the end of the working week, so it just feels right to try and tie off a few loose ends before we start fresh on Monday, and when I say fresh, I mean bleary eyed after spending far too much of my weekend fighting what will surely be a losing battle with a bar (the battle is trying to drink the whole bar by the way). Let’s kick off this news round up!

1. Apparently there was some kind of a debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin? I’d forgive you for not knowing about it since the media don’t really talk about the upcoming election all that much. Apparently, it was actually the most watched vice Presidential debate ever, drawing in 70 million viewers, which was actually more than the amount of people that watched the debate between the two men going for the top job, as Obama and McCain could only manage 52.4 million, although I guess that since they’ve been on debates before people know what to expect when they see those two, whereas Biden and Palin are a rather more unknown quantity, Palin especially. I get the feeling that most people tuned in just to see yet another locomotive crash into the train wreck that her media exposure has been so far, and whilst she was by no means an inspirational orator, she didn’t mess up, she read from her note cards and added in folksy sayings to prove that “she’s a real person,” which is probably the best that the Republicans could hope for. Side note: what’s the deal with this ‘real person’ schtick, why on Earth would anyone ever think that the best person for the job would be someone ‘normal’ that could easily be their neighbour? Don’t they want someone that’s well qualified, intelligent, and would actually be a good candidate for the position?

Oh, and once again, Pop Vulture does not officially endorse one candidate over the other, even if its really, really obvious what I think.

2. Russian President Dimitri Medvedev is of the opinion that the current “financial crisis should be taken as a sign that America’s global economic leadership is on the wane.” I’m not quite so sure how right he is there, the US certainly seems to be leading the world through extremely stormy economic seas at the moment, and earlier this week when the bailout was rejected it looked like they were steering their ship towards the Cape of Doom, and Russia is hardly one to wag the finger, they’ve had to shut down their stock markets three times in the last month (including today), and on September 16th their markets plunged more than 17% in a single day, aren’t you glad that the world doesn’t revolve around Russia?

3. The $700 billion bailout bill was passed at the second attempt. From what I understand, it will actually only end up costing $100 billion, but I still don’t know whether the bill itself is a good thing or a bad thing, so let’s just move on before you realise once again what little grasp I have upon economic concepts.

4. The music industry and Apple, the makers of the most exciting thing in my pants (my iPhone), are at loggerheads over what royaltys musicians should be getting from digital downloads, most of which are done through Apple’s iTunes service. Each track costs 99 cents, and from that, 9.1 cents goes to the artist, the same amount as when an artist sells a track on a CD. The music industry believes that the artists should get 15 cents per track since its much cheaper to distribute things digitally since there are no packaging and shipping costs. Yeah, I can’t work out that logic either, surely the artist gets paid for the song, not the medium its packaged in, otherwise bands would have probably started selling vinyl records that had been dipped in gold so that they could claim the music was more valuable and therefore they deserved more royalties. Yes, that example makes no sense, but then again, neither does the record labels position.

Have a great weekend everyone!

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